The Road to Little Dribbling (48 page)

That really is all I am going to say about this.

—

The walk was a great success, as it always is, and a lot of fun, but above all heartening because nearly everyone on it had been touched by childhood cancer as parent or sibling or victim. Afterward, Matt told me he had something he wanted me to see, and he took me in his car to some nearby parkland, now home to a giant piece of earthwork sculpture called Northumberlandia. It was designed by an artist named Charles Jencks and erected on land donated by the Ridleys, who also provided part of the funding. Matt is very proud of Northumberlandia and for good reason. It is just the most wonderful creation. It is an enormous figure of a recumbent woman, a quarter of a mile long and a hundred feet high, made of earth dug up during the course of mining for coal on Ridley’s land, then lined with paths and planted over with grass.

The scale of it is staggering. “It is,” Matt told me, “the largest representation of a woman in the world.” It is beautiful to behold but also a pleasure to walk over. Paths lead to the top of her head, to the twin summits of her breasts, along her arms, down her grassy thighs. It was just splendid, the best thing I have seen in a long time.

I would love to have spent hours clambering over Northumberlandia now, but I had tracks of another sort to make. It was time to head to Scotland. My English adventure was coming to an end.

II

I stayed the night in North Berwick, ninety miles north of Blagdon Hall and comfortably inside Scotland. My plan was to drive to Edinburgh in the morning, then proceed north through the Cairngorm Mountains to Inverness and thence onward to Ullapool and Cape Wrath. I didn’t have much time to linger—the Cape Wrath season, such as it is, was coming to an end—but I was looking forward very much to the experience of driving into the Highlands. It’s a strange thing because nobody can say exactly where the Scottish Highlands begin and end, but there comes a moment when the world fills with clean, sparkling air and the mountains take on a kind of purply glory and you know you are there. That’s what I was looking forward to.

North Berwick is sometimes confused with Berwick-upon-Tweed, a famous border town, but North Berwick is a different place entirely, forty miles farther up the coast on the broad inlet melodically known as the Firth of Forth. (I was aching for someone to ask me if this was my first visit to the Firth of Forth because I could honestly respond: “No, it’s my fourth or fifth to the Firth of Forth.” But no one asked me.) I knew nothing about it and ended up there simply because it was conveniently on the way to Edinburgh. Well, it is lovely—a prosperous and attractive coastal town with an oceanfront golf course strikingly similar to St. Andrew’s. I liked it a lot.

I dropped my luggage at a hotel, then strolled into town. I went into the Ship Inn, which seemed a pleasant place, and read a day-old copy of the
East Lothian Courier
which I found lying on a table. The paper had an interesting report on a recent litter pick by an organization called the Forth Coastal Litter Campaign. The FCLC not only fastidiously picks up litter, bless it, but then apparently counts it all. Altogether it collected over fifty thousand pieces of litter on this recent sweep, including fifty-five party poppers, twenty-three traffic cones, twelve toothbrushes, forty-three surgical gloves, and fifteen colostomy bags. It was the colostomy bags that gave me pause. How do you account for that? Did one person drop colostomy bags on fifteen separate occasions or was it a party of colostomy bag users on perhaps an annual outing? If the latter, might this also explain the party poppers? Unfortunately, the
Courier
failed to specify.

The news pages of the paper were liberally sprinkled with articles about pub beatings—five on one page, just from this area—but everything else was about flower shows and fun runs and people shaving their heads for charity. I had never seen such a range of kindliness and violence coexisting in one locality. When I went for a second pint, I turned around and a guy was standing behind me waiting to take my place at the bar. We went through that little side-to-side dance where you keep inadvertently blocking the other person’s way. I smiled helplessly, as you do, and he looked at me as if he was thinking about shoving my head through the wall. That is the problem with Scotland, I find. You never know whether the next person you meet is going to offer you his bone marrow or nut you with his forehead.

Afterward I dined at a Thai restaurant on the main street, then went down to the seafront and looked across to a scattering of islands just off the coast. One of them, called Fidra, is said to have been the inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Treasure Island
. He spent a lot of time in the town as a boy evidently. The view was lovely. I didn’t see any colostomy bags.

As I stood there, I was severely startled to have my phone ring. It was my wife telling me that there was a problem at home. I can’t tell you what it was. I was involved in litigation—I had begun action against someone in America—and part of the subsequent settlement of that case was that I agreed not to discuss it. But something big had come up and I had to go home. The Highlands would have to wait.

Chapter 26

To Cape Wrath (and Considerably Beyond)

I

T
HERE ARE TWO HARD
things about getting to Cape Wrath from the south of England. The first is getting to Cape Wrath from the south of England. It is a long way, you see—seven hundred miles from my back door, according to Google Maps—and involves at a minimum a train journey, a car journey, a ferry trip across the lonely Kyle of Durness, and a bouncy ride on a minibus through an uninhabited wilderness. So the logistics take some working out.

The second and even more unsettling part of the undertaking is determining whether you can get there at all. The Cape Wrath website stresses that ferry crossings are subject to the vagaries of tides and weather, which in this part of Scotland can be both disruptive and extreme. The whole of the Cape Wrath peninsula also closes from time to time, apparently without a great deal of notice, when the Ministry of Defense, which owns twenty-five thousand acres there, uses it to practice shooting and blowing up things. On top of all that, the ferry and minibus services shut for half the year. If you miss the last autumn ferry, you have to wait six months for the next one in the spring.

Hoping to introduce a little certainty into the process, my wife called to make a reservation for me.

“We don’t take reservations,” the man told her.

“But he’s coming a long way,” she said.

