h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

What we did on our holidays, or "Round Scotland without an opposable thumb"


Monday

Set off from Huddersfield at 10AM having spent most of Sunday packing the camper. Sunday was a fine day, but of course on Monday morning, as we pulled out of the driveway, dead on cue, a light drizzle started. Slightly dispirited, we drove through the rain to Keswick, and did some shopping in Booths supermarket, also taking the opportunity to break the journey. The original idea had been to get to the Kayak Rack Manufacturers in Coylton, near Ayr, early in the afternoon, but we reckoned without Scotland. Scotland is much bigger than you think it is. That is the first law of Scotland. The second law of Scotland is that for every midge you despatch to the happy hunting grounds, two hundred more take its place.

As the weather improved, our spirits sank, as we had a miserable drive through the central Scottish wasteland, following the motorway up from Moffat towards Glasgow, willing the turning for Ayr to come in sight. Unfortunately, roads in Scotland follow the valleys, which can lead to some spectacular detours, especially further North in the Highlands. Having reached the turnoff and with the Tannahill Weavers on repeat on the CD player in an attempt to get us in the mood, we trailed along the road leading out West towards Ayr, passing through a seemingly endless succession of small towns consisting of two identical rows of bungalows lining a main street, with a shop and occasionally a post office. At the edge of each of these was invariably a school with a speed warning sign: "Twenty's plenty". After three or four of these I took to reciting it aloud in the voice Janet used to use when offering Dr Cameron his tea. Debbie was not amused.

At 4.45PM (so much for "early afternoon" we finally arrived at Coylton (basted in bright, warm, sunshine, unlike England) to fit the kayak bars. The people at Kari-Tech could have been forgiven for having given up and gone home but in fact, once summoned down to the yard by the friendly local farmer with his mobile phone, they mustered around the camper and set to work with a will. And struggled with the job til 8PM at which point we all agreed it had been a long day and it would be much better if we left the kayak with them (until then it had been occupying most of the inside of the camper) found somewhere locally to doss, and came back in the morning.

So it was that we motored on out to the heads of Ayr and stayed the night at Dunmure, watching the sunset over the Isle of Arran. After toasting the fact that the weather had turned with generous slugs of mead, Debbie gazed out over the Firth of Clyde at what she said was a single tree that she could see on top of Goatfell, the tallest mountain on Arran. It turned out that the "single tree" was in fact a dark cloud, and flew off into the sunset to a height of 2000 feet. Obviously confusion between "little" and "far away" is not confined solely to the annals of Father Ted.

Tuesday

After a slow start, we wended our way back to Coylton, arriving as promised, "first thing" at 12PM! During the three hours struggle that followed, the kayak bar fitting was finally subdued, at the cost of one thumb (mine) which I hurt badly during the shenanigans with hammers, stepladders, spanners, planks and other various assorted items of kit necessary to get what is in effect a large pointy plastic washing up bowl with a seat in it, hoisted 9 feet 1 into the air and sitting atop a VW Transporter. Having spent most of afternoon getting the kayak bars fitted we then paid (I had previously thought this would be the most painful part of the exercise but no, it was definitely my thumb) said our goodbyes to Coylton, and then set off for northbound, over the Erskine bridge, up the side of Loch Lomond, and into the Trossachs, Aberfoyle and Loch Ard. Thumb not v. well, hurting a lot and swelling up. Would be useful for hitchhiking though, if the need arose. No motorist could ignore its angry majesty.

During one of the many breaks while we were struggling with getting the Kari-Tech bars fitted, I was talking to the dairy farmer at Coylton who rents them the space they use to make the bars and other kayak accessories. He's getting out of dairy, and now organises and annual country and western festival instead. It's much, much, more profitable. Last year the local Castle complained about the sound, he said, but it was probably just because they weren't invited.

As we left Ayr on the coast road we were uncomfortably jerked back into the real world by the sight of patrols of armed police, conspicuous around the perimeter of Prestwick airport, coupled with reports of expected rioting and protest at the G8 summit. Coincidentally, I found I was wearing a gillet. Perhaps I could have a summit all of my own.

Deb meanwhile was having a disaster day. We finally got to the shores of Loch Ard and almost the first thing she did was to nearly lose a shoe in a bog having a pee. I know that you normally pee in bogs, but this bog was actually a bog, if you see what I mean. She then came back from her little foray into the woods, changed her shoes, and almost immediately broke one of the curtain holders in the camper, finishing off by dropping a light on my head.

