Earlier this month, we swapped the murderous heat and an apocalypse of flies for the cooler climes – and the midges – of the Scottish Highlands. I’d heard that Avon’s Skin So Soft protects wee timorous tourists from the little winged blighters, but where do you find an Avon Lady in this digital age? Ding dong! Customers calling…
We left full of ifs and maybes. If temperatures continue to rise, which they will, can we carry on in this beautiful outpost of civilisation? If not – and the stifling experience of the preceding weeks suggested that we couldn’t – could we really re-adapt to Britain after more than 30 years away? England? It would have to be the north – but how far north? Scotland? It’s a long, long way to go. Roughly 2,000kms we calculated from the Lot to the lochs of the north-west. And let’s be honest, even in a post-apocalyptic world, the climate up there will still be shite.
So, with heavy hearts and Daphne the Terrierdor billeted for the full fortnight with Thompson & Thompson, the godparents, we left Laetitia the Tattooed Lady with four pages of notes (which she probably didn’t read) in charge of the cats and the plants, the hi-fi and the wi-fi. Poor thing, the house was depressingly hot and still not free of the flies that flew in, probably from the cow sheds up at the farm, and quite literally blackened our kitchen ceiling and the floor of the terrace outside. For the first time in our sustainable married life, we had resorted to toxic fly-spray. Strands of sticky fly-paper hung here and there like sickly ectoplasm, and the beer, wine and syrup traps I normally set for Asian hornets turned solid with flies within a few hours.
Whichever route you take, it’s a long way from here to Calais; it’s a long way to go. But we got there in good enough time to mingle with the Ch’tis, as the northern hoi-polloi are affectionately or pejoratively known, and enjoy a barquette of chips on the beach. Calais, however, is a dump and the Ibis ‘Style’, where we stayed for the night, anything but stylish.
Nevertheless… The breakfast wasn’t half-bad and set us up for the day: a long day’s journey to the North. After the technological miracle of the Eurotunnel, surely adapted from an H.G. Wells story, I boldly and bravely took the first leg – to face my traffic demons. Reader, I survived the Dartford Tunnel and the M25 shaken, stirred, but unscathed. It was as hot as France much of the way up the A1, until about Leeds, whereupon the clouds arrived and the temperature dipped. We could have taken a detour to explore places like Selby, Staithes and Saltburn, which my phone suggests are pleasant places to live, but Father Time was against us and we had to reach Corbridge before sun-up.
West of Darlington, we crossed the Durham/Northumberland borderland, a beautiful unexplored part of the country periodically blighted by run-down and forgotten former mining settlements like Bishop Auckland, where English flags hung from windows in support no doubt of the football team but also the kind of right-wing political firebrands who feed on the ire of such communities. Corbridge by contrast is a pleasant, rather genteel little town that lacks only charity shops and a sign to indicate that it is the Birthplace of the Good Wife.
Crossing the beautiful Northumberland moors the following morning and into the Lowlands of Scotland, the temperature took a further tumble. Under an ominous sky, we skirted Edinburgh and headed west for the Trossachs. On driving through Callander, I reminisced about Dr. Finlay’s Casebook. Each Sunday en famille, we would watch Doctors Finlay and Cameron (and arch-rival Dr. Snoddie) bring succour to the sick of Tannochbrae and its environs under the strict eye of their housekeeper, Janet – a kind of Presbyterian prototype for Mrs. Doyle of Father Ted fame.
We never saw Ben Nevis. We rolled down Glencoe to Fort William, nestling supposedly in the shadow of Britain’s highest peak, but low-lying cloud shrouded everything in a damp blanket of invisibility. I had underestimated the size of Scotland. Our destination, Kishorn, not far from Lochcarron across yet another mountain pass, lay a further three hours to the north along main roads narrow enough to make me flinch in the passenger seat from oncoming traffic. Our ‘Kabin’ for four nights, a kind of prefabricated outhouse a kind of prefabricated outhouse priced as something quite remarkable, was a handy enough base from which to explore the area and did at least come equipped with Skin So Soft. But the cold and the wet prevailed and even much of the legendary train trip across the Highlands was obscured by cloud, while destination Inverness was a resounding anti-climax. Only sunny Shildaig and overcast Plockton truly illuminated our stay. No, we agreed, we couldn’t live so far from civilisation as we knew it.
