Posh Frocks & Peacocks - Tracie Podger Page 0,32

scratched his chin, contemplating. “We’ve been to Skye, so how about we head down to Jura?”

I nodded, never having visited any of the islands except Skye. Jura sounded familiar and I wracked my brain. “Is that where the whisky is made?” I asked.

“Yes, and George Orwell lived there. He wrote 1984 while he was there,” Ronan replied.

“Fab, we’ll get drunk and read about a country not that dissimilar to what we have now,” I said, laughing. I remembered having to read the book back in school. It was a stretch for the imagination, I’d thought at the time. Not so nowadays, of course.

Ronan chuckled. He was a well read man, and that was one thing I loved about him. He’d read a book a week, always something from his library. He’d told me once he’d thought the books to be stuffy and irrelevant, old and smelly. After we’d spent months cleaning and cataloguing them, it seemed to spark his interest again. He had always been a reader as a child but had grown out of it for a while. He had often threatened to pick up one of my erotic romances I shared with Maggie.

I climbed into the Land Rover and with a wave and list of instructions to Maggie, we were off.

I often turned to check Christine was still with us, even though I knew we’d feel it if she had somehow got uncoupled.

“She was a great buy, wasn’t she?” I said, smiling and wanting to remind Ronan he thought me mad when I’d first said I wanted to buy her.

“Yes, I concede,” he said, chuckling.

I settled back as we crossed Mull heading for the ferry to Oban. We would have two ferry journeys and we were taking a chance, of course, they could be booked up and, because it was summer, we’d have to wait for the next one. I wasn’t concerned. There was plenty to do in Oban if we got stuck there for a few hours.

We had been lucky to get booked in on both ferries with only a minimal wait for the second one. When we landed on Jura much later that day, Ronan asked me to search for somewhere that looked suitable to stop. Jura was very barren, more so than Skye, and smaller. There were no official campsites so we were hoping we’d be able to stop at the field opposite the Jura Hotel that’s usually set aside for camping in tents. I called ahead and after a little negotiation, they agreed, although we wouldn’t have electric hook up. We didn’t need that; we had gas to cook and a small battery that would give us lights. After the last trip out where Joe and I got stuck in the snow, Ronan had insisted we added a battery for times when we couldn’t get electricity. I was thankful of that. It was, after all, Scotland and the nights, especially on the coast, could still be a little chilly.

Ronan manoeuvred Christine so the bedroom windows faced out to sea, he thought it would be nice in the morning to sit with a cuppa and look out at waves crashing on the rocks. We unhitched the caravan and I put up her awning and set our table and chairs outside. It was warm enough to sit outside and although we knew Max wouldn’t run off, we were advised he had to be tethered. He wasn’t overly happy but he was on a very long lead that attached to a post screwed into the ground. Before we did anything more, I put the kettle on to boil and we then sat with a cup of tea, admiring the view.

“It’s amazing here. Look at the colour of the sea,” I said, shaking my head in wonderment. It was the same shade as any I’d seen in a holiday brochure for more far flung places. A beautiful azure blue changing to a vibrant green as it shallowed and most certainly not the brown we’d see back in the south of England.

Between the sea and us was a beach of soft golden sand and I was desperate to sink my bare feet into it. I undid the laces of my Converse and rolled up the legs of my jeans.

“Let’s go and paddle,” I said, rising from my seat.

Ronan and I took Max down to the nearly deserted beach. Just one other family had camped out at one end and I wondered why it wasn’t heaving. It was a beautiful