The only adjective I can use to describe the mountains round Loch Ard was that they were very Trossach-y. And there were lots of them, all named improbable things like Ben Lomond, Ben Doon, and Ben Vorlick, which sounds like it ought to be a Scottish bedtime drink. Anyway we soon got fed up and decided it was easier just to call them all "Ben Affleck." A) it saves having to look on the map and B) It suggests the interesting question "who was the first man up Ben Affleck?" [Anyone who answered "Tom Cruise" risks the wrath of m'learned friends, and since there is obviously no truth in such a scurrilous assertion I will pass on. ]

Loch Ard had a Crannog in it. Mind you, we decided also that the Ordnance Survey probably just insert them at random all over maps of Scotland (ooh look, a Crannog): see also Castle (or "not ANOTHER bloody castle" to quote Debbie).

Wednesday

Woke up with thumb angry, swollen and purple - this is generally held to be a bad idea if it's your thumb, but a good idea if it's any other part of your body. Also had a stiff neck. What a crazy mixed up kid I am.

Watched the geese beside Loch Ard. Later, did a painting of Loch Ard, while Debbie paddled it. A French lass from the hotel came to watch. Apparently lots of French people come to Scotland to work in the catering industry all summer (why?) I suppose she had never seen a guy without an opposable thumb doing a painting before. Maybe she thought I was an impressionist (wanna see me do Marcel Marceau?) Anyway Deb had her paddle, and Tig had a contretemps with some fierce Scottish ducks who tried to waddle out of the water just at the point where she was sleeping. Neither party saw the other until they were about an inch apart, and both were equally astonished and quick to retreat. We now have to add ducks to the long list of things Tig is scared of, which also includes Rabbits (especially Scottish ones) and Sheep. So far I have resisted the temptation to shoot the sheep and then explain to the farmer that they were worrying our dog.

Having packed up at Loch Ard, we tootled back to Aberfoyle to the tourist info, where we also took the opportunity to fill up the water carriers from the tap in the disabled toilets. In fact, a very nice lady seeing me struggling with my thumb, took them off me and did them for me. I thanked her profusely, explaining that while we were self-sufficient, we needed the water "for the dog". And the kettle, and the cooking, and the washing. Aberfoyle boasts, among its many attractions, "The Wee But a Ben Bistro"! Yes, folks, that whirring noise you can hear is Sir Harry Lauder, revolving in his grave at 78RPM.

Now that we were back in (relative) civilization, we found that the mobile phones worked again, (mobiles were a no-no while we were in the shadow of Ben Affleck, which sort of made me wonder what people use to make all these hoax calls that mountain rescue keep complaining about - smoke signals?) When I dialled in to my urgent three now voicemail messages I found that our tender for a major charity had been accepted and there was to be a presentation the day I got back in the office. Argh. Power point by proxy! More work. It makes you wonder why we bother with holidays.

Left Aberfoyle for Loch Lomond via Balmaha (gateway to the south?) and Rowardennan (immediately christened by us "Rhododendron") where the road up the Eastern side of Loch Lomond stops. Deb asked "did they run out of money?" I answered "no, they ran out of destination".

We heard there that President Bush had collided on his bike with one of the thousands of policemen sent to protect him. The President, out for a bike ride (in the middle of a summit intended to change the world, he goes off for a bike ride, what is he playing at?) had collided with the policeman (who had probably been drafted in from somewhere like Balamory and never seen anything move faster than a hedgehog trying to escape the deadly syringes of Scottish Natural Heritage before now) sustaining a hand injury and broke the cop's ankle. Thank God for a leader of the free world who is able to see disaster coming and avoid it. Er... oh.

Wednesday night was spent by the shores of Loch Lomond with the midges - I have become convinced that midges are the origin of both all the moves in Scottish Country Dancing (especially the Highland Fling) AND Tourette's syndrome. Also there was no way I could get into the gents at Rowardennan (too many steps, too few rails, not enough thumbs to grip with) and there was no disabled bog so I had to use the (fortunately, at that time of night, deserted) ladies (sorry, Ladies of Rowardennan).

That night the camper's bed broke and we had a domestic about it. I can strongly recommend melamine plates to the married couples of England, as they can be thrown over and over again without breaking!

Thursday

Next morning at Loch Lomond we had an early start, courtesy of the broken bed, and saw the sun rise at about 5AM. Deb was out on the water by 8.15 and I spent an idyllic two hours tidying up and catching up on lost sleep. Then I phoned the mobile phone company and (after negotiating their choices of menus and options, specifically designed to deter people less bloody-minded than I was feeling right then) spent a further hour arguing with someone called Jiten about whether or not the 14 day peace of mind guarantee started when I got my new phone or when they first thought of ringing us up, even though they didn't get round to sending it to us for days afterwards. I don't want to be unkind to people who work in call centres, but they picked the wrong person to argue with that day. I ended up screaming down the phone to them that they were a useless bunch of oxygen thieves. If you are interested, the company is called Dial-a-Phone, and no barge pole known to man is long enough. I would rather sniff a steelworker's jockstrap than have any more knowing contact with them. They make Russ Abbot look like an MBA.

