We have not made it home.
We are not very far away, we are on Shap fell, where we are drinking Elspeth’s home made sloe gin, and Mark is reading his book whilst I write to you. We could have reached Windermere in another half an hour, but the night is dark, and it is late. We quailed at the thought of arriving in the middle of the night at a chilled house in the pounding Lake District rain.
We stopped here. We will get home and unload in daylight, tomorrow, and have a roaring fire to warm the house before eventually it is time to go to bed.
When we woke up this morning we were very glad indeed that we had stopped at Glencoe.
Glencoe is quite unexpectedly splendid.
We were beside a steel grey loch surrounded by a circle of white capped mountains.
We were not surprised by the snow, because it had been a chilly night. The camper van had been buffeted by winds and battered by hail, and because we are always warm in our bed, we had not left the fire running. In consequence we woke this morning to our breath hanging in clouds in the icy air.
We fixed that jolly quickly, I can tell you, and by the time we had poured the coffee, the camper van was glowing warm again.
The morning proffered a brisk icy breeze, and we took the dogs for a walk.
The dogs have grown oily and thick woolly coats during the outdoor adventures of the last week, like miniature yaks. This does not smell especially nice, but has made them impervious to all but the worst of the Scottish weather. Hence they bounced out with excited enthusiasm this morning, whilst we donned extra jerseys.
We walked around the top end of the loch, and watched a chap chucking rubbish on his bonfire. To his surprise, and to ours, the rubbish appeared to include some left over fireworks, which exploded with a satisfying burst of diamond sparks and bangs, and brought three enormous stags belting out of the woods.
The stags appeared to have worked out that bangs mean trouble, and that under such circumstances, the safest place is right beside the council estate. They hung around there, hovering next to the playground, for ages, where obviously nobody was going to take a pot shot at them. After a few minutes we got bored with watching them, and walked in, but they were still there when we finished our walk and headed back to the camper van. They might still be there now.
We set off on the long haul up the winding road over the mountain passes, and goodness me, we were glad that we had not tried to do it last night, in the snowy dark. We were glad of the daylight anyway, because it was truly magnificent scenery. The mountains were huge, and inhospitably snowy.
We passed the ski resort at the top. This interested me, because I have never been skiing, and was fascinated to get a glimpse of what it was all about.
I was both astonished and horrified, what an utterly ghastly thing to do. The top of the mountain could only just be seen through the slate-grey snow clouds. A few tiny figures had been dragged patiently up on the ski lift, through the bitter cold to the grey wilderness at the top, where they were starting the grim slide down again.
I could not for the life of me imagine why anybody might wish to do this. In fact, I rather thought that it might be a good idea for inmates of a penal colony, along the lines of the dreary and thankless tasks imposed on Sisyphus. I am sure that Number Two Daughter likes it very much, but it seemed to me to be the most peculiar choice of activity in every possible way.
The mountain tops were barren of everything except the occasional coach stuffed full of Japanese tourists, much to our amusement. We snaked slowly over Rannock Moor and then downwards until we reached the muddy browns and greens of the rest of the world.
We drove along Loch Lomond, which is like Ullswater, except about ten times as big, and then on through some gloomy Scottish backwater so that Mark could show me where his family had farmed once.
We did not hang about there for very long. The Forestry Commission had bought the farm, and tree trunks lay everywhere, heaped in great teetering stacks. The house was gone, and the landscape was pitted and sodden. We both shuddered, and were glad that his life had moved on.
It was dark long before we reached the motorway, and another couple of hours before we finally chugged to a halt here.
Another night out will not be a bad thing. We have got plenty of everything. We filled up with LPG gas just north of Inverness, and the woman at the gas station told us hopefully that an Irishman going to Orkney had left his petrol cap behind a week before, and asked if we knew him, which we didn’t.
I told her to hang on to it, because I was sure that he would be back.
I think the same is probably true of us.
One day we will be back.
Oliver has written again today, it is something of a cliff hanger, presumably because he has had too much prep to finish it. Do read it anyway.
