We are at Glencoe.
I am trying not to feel prejudiced against the Scots.
We stopped at a place called Fort William to do some laundry, because we have been on holiday for a very long time now, and had run out of clean things to wear. This has partly been helped along by wearing a very lot of clothes every day. It does not take long to run out of clean trousers when you are wearing twice as many as usual, and also when you are spending your entire time tramping through Scottish mud.
I wanted to wash and dry two loads. This cost me twenty five Scottish pounds. I could have reduced this cost to £23.50 if I had wanted to unload it out of the machines and into the driers and fold it up myself, but I am on holiday, and thought, what the hell.
I was going to say that this seems a lot of money for clean knickers, but it isn’t even clean knickers. I do not put my underwear through washing machines, and it is all in the bathroom sink, where is has been sloshing about as we drove, just like a washing machine without the spin cycle.
This is more expensive even than Windermere, where I can promise you we are experts at parting tourists from their cash.
We did not think that we liked Fort William very much.
It is a tiny place reached only by driving hundreds of miles along winding Scottish roads surrounded by mountains and trees. I do not have a problem with mountains and trees, only we have got an abundance of them at home and really we like best to look at interesting farming.
I have been there once before, as a child, but remembered nothing about it, and so I have got no idea if I admired it with any more enthusiasm then. I might have done, because I was not interested in farming in those days, and the idea of faerie glens and warring Scottish clans might have been appealing, not that we saw any of either, neither then nor today.
I had some vague recollection of catching some spiky and disgruntled crabs whilst fishing, but I was a shocking coward as a child, and doubt that this endeared the place to me very much. I do remember wearing a raincoat for much of the time, some things do not seem to have changed.
In fact it looked very much like an impoverished version of Windermere. Every other house was doing bed and breakfast and every shop promised to provide something authentically Scottish, mostly shortbread, but also mittens and whisky. Also every inhabitant looked as though they were suffering from the split-personality thing of being desperately broke and longing for the springtime, whilst equally struggling to suppress a bitter loathing for every idiot who arrived in their village and asked stupid questions and drove the wrong way round the one way system.
We had thought we would come the long way around on the journey back, because of seeing Scotland. We also toyed with the idea of heading down to the Isle of Arran, because I have a friend who we think may be working on the ferry there, and I would very much like to find him.
In the end we decided not to do this, because of cash reserves dwindling alarmingly low. The thing about not having real jobs is that when we are not doing them we don’t get paid. Some time soon we will have to contemplate doing something in order to get paid again. This will be difficult if we are stuck on an island, trapped by high winds and snow, and busily sloshing back the whisky in joyful reunion with an old acquaintance. It sounds to be magnificent fun, but we remembered, drearily, that we have got school fees to pay, and turned our thoughts towards home.
We will probably be there in another couple of days. We are not rushing because the weather is vile. The bad weather gloomily predicted to stop all boats from leaving Orkney is closing in on us even as we travel, and the camper van is heaving from side to side like a desperate ferry in a January gale.
We do not mind. We do not have to be home until the weekend, and we can chug along at an easy pace.
In the meantime we are sitting snugly underneath some Glencoe mountainside, listening to the winds and the sleet, drinking wine and feeling contented with our world.
It is Number Two Daughter’s birthday today. I think she is thirty two, Certainly she is very old. In fact both she and Number One Daughter are thirty two at the moment, there is a little bit in between their birthdays when they are the same age. This is a lot easier now than it was thirty two years ago.
Happy birthday Number Two Daughter.