Because of the conversation with Dial-a-Gooby, lunch was a bit delayed, so I rang home and spoke to Deb's Mum, who had been feeding the cats. She told us of the bombs. I put the BBC on and listened with a mounting sense of anger and hopelessness to the reports. It had to come, sooner or later, our blind support for Bush would come back to bite us on the bum, and now it seemed it had happened. The G8 faded like Shakespeare's "insubstantial pageant". All yesterday's buffoonery (Geldof, concerts, protests - themselves tinged with an edge of frustrated violence at the heavy handed police tactics) all diminished when overtaken by the plain factual truth that someone (and we assumed straight away it was Al-Qaeda) had let off four bombs in London, killing dozens of people. We listened to Blair making his statement, with those odd pauses in. between. the. words. Sadly, the word "sorry" did not feature. In fact it was nothing to do with Iraq. So that's alright then. Must've just been a coincidence.

Sobered, chastened, we headed down from Loch Lomond, back over the Erskine Bridge, heading for Ardrossan and the ferry to Arran. God, what a place. Ardrossan I mean. Still the lady there in the Calmac Terminal did offer to post my postcards for me when I couldn't find a post box, and she was as good as her word, because everyone got them the day after. Strike one for the Royal Mail. It won't happen when it's been privatised.

People have unkindly said that if you want to know what the Isle of Man was like fifty years ago, go to Arran, but I quite like the "timeslip" quality of the place. After landing we went into the Co-op at Brodick, taking care to walk down the aisles the right way so we could read all the signs (they have gaelic on the back) Gaelic may be incomprehensible but at least unlike Welsh, it was still in use til relatively recently (Welsh is of course made up on the spot, to confuse the English) Gaelic was still in conversational use on Skye as recently as 1984, I can report, having sat and listened to two crofters discussing I know not what in Gaelic, to a background of Barry Manilow, in the pub at Carbost.

I bought a bottle of Skye Whisky (established 1933) by Iain MacLeod - purely as thumb anaesthetic you understand - and came to the conclusion as I drank it that all Scottish place names are interchangeable (DunDonald Macdonald Dunmure Dunromininthe gloamin etc)

Leaving Brodick, we stopped off at Lochranza, where the ferry comes in the other side, from Clanaoig on the Mull of Kintrye, for water (from another public bog tap) then drove on down past Pirnmill on the coast road. The weather had dulled and Kilbrannan Sound was a flat calm. Last time we saw seals swimming here, and we were not to be disappointed, as they made a reappearance, swimming around just off shore and hauling out on to the rocks. While we were parked up watching them, a school of porpoises went by, doing perfect synchronised leaping out of the water and then reappearing again a few yards further on. Both of us were pinching ourselves. (Although with my thumb I wasn't being very effective). No, we were not dreaming, we had both seen a school of porpoises just swim by, from left to right in perfect order. The seals were unfazed, they have seen it all before.

That night, having fixed the bed, fortified by Mead and by nips of "The MacLeod" we slept sounder than a sound thing in the layby at Pirnmill. The phones had stopped working again.

Friday

Began with a slow start and then we spent the afternoon having a prolonged lunch on Pirnmill Beach, discussing (amongst other things) Platonic archetypes, and how it was impossible to disprove Bishop Berkeley's theory that things ceased to exist when you could not see hear or feel them. We had the beach to ourselves, well, actually there was, occasionally, only one other person there, about half a mile away to the North, but for about three hours it was ours and ours alone.

A family with an improbable collection of dogs came along eventually, and stopped to chat. Were we on holiday? Yes, they thought so, because, as they said - "we've been watching you!" Shades of the Wicker Man - perhaps it was a local beach for local people, who knows, anyway they poddled off, taking their pack of various motley mutts with them, while Tig snoozed contentedly on the warm sand by my camping chair, with the superior air of a Geman Shepherd who had been there since early on and claimed her place with a towel.

I was also trying to instil in Debbie some of the rudiments of navigation prior to her embarking on her first sea-kayaking trip. We had trouble with windward and leeward. I managed to get her to recite the compass rose, but Port and Starboard also caused problems. "Why don't they call it something sensible, like Port and Stilton?" Why not, indeed.

Then she went off for a paddle while I did a very indifferent painting, and also, having given up the landscape, painted the points of the compass onto a flat pebble for her. The kayak rack was playing up again and we had to reverse back to the layby with the kayak hanging off the side so we could get it back on top properly. Fortunately you only get one car every 45 minutes along that road, or we would have been toast, wandering about in the gloom.

We drove on to Dougarie Point and found a place to spend Friday night: it was just light enough when we pulled up to see a seal basking on the rocks offshore. The seal did not bat an eyelid (actually, do seals have eyelids to bat?)

