But know I must otherwise it will be forgotten and swallowed up in the mists of time.
So on Wednesday I was in the depths of despair after my hillside sobbing of the night before. It was pissing with rain and I refused to put waterproofs on out of some fit of childish curlishness and so was soaked within about ten minutes of weeding. I then conceded that waterproofs were probably preferable to pnemonia so headed back to Willow to get changed and encountered a soggy and rather sad Scarlett who said she felt rubbish and wanted her mummy. That was more than sufficient excuse for me to go back and tell them I needed to stay with Tarly instead of do weeding in the rain so I got changed into dry clothes and spent the rest of the day huddled in the van with Davies and Scarlett eating sherbert lemons and reading Enid Blyton, which (forgive me modern medicine peddlars) seems to be to be the very best cure for such ailments.
Ady brought some lunch in to us which meant we got to carry on sitting in the van and then the much awaited phonecall finally came to say the water pump had arrrived back so Ady and Alan headed off to collect it.
There followed possibly the most tense few hours of my life so far as we waited for them to get back, waited for Alan to drink his tea, waited for the water pump to be fitted and so on. They got back at 6pm, we had tea and doughnuts and I guess Alan was working on it by 7pm. He had said 2 hours so I expected to be done by 9pm, 10pm at worst and driving down that hillside in daylight (daylight til nearly 11pm up here).
Wrong!
8pm came and went. The water pump went on ok.
9pm came and went. It turned out the electric fan (nicked off a car Alan had skulking about) didn’t fit using the bracket Alan had made as he had not allowed for the water pump being in the way.
10pm came and went. At 930pm I was up the hill ringing my Mum who had started to worry about not having heard from us and rung and left a message on Anna’s mobile, which rather blew our cover on my story about us needing to leave on Wednesday as my parents would be arriving at the campsite, when she left their landline number.
11pm came and went. Alan started welding a new bracket for the fan. Then he installed a switch on the dashboard. Then he realised he needed some ‘spade connectors’ so Ady (by now chief torch holder) and he walked down the hill to the wrecked car to see if that had any. It didn’t. So they walked back up the hill to a trailer to see if that had any. It did. So they removed them from that. Which despite the ease of the sentence was not straightforward 😉
1145pm – I had long since given up hope of seeing friends of family again. I had resigned myself to living there forever and submitting to their strange and curious ways when all was declared complete. Willow started up, hugs were exchanged, promises to stay in touch issued and we began the long road down the hill and away. It takes nearly half an hour to negotiate their track including five gates, many cows who fail to moooove out of the way of the van and some very non Willow friendly terrain but we finally closed the last gate behind us, watched a badger (remote control obviously) scuttle across the road infront of us and hit the open road.
The kids fell asleep and despite not having had dinner by the time we reached the campsite at about 130am we shoved them up into their beds, parked in the carpark, put the bed down and crawled into our sleeping bags at about 3am.
A mad journey but 100% worth it for that feeling before we even opened our eyes on Thursday morning that we were no longer at Bryn Mawr. 🙂