Notes From a Small Island (29 page)

I liked Inverness immediately. It is never going to win any beauty contests, but it has some likeable features - an old-fashioned littlecinema called La Scala, a well-preserved market arcade, a large and adorably over-the-top nineteenth-century sandstone castle on a hill, some splendid river walks. I was particularly taken with the dim-lit market arcade, an undercover thoroughfare apparently locked in a perpetual 1953. It had a barbershop with a revolving pole out front and pictures inside of people who looked like they had modelled their hairstyles on Thunderbirds characters. There was even a joke shop selling useful and interesting items that I hadn't seen for years: sneezing powder and plastic vomit (very handy for saving seats on trains) and chewing-gum that turns the teeth black. It was shut, but I made a mental note to return in the morning to stock up.

Above all, Inverness has an especially fine river, green and sedate and charmingly overhung with trees, lined on one side by big houses, trim little parks and the old sandstone castle (now the home of the regional sheriff's courts) and on the other by old hotels with steep-pitched roofs, more big houses and the stolid, Notre Dame-like grandeur of the cathedral, standing on a broad lawn beside the river. I checked into a hotel at random and immediately set off for a walk through the gathering twilight. The river was lined on both sides by gracious promenades thoughtfully punctuated with benches, which made it very agreeable for an evening stroll. I walked for some distance, perhaps two miles, on the Haugh Road side of the river, past little islands reached by Victorian suspension footbridges.

Nearly all the houses on both sides of the river were rambling places built for an age of servants. What, I wondered, had brought all this late Victorian wealth to Inverness, and who supported these handsome heaps today? Not far from the castle, on spacious grounds in what I suppose a developer would call a prime location, stood a particularly grand and elaborate mansion, with turrets and towers. It was a wonderful, spacious house, the kind you could imagine riding a bicycle around in, and it was boarded, derelict and up for sale. I couldn't think how such a likeable place could have ended up in such a neglected state. As I walked along, I lost myself in a reverie of buying it for a song, doing it up, and living happily ever after on these large grounds beside this deeply fetching river, until I realized what my family would say if I told them we weren't after all going to the land of shopping malls, 100-channel television and hamburgers the size of a baby's head, but instead to the damp north of Scotland.

And anyway, I regret to say that I could never live in Inverness

because of two sensationally ugly modern office buildings that stand by the central bridge and blot the town centre beyond any hope of redemption. I came upon them now as I returned to the town centre and was positively riveted with astonishment to realize that an entire town could be ruined by two inanimate structures. Everything about them - scale, materials, design - was madly inappropriate to the surrounding scene. They weren't just ugly and large but so ill-designed that you could actually walk around them at least twice without ever finding the front entrance. In the larger of the two, on the river side where there might have been a restaurant or terrace or at least shops or offices with a view, much of the road frontage had been given over to a huge delivery bay with overhead metal doors. This in a building that overlooked one of the handsomest rivers in Britain. It was awful, awful beyond

words.

I had recently been to Hobart in Tasmania, where the Sheraton chain had built a hotel of stunning plainness on its lovely waterfront. I had been told that the architect hadn't actually visited the site and had put the hotel restaurant at the back, where diners couldn't see the harbour. Since then, I had thought that was the most brainless thing I had ever heard of architecturally. I don't suppose this pair could possibly have been designed by the same architect - it was terrifying to think that there could be two architects in the world this bad - but he could certainly have worked for the firm.

Of all the buildings that I would deeply love to blow up in Britain - the Maples building in Harrogate, the Hilton Hotel in London, the Post Office building in Leeds, a lucky dip among almost any structure owned by British Telecom -1 have no hesitation in saying that my first choice would be either of these two.

And here is the cruncher. Guess who inhabits these two piles of heartbreak? Well, I'll tell you. The larger is the regional headquarters of the Highland Enterprise Board and the other is the home of Inverness and Nairn Enterprise Board, the two bodies entrusted with the attractiveness and well-being of this lovely and vital corner of the country. God.

