Travel Diary
Sunday, August 6th, 1995—Philadelphia
Packed, did last-minute stuff.
Bob Walters and Tess Kissinger come over, give us a lift to the airport, dropping us at Terminal A a bit before 5 P.M. We check our bags with British Airways, go upstairs to the coffee shop and wait for an hour or so; finally go through the security gate, visit the Duty Free shop, look at the Rube Goldberg-like kinetic sculpture in the waiting room near the gate. On to the plane, a 747, settle into our seats, Susan asleep almost at once. Long delay ensues, during which the plane taxies out to the runway and then has to come all the way back to the gate because the internal PA system (as they inform us through a bullhorn) is not working. Then, after that is fixed (sort of; you never can get the sound to work right on the audio channels for your earphones, which, since the movie they’re showing is Tommy Boy, is no great loss, and may even be a benefit), there is another long delay because a plane up ahead of us has run over a dog on the runway, and we must wait while they clean up its remains—what a strange death that must have been for the poor dog, death falling suddenly from the sky; I wonder if he had time to think in angry protest that he’d never seen a car coming from that direction before? Finally airborne. Uneventful flight during which I read and doze fitfully, although I get little sleep overall; after we’re airborne, Susan wakes up and can’t get back to sleep, so her plan to sleep all the way to London is frustrated. Nice sunrise over Europe, deep sullen red below with bars of black over it, later changing to orange that ranges up into peach and lemon. They turn on the lights at what is about 1:30 A.M. by our body clocks, and feed us a croissant for breakfast. Land about 8 A.M. local time.
Monday, August 7th—London
Get off the plane, long walk down the corridor at Heathrow, then wait in line to show our passports. Waved through customs, then into the terminal, where we find out that we have to pick up our Heritage Passes downtown near Piccadilly Circus. Take a traditional black taxi into the city, winding through Hogarth and Earl’s Court, past Hyde Park, seeing the Horseguards go by in the middle distance, then by the top of Soho and past the British Museum to Russell Square. It’s overcast in London, but not actually raining. It strikes me during the early stages of the cab ride how many horses we see grazing in fields within only a mile or two of the airport, something that certainly would not be true within a similar distance from the Philadelphia airport, where only oil refineries and other similar examples of industrial desolation would be found; the horses don’t seem to pay much attention to the huge airplanes roaring overhead—I guess they get used to it, although what they think the planes are is, I suppose, unknowable.
Check into the Hotel Russell, but find, to our dismay, since we’re both staggering with fatigue, that our room is not available yet. Leave our two immense suitcases (which will grow ever heavier and ever more of a logistical problem as the trip progresses, particularly as mine came down the luggage carousel with its handle broken off) with the concierge, take a short dispirited walk, buy some postcards, and sit in the bar of the Russell, refamiliarizing ourselves with how bad most English coffee is, filling out postcards, and half-heartedly talking about what shows are in town. Finally get into our room about an hour later, dragging our suitcases behind us down labyrinthine corridors of a sort of faded shabby-genteel grandeur. Our room is small, and very hot, but we go to sleep immediately, and nap for about two hours.
When we awake, we grab a disappointing lunch at the Night and Day coffeeshop (a place that attracts me because its name reminds me of the Night and Day Joint in Silverlock, showing you that you should never allow literary resonances to guide your choice of eating establishments) in the Imperial Hotel next door, take a cab to Lower Regent Street to the British Tourist Authority Office, the cabdriver mentioning in passing that he had been born in 1968, the date of my first visit to London (God!). Looking out of the cab window, note that London has been even more taken-over by American fast-food joints than it had been during our last trip here in 1988; when I first came to London in 1968, you couldn’t have found a slice of pizza in London if someone had held a gun to your head and threatened to kill you unless you guided him to one—now, American fast-food places are everywhere, and it seems like every street-corner boasts a freight of Pizza Huts, Burger Kings, Kentucky Fried Chickens, Baskin-Robbins, and, especially, McDonalds; there must be hundreds of McDonalds now in London alone, and we were to encounter them almost everywhere else we went in Britain, except for the very smallest of villages. Having eaten what passed for fast-food in London in the old days, where the best you could hope to find was some moderately palatable fish-and-chips or pub grub, I can understand why the American fast-food chains have filled this particular ecological niche so explosively here—compared to the hamburger I had here in 1968 in the closest English equivalent of the time to a McDonalds, the Wimpey Bar chain, where the hamburger was charred black all the way through, like a charcoal briquette you were supposed to eat, and the milkshake was warm chocolate milk with no ice-cream at all in it, the food at McDonalds is a treat fit for the gods—but that doesn’t make it any more tolerable to see one of them every few hundred feet along the street; as a tourist, I want foreignness, something different and exotic and strange, and it’s hard to maintain the feeling that you’re really in a foreign country when the streets are filled with McDonalds and Pizza Huts. (As an unfortunate side-effect, the success of the American chains also seems to be killing off the traditional pub-grub such as Shepherd’s Pie and Bangers & Mash and Steak & Kidney Pie—very few pubs we went into were serving anything like that anymore, having switched over to pizza and lasagne and hamburgers in imitation of the American fast-food fare; the word “chips” may be dying out, too, as several pub menus listed “fries,” instead; it may be that the younger generations of English people, because of the popularity of McDonalds, will grow up calling them “fries” instead, which I suppose is not a great tragedy, but which is yet another part of their cultural heritage gone.)
Stand in long lines at the Tourist Authority, finally get our Heritage Passes, then take a cab to the Tate Gallery. Tour the Turner exhibition there—Turner having been one of my favorites since the days I used to stand slack-jawed before the immense canvas of Rain, Steam, and Speed at the National Gallery, when I was a skinny, callow, teenage bumpkin, instead of a fat old callow bumpkin—then go to see the Pre-Raphaelites. Leave Susan to commune with Lizzy Siddal as Ophelia for awhile (Susan is writing a book about Elizabeth Siddal) while I explore the rest of the museum. After the inevitable visit to the gift shop, where Susan buys lots of Pre-Raphaelite stuff, we leave the Tate about 4:30, and walk slowly up the Thames Embankment toward Westminster, passing the Houses of Parliament. Notice how brown and sere the grass everywhere in London seems to be, worn almost bald in places by foot traffic, unusual since London is usually very green and lush—my first inkling of what a severe drought London has been going through; the overcast day has fooled us into thinking that the weather has been normal London weather, but in fact, as we find out as the trip progresses, many parts of southern England have not seen any rain since March. Tour Westminster Abbey. A religious service is in progress as we walk around, and, as always (I had similar reactions to similar circumstances in Notre Dame in Paris, and in several other cathedrals), I am appalled by the fact that the Church will allow crudely irreverent people with purple hair and nose-rings, young girls chewing gum and giggling nosily, and bellowing tourists in T-shirts with cameras to wander around laughing and taking photos and shouting obscene jocularities and blowing their noses on their sleeves while, a few feet away, grim-faced devout people are trying to worship. I’m not religious, and yet this strikes me as extremely tacky, and I always feel very uncomfortable when joining the milling crowd of tourists just outside the velvet ropes (because, after all, I’m part of the problem, aren’t I?), and try to be as non-intrusive on the worshippers as I can, feeling that when some poor old woman is in the process of lighting a candle for her departed husband, she really shouldn’t have to listen to someone a few feet away shrieking jokes about the incontinence of someone on their bus tour. I suppose this is old-fashioned of me. Can’t see Poet’s Corner because of the service, which several people are complaining about in loud voices, but tour the rest of the Abbey, which is full of people doing brass rubbings (for a price) and shops selling key-chains and toy tour buses. See the grave of Lloyd George, and am tempted to tell someone, “Lloyd George knew my father, Father knew Lloyd George,” but do not. Also see the grave of that Peabody who emigrated to Massachusetts, and for whom the town of Peabody (a grimly Dickensian factory town where my father used to work) and the Peabody Museum in my hometown of Salem, Massachusetts is named.
