Hot stuff

Gordonstoun has won itself a place on somebody’s list of Best One Hundred Schools In The World, and they are feeling very pleased with themselves.

Certainly they are up there in the top Most Peculiar Schools in the world. I had an email from them this morning, offering us places on their Parents’ Summer Arctic Sailing Expedition. This was not, as you might think, the usual sort of public school parents’ jolly, with indifferent wine and canapés and lots of middle-class joshing. It is a serious expedition up where the sun don’t shine.

They were very up-beat and encouraging about it. The Arctic in the summer, they said, cheerily, is hardly any colder than a Scottish springtime, so plenty of swimming and walking is easily possible. You do, however, need to have plenty of sailing experience already, because sometimes conditions can be challenging.

Just like a Scottish springtime, presumably.

Since my total experience of being waterborne has been on the occasional cross-channel ferry in our rather more lucrative years, once or twice on the steamers across the lake, and the dinghy we had for swimming when the children were smaller, I suspect this counts me out, not that I am exactly disappointed about it. If I had several thousand pounds to blow on a summer holiday, which I haven’t, bunk beds and North Sea swimming on an Arctic sailing ship would not be my first destination of choice.

Oliver is enjoying it, though. He is confined to sick bay this week with some mysterious gastric ailment, and I can practically hear him chafing to be allowed out from here.

He called me the other night to extol the virtues of early morning running, an activity about which I could have no sensible opinion whatsoever, never having tried it, although I am reliably told it makes you feel brilliant. They run five kilometres before breakfast every morning, leaving the House at six in order to be back in time to have showers and be at the refectory in time for breakfast. He was very scathing about the laggardly sluggards who did not set off on their own run until seven, how could they get properly polished and fed before lessons when they had barely started before lunchtime?

The King would be proud.

For my part I generally loaf about in bed until half past nine, justifying this to myself by never getting into it until almost two. Today the sun shone, and I gloomily reflected that magnificent as this was for pegging the washing out on the line, it meant I had no reasonable excuse not to take the dogs up over the fell, so off we went, and of course once the worst of the uphill bit was over, it was splendid, fresh and breezy and clear, probably just like an Arctic summer.

There was a huge pile of firewood dumped by the dustbins when I got back, and I had to try to feel grateful and not grumpy, because of the hour or two of sawing that had to follow. I cheered myself up by opening the fire up so that it burned bright and hot all day, so when eventually I came to write my dissertation story this afternoon, the house was gloriously warm.

I was horrified, an hour or so into my literary musings, to see the builders chucking another huge pile of firewood off their truck. I had just spent an uncomfortable fifteen minutes picking the splinters out of my fingers, and I was finding it very hard to be grateful. I think they are completely removing the whole inside of somebody’s house, and starting again. This makes brilliant firewood, it is dry and hot, but by the time I had finished sawing it all up I had got so much of it that I did not have a square inch of firewood-storage space left anywhere. I have always been niggardly about feeding the fire, because it is so much work to saw the wood, but now I have thrown caution to the winds, and the house is so warm I think I could quite reasonably take my thermal vest off.

Even the water is too hot to put my hands underneath.

I wouldn’t even mind if it snowed.