Notes from a Small Island

CHAPTER   TWENTY-SEVEN

I HAD BIG PLANS FOR THE MORNING: I WAS GOING TO GO TO THE BANK,

buy some plastic vomit, have a look at the local art gallery, perhaps take another stroll along the lovely River Ness, but I woke late and had no time to do anything but fumble my way into clothes, check out of the hotel and waddle in a sweat to the station. Beyond Inverness trains run infrequently - just three times a day to Thurso and Wick - so I couldn't afford to be late.

As it happened, the train was waiting, humming quietly, and left right on time. We slid out of Inverness against a backdrop of round mountains and the cold flatness of the Beauly Firth. The train was soon rattling along at a fair old clip. There were more passengers this time, and there was a trolley service again - all credit to BR -but no-one wanted anything from it because the other passengers were almost all pensioners and they had brought their own provisions.

I bought a tandoori chicken sandwich and a coffee. How far things have come. I can remember when you couldn't buy a British Rail sandwich without wondering if this was your last act before a long period on a life-support machine. And anyway you couldn't buy one because the buffet car was nearly always closed. And now here I was sitting eating a tandoori chicken sandwich and drinking a creditable cup of coffee brought to me in my seat by a friendly and presentable young man on a two-carriage train across the Highlands.

Here's an interesting statistic for you, which is kind of boring but must be taken in. Rail infrastructure spending per person per year

in Europe is £20 in Belgium and Germany, £31 in France, more than £-50 m Switzerland, and in Britain a slightly less than munificent £5- Britain spends less per capita on rail improvements than any other country in the European Union except Greece and Ireland. Even Portugal spends more. And the thing is, despite this paucity of support you actually have an excellent train service in this country, all things considered. Trains are now much cleaner than they used to be and staff generally more patient and helpful. Ticket people always say please and thank you, bless them, and you can eat the food.

So I ate my tandoori chicken sandwich and drank my cup of coffee with pleasure and gratification, and passed the time between nibbles watching a white-haired couple at a table across the way delving among their travelling fare, setting out little plastic boxes of pork pies and hard-boiled eggs, lifting out flasks, unscrewing lids, finding little salt and pepper shakers. It's amazing, isn't it, how you can give a couple of old people a canvas holdall, an assortment of Tupperware containers and a Thermos flask and they can amuse . themselves for hours. They worked away with well-ordered precision and total silence, as if they had been preparing for this event for years. When the food was laid out, they ate for four minutes with great delicacy, then spent most of the rest of the morning quietly packing everything away. They looked very happy.

They reminded me in an odd but heartwarming way of my mother, as she is something of a Tupperware devotee herself. She doesn't picnic on trains, since there are no passenger trains in her part of the country any more, but she does like to put stray items of food in plastic containers of various sizes and file them away in the fridge. It's an odd thing about mothers generally, I believe. As soon as you leave home they merrily throw away everything that you cherished through childhood and adolescence - your valuable collection of baseball cards, a complete set of Playboys from 1966-75, your high-school yearbooks - but give them half a peach or a spoonful of leftover peas and they will put it in a Tupperware container at the back of the fridge and treasure it more or less for ever.

And so the long ride to Thurso passed. We rattled on through an increasingly remote and barren landscape, treeless and cold, with heather clinging to the hillsides like lichen on rock and thinly scattered with sheep that took fright and scampered off when the train passed. Now and then we passed through winding valleysspeckled with farms that looked romantic and pretty from a distance, but bleak and comfortless up close. Mostly they were smallholdings with lots of rusted tin everywhere - tin sheds, tin hen huts, tin fences - looking rickety and weatherbattered. We were entering one of those weird zones, always a sign of remoteness from the known world, where nothing is ever thrown away. Every farmyard was cluttered with piles of cast-offs, as if the owner thought that one day he might need 132 half-rotted fenceposts, a ton of broken bricks and the shell of a 1964 Ford Zodiac.

