Hello, everybody.
I am writing from the slowly fading depths of a Scottish twilight. If you are in the south and still bewailing Global Warming I invite you to head to Scotland, where no hint of it can be found.
It is jolly cold here. Also it goes dark early. It is dark.
Goodness, they must be robust at Oliver’s school. Only yesterday they were showing pictures of shivering Year Nines frolicking in the waves. I have been in that sea, nearly up to my ankles, and I can assure you that it is jolly cold, even in the summer, which it certainly isn’t any more, whatever you might think where you are.
Anyway, we are on our way to rescue him. He can come and bask in the balmy Lake District climate for a couple of weeks until his chilblains have healed.
Still, I am pleased to tell you that we are nearly there, that is, nearly there in the sort of way that means we have only got another three hours to go, but we are north of Perth and chugging up the A9, which is good going, because it is only just after seven.
We had a long day of dashing about. Mark took the car for its MOT, which it failed, as we knew it would, but we now have a definitive List of the things that need to be done, and it is not terrible, so that is all right. Better still, Mark rang Autoparts on his way home, and so the things that we need for doing it are waiting in the conservatory for when we get back. I have no idea what they are, something to do with the suspension, I think.
Whilst he was thus engaged I occupied my morning baking the last of next door’s bananas into a pudding to take with us. Our diet is going to be a bit uneventful for the next few days, we have got banana curry followed by banana pudding, with banana muesli for breakfast the next morning. I hope bananas are not the sort of things that cause inadvertent poisoning if consumed to excess.
Actually I am rather looking forward to it. I have long had a complicated relationship with bananas. When we were children my brother liked them and claimed the right to all bananas in the fruit bowl. I never ate one without an anxiously guilty feeling, which inexplicably has never left me in the fifty two years which have since flowed under the bridge.
It has just occurred to me that Mark never eats them at all. I have just interrupted my writing to ask him if he had an unresolved banana issue, and even in the dark I could see he was looking at me as if I was mental, so it must just be me.
Anyway, I made banana puddings, soaked in blackcurrant rum just to make sure they turned out well. Then I rushed round hoovering everywhere and squirting a final spray of Flea Massacre just to be on the safe side.
We were just about to go when we remembered that when we got out of the van we had taken the awful rusty shelves out of the fridge because they were just too dreadful to be tolerated any longer. We meant to Do Something about them, although I don’t quite know what, we have sanded all the rust off them so many times that there was practically no shelf left in places, and actually no shelf left in others.
Mark hastily sawed up some bits of board from the builders’ yard and made them into shelf shapes, and then I scrubbed all of the boot prints off them with bleach, and I can tell you that they look splendid. The fridge feels as if it has been renewed. I had come to loathe the dreadful old shelves, whose awful rusty dandruff all over the fridge had stained everything brown. It was a very pleasing start to the journey.
We hunted the cats down and shovelled everyone into the van, and we are on the way.
I am going to go. It is a very odd feeling, writing in the all-encompassing Scottish darkness, being a tiny bright spot in the middle of a massive landscape of nothing.
By bedtime we will be under the trees by the far-distant shore.