We are both seriously tired by this point, and take a cab to the Gaylord Indian restaurant, recommended by my Michelin Red Guide, which, however, turns out to be closed. We wander around the neighborhood, and end up eating at an outdoor table in a Greek restaurant called Andrea’s, which pleases me because it is on Charlotte Street, which is where the spy has his offices in Len Deighton’s The Ipcress File, Horse Under Water, Funeral in Berlin, and The Billion-Dollar Brain, four of my favorite novels . . . and because you can see the strange edifice of the Telecom Tower from here, like an immense surreal ice-cream-cone wrapped in winking lights, which I recall nostalgically from my first trip to London, when it was known as the Post Office Tower. While we eat, we are entertained by street buskers playing “Over the Rainbow” and a selection of old Beatles songs on the guitar and accordion. Walk slowly back past Tottenham Court Road, through Bedford Square, past the back of the British Museum under the sleeping stone gaze of the lions, through Russell Square. Have dessert in a little outdoor Italian cafe in an alleyway a few blocks down, just off Southampton Row, very Left Bank and bohemian in its English way. Then back to the Russell.
Tuesday, August 8th—Greenwich Observatory & London
Up early, about 6 A.M. (much earlier than I usually rise at home, but this was to become the pattern of the trip for me). Sit and catch up with this diary while Susan sleeps. We go downstairs about 8 A.M. and have the usual Trusthouse Forte breakfast, which we had every morning on our last trip here; I have sausages, toast, croissants. Meet Walter Jon Williams and his wife Kathy Hedges in the lobby of the Russell, by prearrangement. We buy theater tickets for that night’s performance of The Importance of Being Earnest, then cab to the Tower of London, where we catch a boat down the Thames to Greenwich. We all tour the Cutty Sark, a famous sailing ship now sunk in concrete, which is adorned with a masthead of a bare-breasted woman clenching a horse’s tail in her hand (she’s supposedly a witch who was trying to catch a passing rider but missed and got only the horse’s tail, but she does get to go bare-breasted in public in London, proving once again that only Evil Women are permitted to have nipples . . . or show them, anyway), and which features, up on deck, a box of fake chickens, complete with a continuously playing tape-loop of chickens clucking. Seeing the sailor’s bunk-room, it strikes me once again, as it did when I was here before in 1968, how small the bunks are—I’d have to sleep in them almost doubled in half. There’s also a fake plastic pig, with a tape loop of it grunting, and the tour-guide, talking about the livestock they kept aboard for long cruises, is saying, “On British ships, the pig was always called Dennis.”
Have a quick lunch in a pub called The Gypsy Moth, which features an electronic Monopoly game; wonder how it works, but don’t play it. We walk up through Greenwich toward the Royal Observatory, Walter amused at the number of Mexican and even “Tex-Mex” restaurants in town; why in Greenwich, of all places? (We don’t see another Mexican restaurant for the entire trip, by the way). Walk into and across Greenwich Park, Susan and I stopping to rest at the foot of the very steep climb up to the Royal Observatory itself, while the hardy Walter and Kathy press on ahead. Spend a pleasant five minutes looking out across the park, which falls away from our bench in a long rolling hill, watching a man playing with a small child in a stroller by letting the stroller go racing away down the hill; looks kind of dangerous, but when the stroller gets to the bottom, the child eagerly pushes it back up the hill so that his father can send him careening down the slope in it again. Long steep climb up the hill to the Old Royal Observatory. See the Prime Meridian in Meridian Courtyard, take the obligatory tourist photos of us standing with our feet straddling the Meridian, then tour Flamsteed House. In the Octagon Room, a peak through a long telescope there gives you a look at “Pluto”—the Disney character, that is, whose likeness they have pasted over the end of the tube. Also find the “Dog Watch” idea interesting, a proposed sympathetic-magic system for telling time at sea, from before the days of precision timepieces—the idea was that at noon a knife would be plunged into a pile of magic chemicals in London, making the dogs aboard ship, who had previously been pricked with it, all howl at the same time, thus telling the sailors asea what time it was in London. Also interesting, although a bit gruesome, was a time-lapse film of a dead rat rotting. We finish first, and wait for Walter and Kathy outside, while crows squabble and fight and call harshly down through the tangled trees of the hillside. Outside the Observatory, I point out the holes in the statue there; when I was here in 1968, with a group of fans that included Alex and Phyllis Eisenstein and Steve Stiles, I remember Atom Thompson, the old British fan artist, pointing out the same holes and telling us, with his voice quivering with passion and indignation, that the damage to the statues had been caused by Luftwaffe planes strafing the Observatory during the war.
Walk down the long hill and across the park to the National Maritime Museum, where we go to see the Titanic exhibit, which is quite engrossing. Strange to see the restored items, plates, glassware, uniforms, that had been sitting on the bottom of the ocean under two miles of cold water for seventy years, including tobacco in good enough condition to smoke—which made me fantasize that a cigarette made from tobacco brought up from the Titanic would be a nicely decadent luxury item for some future multimillionaire to buy. Stop for scones, then back to the pier and catch the boat back to the Tower of London. As we cruise down the Thames, it strikes me that almost all of the industry is gone from this stretch of the river, which once bustled with commerce. The river is now lined with former warehouses that have been turned into luxury condominiums—which makes me imagine sardonically that a hundred years from now the tour guide will be pointing out all the buildings that used to be luxury condominiums, but which have now been transformed into warehouses.
We get off the boat at St. Cathrine’s Dock, one stop shy of the Tower, because one of the boat crew has recommended an Indian restaurant there, and we are running out of time for dinner if we want to get to the theater. Have a hurried so-so dinner there, literally opening the place up, going in a step behind the man with the keys, and then cab to the Old Vic, where Susan and I, still jetlagged, nod out and jerk awake fitfully through an excellent performance of The Importance of Being Earnest. Have a quick drink afterward, and then say goodbye to Walter and Kathy, and take the tube from Waterloo to Russell Square, with one transfer; the only time we use the Underground this trip. It’s a lovely night, and the streets around Russell Square are thick with students heading for one sort of party or another. Ah, to be young in Russell Square at night, pushing through the excited crowds with the eager darkness all around you, with the air like velvet and a yellow moon overhead, and all time and possibility opening before you! But instead we are old, and go upstairs and watch an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in German. Go to sleep to Captain Picard barking something guttural in German in a voice that makes him sound as though he has a bad head-cold.
Wednesday, August 9th—London
Up at six, work on my trip diary. Susan, who had a fitful night, sleeps until about ten. Too late for breakfast, we go out of the Russell and walk down to the British Museum, having coffee and scones at a little sidewalk place on a side street near the Museum. Later, we look through the Scottish Woolens place across from the Museum, buying some inexpensive gifts, mostly Celtic jewelry, for people back home. Then we catch a cab to Harrods department store. Long bout of shopping there, then an awful lunch that neither of us is able to finish, then another long bout of shopping, during which Susan comes very close to buying a stuffed Obelix doll, but decides not to; we also admire a stuffed plush alligator which is too large to fit comfortably into our living room, and which costs more than a thousand pounds; must be very rich parents indeed who can afford to buy that toy.
We buy a bag of assorted kinds of bread to feed to the birds, and walk over to Hyde Park. Cross Rotten Row, covering our shoes in dust, and walk up the Serpentine in bright sunlight, almost the brightest of the trip so far, looking in vain for someplace to sit in the shade. There seem to be fewer water-birds in the Serpentine this year, and we see two or three dead fish washed up on the bank. This and several large “NO SWIMMING” signs make me wonder just how bad the water-quality is, and if the relative sparseness of water-birds this trip is another effect of the prolonged drought. Finally get tired enough to settle for a bench not in the shade, and we sit there feeding bread to Canada geese and pigeons. A father comes strolling up with a little girl, a toddler, who is completely naked. We lend her some bread, and the little naked girl feeds it solemnly to the geese, who are almost as big as she is. I think that this would be a good photo, but hesitate to take it for fear of offending the father. They walk off without a word having been spoken, and I end up wondering if they were French; the little girl’s nudity was a little too casual for the English, I think—in the States, they probably would have been arrested. We walk on to another bench, in front of the Peter Pan statue, and feed bread to coots and ducks, wondering sentimentally if one of the ducks could be the duckling we’d seen there in ‘87, all grown up.
