Och Aye

We are here.

We have walked through the woods and paddled in the sea and drunk a bottle of Prosecco, because our champagne days are long gone. Nevertheless, I do not think that life could be any better.

The Prosecco might be something to do with this sentiment, and really, if I am brutally honest, I can’t really tell the difference any more. This might be because I do not drink champagne very often in our Brave New World, or it might simply be because age and bat flu have dulled my taste buds. Either way, a more economical future beckons, which can only be a happy outcome.

In any case, it has been lovely.

We are parked beside a deserted road, about twenty minutes walk through silent woods down to the sea. The beach was empty apart from us, with barely a footprint to suggest that the zombie apocalypse has not been and gone whilst we have been travelling. It is late at night, but because it is the far north, it is, like the Ministry of Love, the place where there is no darkness, except it is a lot nicer and so far  I have not seen any rats.

It is as bright as noon.

We have been driving all day. This was pleasanter than it sounds, because we have had stories playing over the speakers, and every now and again have stopped them to talk about their interesting ideas. One of them was about a couple, one half of whom was having an affair. We listened with the sort of scandalised satisfaction that one has when hearing about other people’s problems from a safe vantage point, and decided that it all sounded too upsettingly complicated for it to be worth a try.

Mark is rubbish at keeping secrets anyway. I would know what he had been doing before he even took his coat off.

The dogs were quite remarkably well behaved, but were, unsurprisingly, beginning to get restless by the time we arrived here, on the far north coast a couple of miles from school. We leaped straight out and went for a long walk, which really we needed just as much as they did. It is never a good idea to spend an entire day sitting listening to stories and eating chocolate buttons, no matter how many interesting thought-avenues it might open up when you do.

The woods here are splendid, green and dark and silent. They have been planted over sand dunes, and the combination of sand, and moss, and a thick carpet of fallen needles, muffled even the dogs’ ecstatic charging about. We followed lots of intriguing little paths, and I worried a bit about not having any breadcrumbs in my pocket, and then suddenly we reached the crest of a hill and the sea stretched out in front of us.

Obviously we slid down the sandy slope and went for a paddle, which was snow-melt cold. Oliver went for a swim in these waters this week, but we were not nearly so brave, and contented ourselves with some toe-numbing splashing.

Rosie leaped straight in. Obviously.

You will be very pleased to hear that when at long last we strolled back to the camper van, pleased and sandy, we had a very splendid dinner.

Several times during our hedonistic past, we have visited Disneyland in Paris, and stayed at their flagship hotel, a wonderfully frothy pink confection at the gates to the park.

The food in there is utterly marvellous. They do a lunchtime buffet, the very purpose of which is to provide exhausted French parents with a brief interval of tranquil civilisation, some excellent wine, and a lunch which is  most definitely not Mickey Mouse.

I have copied this in the camper van.

I did not manage to carve a perfect image of Tinker Bell into the watermelon, and the wine was Prosecco, but apart from that I was fairly close.

We had salads and spiced prawns in oil. We had olives and feta cheese. We had miraculously perfectly cooked cheese and onion pie, with crisp flaky pastry which turned out so right it amazed me, and I wish I had paid more attention to what I had done to it. We had Moroccan lamb sausages and barbecue chicken and finished the whole lot off with fruit mousse made from last year’s frozen black currants and topped with whipped cream blended with yoghurt.

It is lovely to have reached the age where one considers a jolly good dinner to be a happy ever after.

We are collecting Oliver tomorrow, and are going to watch him being First Murderer in the school production of Macbeth, so I should warn you that probably there will be no diary entry tomorrow. I am hoping to be sleepy and happy and probably full of wine by tomorrow night.

I will tell you about it the day after.