The dogs are very pleased to have us back home.
Their walking-to-heel has been faultless, not at all like the usual reluctant trailing behind us until told they can go, at which point they both vanish like the spare loo rolls out of pub toilets.
They have recently been banished to their cushions rather than our bed at nights. This has been because a late night walk through a torrential downpour is not compatible with clean sheets.
It is not raining now, but they have made themselves some entirely comfortable if smelly nests on the floor, and so they can stay down there. Anyway, I woke up this morning to find my dog standing patiently and happily on his back legs with his nose on the bed next to my ear, waiting for me to stir, at which point he bounced up and down several times until he finally managed to scramble on to the bed, and then obviously the day had got to start.
I have got to say, I wasn’t over excited about it starting. The thing about coming home from holiday, even though it was only four days, is the huge quantity of washing that comes with us.
Also we had run out of everything that I thought might be nice to eat. We had even run out of things that we only eat in emergencies when everything nice has gone.
We all went shopping in Booths together, including Number Two Daughter, which was a mistake, because we all chucked the things that we like best into the trolley, and by the time we got to the checkout we had got a trolley full of melon and olives and salmon and similar lovely things and had spent a fortune.
We had also forgotten handy things like milk and dog food, and had to go to the Co-op afterwards.
Number Two Daughter had to go off to work then, and I found myself in the middle of the most enormously depressing muddle of suitcases and washing and shoes and shopping and unopened post. There was also a surprising quantity of clean washing that Number Two Daughter had done in our absence, but left on the coffee table, presumably in case I thought that might be a good place for my underwear to live.
I have lost a set of underwear on my holidays, to my irritation, because it is a pink set that I like very much. I have got no idea what I have done with it and am so reluctant to lose it that this morning I have had the deeply embarrassing experience of telephoning the hotels where we stayed asking if anybody had found my lost knickers, which so far they have not.
Also I had already written an unflattering review of the hotel near Gordonstoun on TripAdvisor, and so if I have left them there I imagine they will cut them into tiny bits before they return them. This, of course serves me right I suppose, for being unkindly witty at their expense: cooking everything by deep frying it in batter is a fine old Scottish tradition and ought not to be ridiculed by would-be sophisticates who think they know everything just because somebody thought they were middle class once.
Fortunately the sun was shining, and everything could be pegged on the line, which helped a lot, and over the course of the day we trailed in and out of the garden and up and down the stairs with arms full of clothes, and I ironed and folded and smoothed and tidied.
Mark chopped up vegetables and we made soup, and we baked potatoes and cooked sausages and baked the salmon in lemon and garlic for everybody to eat with salads, and slowly things started to look better.
We filled the fruit bowls and swept the hearth and took the empty suitcases back upstairs. Then I wrote to the headmaster at Gordonstoun thanking him for his kindness and telling him that we would be very pleased indeed to go forward with the admissions process.
When I had pressed ‘send’ it was the oddest feeling. Relief and happiness and tiredness and worry washed over me all together.
It is the beginning of a new journey.