“Everybody who comes up here has come a long way,” the man pointed out.

“Well, what are the chances of him getting on the boat if he just turns up?”

“Oh, he should be OK,” the man said. “We’re not that busy at the moment. Well, most days we’re not. Sometimes we are.”

“I don’t know how to interpret that.”

“If he gets here early, he should be OK.”

“How early?”

“Earlier the better,” the man said. “ ’Bye now.” And he rang off.

Thus it was that I found myself on a rainy Sunday evening, in a mood of vague unease, with no certainty that I was going to get to where I ultimately wanted to go, walking along the imposing length of the famous Caledonian Sleeper train at Euston station in London and finding my way to carriage K and the little berth that was to be my home for the night and my conveyance to the distant north of Scotland.

The train, I have to say, was a little past its best. In fact, if I am completely honest, it was several miles past the point at which it was merely a little past its best, but it was clean and reasonably comfortable and the staff were friendly. According to a leaflet left on the bed, the company will be acquiring seventy-five new sleeper cars in 2018, but in the meanwhile is making some other small improvements. The leaflet noted with particular pride that all the bed linens had been “refreshed,” which sounded to me like at least one whole level below laundering, but perhaps I was just misreading things.

I wandered down to the lounge car for a drink. Half a dozen people were there already. I had a look at a little menu that stood on my table. Everything on offer was robustly Scottish and not in the least appealing to someone from Iowa. (I believe I can speak for my entire state on this.) The dinner options featured a plate of haggis, neeps and tatties, and the snacks included Tunnock’s teacake, haggis-flavored potato chips, and Mrs. Tilly’s Scottish Tablet, which sounded to me not at all like a food but more like something you would put in a tub of warm water and immerse sore feet in. I would imagine it makes a fizzing sound and produces streams of ticklish bubbles. The drinks were all Scottish, too, even the water. I ordered a Tennent’s lager.

It is perhaps dangerous to conclude too much about the character and intentions of a nation based on a snacks menu in a railway carriage, but I couldn’t help wonder if Scottish nationalism hasn’t gone a little too far now. I mean, these poor people are denying themselves simple comforts like Kit-Kats and Cornish pasties and instead are eating neeps and foot medications on grounds of patriotism. Seems a bit unnecessary to me.

Years ago—back in the early 1980s, I would guess—I was in Scotland when England had a big soccer match against Italy, which I watched in a hotel bar in Aberfeldy in Perthshire. Early in the match, England nearly scored, but I was the only person in the room to raise his arms in tentative joy. A few minutes later, Italy scored and everyone in the bar responded with great pleasure and took a big drink from their glasses, and I remember thinking: “These people are not part of Team UK.” I was severely unsettled by this. I thought everyone cheered for their cousins. I always cheered for Scotland and Wales and even the Republic of Ireland on the grounds that we were all basically kin. I had no idea that the Scottish so loathed the English that their favorite team in the world is whichever one is presently playing England. Despite this, I try to be big about it and cheer for Scotland in neutral matches, though part of me frankly is also secretly thinking: “Fuck ’em. I hope they struggle to beat Malta.” Amazingly often, I get my wish.

Anyway, I was glad when Scotland voted in a referendum in September 2014 to stay in the union. I like the Scots, especially the ones who don’t look at me like they might in a minute have to shove my head through a wall.

—

I turned in early and slept like a baby and only awoke because the steward knocked on my door and presented me with a cooked breakfast on a tray, which I hadn’t expected and appreciated very much.

“We’re running two hours late,” he told me cheerfully.

“Oh,” I said.

I popped open the curtain. Outside it was the Highlands—mountains and glens and a narrow black road racing along beside us. How exciting it is to wake up in a new country. At length, we came to Kingussie station and stopped, and then stayed stopped so long that it began to feel permanent. The train took on that kind of silence that gives you perfect hearing. I could hear voices in other cabins and a fly in death throes by the window. I glanced out and saw three people I recognized from the bar standing on the platform smoking. I went out and found lots of people just standing around. Our steward passed and told me that a freight train had broken down farther up the line and that our engine had gone to save it.

I lost track of how long we stayed in Kingussie. All I can say is that we arrived in Inverness, our final destination, more than fifteen hours after boarding and several hours later than we should have. I walked out to a zone of light industry a mile or so from the station, where I collected a rental car and, with a light heart and good attitude, headed north and west for Ullapool.

Ullapool is a tidy village in a superlative setting on the shores of Loch Broom, some sixty miles from Inverness. I checked into my hotel, then went straight out for a walk, happy to get my legs in motion again. Ullapool was busy with tourists who looked uniformly relaxed and happy. It seemed an entirely agreeable place—prosperous, friendly, very clean. The harbor was dominated by a terminal for ferries to Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis, which lent the waterfront an air of purpose and enterprise, and there were some pleasant shops and galleries to nose about in. I liked it all.

It occurred to me that if you could just make all of Britain like this—if you could somehow infuse this comfortable orderliness and unshowy prosperity into places like Blackpool and Grimsby—you would have a nearly perfect nation. May I tell you what I would like to see? I would like to see a government that said: “We’re going to stop this preposterous obsession with economic growth at the cost of all else. Great economic success doesn’t produce national happiness. It produces Republicans and Switzerland. So we’re going to concentrate on just being lovely and pleasant and civilized. We’re going to have the best schools and hospitals, the most comfortable public transportation, the liveliest arts, the most useful and well-stocked libraries, the grandest parks, the cleanest streets, the most enlightened social policies. In short, we’re going to be like Sweden, but with less herring and better jokes.” Wouldn’t that be delightful? But of course it will never happen.