Somewhere Else
Yesterday, I was able to wave farewell to the last of this session’s exam papers. The hideous business of coping with scripts has dominated my life for the last three weeks, and thus, I emerged, blinking, today, feeling a bit like a battery chicken who has found the coop door mysteriously open. It is not that we are exactly short of things to do, but the things we have to do can from now on be done according to schedules appointed by ourselves, which makes a huge difference. Meanwhile, Dr Biswell, who has also been much oppressed by exam papers, was intending to go to Manchester today, ahead of the hideous weather prophesied for Friday and the weekend, to get various needful stuff done. We woke to a day of clear, calm blue skies and golden sunlight, with Honey the Hamster-Loving Hippie creating more and better order in the kitchen. We decided to bunk off for the day, the first chance we had had for a day off in really quite a long time. But before we went, I checked news and weather on the computer. To my astonishment, horrors abounded; lorries all over the M6, accidents on the A68, accidents on the A1 – basically, all the roads Southwards had something horrendous on them, while northern Aberdeenshire continued, as I went into this in more detail, to look like Paradise. Anyway. Pausing only to convince Dr Biswell to stay for the weekend, we went to Inverurie to stock up with food, just in case, and on to a prolonged, complicated and delicious lunch with an old friend. It was cold, but the sun was piercingly sharp and vivid, the dun-grey colours of late winter made lovely by the brilliant sky. We went on after lunch to one of the good antique shops, bought a beautiful carver chair which I thought at first was satinwood but is apparently an unusually blond mahogany, and circled homeward in the exquisite end of the day’s light: as fine a winter twilight as you could conceive, with slate-blue sky, clouds with gilt edges, clear and calm.
This happens from time to time. Due to the Grampians, west of us, and the Mounth, to the south, we sometimes find ourselves the bottom-left-hand corner of Scandinavia, in terms of weather, rather than the top-right-hand corner of the British Isles. Sometimes this is good, sometimes bad (I have known us under two feet of snow when everywhere else spring was well under way), but today, it was quite extraordinary. Perhaps we have moved to the otherworld without noticing. Here be dragons. Miss Kit, for one, is convinced that we have dragons. The boys from Kinloss RAF station have been practicing low night flying, and last night, we had jets overhead so alarmingly low that Dr Biswell confessed to having ducked. Miss Kit is exceedingly worried, hurls herself from whatever point of vantage she is occupying, and hides under a stout bit of furniture as if she has familiarised herself with WWII pamphlets about Home Defence. I would not be wholly sorry to find we have moved to the otherworld, I have to say: among the depressing items I have just cleaned out of the blog’s spam filter, I found the following. ‘Live out your abattoir fantasies with this sexy heavy-duty butcher’s apron’. Well, really. I’d sooner take my chance with the dragons.