The joys of motorhome holidays in Scotland

What better way to spend Easter than in a motorhome in the north of Scotland. Yes, OK, but someone had already volunteered to do the bank holiday on-call. And even here, where there’s no internet access, news of the imminent election has been impossible to avoid. It’s quite tempting to claim a stress-related illness and remain up here, incommunicado except for the Blackberry, for the next four weeks, thus avoiding the hearing any more fatuous claims about all the money the NHS could save if only staff would stop going off sick.

We’ve been here for three days now and have seen so little sunlight that I think I’m developing rickets. This is exacerbated by the total absence in any shop within a 20-mile radius (so that’s the Spar and the Co-op) of anything resembling a fresh vegetable - at least, one that hasn’t been wrapped in two layers of plastic and flown in from Argentina. We’ve spent every evening so far (and most of the days) wrapped in blankets playing Children’s Monopoly. My daughter likes to hold the bank, and she’s got the hang of this gratifyingly quickly, siphoning money into her own account whenever our attention is diverted by the task of opening the next bottle of wine. In fact, the whole thing is giving me vivid flash backs to childhood holidays in the 70’s - for a start there’s no TV, secondly £3 buys you a whole set of Dodgems complete with ticket office, and thirdly it‘s raining. The only difference is that now Goretex has been invented, so we can go for a walk while it’s raining.

Yesterday we took the van to the nearest village to remind ourselves what other people look like. I hadn’t driven the ‘monster’ myself before, and the experience reminded me of the first time I did a bariatric-surgery list - an invigorating combination of terror tinged with surprise that everyone was still alive at the end of it. It was only when we arrived in the village that I appreciated the main drawback of mobile homes: you can’t park anywhere without blocking the main street, which tends to annoy the locals.

Back on the campsite, visibility was reduced to around 50 meters. “Just imagine what that view would be like on a sunny day,” commented my husband, who likes to be a glass-half-full kind of person because he knows it winds me up. To be frank, the leap of imagination required would be so vast that I would like to put it to better use - imagining lying in a nice hot bath, for instance.

But then, this morning, we wake to silence. There’s no rain beating on the roof, no wind threatening to topple the van. I open the van door. Sunshine. Birdsong. And the view is absolutely breathtaking - the mountains of Skye, scalpel-sharp across an unfeasibly blue sea, and the perfect, white sand of our little beach.

There’s only one thing to do: I reach for the mobile phone. The 5 MegaPixel camera takes a great shot, and this will be one to look at the next time I am stuck in theatre or, worse, the Clinical Effectiveness Committee. It will remind me that there is still a beautiful world out there.