Going North
We started at Arisaig, on the Road to the Isles. It is full of memories. Susie and her family camped there each summer for about a decade, on Alasdhair MacDonald’s croft at Port Na Dorn. From what I gather the facilities were a bit primitive in those days, with a separate latrine tent. And George had to get up on wet nights [of which there were plenty] to dig a ditch to drain away the water from the fly-sheet. A decade or so later I rang Oxford University Press from the call-box in the village, on a reverse charge, person-to-person call, to be offered a job with them in Paris. And we celebrated with a pair of kippers from the smoke-house at Mallaig. A year or three later we rented Johnny MacDonald’s house at Cuillin View on the road towards Traigh Golf Course for a month [it cost £120 for the month]. And Joanna, five months old, was small enough to be bathed in the washbasin.
We drove up in a car hired from Short’s, a very friendly garage in Dalkeith. It was a gold Suzuki Vitara. Gold in colour, that is. On a sunny morning we stopped for coffee in Callander, at Mhor Bakery, coming away with a large crusty sour-dough loaf. And we stopped again for lunch at The Real Food Cafe in Tyndrum, a jumped up chippy which does excellent fish and chips. The girls taking the order were both Ukrainians, who were amazed to hear that we had been in Kyiv over Christmas 2021-22. After the meal I suggested to Susie that she say ‘Thank you very much’ to them in Ukrainian. So we scratched our heads to come up with the phrase. She said ‘çok tesherkurla’ to them twice Leaving them looking totally bewildered. I didn’t think Susie’s pronunciation would be that bad. Twenty miles up the road realised that she had spoken Turkish to them !
It rained a bit after Callander, but that is quite normal. And the road down through Glencoe is usually a bit dark and hostile. At Glenfinnan, where Bonnie Prince Charlie raised his standard on August 19th, 1745, there used to be a small car-park. And a chance to climb a narrow, spiral staircase to the top of a commemorative tower. Now there is an enormous car-park to cater for Harry Potter fans who assemble on the hillside to take photos of the Hogwarts Express on the Glenfinnan Viaduct. I bought a day-return on the train from Glasgow up to Mallaig about fifteen years ago. It is a spectacular journey. But the train windows were too dirty to get good photos. We caught up with the Hogwarts Express in Mallaig the following day; as a couple of hundred tourists disgorged from the train for a three hour stop-over in Mallaig. Time enough to buy fish and chips and to take a couple of photos.
In Arisaig we stayed in The Old Library, in the centre of the village, in a superior room with a glorious view of the sea. [I reflected ruefully that one night there cost exactly twice as much as a two week full-board package holiday, flights included, in Cefalu in the mid-1970s.] In the evening we walked down towards Rhu. In the morning, fortified by the first of several copious Scottish breakfasts, we walked a bit on the beach at Camusdarrach, made famous by the film Local Hero. In the Fishermen’s Mission bookshop in Mallaig, which is by some distance the most chaotic second-hand bookshop that I know, I bought a clean copy of Ben MacIntyre’s book A Foreign Field for £1.00. [This is one of MacIntyre’s early books, written I think when he was Paris correspondent for The Times. If that is true, it supports my contention that for many authors their first or early books are their best. Before they start churning out new books every year.]
And from Mallaig we sailed past Eigg and mountainous Rhum towards South Uist …
September 2023
Through a glass darkly 