Thoroughly shod

Well, I have managed to waddle back home.

I am not actually at home. I am on the taxi rank, feeling, as Elspeth very perceptively put it, like Cinderella might have felt had she arrived home after the ball to discover she still had both of her shoes on.

It took me ages to notice that actually I was rather sad at the end of it all. I said goodbye to everybody entirely cheerfully, and did not realise it until I was unloading the car in the alley, and suddenly thought that really I would very much like to have a sit down and a little cry. I have enjoyed Cambridge very much, also the company of so many clever, thoughtful people, and I will never see most of them ever again.

We all said we would try and stay in touch, and get together, but of course we won’t. We won’t even graduate together, of course, because we are dispersed between different colleges, and we will all graduate  at different times.

I had not expected to feel sad, but I did, even though I am very pleased to be home again. It is odd to think that this very morning I was breakfasting in Cambridge, talking about books over hash browns and coffee, after which a gentle perambulation around the herb garden provided some thoughtful activity before my departure became due.

Of course it is not over. I have got lots of things yet to do, not least to write my dissertation, and have got several trips down to Cambridge yet to come, but our lectures are over, passed, as all things eventually pass over. I do not really mind. Mark and Oliver are gone and I have got two whole weeks in which to do almost nothing but work and write.

Apart from the dusting, obviously. I do not think either Mark or Oliver has dusted a single thing since my departure. I know that this is because they have been terrifically busy, not just because of the tedium of dusting, but it does not matter why, only the dust, and the spider that has taken up cobwebby residence above the bath.

I have got a massive pile of firewood to saw up as well.

This is because on my way home I collected a large pile of scrap timber, left over from various kitchen-reconstruction activities at Lucy’s house. Mark and Oliver had abandoned the dogs there, because it seemed the most continuously occupied dwelling in our globetrotting lives at the moment. I had to stop by to pick them up on the long journey north, so I chucked the wood in the boot and the dogs in the footwell in the front, with the immediate consequence that the first job on arriving home was to clean out the hideous mess in the taxi.

I had eaten all of my chocolate buttons, pensively, on the journey, which was not a good sign. I have not eaten any chocolate buttons for ages, nearly a whole week now, and the tub of them had only been left in the taxi for terrible emergencies. I did not even exactly realise I was doing it, but was lost in my contemplation of academia, and by the time I got to Lucy’s house, the tub was empty. I have become terribly rotund in Cambridge. I think I should perhaps eat tissue paper for a week, or something. I have heard that you do this if you are trying to lose weight, but I don’t have tissues, only handkerchiefs, which I don’t think would work so well.

Lucy was not at her house. She was at work. I reloaded the car and chugged disconsolately home.

I was still wearing my respectable Cambridge attire, and so I put one of Mark’s work jackets over the top for the taxi-cleaning project, which completed the Cinderella metamorphosis, and disconsolately hoovered the pumpkin out.

There was nobody to help, which seemed perfectly fair, since I never want to help Mark clean out the camper van when he comes back from Aberdeen, but there was nobody to ask in any case. Oliver has gone back to school and Mark has gone off to Aberdeen, and I was by myself.

Somehow the fire had gone out, and the house was cold. I re-lit it, and then threw open the windows to get rid of the smell of last week’s air in the house. This worked perfectly well, actually, and by the time I had finished unloading and cleaning I was feeling considerably recovered, not least because it is not possible to feel lonely in the company of two enthusiastic dogs, although the prospect of eating handkerchiefs for a week was not encouraging.

It is all going to be fine. I have still got lots more Cambridge to go, and I will still see people and have happy times.

It may not exactly be Cinderella’s ball, but it will at least be line-dancing in the pub.