Quite by chance, we booked a night in Helensbrugh, west of the bonny banks of Loch Lomond, for a night en route to Cumbria and the south. The sun almost came out in the birthplace of John Logie Baird, but otherwise… Until, that is, we discovered that it harbours Hill House, the stunning Art Nouveau family house designed for the publisher William Blackie’s family by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife, Margaret MacDonald. The house is now, temporarily, encased in a remarkable wire-mesh cage prior to re-rendering in something other than the cement that C.R.M. foolishly specified. As a result, the exterior looks more ancient and weather-beaten than fin de siècle modern, but the interior is so stunning that it almost moved us both to tears.
Cumbria, Mother Mary’s former stamping ground before being removed to her current custodial residence for superannuated crackpots, usually means Lakeland rain. But the two days and nights we spent with friends from Sheffield were so balmy and blissful that I was tempted to move there lock, stock and barrel full of Lotois walnuts. Sitting by the bountiful raspberry canes beside the brook at the foot of their gorgeous garden was about all that you could wish for in life. But that same picturesque brook bubbles over in winter, threatening both garden and cottage with flood water. Hmmm. Perhaps not. Not at least with seedy Penrith, ‘Gateway to the Lakes’, as the nearest urban hub.
We left Cumbria with hearts heavy once more, knowing that from here on south the traffic would be like a Los Angeles freeway. We paid the toll to go around Birmingham in comparative peace and reached Banbury on the M40 without fatal accident. It was time to visit Mother Mary in her custodial residence for crackpots: a first time for me. Very nice, too, and staffed entirely by the kind of big-hearted women who could get together and save the world if they weren’t so busy looking after residents waiting around to die. Mother Mary was just getting ready to glare at the daughter who has probably single-handedly kept her going this last lost decade when her face lit up to spot her ‘favourite [only] son-in-law’. How she loves the male sex, poor deluded fool that she is. Since the sun was shining, I pushed her around the beautifully tended gardens, oh so tempted to do a Bette-Davis-as-Baby-Jane and let go of her wheelchair on the grassy knoll.
Debs took me to see the nearby village of Eydon and the imposing house in which she spent some of her unhappiest teenage years. A charming enough place, it’s the personification of Middle England: totally out of our price range and populated by clones of David Cameron and wife. Sorry, Lord and Lady Cameron. We spent the night with an old friend of the family, an eighty-something character who spends most of her spare cash on daily newspapers. The Mail and the Telegraph for a balanced view on life.
After a further two visits to the luxury waiting home the next day, we headed for London to visit our queen, Sampsondottir, in her palatial studio flat. Having faced my demons on the M25, I was happy to let my good wife negotiate the traffic of London, while I sat and fumed about the route that our French SatNav chose for us. Si possible, faites demi-tour… We steered clear of the Central London congestion charge, but opened up a can of worms in trying to pay Transport for London its emission charge for the temerity of breaching the suburbs in a diesel car. Would they, I wonder now, have tracked our foreign number plate down to this happy homestead in the Lot? Born in London (despite the disappointing lack of blue plaque), I’m nevertheless surprised why my flesh and blood should choose to live in such a dystopia.
All of which left the final three days in Romsey, Hants. – and a chance to visit sisters and brother, nephews, great nephews and under-nephews. And… the Oxfam bookshop. I love Romsey’s majestic abbey and its plethora of charity shops and it’s kind of nice to feel tucked up in the bosom of my family, but we both agree that it’s probably not where we would choose to end our days. Too darn hot and too darn South of England.
It is, however, quite close to Portsmouth, gateway to our long drive home. We spent one final night away, in Ouistreham, at another Ibis Style. Being port-side, this one pretended that its bedrooms were cabins. We got to our ‘cabin’ after an interminable queue at Passport Control (Si possible, faites demi-tour…) just in time to catch extra time of the World Cup final. Spain scored the only goal and vanquished the histrionic Argie-bargie scoundrels. The win for football pleased me as much as the fact that an American golfer didn’t win the British Open. I may have recently developed a floater in my left eye, something to do with degeneration of the ocular membrane, I believe, but these little victories have helped restore my will to live a little longer on this earth.
Back home at last, it may be too darn hot once more and the garden is nought but a blasted heath, but the flies have gone. Incidentally – and mirabile dictu, as the Romans might say – although we agreed on a 5 out of 10 overall mark for the holiday, we didn’t see a single midge. No need for Skin So Soft. So it’s (cue Soul II Soul) back to life, back to reality… We’ll stay where we are for now, we’ve decided, and start preparing for the summer of ’27. Time to drop the shutters.
