I'm in Bonny Scotland within sight of the red teeth of the Forth Road Bridge - if I climb up the hill to Tesco's, which I don't have a mind to do though it's about the only place I can get to without a car, which, inconveniently, I do not possess.
Internet access is also iffy, and I feel like someone has cut out my tongue without the ability to communicate with the outside world. However, by standing by the window holding my laptop up at the sun I found a BT Openzone and signed up just so I could check my email. There's one from my daughter who needs some financial juggling before she leaves for Oxford on Friday, and erm, perplexingly my Oyster card has been topped up - though I haven't used it for four days. I want to help the daughter out but I can't connect to my bank. My building society card is still, a month on, in the post thanks to the dual inefficiencies of the Post Office and Santander and so I can't access any of those funds either. My friend George (originally from the next village along) who now lives in Cambridge has been in touch to reprimand me about my personal life which he feels, as honorary elder brother, he has a right to do (in the vernacular - 'och, lassie ye shouldnie be wastin yer time....' though he speaks in real life as though he's presenting the Today program) and so I'm now sulking with him. That leaves a big fat nobody to respond to. And for this I paid a fiver.
Elder daughter is off to Oxford on Friday. I will be leaving work, jumping in the car and driving her straight off there to settle her in to her new home in Cowley Road where I once lived myself. I am going to miss her like an amputated limb though it will also be nice to have a bit more space in the sleeve I can now pin to my chest. Henceforth it will just be me and the younger daughter. The elder son also lives at home but since he is nocturnal we don't actually see him - it's like having mice, you only find evidence of his existence, though thankfully he doesn't poo on the floor (yet) but does leave a small trail of crumbs and dirty dishes. Peace and tranquility will return to Walton's Mountain (not that the elder daughter disturbs this peace but she's probably even more anxious to have some space of her own than I am. When I suggested I might go up to Oxford once a week to see her (for an hour or two) she recoiled with horror: 'Not every week, ma!'
Worcester is off to the Opera and arriving for a very late check in at Hotel Girlfriend on Friday night, so will not be requiring room service, I expect. And that's the coming weekend, already folded into neat little creases like an origami crane.
Meanwhile I'm in saturated fat limbo - north of the Border gorging on scones, Scotch pies, German biscuits, Lorne Sausage, Bourbon creams, morning rolls, fried tattie scones, cream cakes, treacle scones and Cinzano with (diet) Lemonade. So far I've discovered a stockpile of chocolate biscuits in my sister's kitchen that would shock UN Weapons Inspectors. If we sent the Scottish diet - of which I'm currently an enthusiastic consumer - to Iran and North Korea we wouldn't have to worry about the nuclear bomb - they'd be too busy eating multi-packs of crisps and jam sponges to press the button. So far the only fruit I've seen in four days has been the lemon floating in my Cinzano and I've eaten more bread over the weekend than I have in the last month. Readers - I am the EU butter mountain. The jeans that were already tight when I boarded the plane now resemble the ankle to thigh elastic bandages that you have to wear after you've had liposuction (so I'm told, so I'm told) and feel like a non-surgical gastric bypass as they are so constricting they don't leave room in the stomach for food. I now understand why my mother wore an 18 hour girdle - it meant you only had 6 left for eating, and in those you were supposed to be asleep.
I'm also doing a lot of sleep. My sister and her husband are both retired. To their beds until about ten o'clock every morning. So, I'm fat, but refreshed. And half way through my second book. Reading it, I add, writing - not so much.
However, the reason I'm here, other than to catch up on the the X-Factor and Strictly Come Dancing marathons and to continue the Worcester tradition of visiting every supermarket in a 5 mile radius (so far we've done Tesco's, The Co-op, Somerfield and Aldi - and lest I get too jaded, Worcester informed me that there are still some left in his neck of the woods, the extensive, green, thick, muddy woods, that I haven't yet been too - oh joy, oh joy, oh joy!) is because I was giving a little talk at a local library.
Not that local, actually. It's - oooooh - a good five miles away from my home village to the metropolis of West Calder which, when I was growing up, was the equivalent of going to Manhattan from Queens. Apparently there are signs like wanted posters advertising my talk in the village library. My cousin saw one:
'Aye Marion, I saw it stuck ootside on the door, so ah went in and said "that's my wee cousin ye've got stuck outside' - yer famous, you know - front page of the Edinburgh Evening News, 'n everything.'
I mumbled modestly and asked her if she was coming.
'Nah, well, ye see, I've already signed up for something at the Rural that day. We're going to Dobbie's Garden Centre.'
Fair enough. Never let it be said I have 'a big heed'.
So I turned up at the Manhattan library, terrified that my cousin would be representative of the local populace who voted with their feet and didn't bother to turn up to hear me. The library was charging a a quid and though fame may have its price, even I don't think I'm worth a pound. However, there was wine being served (at 12.30 - this is Scotland!) and nibbles, so I think the booze was well worth the entrance fee.
I needn't have worried. Despite my cousin being busy with the Rural, and all my other cousins having invented a wedding in Cyprus that they had to go to and so, en masse, excused themselves (as if they couldn't have got married another weekend) - a good audience turned up. Nobody actually made the 5 mile trip from my home village however, which was a shame, but have to eat somebody in my birthplace to be really famous, so I'm trying to get past the disappointment.
As soon as I settled myself in the chair, I felt right at home, as well I should have, since I (nearly) was. There was one woman there who had known my father, another who knew my best friend Patricia when I was a child, another lovely woman called Carol who went to the same school I did, and another whose daughter and son both lived in my village - and everyone was familiar with a lot of the background of the book and even, in some cases, knew exactly where I'd set it and who the characters were based on. I had a lovely time. Actually, with a glass of red wine in one hand and a fistful of crisps in the other, I wonder why I live in London. The sun even shone.
Apparently I'm in the Local History Library too - for reference. Me and Britain's Got Talent's Susan Boyle who comes from a village five miles the other way.
Damn her.