Susan gets tired, and wants to go back to the room for a nap, so we walk up past the Italian Fountain to the Lancaster Gate. At the last moment, I decide that I don’t want to go back to the room, so I put Susan in a cab on the Bayswater Road about 4 P.M., and then go sit on a bench in Kensington Gardens. The smell of burning leaves is heavy, and there are lots of dogs, some being walked on leashes, some running free across the park, some barking in the distance, too far away to see. Small groups of tourists go by, speaking in French or Spanish or German. Try with indifferent success to feed bread to ravens, who keep hopping nervously away (although they do want the bread, and come sneaking back as soon as I get far enough away), then walk on. Settle the great controversy over whether there are squirrels in England or not—which we had been discussing on the plane—by seeing one; make it run like mad for cover by going over for a closer look (squirrels can’t be as common here as in the States, though; only saw one more during the entire trip, where in similar country at home we probably would have seen dozens). Walk down to the Round Pond, which, it turns out, is where most of the geese and ducks and swans have been hanging out. Stroll around the curve of Round Pond, throwing the rest of the bread in the water for the birds, who end up following me in swarms as if I were the Pied Piper, particularly the aggressive and nasty Canada geese, who will crawl right up your pantleg if you let them. Someone sailing a model sailboat on the Round Pond, just as people had twenty years ago, when I used to walk around this pond as a young man. Drifted slowly over to the Broad Walk, sat on a bench, and reflected sadly on how little this haunt of mine from years ago has changed, and how greatly I have. Is there really any connection between that boy who used to stride excitedly around here so long ago and me, except that we share some continuity of memory? Perhaps I just think that I used to be him, and that belief, taken on faith, is the only connection there really is.
Walk up to Queensway. Finally manage to put in a call to the Gay Hussar for a reservation by the expedient of buying a phonecard, since I can’t seem to get any of the coin phones to work; notice that the phone booths along Queensway are still festooned inside with advertisements for massage parlours and prostitutes, although the discretely worded advertisements of my youth—“Madam Colette gives lessons in French”—have been replaced by much more explicit solicitations of the “Want a spanking?” “Like hot oral sex?” kind that leave little or no room for misunderstanding. Walk along the Bayswater Road for a while, then catch a cab back to the Russell. Wake Susan up, and we catch a cab to 2 Greek Street, to the Gay Hussar, a Hungarian restaurant just south of Soho Square. Dinner alone there in the upstairs room, the waiter dividing his time between us and a private party in the room upstairs, whose footsteps we can hear clomping around over our heads from time to time. I have roast duck with red cabbage, Susan has chicken paprikas. Two out of the three paintings on the wall behind Susan are clearly a matched set, scenes from Little Red Riding Hood, but the picture in the middle is of a maddened gorilla attacking a party of armed men, which makes a curious addition to the story of Red Riding Hood. Little Red Riding Hood meets Congo, perhaps? All the pictures up here appear to be old magazine illustrations. Always forget how tiny the Gay Hussar is until I eat here again. It’s not much bigger than a Trinity house back in Philly.
Walk back to the Russell by way of Oxford Street to Great Russell Street, past the sleeping Museum, to Southampton Row. Stop at a Garfunkel’s on Southhampton Row for some tea and some peculiar-tasting vanilla ice-cream, then back to the hotel. The room is stiflingly hot, as it has been every night so far this trip, with not a breath of air coming in, even though the night outside is relatively cool by now; our windows look out on the internal courtyard of the hotel, and no breeze ever comes in, although we have every window wide open. As we try to get to sleep, snap briefly around the dial on the TV. British TV has become much more like American TV than it used to be, which, from my perspective as a tourist, is too bad, another piece of local color lost. Soon London will be just like New York City—and then, why bother to go? When I finally fall asleep in the smothering heat, Susan is sitting up on her bed, still industriously filling out postcards.
Thursday, August 10th—London & Train to Cornwall
Up early, pack. While Susan finishes getting ready, I go downstairs and consult with the concierge about the feasibility of getting to Highgate Cemetery (where Lizzy Siddal is buried), which, without a car, doesn’t look to be very feasible. We have breakfast, buy theater tickets for Crazy For You, and check out, leaving our bags stored with the concierge. We give up on Highgate Cemetery, and instead take a cab to Chayne Walk in Chelsea, where we look at the house where Rossetti used to live, and where he kept a wombat in the front yard until, not surprisingly, it sickened and died. Walk around the neighborhood for a while, then catch a cab to Little Venice, where the Jason’s Trip canal boat tour starts from. Sit by the canalside and have tea while waiting for the canal boat to arrive, then get on the canal boat for a pleasant ride down the Regent’s Canal, past the zoo, past banks lined with moored canal boats, past the two-story floating Chinese restaurant, to Camden Locks. Get off at Camden Locks, walk around and look at the little craft shops, and then take the waterbus back to London Zoo. We are really a little too hot and tired to really appreciate the zoo by this point, but we trudge around anyway, dutifully looking at elephants and white pelicans and marmosets, and stumble unexpectedly on a demonstration of falconry that freezes us in our tracks, the great bird swooping overhead, huge wings beating, seeming to almost brush the tops of our heads as he sweeps past to get his piece of dead rat from his handler.
Take a cab to Leicester Square, which is totally jammed with tourists, students, buskers, street bands, mimes, jugglers, to a degree that makes Times Square look nearly deserted by comparison. Watch the plastic glockenspiel at the Swiss Center, then walk around looking for a restaurant, gradually realizing that we are on the edge of London’s Chinatown, and we basically have a choice of Chinese food or American fast-food places such as Pizza Hut and Burger King and the ubiquitous McDonalds. Finally settle on a restaurant called Poons, which I recognize from the Michelin Red Guide, not without some trepidation on my part, since, although I love Chinese food, I have never had a good meal in a Chinese restaurant in England . . . and some of them have been memorably awful, like the hideous Chinese meal we had in Stratford-Upon-Avon eight years ago. The food turns out to be actually pretty good, though, to my relief, and one of the cheapest meals of the whole trip. After dinner, we stroll around Leicester Square for awhile, in places having to force our way through the shoulder-to-shoulder crowds, and then head up Old Compton Road to the Prince Edward Theatre, where we see Crazy For You. The show is shallow but entertaining, with good dancing, great sets and costumes, some good effects, and a brisk pace which helps keep us awake this time; the female lead is not really up to singing some of the standards such as “Someone To Watch Over Me,” and does an uneven job overall—she may have been a stand-in, though. On the whole, as good a way to kill two hours as any, although by the end I am beginning to get nervous about catching our train.
After the show’s final curtain, we scoot out of the theater and scramble to get a cab, finally catching one after some difficulty. Go back to the Russell, pick up our bags from storage, then have another hassle trying to get another cab. One cab stops for us, but when the driver, an old Russian (I think) man, gets out, he is obviously drunk, staggering and swaying and almost unable to stay on his feet. I tell him, bluntly, “You’re drunk. I’m not going anywhere with you.” He screams, “Fuck you!” and I devastate him with my wit by making the brilliant, Oscar Wilde-like retort of “Fuck you, too.” Unwilling to push this any further—being Large does sometimes have its advantages—he staggers back to his cab and screeches away. (I make a point, after this, of only catching the traditional black cabs, if possible, since the only bad and/or unfriendly drivers we run into seem to be driving the non-traditional sort.) We finally do get another cab, drive to Waterloo Station, find our way to the Night Riviera train to Cornwall, find our sleeping car and our adjoining rooms. I go up to sit in the Night Riviera lounge car, have a cup of tea, and catch up with this diary. I must say that the British sleeper trains are much nicer than Amtrak’s, with the equipment much more modern and in much better condition. A British traveller used to these cars must feel that he’s in a Third World nation when he takes a sleeping car in the States, where most of the equipment, east of the Mississippi at least, is broken-down and shabby and at least thirty years old.
