As if it was not enough to wake up at the top of a deserted Scottish mountain, we started the day with one of the most peculiar breakfasts ever.
Number Two Daughter had sent us some Breakfast Flavoured chocolates.
We had a couple of them with Oliver the night before, and then the last ones for breakfast.
They were just about as odd as can be.
There was the obvious coffee flavour, and less obviously an Earl Grey Tea flavour. The Grapefruit one was very peculiar indeed, and the Peanut Butter And Jelly On Toast flavoured chocolate was odder still.
It was a nice breakfast though, appropriate as we chugged downwards through the village, which boasted being the home of the Golden Spurtle, which appears to be the World Porridge Making Championships.
There was not a porridge flavoured chocolate, merely a cereal one. That was weird enough.
Of course it was an uneventful sort of a day, since we are not Boris Johnson. We heard about his misadventures, of course, because of the glorious communication powers of the mighty Internet. Even in the northern wilderness a subscription to the august Daily Telegraph still dogs our footsteps, and we thrilled with excitement to think of the magnificent events happening in Westminster, even whilst we ploughed our way slowly southwards.
It is now the middle of the night and we all know the outcome, and so I will not bother discussing it here. Everybody knows that Boris is no longer the most popular boy in the Lower Fourth, and the Telegraph, which has clearly had enough of him, ran a piece reminding us that he failed to get a First at Oxford.
This is my concern at the moment, although related to the other half of the Oxbridge duo. I have still not finished my assignment, and poor Mark had to suffer a very quiet journey south whilst I bashed away at my computer, trying to compose a modern version of the York mystery plays.
I have still not finished.
It has got to be in on Thursday.
I might be going a bit quiet for a few days.
Anyway, we did not go home. As you know, tomorrow we have got to present ourselves at Her Majesty’s convenience to bear witness in a court case in Barrow.
The road to Barrow is paved with lots of road works.
Hence we thought we would carry our holiday on a bit, and go down tonight. It would be terrible to let the Queen down by being late because of traffic lights and a shortage of parking spaces.
I am writing from a car park in Barrow.
We got here and found a parking space which did not say too many rude things about unwanted camper vans, not that they can exactly be much of a problem next to the shipyards and the nuclear submarine warehouses. We ambled around with the dogs and looked at things for a while, because we had a house here once, long, long ago, which we rented to an extremely drunk person, and then did lots of building work to it.
The house was still there, although the drunk person was long gone. We thought about roads-not-taken and wondered how our lives might have been different if we had carried on building houses and renting them to impoverished drunks.
We did not do it, so we shall never know, but we did sell that house for a very satisfactory profit, many years ago, so it came out all right in the end.
Encouraged by these recollections, we took the dogs back to the van, and then recklessly splurged the last of our weekend cash in an Indian restaurant.
This was splendid.
We had a bottle of wine, which made us quite intoxicated very quickly indeed, and Mark had a bit of lamb with a huge bone, which we hacked into three bits and brought back for the dogs.
We sat in our deckchairs in the car park, with the last of the wine, whilst the dogs ate their bones. It was not much like yesterday at Gordonstoun but was very nice all the same.
I have attached two photographs, one from last night, and one tonight, so that you can see the way our fortunes have changed in the meantime.
The second one is a brilliant example of the camouflage we painted on the side of the van.
Can you see it?
