This is a very much shortened entry because it seems that everything electrical we have in the whole world is flat. We are back, and the camper van battery is flat, and the battery on my computer is flat, and I have completely and possibly permanently lost my telephone. We are beginning to think that I might have left this on the train, so if you are trying to call me, forget it because I am no longer a member of the mobile network.
This does not matter because it was a rubbish phone with a permanently flat battery and no internet, so it is not a very great loss.
I have got nineteen percent of charge left on this before it goes completely flat and I am completely cut adrift from the cyber-universe, so I am going to write it as quickly and briefly as I can,
Obviously we are not exactly back, because we are nowhere near home yet. All the same, I feel a bit like I might at the end of a foreign holiday, finally on familiar soil, where I can understand the language, recognise the food, and can identify which way is North without needing to think about it.
We are at Number One Daughter’s house, which is to say, we are out of London.
We spent the morning pottering contentedly around London before we came home. We strolled along Regent Street, and watched a magician performing magic tricks, and listened to a string quartet playing the William Tell Overture, and thought how strange and foreign and exciting it all was.
London is not at all like anywhere else, and might as well be abroad. We sat on the tube station this morning and realised that we did not understand a single word that the announcements were saying: indeed, I had been absently thinking that they were in a foreign language and it surprised me suddenly to hear the word Delays slotted in amongst the peculiarly incomprehensible yawlings and growlings.
It is an oddly different sort of place. Everywhere you look there are advertisements. These are not for the sort of things that anybody might want. They are for weird things like meditation applications for your telephone, and iron tablets and award winning mattresses.
London seems to be entirely obsessed with its health and well-being. I have never seen so many different types of vitamins on sale. You can purchase tests to see if you have got bat flu, some for going on aeroplanes, but some just because you might like to know. This sort are massively cheaper, although not as cheap as the Government issue variety, which although impossible to get hold of, are of course free.
The tube is like nowhere else you might ever go. Wonderfully decorated in an era before anybody invented stick-on vinyl, it is ancient and crumbling and so cheaply efficient it is almost impossible to believe in it. You can spend the entire day hopping on and off trains for the price of one train from Windermere to Kendal.
Once above ground the world is beautiful and sophisticated, with shops where a scarf will cost you two hundred pounds, and a handbag several thousand. Sitting on the pavements outside are countless beggars with cardboard signs explaining their desperation.
I liked it all immensely, apart from the poor beggars, what a terrible feeling, that one day that might be any of us. I was not sorry that we do not have them in Windermere. We had one once, but I think he got fed up with everybody offering him a job instead of money, and buzzed off somewhere else.
In the end we got the train back to Number One Daughter’s house, which was lovely, full of harmonious lighting and calming candles.
I will have to tell you about this tomorrow, because now I have only got ten percent left and must go before I have nothing.
We are going to start on the long journey north in the morning.
I will charge my battery then.
