If party is such sweet sorrow

We are having a brief Travelodge interlude.

We have spent all of the morning at Gordonstoun, and my feet are so sore that I can only think I absolutely must have qualified for the middle classes by now.

We have come back to wash and change and have a little snooze, which we certainly won’t have time to do, and at six it all starts again, being drinking and dinner, Scottish reels and a casino, all quaffed down with port and cigars whilst wearing our very best polished ball gowns.

I am writing this now because once again, I suspect I won’t be in much of a state when we get back.

The morning was absolutely splendid, starting with a concert in the Ogstoun theatre. Oliver featured largely in this, and was really quite astonishingly good. I mean surprisingly good. He was in several vigorous and exhausting-looking dances, and then an excerpt from Much Ado About Nothing, which is about to be their summer production and in which he has been cast as Benedick, and then a monologue from Private Peaceful, which is a horrid tragedy about soldiers in World War One.  He was splendid in all of them, and we clapped until our hands were sore, and the chap next to us said Is that your son? Wasn’t he good?

The second it was over we were shepherded outside, blinking in the bright sunlight, to leap on to buses. Gordonstoun campus is so huge it takes almost an hour to walk from one end to the other, and the Leavers’ Service was miles away in the chapel.

The chapel is a huge, imposing affair, designed to look like the prow of a ship on the outside and an open book on the inside, and this morning it was packed with parents trying to look casually smart, and teenagers, all of whom had been corralled into shiny shoes and gleaming hair by half a dozen anxious matrons. By random good fortune we found ourselves next to the parents of Oliver’s best friend Kin-Wai, whom we had never met, and when we said we were Oliver’s parents they still did not know who we were, because of course Oliver is called Ibbo at school, he has not had a Christian name since he first set off for boarding school aged eight.

I do not know if Kin-Wai is called something else at home, it seemed rude to ask.

Anyway, the service was lovely, if sad, and I got as far as the first line of I Vow To Thee My Country before I needed my handkerchief, which always happens, and the sixth form were all formally booted out of school and into the Old Gordonstonian Association. The King is now in charge of this, so they will be in good hands, in between him dashing about pinning medals on Number One Daughter and swapping about his Prime Ministers.

They have not quite left yet, they have still got exams to do, but they were all given a Gordonstoun Diploma, which is the original certificate of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, except he wasn’t a Duke when he got his, he was an uncomfortably polished teenager like all the rest of them.

They gave us Oliver back briefly then, and we all had an excellent lunch together in the dining room, with lots of health giving fruit and vegetables so that we would know they have not been allowing our offspring to stuff themselves on junk food in our absence, and then he went off to spent the afternoon on a waterslide in the sun, and we came back here.

I have got to go and do some polishing. More later.

LATER: It is two in the morning and we have danced the night away.

We have had the most magnificent Gordonstoun party, and if this is what it is actually like to be in the middle classes then you can count me in. It was splendid.

I am too exhausted and intoxicated to talk, but we have had the most wonderful, joyful time, and I will have to fill in the details tomorrow. We are back at the Travelodge, but Oliver is not. We don’t know where he is, but he is a grown-up now so it is his own problem. He has got some money and a taxi number and instructions not to be sick in the taxi, and I think that will be sufficient.

I will tell you about it tomorrow.

We like Kin-Wai’s parents very much.

I am exhausted, drunk and very happy.

I could ask no more of life.