Hello.
It is only halfway through the day, but I thought I would write to you now so that I don’t have to do it in the middle of the night when I am definitely exhausted, and very probably drunk as well. We are buzzing along in my mother’s little car, somewhere on the A1, and I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep.
I haven’t really made any promises, except to Oliver, that we will come and watch him in his concert tomorrow, but that doesn’t really feel like a promise, because we are looking forward to it very much.
Mark is driving. I can assure you that I am not trying to write with the other hand whilst navigating through traffic. I am glad I am not driving. I worked myself up into such a huge state of flappiness last night that this morning I could hardly eat breakfast because of indigestion.
We had a lovely time. It was especially lovely because all my worries about the dreadfulness of winning and my friends being disappointed did not happen. My friend Emma won something as well, a prize for a story about an alternative future, so that was all right, because we both had certificates and bottles of Prosecco to waft about at the dinner table.
The Prosecco says University of Cambridge on it, so I will never be able to drink it, and will just have to keep it, probably on the shelf behind my office chair, so that people who ring me up for Zoom meetings and look at me out of my computer will be able to see it. Most of them will not give a hoot, because really the only people who ever ring me up for Zoom meetings are already at Cambridge themselves, and so will not care, but I will know. Also I could suggest Zoom meetings with other people then, and know that they would take me seriously because of the intellectual alcohol behind me, I wonder if the taxi licensing inspector would like one.
The dinner was jolly good. I have already forgotten what it was, but it was not celery and raw carrots, so that was wonderful, and there was a pudding. I am going to be very rounded indeed by the end of this weekend, and will probably have to take the leopardskin dungarees back for a bigger pair.
I am wearing them even as I write, they are lovely.
The radio will not tune into our Audible story, and I most certainly do not wish to listen to the BBC going endlessly on and on about the election, so I have left Mark to gaze absently at the traffic whilst I write emails and think about things. I had a very nice letter from one of the prize judges which said that for the very first time ever they had all been agreed which story should come first, so that was lovely, and I have been feeling quietly smug ever since.
It is being a very lovely weekend. We will be staying in a splendid Travelodge tonight, and tomorrow will be entirely occupied with Gordonstoun splendours. There will be a concert and a dinner and some Scottish reel dancing. We are going to be exhausted by Monday when we go back to work.
LATER NOTE: It is eleven at night and we have just about reached the Travelodge and unpacked. Apart from the receptionist being so painfully rude I put an unfavourable review on TripAdvisor before we had even finished checking in, it is all right. That is to say, it is clean and the shower works, and frankly, after almost six hundred miles driving, that is quite good enough for me.
Gordonstoun in the morning.
If we haven’t made the middle classes by the end of the weekend, we never will.