By this time, we are underway, sliding by the sleeping industrial suburbs of London by night. Go back to my room. Goodbye, London. On to Cornwall!
Friday, August 11th—Trebrea Lodge, Trenale, Truro, & Tintagel, Cornwall
Wake up about six with the green Cornish countryside sliding by the window. Hassle-filled morning, first hurrying through the breakfast brought by the brusque room steward, a woman who looked like the warder in an old prison movie, and then hurrying to get ready before our stop, On the platform in Truro, things start to go wrong immediately—there are no cabs, the car rental place is all the way across town, and, when I try to call a cab, I find that my recently acquired phonecard seems to be depleted, although I only made one local call with it . . . and, of course, we have no change. When we finally do get a cab, he takes us up a maze of hilly back streets, and drops us in front of the car rental place—a small garage on a quiet residential street, which is tightly closed. There’s no one at all around after the cab leaves, and who knows how long it’s going to take for the car rental place to open. We loiter restlessly in front of the garage for more than an hour, grouchy and dispirited. Just before the car rental place does finally open, an elderly lady comes out from the house next door and offers to bring us out a cup of tea, and the kindness of this simple human gesture cheers us up a bit.
Finally do manage to get the car—a kind we’ve never seen before, a South Korean car called a Daewoo—and hit the road, aiming for and finally connecting up with the A39 toward Tintagel. Drive past several wind-farms stretched across the crests of the rolling hills, their huge plastic windmills whirling away like children’s whirligigs grown mutated and huge and strange; I had expected not to like these, to find them an ugly intrusion upon the rural countryside, but they add such a surreal touch to the landscape, like driving into a Dali painting, that I actually find them attractive, somehow not an intrusion at all—besides, their lines are so clean and simple and functional that they are intrinsically pretty in their own right, as objects, and the flowing smoothness of their motion somehow fits in well with the long rolling lines of the countryside itself. We continue on, past fields full of cows and sheep and horses, the roads getting smaller and the hedges on either side of the road higher the nearer we get to Tintagel, until finally the smallest road of all takes us from Trewarmett, a tiny hill town overlooking the sea, to Trenale, an even smaller town, and we find our inn, Trebrea Lodge, set just off an extremely narrow lane, barely wider than the car.
Our room isn’t ready yet, but the proprietor, John, gives us a brief tour of the main house, a lovely old stone mansion. Then we drive into Tintagel, park at the park-and-display, walk up to the Old Post Office, hitting various little shops on the main street along the way. Tintagel is much hotter than London had been, and the sun is stinging and fierce, strong enough to make me feel the need for sunscreen for the first time this trip; I buy some at the local chemists. The drought has obviously had an effect here, too—the rear garden at the Old Post Office, which l remember as one of the most beautiful gardens in England from our last trip, is wilted and sparse, with the snowballs on the snowball bushes burnt brown. Hit some more craft shops and gift shops, wilting somewhat ourselves in the oppressive heat and the relentless sun (this actually will turn out to be the hottest single day of the trip). The streets are full of men wearing nothing but bathing suits, or men without shirts, giving Tintagel something of the air of a town on the New Jersey shore in summer. We look around for a restaurant, finally settle for one that smells good, because of the on-view bakery in the front. Eat in a field in back at tables with umbrellas, both of us having Cornish Pasties, which are heavy but very good.
We drive out to the 14th Century Norman church on top of Glebe Cliff, and park in the lot next to it. Walk over the cliff-tops to the ruins of Tintagel Castle, Susan being nervous about the height. This time, I decide to walk down the extremely steep and winding staircase to the bottom and up the other side onto Tintagel Head itself, where the rest of the castle ruins are, something I had wanted to do last time, but had talked myself out of because of the effort involved; I tell myself this time that I won’t have too many more years when I am physically capable of doing stuff like this, so if I want to do it, I’d better do it now, while I have the chance. Susan going along is out of the question, of course, because she has a mild touch of acrophobia, so she stays behind on the walled terrace of the ruins, while I set off. The climb is quite strenuous; on the way down the very steep staircase, with its eroded and uneven stone steps, I immediately rub a big blister on my right palm from bracing my weight against the wooden railing as I descend, and then tear it open bloodily as I haul myself up the stairs onto Tintagel Head. The return trip is even tougher, especially the return leg back up to the mainland side of Tintagel Castle, where the stairs are so steep that I end up practically hauling myself up them hand over hand, like Batman walking up a wall with a rope in the campy old TV series. This is probably a dangerous level of exertion for someone of my age and weight, especially in the smothering heat. But the views from the top of Tintagel Head, headland after headland opening up down the coast until they are swallowed by the haze, are glorious, and it is strangely serene up there on top of the headland, a sort of vibrant, singing white silence, lonely and splendid. Probably not much different from the way it had been when the Celts and the Romans lived up here. The constant pressure of the sun, like a hand on top of your head, the keening of the wind and the screaming of the seabirds wheeling above, the occasional cannon-like booming of the surf hitting the rocky cliffs below—all would have been the same on any afternoon for thousands of years back into the past as they are today on this afternoon in August in the year 1995, toward the end of a troubled century. You could have come up here during the reign of Hadrian or Ethelred the Unready or the first Elizabeth or Queen Victoria, and found it all exactly the same. The wind and the birds and the sun are indifferent to what kind of man walks around up here, or whether any do at all. As are the insects, who have their own intricate ecologies going down around the grass-roots and the mosses and the heather, and would have been doing exactly the same things they’re doing now when Stonehenge was being put up away across Salisbury plain to the east, and would be doing exactly the same things whether humankind existed on the planet at all—and who probably will still be doing the same things up here on a sunny afternoon long after the last human has vanished from the Earth.
When I finally haul myself back up onto the terrace on the mainland side of Tintagel Castle, I’m sweaty and staggering and exhausted. We go back to Trebrea Lodge, where we finally get into our room, Number 8, which turns out to be one of the nicest rooms we’ve ever had—it’s set in a small two-story stone structure that probably was once one of the outbuildings, and we have the entire structure to ourselves, bedroom on the top floor, and, on the ground floor, a bathroom that is far larger than our whole hotel room at the Russell had been. We have dinner at the Lodge, salmon and boiled potatoes. Walk out front afterward into the tiny country lane that winds past the Lodge, listen in the dark to sheep baaing, watch the flocks of startled crows who periodically burst up from the forested hill behind the main house, wheeling behind the gabled roof of the Lodge and crying out harshly as they fly. Meanwhile, the black-and-white lodge cat is sitting in the dark by our feet, looking out across the edge of a farmer’s field and thinking of mice.
Saturday, August 12th—Chysauster, Land’s End & Penzance
Wake about six as usual, but manage to get back to sleep for an hour or so. Breakfast at the Lodge; pat the lodge dog, whose name is Sam, a black mix of flatcoat retriever and spaniel who seems to take our attention as his due, a tithe every guest is obligated to pay, and then hit the road, taking the A39 to the A307, heading for South Cornwall and the ruined Iron Age village of Chysauster. Drive through a brief spot of rain, our first this trip, and manage to avoid a traffic jam down around Truro, but both traffic and rain have thinned by the time we hit the top of the peninsula that leads at last to Land’s End. We ignore Paddy Hancock’s advice, from the BBC Travel Show, and do, by necessity, drive in St. Ives, but only until we can cut through the edge of town and on to the B3306, a winding narrow road that hugs the coast.