Two hours after leaving Inverness, we came to a place called Golspie. It was a good-sized town with big council estates and winding streets of those grey pebbledash bungalows that seem to have been modelled on public toilets and for which they have a strange fondness in Scotland, but no sign of factories or workplaces. What, I wondered, do all the people in all those houses do for a living in a place like Golspie? Then came Brora, another good-sized community, with a seafront but no harbour, as far as I could see, and no factories. What do they do in these little places in the middle of nowhere?

After that, the landscape became quite empty, with neither farmhouses nor field animals. We rode for a seeming eternity through a great Scottish void, full of miles of nothingness, until, in the middle of this great emptiness, we came to a place called Forsinard, with two houses, a railway station and an inexplicably large hotel. What a strange lost world this was. And then at long last we arrived in Thurso, the northernmost town on the British mainland, the end of the line in every sense of the word. I stepped from the little station on slightly unsteady legs and set off down the long main street towards the centre.

I had no idea what to expect, but my initial impressions were favourable. It seemed a tidy, well-ordered place, comfortable rather than showy, considerably larger than I had expected, and with several small hotels. I took a room in the Pentland Hotel, which seemed a nice enough place in a deathly quiet, end-of-the-world sort of way. I accepted a key from the pleasant receptionist, conveyed my things to a distant room reached through spooky, winding corridors, then went out to have a look around.

The big event in Thurso, according to civic records, was in 1834 when Sir John Sinclair, a local worthy, coined the term 'statistics' in the town, though things have calmed down pretty considerably since. When he wasn't contriving neologisms, Sinclair also

extensively rebuilt the town, endowing it with a splendid library in

cautiously baroque style and a small square with a little park in the middle. Around the square today stands a modest district of small, useful, friendly looking shops - chemists and butchers, a wine merchant, a ladies' boutique or two, a scattering of banks, lots of hair salons (why is there always an abundance of hair salons in little out-of-the-way communities?) - pretty well everything, in short you would hope to find in a model community. There was a small' old-fashioned Woolworth's, but apart from that and the banks, nearly everything else appeared to be locally owned, which gave Thurso a nice, homey feel. It had the air of a real, self-contained community. I liked it very much.

I pottered about for a bit among the shopping streets, then followed some back lanes down to the waterfront, where there was a lonely fish warehouse marooned in an acre of empty car park and a vast empty beach with thunderous crashing waves. The air was fresh and vigorously abundant in the blowy way of the seaside, and the world was bathed in an ethereal northern light that gave the sea a curious luminescence - indeed, gave everything an odd, faint bluish cast - that intensified my sense of being a long way from home.

At the far end of the beach there stood a spectral tower, a fragment of old castle, and I set off to investigate. A rocky stream stood between me and it, so I had to backtrack to a footbridge some distance from the beach, then pick my way along a muddy path liberally strewn with litter. The castle tower was derelict, its lower windows and door openings bricked over. A notice beside it announced that the coastal path was closed because of soil erosion. I stood for a long time by this little headland gazing out to sea, then turned to face the town and wondered what to do next.

Thurso was to be my home for the next three days and I wasn't at all sure how I was going to fill such an expanse of empty time. Between the smell of sea air and the sense of utter remoteness, I had a moment of quiet panic at finding myself alone here at the top of the earth, where there was no-one to talk to and the most exciting diversion was an old bricked-up tower. I wandered back into town the way I had come and, for want of anything better to do, had another pottering look in the shop windows. And then, outside a greengrocer's, it happened - something that sooner or later always happens to me on a long trip away from home. It is a moment I dread.I started asking myself unanswerable questions.

Prolonged solitary travel, you see, affects people in different ways. It is an unnatural business to find yourself in a strange place with an underutilized brain and no particular reason for being there, and eventually it makes you go a little crazy. I've seen it in others often. Some solitary travellers start talking to themselves: little silently murmured conversations that they think no-one else notices. Some desperately seek the company of strangers, striking up small talk at shop counters and hotel reception desks and then lingering for an uncomfortably long period before finally departing. Some become ravenous, obsessive sightseers, tramping from sight to sight with a guidebook in a lonely quest to see everything. Me, I get a sort of interrogative diarrhoea. I ask private, internal questions - scores and scores of them - for which I cannot supply answers. And so as I stood by a greengrocer's in Thurso, looking at its darkened interior with pursed lips and a more or less empty head, from out of nowhere I thought, Why do they call it a grapefruit? and I knew that the process had started.

