I am on a boat.
It is an absolutely hundred percent real boat. I don’t know which of us is more excited, me or Oliver.
Quite possibly me, actually.
This is going to be a short entry because once we sail we won’t have wifi and so I need to get this online as soon as I can otherwise tonight there would be Diary Silence, which would never do. Also I want to get on with being on a boat rather than just writing about it, and want to go and poke around the other decks and mill about outside and generally have an adventure. So this will be but a brief update on the day’s events, which for the most part have been fairly unremarkable anyway.
We had the morning with Nan and Grandad, and I let the sleeves of Oliver’s tweed jacket down because they were nearly at his elbows, and the children played at Wii tennis, and Grandad had the brilliant idea of having doughnuts for breakfast. This was an inspiration, and Lucy and Oliver had three each. I would have liked to have eaten three as well but decided against it on account of having some niggling reservations about possibly needing bigger trousers before the end of the holiday.
After that it was packing and tidying up, and we sorted all of Lucy’s stuff out, which was a bit embarrassing because it was much tidier and flatter and cleaner than it had been when she left me, and reorganised bits of camper van that weren’t properly finished off, and I cleaned everything and felt happy about it all.
We had the most enormous lunch, and the children helped wash up, which turned into a bit of a riot, and then Nan and Grandad were starting to look a bit haggard, and we had got to get to the boat before the end of the day, so we thought it would be a good moment to let them rediscover their tranquillity, and we were off.
I can’t remember what I have told you about our plans for the journey, so you may not know that we decided to sail from Hull.
The thinking behind this was that it is such a long way to Dover from the Lake District, when you have got a top speed of fifty, that it would have taken most of the holiday just to get there and back. Also we don’t arrive in France after two days driving and half a night on a boat feeling tired and grumpy and not certain about which side of the road is a good idea, and so on. Also I like travelling and spending a night on a boat is an ace thing to do
Hull is not a very long way from Nan and Grandad’s house, and we tootled down through wide prairies of farmland, which was lovely, glorious colours and ploughed, bare fields, and then abruptly into Hull.
Hull is a busy sort of place, my eyes were on stalks driving through it, engineering works and paint shops and plastics manufacturers and interesting things to look at all the way to the port, and then suddenly we were there, and Oliver and I nearly burst with excitement, because the boat is huge.
The picture shows your diarist and family settled in to the bar on the top deck, listening contentedly to a man playing a piano and writing these very words, in fact. In a little while we are going to make our way to the restaurant for dinner and wine, and we might go and see a film later, because they are showing a film about Everest which looks exciting: and then after that we are going to go and settle down for the night in our tiny cabin. It is a tiny cabin because Mark would not let me book into Club Class, which is the way we used to travel before school fees, but even he was a bit surprised not to have our own lounge and coffee so we thought we might try and upgrade for the journey back.
We are going to be absolutely bankrupt by the time we get home. I am sorry to say that I can see it coming.
That will be next week, though, and right now I just don’t care.