A while later, we stop in rolling hill country above the sea, at a roadside cut-off somewhere east of Zennor, get out of the car, cross the narrow road, and stand by the edge of the hill looking out and down to the sea. In some ways, this is one of the best moments of the whole trip. The sky has mostly cleared, with the sun breaking out of the scattering clouds. The hill-country silence is vibrant, a cool breeze has come up, and below, away down the hill, are stone farm buildings and fields full of cows, and then the sea, bright and tossed with whitecaps, with a big boat moving out near the horizon. On a hilltop nearby you can see the ruins of a neolithic hill-fort, with the clouds rushing by it. When a big cloud comes up and hides the sun for a minute, you can see the crisp edge of a line of shadow sweeping down the hill in front of us, over the farm houses, over the fields, until it reaches the sea. There’s very little sound, except the whoosh and whine of a car rushing by every once in a while, or, occasionally, the lowing of a cow coming up from the fields below (I check through my binoculars, and can spot three different kinds of cows: black with white markings, white with black markings, and brown ones; they all seem to moo the same, though).
At last, we press on, looking for the unnumbered road that leads to Chysauster. It turns out to be unmarked, too, and we miss both turnoffs for it, at Zennor and Porthmeor, and get all the way to Morvah before we realize we have to turn back. Finally find the unmarked turn, just past Porthmeor, and drive a few miles inland to the site of Chysauster. Park at the inevitable car-park (every ancient monument in Britain, no matter how small or obscure, seems to have one), climb up some steep stone stairs and then up a steep gravel path to the ticket kiosk (every monument in Britain also somehow manages to be uphill, both ways . . . and have a ticket kiosk), then on up the rounded swell of the hill to the ruins of the old village itself. Mostly only the outer walls of the ancient houses are left standing, grey stone walls thickly overgrown with weeds and purple flowers, although you can see the interior divisions that marked-off the rooms, and where the hearths once stood. Strange to think that we are walking through someone’s house, and I wonder if, thousands of years ago, they feel the air stir, and look up, and faintly sense our passage, ghosts of the future? I spend as much time as I spent looking at the ruins watching a hawk soaring over the valley, sometimes at our level, sometimes above, swooping way out across the valley toward the sea, finding a thermal, riding an invisible elevator of air up into the top of the sky, circling, swooping again. Yes, of course, it’s hunting—but I wonder if, at the same time, it’s also playing, enjoying riding the rivers of the air? On the way back, see the sign on the ticket kiosk that warns you that adders may be sunning themselves on the rocks—a sign I’m glad I didn’t see on the way up! Would have been much more careful climbing around in the ruins—as it was, we enjoyed the bliss of ignorance, and tromped around in a perfectly carefree manner, unaware that there might be adders all around us. A good metaphor for life in general.
Continue on around the peninsula to St. Justs, the day clouding up and growing grey, and then on to Land’s End, stopping just beforehand at the Wrecker’s Inn for a mediocre lunch, Susan ordering chicken salad, and, to her surprise, instead of getting what you’d get in the States, getting instead a piece of cold chicken and some salad; what you have to ask for instead, we discover, if you want what we would think of as chicken salad, is a chicken mayonnaise. Proceed on to Land’s End. The end of the peninsula is covered with an incredibly tacky Fun-Fair, but, once you get beyond all that, the view from the cliffs out over the Atlantic to the offshore sea-stacks and islands is still beautiful and worthwhile. (I don’t understand the English tendency to huddle in Holiday Camps and Fun-Fairs and Theme Parks and caravan sites and huge soulless camping-grounds, ignoring the natural splendor of the landscape all around them, but they do; some of them spend their vacations in rigidly organized Holiday Camps, which are sort of like concentration camps you pay to get into, surrounded with barbed wire and with Jolly British Muzak coming over the PA systems all day and most of the night, and never venture outside into the surrounding countryside at all. I’d pay to get out of having to go to one of these places, which I imagine as like taking your vacation in a Basic Training camp, with DJs and tennis laid on.) While we’re looking out over the cliffs at Land’s End, we have our first serious, discomforting rain—not a downpour, but a steady moderate rain, fading fitfully in and out of a drizzle. (It will turn out to be just about the only real rain we get until we reach Skye.)
Drive in to Penzance, get out and walk around for a while in the center of the town, but it is still drizzling and we’re getting tired, so we have our first real cream tea of the trip at the Penzance Buttery (it’s almost as difficult to get real clotted cream in London or Scotland as it is to get it back in Philadelphia), and then drive home. Dinner at the Lodge (chicken paprikas of a sort), during which we consume between us an entire bottle of wine. Retire unsteadily to bed.
Sunday, August 13th—Clovelly & Hartland Point
Breakfast at the Lodge, during which I muse about all the old sites of environmental rape we’ve seen here in Cornwall that are now tourist attractions, with people paying money to get in to see the old tin mines and slag-heaps and quarries. Wonder what the old miners who slaved their lives away there would have thought of that?
After breakfast, stop for petrol (the attendant washes our windscreen and then says “Lovely job!” to himself in congratulations as he finishes and saunters away), then head north on the A39 toward that area where the Cornish coast turns east into Devon. Huge grey clouds sweep overhead, alternating with patches of bright blue sky and brilliant sunshine. We drive through a rain shower, but it is over in a few seconds, and then the sun is blazing again; this pattern persists for the entire day. We pass over the border into Devon, and arrive at the town of Clovelly after about an hour’s drive.
We park in the lot at the top of the cliff, pay to get into the town (for Clovelly is entirely privately owned, and you have to agree to a long list of regulations, and be approved by a board, in order to live here; the entire town is run as one big tourist attraction), pause to watch a group of the donkeys and mules who are kept to haul tourists and their luggage up and down the hill from the hotel below being herded by (prompting Susan to comment later, “Donkeys always look so sad. I suppose that’s because they have to be donkeys.”), and then slowly walk down the steep cobblestone paths which lead to the very steep but wide cobblestone steps which fall down through the town. The street, which is made up entirely of steps, is so narrow, especially through the “Upalong” and the “Downalong” in the upper part of the village, that the houses on either side seem almost piled one on top of the other, so that you get the feeling that you could jump from one roof to another all the way down the hill; apparently it is possible to lean out of one upstairs window and shake the hand of someone leaning out of another window in a house across the street. Most of the houses fronting the street have tiny bright gardens, and it seems that every other garden has a cat sitting in it. We see more cats here in ten minutes than we’ll see anywhere else in Britain, by far, and Susan speculates that maybe people here tend to have cats because there’s really no place in these steep narrow streets to walk dogs. The streets are so steep and so narrow that the only way to get supplies down them in winter is by sledge, and most of the houses have one leaning up against the wall outside.
We walk on down to the stone quay at the bottom of the hill, walk out along it to the end, look at the ocean, watch the Brits who are lounging on blankets on a stone beach full of very uncomfortable-looking rocks as if they are on the finest sand beach in the Caribbean; their children are playing with sand-buckets and shovels, just like at home, but, since they have no sand to shovel, they are carefully piling up little heaps of stones instead of making sandcastles—perhaps this is the origin of the cairn, and it was originally Neolithic children on stone beaches who came up with the idea. We have lunch at the Red Lion Hotel, Cornish Pastie for me, ham ploughman for Susan, while another brief rain shower sweeps by outside; by the time we finish our last bites, the sun is blazing again—good timing. We pay to take the Range Rover back up to the top of the cliff, seventy pence apiece, and consider it money well-spent; certainly I’ve wasted many a 70 p on this trip on things I’ve gotten much less benefit from.
We drive through extremely narrow roads bordered closely on either side by high hedges to Hartland Point, on one occasion having to back up a fair way to let another car get past. Park at Hartland Point, which is an impressive headland stretching up 350 feet above the Atlantic, and walk down a moderately steep (although not as steep as Clovelly) path that gradually curves around the face of the cliffs and down to sea-level, where the lighthouse is. It’s still a working lighthouse, although automated now. It seems to be low-tide, and there is an impressive collection of kelp-fringed rocks surrounding the lighthouse, with a shipwreck—the rusting hulk of a tanker, broken in two—resting on some of them. This is obviously not a place you’d want to be offshore of in a boat during a storm. Sea cliffs march away south. Straight ahead is nothing but open sea, with North America somewhere on the other side of it.
