We have just had a terrible scare.
We are on our holidays. We have only been on them for a few hours but already they have been very difficult.
We started off at Elspeth’s, where the pothole on her driveway has finally got too deep for the camper van. We did not entirely sink, although we might have done, certainly it is deep enough for you to consider bringing your swimming costume and flippers. Anyway, the camper van scraped on the end of it and broke the gas connector for the LPG. This runs the fridge and the water heaters and the cooker, and hence is pretty important.
Fortunately Elspeth is used to people drowning in her pothole and is well prepared for emergencies, so once we had clambered out of it she provided some new gas hose and another connector and Mark fixed it. I was impressed by this, I thought Mark hoarded a lot of clutter, but it turns out that he is small potatoes beside Elspeth.
Elspeth is having a stressful time. Her happy-ever-after seems to involve not going on holiday. The driveway, kitchen and living room were all filled with things they might or might not be packing to take to some hippie festival where she is supposed to be teaching hippies how to survive in the wilderness, or something. You will not be surprised to learn that she is not feeling optimistic about this. I would not be, either.
After Elspeth’s we went to Lancaster to have a cup of tea with Kate and Kevin, who were busy having a cup of tea with some other people but who were very polite about it anyway.
After that we went to consider our holiday options on the beach at Cockerham Sands in Lancaster.
It was dark but the time we got there, and completely deserted, because it is not the sort of beach with doughnuts and fish and chips and gift shops. It is the sort of beach with a faintly muddy smell and the endless calling of seabirds in the distance.
We jumped out of the camper van and ambled along the shingle, picking our way carefully because it was dark. The dogs belted around and barked at one another, and rolled about in disgusting damp stuff that was probably a mixture of dead fish and seaweed. They like that sort of thing.
When we got back to the camper van, which did not take very long because it was cold, Roger Poopy’s stupid father was not with us.
We went back to find him. He is not very good at keeping up because of being deaf and blind and also not being very clever.
We couldn’t find him.
We hunted and shouted and whistled and searched and clapped and worried.
He did not come back.
We retraced our steps and then took a new walk in the other direction.
We went along the beach and along the road. Mark told me to go back and get a shower whilst he went to the caravan site up the road to see if he was there, but I couldn’t. I wandered along the beach, staring into the dark and calling, but he did not appear.
I thought probably he was dead. A black rabbit had run across our path on the way there, and I thought maybe it had been the Black Rabbit of Fu Inle who had come to take him for his Owsla, not that dogs would probably be allowed. I said this to Mark when he came back, but he just laughed and said some rude things about the stupidity of Roger Poopy’s father making him unsuitable for any Owsla.
We were just deciding to drive back along the road and see if he had wandered back towards Lancaster when he emerged, blinking and stretching, from underneath the camper van.
We told him that he had no friends any more and that he would be going to bed an unloved dog.
Having a dead dog would not have been a very nice start to the holiday.
I am very glad we do not have to do that.
