Chapter Two: We've been on this road before.

We’ve been on this road before, mum, dad and me (and my sister). Each motorway services ripe with its own ring fenced memories. I remember visiting Tebay when it was just a quirky farmers’ co-op: all rustic sandwiches and polystyrene cups of soup. 

As we pull in I remind mum and dad of our visit, half a century ago: on my first trip to Scotland. Dad’s doctor had advised a fresh air cure for his pleurisy. We loaded up the car and drove 500 miles to Ullapool: Dad wheezing all the way, mum lighting up Players’ Number 6 next to him, and blowing the smoke over her shoulder to us.

“I loved that Cortina,” Dad says. “I wish I’d never sold it.”

“You wouldn’t get in it after it was stolen,” I say to Mum, recalling how she shunned it after it was recovered in the Kwik Save car park, its passenger seat smothered in melted Milk Tray chocolates.

“That was disgusting. They were my birthday present,” Mum says, looking as distraught as if the offence happened yesterday. “I never ate Milk Tray after that,” she says.

This is news to me. But also, as I think back, there is a ring of truth about it. The latter half of the seventies were definitely the Fry’s Peppermint Cream years. 

Tebay is a seething mass of concussed-looking day trippers. I count ten coaches in the overflow car park. In the shop, a melee of women stroke lambswool cardigans and open candle boxes for furtive sniffs. I’m momentarily distracted by a bottle of bath foam. I pick it up - it costs £30 - and I put it down again. 

Mum is grabbing handfuls of tourist leaflets from the stand and shoving them in her pockets in readiness for the day that we decide to visit The World of Beatrix Potter and take a ride on an Ullswater steamer. Dad seems bewildered by it all. He looks at me, in that way he does now: waiting for his prompt. 

“Shall we grab something to eat?” I say. 

“I was just about to say that,” he says. 

I’m glad I came. I realise that this is all too much. The newness, the chaos, the terrifying realisation that they are cut adrift from their known world. But here they are, with their hapless son who needs their protection. These roles are irrefutable. What we are all searching for, as we conga through the queues for the tills, are new ways to make them work. 

We don’t say anything – the artisan gins and gorse-flavoured chocolates say it all for us – we’re a long way from 1973. The old order has broken down. So how do we begin again? 

We begin in denial. I am taking my parents on holiday, and we’re all pretending that they’re taking me. The longer we all stick to the script, the happier we will all be.

“That bread looks very greasy,” Mum says.

“It’s focaccia,” I say. 

“Shall we have some cake?” Mum says. “My treat.”

--

We cross the border soon after our morning coffee break, and Wendy pipes up to tell us a little more about the rules of engagement. The hotel runs like a Japanese car plant: a ruthlessly efficient system of rotating meal times and coach departure schedules displayed on the notice board every morning.

“Breakfast times vary, depending on what we’re doing in the day, but we always like to be back at the hotel at least an hour before our evening meals,” she says. “And whatever you do, don’t get on the wrong coach. Last week we almost took a couple from Kent to the hydroelectric power station and they thought they were going home.”

“Two Davids,” David chuckles down the microphone.

“That’s right,” Wendy says. “We had two coach drivers called David that week, so you can see how they got into a bit of a kerfuffle.”

I am thinking of all these complex moving parts. The timetables, the fleet of identical coaches lined up outside the hotel. The nights of whisky and bingo, and the early starts. This is going to be a challenge. I need to act like one of the old queen’s ladies in waiting, surreptitiously greasing my parent’s passage through it all, while simultaneously looking like I’m just wandering about aimlessly. The hapless son as shadowy factotum.

--

It’s getting dark when we arrive at our destination  – a lavishly turreted Victorian railway hotel teetering on a rocky bluff above the edge of a loch. A jaunty woman with a clipboard jumps onboard and addresses the, by now,  weary and bumsore passengers. 

“Hello everyone,” she says, grabbing the mic from Wendy, “I’m Janine, your hotel manager. Welcome to the Loch Awe Hotel. “We’ll have you in your rooms as quickly as we can. Just to let you know you’ll be eating at seven tonight, and we’ve got Justin McBieber entertaining you in the Mackenzie Lounge at nine so, ladies, you’re in for a treat.”

I look at my watch. That gives us forty minutes to unpack and get down in time for soup. This is going to be interesting, I think. Mum takes two hours to prepare for a trip to Sainsbury’s.

“I don’t know about that, Dave. That’s cutting it a bit fine,” Dad says to me as we leave the coach. The implication is clear: this is my fault. Unbeknownst to my parents, I’ve been secretly conspiring with the hotel’s catering manager to make things as inconvenient as possible for them. Don’t they realise Mum has 42 evening dresses to unpack and hang up first? Your Mum and I are really disappointed in you. You don’t get this kind of inhumane treatment at a Warner Village. 

“I’m sorry, but seven is just not going to work for us,” Dad says to the harassed young girl at reception when she hands him his room keys.

“Ah, right,” she says, temporarily unsure of her next move. “Is half past OK?”

“That’ll be fine,” Mum says in a way that makes it sound like a gracious compromise. 

The girl takes an eraser to her timesheets and hardly raises a smile as she hands me my keys. She’s gone dangerously off-script and is mentally preparing herself for the consequences. 

I pretend I’ve never seen my Mum and Dad before as I take my keys and shuffle off. Whatever my parents thought a communal coach trip was, this clearly isn’t it. I’ve been put on warning, and I’m going to have to up my game. Dad’s dark mutterings in Moffat, about ‘preferring to visit Edinburgh than traipsing around an old battlefield’ now start to sound like a premonition. 

Pitted against an Edinburgh Woollen Mill and a Weatherspoons, even the hallowed fields of Culloden faced the very real prospect of a second home defeat in a row. The week’s itinerary, for Dad, is more ‘serving suggestion’ than nailed down agenda. My only hope was to thwart his nascent plans to muster the naughty end of the coach into an uprising.

“Dad, you can’t pick and choose what time you want to eat,” I say as I show them to their room. “Didn’t you hear Wendy explain about all the different coaches, and the set meal times?”

“She never said that,” Dad says, emphatically. “And anyway, your Mum needs a lie down.”

Thanks to Dad, the three of us manage a lie down before we head back to reception at twenty past seven. But we’re the only ones.

As we descend, we see a fractious queue of fellow passengers snaking from the doors leading to the dining room to the foot of the hotel’s sweeping mahogany staircase. 

An elderly woman, draped over a stroller, hunts feverishly for her medication from a multicoloured pill box. Another is propping herself up on a bookcase while her husband hand-signals to staff on the other side of the dining room doors, tapping the face of his watch with fury. 

The scene looks more like a disaster relief point than a jolly pre-supper get together. Justin McBieber’s going to have to pull some magic out of his tartan waistcoat if he’s to revive this lot, I think. 

As we pass, the quilting know-alls tut, theatrically, to Dad.

“Awful, isn’t it,” the chief know-all says to him.  “She definitely said seven o’clock. We all heard her.” 

“We’ve been waiting here since quarter to seven,” her sidekick says. “Apparently, someone from the coach company told reception to change our dinner time. But no one told us. Bit shoddy, isn’t it?”

“Awful,” Dad says. “Not the best start, is it?”

I shoot him a look. “No, it’s not, is it, Dad?”