Long, tiring walk back up, then drive back to the Lodge, overshooting and ending up in Camelford, and having to backtrack. On the tiny road that leads to Trenale and the Lodge, we stop to look at the view down over the fields to the sea, alarming an old lady who lives in a stone hut by the road, and who fears that we’re going to take a photo of her house and sell it to criminals so that they can figure out how to rob her. She makes us promise not to do this. Back at the room, Corky the black-and-white lodge cat marches inside and settles himself down on Susan’s bed, apparently ready to stay for as long as we are—well, we had joked earlier about getting a “travel cat” for the trip, and now it appears that we have one. Later, when we’re taking a walk around the grounds before dinner, Corky follows Susan everywhere, “following” her by dashing ahead and then waiting for us to catch up, in that way that cats have. When he even follows us across the road when we go to look at the horses in the adjacent field, we decide to go back to the “snug”—there are two bars or lounges, the more formal one upstairs, and the “snug room” on the ground floor—for a drink before we get Corky run over. Dinner is beef in some sort of sauce, potatoes, and brown-bread ice-cream, which is quite good. Split another bottle of wine, stagger to bed, reeling through the country silence.
Monday, August 14th—Dartmoor, Two Bridges, Wigham & Morchard Bishop
Last breakfast at the Lodge (which proved to be our favorite place to stay on the entire trip, rivalled only by Fallowfields, near Oxford). Check out, say goodbye to Sam the dog, who lunges up and snatches a piece of toast I’m holding in my hand (to feed to the birds later), and then trots proudly around the yard with the toast in his mouth for the next five minutes, while we load the car. A trophy, perhaps?
Leave Cornwall behind, drive into Devon, this time heading east. Drive to Moretonhampstead on the A30 and the A382, and then into Dartmoor on the B3212, stopping at the miniature pony center, where they had pigs and piglets and some newborn baby ponies, who were not much bigger than a small dog, as well as the adult miniature ponies, which are used for pony rides. (The adult miniature ponies looked at me with suspicion and growing alarm, but I was in a benevolent mood and made no attempt to ride them.) Move on down the B3212. Somewhere just to the north of Postbridge—in the high treeless country I think of as “the real moor,” although I suppose all of it, high and low, valley forest and barren rocky hill, is all officially Dartmoor—we park the car by the side of the road, in a cutting, and walk up a long rolling hill covered with purple heather and golden gorse. Also covered with sheep-droppings, which are everywhere—not surprising, since the sheep themselves are everywhere. Two of them wander up the hillside in front of me on a faint trail that they and their kin have probably broken themselves, not hurrying or alarmed, but not letting me close with them either, always staying the same distance ahead of me. There is a wild moor pony off some distance to the left, and he too, although also seeming unalarmed, moves away in an unhurried fashion when I approach, stopping to graze every few steps in an unconcerned way, but still not letting me close with him. A ruined hill-fort is visible in the distance on the ridge line, with hikers moving toward it; in the other direction, down the hill past the car, herds of sheep move and bleat, and, as I watch, a party consisting of four riders and two happily panting dogs comes by. I spend a contented half-hour or so wandering around on the high moor, in heather up to my knee, stepping on sheep-berries, bees buzzing by my ears and the wind soughing, looking at the hill-forts on the surrounding ridge-lines through my binoculars, occasionally breaking into a whistled chorus of “The Heather on the Hill,” which doesn’t seem to either startle the ever-receding sheep into moving any faster or intrigue them into investigating. I find the high moor country strangely attractive and inviting—odd, since I usually instinctively dislike and avoid places where there isn’t any shade, and here on these bare rocky hills there is no shelter from the sun at all. Nevertheless, I am strangely happy here, and would probably be content to spend the entire vacation tramping aimlessly around over the moors. (I am fundamentally a mountain person, always happiest when I am in high country, and Susan is fundamentally a water person, happiest near or on a large body of water; I later noticed that throughout the trip, whenever I would say “Look at that!” and point at something particularly scenic, I would usually be pointing at a mountain view; when Susan would do the same, she was almost inevitably pointing at a view of a lake or of the ocean.)
Continued on to Two Bridges, which consists almost entirely of the Two Bridges Hotel, where we have a mediocre lunch (lunch is almost always the meal that the British do the worst job on; breakfasts are usually quite good, sometimes the best meal of the day, and many of our dinners were perfectly acceptable, too, but we had few lunches that rose above mediocre—most of them, in fact, sucked). After lunch, took the B3357 to Ashburton, up and across the high moor again, the narrow road practically lined with sheep, their coats splashed with green or red or blue, some of them laying half-in the road, all of them seemingly unafraid of cars, although surely a tourist must hit one occasionally, the road is so winding and narrow, there’s so much traffic, and so much of it drives unnervingly fast. There are also groups of wild moor ponies here and there by the side of the road, usually being cooed at by tourists, all of whom, British and American, are feeding the ponies, of course, although supposedly this is illegal; the ponies, though, don’t seem in the least concerned about participating in an illegal event. We stop again on the high moor somewhere west of Dartmeet. There’s another ruined hill-fort visible from here, closer to us, on the crest of another hill, and I’m tempted to hike up to it, but the afternoon is dying, and we don’t really have the time. Continue on, stopping at a narrow stone bridge over the river Dart, just as we did eight years ago. At Ashburton, turn off on to the A38 to Exeter, then creep along behind hay-trucks and lorries on the A377, turning off at Morchard Bishop and following unnumbered back roads and then a private road to Wigham, our next inn.
Greeted by the proprietor, Steve, and two black dogs, one of whom is just a puppy, not much more than a month or two old. Steve helps us up to our room with our immensely heavy suitcases, while the puppy, Zulu, frisks about and play-bites our hands. Both of us are somewhat disappointed in Wigham, especially coming off of our stay at Trebrea Lodge, which we loved. Wigham is extremely twee, with throw-pillows and cute little stuffed animals everywhere, a sort of a Disneyfied version of the traditional thatched cottage that it advertises itself to be. I am also bothered by the fact that there’s “no there there”—at Trebrea, we could stroll around the extensive grounds, but all there is here is the main house, with a gravel terrace in front of it, everything squeezed in between the driveway/parking area and the fence that blocks access to the “working farm” part, which is private; on the other side of the gravel terrace with its picnic tables is the swimming pool, set down a level, and on the other side of that, down the hill a bit, are fenced-in fields full of sheep . . . so there’s really no place to go here unless you get back in the car and leave, no place to stroll around. (Susan points out that it’s odd that a place that makes such a big deal about being an “organic farm,” all very self-consciously and piously Green, should have animal-skin rugs all over the floors . . . but it does.) We go swimming, and the pool is nice, and welcome, since the sun is still high and blazing, although the pool is much dirtier than a pool even in a small roadside motel in the States would be, full of dead floating bugs and twigs and leaves. Susan goes upstairs while I sit at one of the picnic tables on the gravel terrace and work on these notes, listening to the almost constant baa-ing of the sheep, counterpointed by the occasional lowing of a cow. A black-and-white cat comes by, crying as it walks, seeming almost to be answering the mewling cries of the sheep; but perhaps it is only calling its kittens.
Dinner is late because the other guests, a party of eight French people travelling together, are late returning from Clovelly and Hartland Point, where we were yesterday. We are offered a free drink as compensation; I have a Tia Maria and Susan has a gin and tonic. Finally the French arrive, and we are introduced to them, although only one or two of them speak even a word of English; Susan has a smattering of tourist French, but they speak so fast that this turns out to be largely useless. Dinner is served family style around one big wooden table—rice with raisins, steamed vegetables, with skimpy portions of some sort of sweet-and-sour pork put on the plates first. The French clearly do not like the food, and several of them barely bother to touch it; jokes about the food are made in rapid French, which Steve, who speaks French haltingly, seems to catch and resent. The eight French people, four couples, all late middle-aged, talk loudly and enthusiastically to each other during dinner, with much shouting and laughing and gesturing and even a brief outbreak of singing, and this seems to embarrass our hosts, who keep whispering apologies to us for the exuberance of the French, and promising us that things will be “much quieter” tomorrow, when there will be only an English couple and us. The black labrador puppy, Zulu, is clearly very popular with the French people, and circles the table while several of them call his name, leaping up to have his head tousled and to chew on people’s fingers. I play tug-of-war with him with a napkin, which he joyously shreds into little pieces. After dinner, the French all troop outside onto the terrace and light up cigarettes, in defiance of the inn’s strict no-smoking policy. While they’re puffing away, I hear the innkeeper’s five-month-pregnant wife, Dawn, complaining bitterly in the kitchen about the fact that the French people are smoking, saying that if there’s a fire, it will void their insurance. If the French hear her, they either don’t understand or don’t care, because they continue to smoke for some time, while we go up to bed.