It's not a bad question, as these things go. I mean to say, why do they call it a grapefruit? I don't know about you, but if someone presented me with an unfamiliar fruit that was yellow, the size of a cannonball and tasted sour I don't believe I would think: Well, you know, it rather puts me in mind of a grape.

The trouble is that once these things start there is no stopping them. A couple of doors away was a shop that sold jumpers and I thought: Why do the British call them jumpers? I've actually been wondering this for years, off and on, usually in lonely places like Thurso, and I would sincerely like to know. Do they make you want to jump? Do you think to yourself when you put one on in the morning: Now not only shall I be warm all day, no small consideration in a nation where central heating still cannot be assumed, but if I should be required to do some jumping I shall be suitably attired.

And so it went on. I proceeded through the streets under a meteor shower of interrogations. Why do they call them milk floats? They don't float at all. Why do we foot a bill rather than, say, head it? Why do we say that our nose is running'} (Mine slides.) Who ate the first oyster and how on earth did anyone ever figure out that ambergris would make an excellent fixative for perfumes?

When this happens, I know from years of experience, it takes a special distraction to shock the mind from this solitary torment,

H fortunately Thurso had one. On a side-street, as I was just beginning to wonder why we say we are head over heels when we rehappy when in fact our head normally is over our heels, I happened on an extraordinary little establishment called the Fountain Restaurant, which offered three complete but different menus - a Chinese menu, an Indian menu and a 'European' menu. Thurso evidently couldn't maintain three separate restaurants, so it had one restaurant offering three kinds of cuisines.

Immediately taken with this concept, I went in and was shown to a table by a pretty young lady who left me with a menu that ran to many pages. It was apparent from the title page that all three kinds of meals were cooked by a single Scottish chef, so I pored through the entries hoping to find 'sweet-and-sour oatcakes' or 'haggis vindaloo', but the dishes were strictly conventional. I opted for Chinese, then sat back and enjoyed a state of blissful mindlessness.

When it came, the food tasted, I have to say, like a Chinese meal cooked by a Scottish chef - which is not to say that it wasn't good. It was just curiously unlike any Chinese meal I had ever had. The more I ate it the more I liked it. At least it was different, and that, by this stage of the trip, was all I craved.

When I emerged, I felt much better. Lacking anything better to do, I strolled back down to the vicinity of the fish warehouse to take the evening air. As I stood there in the darkness, listening to the pounding surf and gazing contentedly at the great starry dome of sky above me, I thought, Who decided that Hereford and Worcester would make a zippy name for a county? and I knew then that it was time for bed.

In the morning, I was roused early by my alarm clock and rose reluctantly, for I was having my favourite dream - the one where I own a large, remote island, not unlike those off this section of Scottish coast, to which I invite carefully selected people, like the guy who invented the Christmas tree lights that go out when one bulb blows, the person in charge of escalator maintenance at Heathrow Airport, nearly anyone who has ever written a user's manual for a personal computer, and of course John Selwyn Gummer, let them loose with a very small amount of survival rations, and then go out with braying dogs and mercilessly hunt them down - but then I remembered that I had a big, exciting day in front of me. I was going to John O'Groats. I had been hearing about John O'Groats for years, but I had notthe faintest idea of what it would be like. It seemed exotic beyond words and I ached to see it. So I breakfasted in a spirit of keenness at the Pentland Hotel, the only person in the dining room, and then repaired at the stroke of nine to William Dunnet's, the local Ford dealer, where I had arranged by phone some days earlier to hire a car for the day, since there was no other way to get to John O'Groats at this time of year.