Saturday

Started with the seal of approval, and the approval of a seal. Perhaps they haul out and say "Ooh look, a tin of humans. I wonder if there is any fish in there". After another slow start, we drove round the coast road back towards Brodick and the shops. Once more (at Kilmory) the Ladies was the only bog I could use. The thumb was easing but it's amazing how much you need your thumb to haul yourself up steps.

We drove on, past the memorial to the airmen who died when their plane crashed into the Sound of Pladda in 1942, with Ailsa Craig prominent on the horizon (Or "That currant bun" , as Debbie referred to it. Clearly her navigational skills still need some honing.)

After shopping in Brodick we parked up and I sat painting a picture of Goatfell and the Arran mountains, while a man busking in the pub garden behind us sang "Amarillo", over and over again. Peter Kaye has a lot to answer for. Deb, however, had a more productive evening and paddled across the bay and saw 5 seals, one on a rock and four swimming round her as she sailed along. Perhaps they thought she was a giant orange seal. It's an easy mistake to make. I told her next time to take a tin of pilchards ("They'll be all over you like a rash")

Back at Dougarie we had a barbecue on the beach. The last of Macleod went down, the thumb was pleasantly numb, the food was vaguely warm, the only thing which unsettled me slightly was Tig's strange behaviour, frequently leaving the fire and always going towards the south west, the direction of home. I speculated at the time that maybe a Barrow-wight from one of the ancient sites had come to the edge of the firelight, drawn from his chambered tomb or cairn by the need for human company. As it turned out, Tig had other reasons to be harking towards home.

Sunday morning

Finally got one of the phones working, to find a text message "ring Mum ASAP". When Debbie rang her Mum, we learnt the sad news that Russell, the Baggis Cat, who had defied so much in the way of illness that would have killed off many a lesser mogster, had died on Saturday night.

Deb's mum had been coming round to feed the cats while we were away, and not finding Russ in his usual place, went searching and found him flaked out at the end of our bed. She bundled him up and drove him straight to the vets, they stuck him on a drip, but there was nothing they could do, this time, unlike back in February, he just didn't have the strength this time around to pull off a second miracle. He died about 8PM on Saturday night. Just as Debbie was paddling with the seals.

When Russ was first ill, I happened to be reading the Mass Observation diary of Maggie Joy Blunt, and kept this bit from when she wrote about one of her cats, on 14 March 1947:

"The cat died. Such an insignificant event. A dead cat - target for mockery, small boys, and dust. There are too many cats in the world. Why make all the fuss because now there is one less?

Every cat is a miracle of independent, loveable life, if you have the eyes and the feeling to understand it as such. I have loved many cats and I expect I shall love many more. Each one becomes a friend with a distinct individuality, and the loss each time is a deeply personal one. No one else ever replaces that person exactly, but new personalities help you to forget your grief at the loss of others."

I'm not going to re-write Baggis's epitaph now, the one I wrote originally in the Epilogue for him back then still stands, even though, cantankerous little creature that he was, he undermined it, at that time, in typical Russell fashion, by not actually dying!

Deb summed it up by saying he wasn't a good cat, but he was the best bad cat in the world, and always managed make you smile at his antics, even those he shouldn't really have been allowed to get away with, eg swiping food off your plate while you were still eating it...

We stopped briefly at the Ruthwell Cross near Dumfries on the journey home, and I couldn't help but be struck by the thought that the last time I was there, I was speaking on the phone to Ian W., also alas, no longer with us. Debbie jerked me out of my reverie by asking me if "this was that place where Jesus visited". No dear, that was Glastonbury. Allegedly.

All Sunday, on that long hot journey back from Ardrossan, down through Scotland, past the lake district and then on via Skipton and finally trundling into the drive about midnight, I was re-living all the times, good and bad, that Russell and I had been through together, me a human, him a cat. I had that old Eagles song going round my head, about "My man's got it made, now he's far beyond the pain, and we who must remain, go on living just the same."

Except it won't be the same, after 13 years, it is the end of an era. And I-church needs a new virtual cat. Russ will be a hard act to follow. In many ways. We buried him the following Wednesday, in the shadow of the honeysuckle hedge in the garden where he liked to go in the shade on hot days, and then in the evening, we lit the chiminea, filled the garden and the deck with T lights, and finished off the last of the mead.

So there you have it, small fry compared to some of the heavy stuff that had been kicking off in London during the week while we were away, but all too real to us. I am going to stop writing now and raise a glass to Russell, now feasting on chicken in aspic up there in cat heaven, along with Ginger, Silvo, Halibut, Reggie and Ossie, all purring to the music of the spheres. Which is, in itself, purring. And all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.