Tuesday, August 15th—Okehampton Castle & Tavistock
When we wake, we are socked-in—very foggy, although as yet no rain, and we tell ourselves maybe it will burn off. Susan says that when she first looked out an hour or two earlier, the fog was like cheesecloth pressed against the window. Even now you can’t see beyond the edge of the gravel terrace, and the mournful voices of the sheep rise up out of the fog.
Breakfast is late because our hostess is busy screaming at her assistant in the kitchen over his request for more time off, and they continue to fight vindictively for quite some time instead of starting breakfast, which makes for a very tense atmosphere which the French, upon arriving, either ignore or are oblivious to. After everyone has been waiting around the table for a while, the hostess and her assistant belatedly notice and pull themselves together, and breakfast begins. Am amused to note during breakfast that the puppy Zulu is sticking her nose into the big bowl that holds the cold cereal, and is happily eating it. Fortunately, I’m not planning to have cereal here tomorrow.
Take off after breakfast, miss our turning, and end up taking the “backdoor” route to Coppelstone, through tiny towns called Oldbourough and Newbuildings, along roads so small that the hedges on either side of them scratch the sides of the car as we pass. At Coppelstone, take the A3072 to Okehampton, park, walk up to tour Okehampton Castle. On the way to the castle, we explore a few yards down a footpath marked romantically “Lover’s Meet,” and find waiting for us there, romantically, a backhoe, which is parked sitting partially in the stream. It is, however, we tell ourselves, a very romantic backhoe. At the castle, Susan buys earphones and takes an “audio tour” of the castle while I, disdaining the earphones, walk around at my own pace, speculating that someday people will be able to take “virtual tours” of castles, seeing projected around them as they walk the castle as it would have looked when it was intact, perhaps not bothering to look at the ruins in the real world at all. I am amused by a sign that says that, while in attendance, the Lord of the manor maintained a retinue that included eight men-at-arms and fourteen lawyers. If he had that much more use for lawyers than for men-at-arms, then I guess that things haven’t really changed all that much since the 14th Century.
Leave Okehampton, drive to Tavistock on the A386, park in the ubiquitous car-park, walk around looking for the tea-room we’d eaten in in 1987, finally give up and have lunch in a place called The Coffee Mill. Toasted cheese and bacon sandwich for Susan, cream tea for me—the Cornish clotted cream and the Devon clotted cream are not quite the same, the Devon variety having a texture more like that of butter; both are good, but the Cornish version has the edge, I think. Shopped in town for a while, trying to determine how difficult it would be to send a bottle of Dartmoor Mead back to the States for Janet and Ricky Kagan (very difficult, as it turns out, so we give up the idea), then drive up on to the moor on the B3212, stopping briefly just before Princetown, somewhere near Merrivale, and stopping again later on somewhere up near Postbridge. The color of the hills on this side is predominantly purple, the color of the heather, which makes them look almost red from a distance. On the other side, where we stopped yesterday near Dartmeet, the hills were much more golden, the color of the gorse, as there was more of it there admixed with the heather. Drive to Mortonhampstead, passing the pony center again, then up the A382 to the B3219, up the A3072 to Coppelstone, then home on the A377 and along the network of back roads past Morchard Bishop to Wigham.
It’s still quite hot and bright, drought weather instead of the more usual English weather, and so we take a swim, joined by the new guests, the promised-to-be “quiet” English couple, who turn out to be a pleasant middle-aged English couple called Eva and Bill (he somewhat older than her; he remembers being wakened as a small child in the middle of the night when the news of VJ Day came in, and hearing all the boats in the harbor sounding their whistles—he was a retail buyer of china, who had bought plates for the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth; she was an English teacher until her recent retirement, blonde, still pretty), and later by Steve and Dawn (Steve obviously somewhat apprehensive about the upcoming birth; talks uneasily about the birthing classes they are taking, hoping that the baby doesn’t come until they graduate), and then by Zulu, who splashes into the pool, swims around for awhile, and then tries to get out by the pool ladder, slipping and scrambling and whining, but finally clawing her way out (amusing to me that Dawn is concerned about the legal consequences of the French smoking, but doesn’t seem to care about the dog swimming in the pool with the guests, which in the States would almost certainly be enough of a Board of Health violation to shut them down). Zulu shakes herself dry, and then pounces on the cat when it comes wandering by, biting it ferociously—not really hurting it, but obviously annoying it. The cat makes protesting noises, and then finally gets fed up when Zulu won’t stop and starts to fight back; they disappear into the distance, still fighting and barking and spitting.
Dinner is again served at the big wooden table that night, but this time with just us and the English couple: chicken in a brownish sauce with bits of mushroom and bacon, red cabbage with juniper berries, roasted potatoes, squash (or marrows, as they’re called here) in tomato sauce—not tremendously good, but there’s lots of it, served family style in big bowls, and it’s considerably better than the night before; you get the feeling that they’re trying a bit harder now that the French, who they obviously didn’t much like, are gone. Pleasant dinner conversation with Eva and Bill during dinner and in the sitting room afterward, mostly about the inadequacies of various educational systems. Then to bed.
Wednesday, August 16th—Kelmscot Manor, Fallowfields & Kingston Bagpuise
Up about 7:20. When I go down to the gravel terrace before breakfast to write up these notes, Zulu comes prancing up with her food bowl in her jaws and thrusts it into my lap; do you think she’s trying to tell me something? A pleasant breakfast with Bill and Eva, over which we linger too long—we’re getting a late start today, and it’s a bad time for it, since today we also face the longest uninterrupted drive of the trip, from Devon almost to Oxford.
Drag our suitcases down to the car, pack up, and set off, on the road about 10:40. Take the A377 to Credition, then the A3072 to the M5. Take the M5 to the M4. It’s amazing how much quicker travel is on the M roads than it is on even the A roads in rural areas like Cornwall and Devon—it only takes us a bit more than two hours to get up near the Oxford area once we hit the M roads, and it takes us an hour just to get to where we pick up the M5 in the first place from Morchard Bishop; some of our journeys around Cornwall and Devon actually took as long or longer than it takes us to get from Exeter to Oxford.
Get off the main road a few miles from Kingston Bagpuise, about ten miles from Oxford, and, after some difficulty, find our way to Kelmscot, the country estate of William Morris, where Rossetti and others of the Pre-Raphaelites used to hang out, which is why Susan wants to see it. Stopped for an indifferent lunch at a pub called, believe it or not, the Plough Inn, and then pushed on to Kelmscot Manor itself. Explored the manor, which had unusually lovely hangings, tiles, wallpaper, and design elements, far superior to other country houses of this sort that we’ve seen—not surprising, I guess, considering that Morris and his artist friends designed and/or executed just about everything in the house themselves. Interesting that a man who considered himself a devoted socialist and who apparently would scold his wife for being extravagant in the shops would have such a rich and lovely home, but then Morris was full of contradictions, like many artistic people both then and now.
Finished touring Kelmscot about 4:15, drove back to the A420 to the A415, and so to Kingston Bagpuise, and our next inn, Fallowfields. This is another stone manor house, set a little closer to the main road than I had thought it would be, but there are extensive grounds behind the main house, including a large vegetable garden and some flower gardens. On the lawn in the rear is a sequoia that has been hit by lightning and blasted into an odd shape (the host seems surprised when we don’t recognize it, as though Americans see sequoias every day, but Susan explains that its almost as far to the nearest sequoia from our home in Philadelphia as it is from Philadelphia to Oxford). The host is named Anthony. His wife, Peta, is the behind-the-scenes person, while he deals with the public—this seems to be the way it usually breaks down at these B&Bs that are run by couples: one front person, usually the man (always was the man, anyway, in every place we stayed on this trip, and usually is at B&Bs at home, too), to deal directly with the guests, and one person, usually the woman, behind the scenes to deal with logistics and organization, and usually to do the cooking. Anthony’s duties also include taking care of the huge vegetable garden, and he tells us that when he first moved up here from London, he was quite a Green, and would never willingly have harmed an animal, but that maintaining a vegetable garden is a constant war with pests who want to eat your vegetables, and now, after two years of it, he now feels no compunction about going out with a .12 gauge and shooting the wood pigeons, who eat his brussel sprouts. Across the rear lawn, the one with the sequoia, is a field where sheep, and, occasionally, horses graze. House martins flit about under the eves of the main house, doing incredible aerial acrobatics; they nest right up under the eaves right above the window to our room, and we constantly see them flashing past the window as they swoop out to gobble bugs, or swoop home again.
We take a swim before dinner in one of the strangest swimming pools I’ve ever seen, an oddly designed stone pool set a few steps down from the lawn, overhung by grape vines and lavender. The deep end extends all the way across the long end of the pool, rather than dividing it in half horizontally in traditional fashion, and I can’t help wonder if the Aga Khan, whose mansion this formerly was, might not have come up with its eccentric design himself. (Later the thought occurs to me that perhaps we were swimming in the former horse trough.) We swim for about an hour, while sheep graze and bleat in the field alongside the pool, horses move restlessly around in the distance, and butterflies dart about near the lavender bushes. Spend some time rescuing ladybugs from drowning in the pool, scooping them up and putting them down by the poolside—probably largely a wasted effort, since many of them seem determined to march right back into the water again as soon as they recover themselves.
Dinner at the inn is expensive but fairly good. All Americans in attendance for the first time this trip, one nice couple from Chicago, and a nerdy fellow with an annoying voice who we take a dislike to at once, who is here with his family: a resigned-looking wife, and two daughters who he’s taking on a tour of Oxford in order to encourage them to go to English colleges. They look less than enthusiastic about the prospect.
Thursday, August 17th—Uffington, Burford, Bourton-on-the-Water & Upper Slaughter
Called the car-rental company this morning to see if we can drop the car off in Oxford tomorrow rather than in Heathrow as we had originally arranged. Apparently, we can. The idea is that we will take the train into London from Oxford to catch our overnight sleeper to Inverness; this will save us a 40 pound cab ride in from Heathrow, and, since we have the rail flexipasses, should actually cost us nothing at all, as far as money out of our dwindling supply of cash is concerned, anyway.
After breakfast, drive out to see the Uffington White Horse. We park in the car park and walk up the long swell of a hill toward the White Horse, but are somewhat disappointed—because of the angle that the chalk figure is cut into the hill, it’s tilted away from our position here, and you really can’t get that good a look at it; you’d probably get a better angle on it and a better overview of it from one of the back roads in the valley below, but we don’t have the time to look for such a vantage point. Giving up on the White Horse, we drive on up into the Cotswalds, stopping at Burford. There’s a stream next to the car park, and we feed the ducks and swans the piece of toast we’ve brought all the way up from Tintagel (its companion having been carried off to an Unknown Fate by Sam the Dog), having forgotten to feed it to anything on Dartmoor the previous two days; the birds don’t seem to be particularly impressed by all the trouble we’ve gone to to import this piece of toast hundreds of miles especially for them, and devour it with neither more nor less enthusiasm than usual, although it is, by now, stale enough to be of the same consistency as sheet iron. We visit a craft’s fair in an old almshouse next to an ancient church and graveyard, then walk up the steep main street of Burford (everything here is uphill, remember?), shopping, buying presents for Ricky—a knife, that should be fun to get through customs—and for Tess, an Italianate plaster cherub for her garden.
Get back in the car and drive to Bourton-on-the-Water, park in a car park on the outskirts of town. Long hot walk in beside the little river Windrush. Bourton-on-the-Water is absolutely packed with tourists, with a population density that puts that other world-class tourist trap, New Hope, Pennsylvania—which it otherwise reminds us of—to shame; they also have more gift shops per square foot than New Hope does, an amazing accomplishment, and one that I frankly wouldn’t have thought possible. The walkway along the river and the narrow footbridges over it are especially crowded and busy, with several naked or near-naked children wading in the ankle-deep river, splashing, throwing stones, pushing each other over. Also see lots of dogs leaping in and out of the water, happily shaking themselves dry, leaping in again to retrieve a stick or a ball. Picnickers are everywhere. We also see lots of people being wheeled along the riverside and through the town in wheelchairs; we see far more handicapped people here in fifteen minutes than we’ve seen in all of England so far, or that we will see in Scotland—why so many in this one particular town, I wonder? Susan suggests that it’s because this is one of the few places we’ve been where everything isn’t sharply uphill; perhaps it’s also because it’s within day-trip range of bigger cities such as Oxford and London.
After lunch, which we have out under the trees in a grassy square in the center of town (Susan has a strange dish which consists of an enormous, hollowed-out Yorkshire Pudding full of Steak & Kidney Pie mix and french fries (sorry, chips)), we walk back along the river to the car, passing a clever duck who is hanging in the water downstream, comfortably out-of-sight from the main mass of tourists, and eating all the goodies that those tourists have let fall into the water, and which the current is now bringing to him: pieces of bread, bits of cake and cookies, ice-cream cones, etc. He can afford to be choosey, and he is only selecting the very choicest delicacies, which the current delivers almost right into his beak, with very little effort needed on his part except to open his beak at the right time. Smart duck.
Drive through Lower Slaughter, can’t find anyplace to park, drive on up to Upper Slaughter, on the hill above, park there. In contrast to Bourton-on-the-Water, there are almost no tourists at all in the Slaughters, particularly Upper Slaughter, although they are at least as lovely as Bourton-on-the-Water, and perhaps even more so. We have the whole village nearly to ourselves; the place is as deserted as a Hollywood back lot after working hours. We walk around looking at the fine old Cotswald stone buildings, walk down the hill to a ford over a small stream (a car conveniently fording it just as we arrive, splashing through water about a third of the way up its wheels, as if it is demonstrating the ford for us), then back up and around on the other side of town, back to the tiny square where we are parked. It’s getting late by now, so, reluctantly, we head back to Fallowfields.
Back at the inn, we go down to the pool for a swim, joining an English couple from Yorkshire named Sid and Kate, who are already down by the poolside. The inn cat, Healy, crouches nearby throughout, staring at us in amazement and some alarm as we actually put ourselves into the water. Willingly! (Strange, inscrutable creatures, these humans . . .) He is careful not to get too near, in case we should drag him in, too. We have a swim and a nice chat with Sid and Kate, then sit out by the pool and have drinks, very civilized. At dusk, the house martins dart about, gobbling up bugs, and then swoop up under the eaves, seeming to be about to fly right in our open bedroom window. They look like little jet fighters silhouetted against the darkening sky.
Rack of lamb for dinner. Afterward, sat outside on the rear lawn, watching the stars; you can see an amazing number of stars from here, for someplace so close to the light-pollution of Oxford, and I see something describing a perfectly circular path across the night sky at a fast but steady pace that I’m sure is a satellite in earth orbit. Anthony, who was a Navigator in the RAF, tells a story about being in a plane packed solid with soldiers inside all the way to the tail, and needing to go to the loo, which was in the back of the plane, and the sergeant gruffly ordering his men to bend over, so that Anthony could walk over their backs, literally stepping on them, to the rear of the plane to reach the loo. As an old enlisted man myself, this sounds like perfectly normal officer behavior to me, but I refrain from telling Anthony so.
Friday, August 18th—Oxford, London, Train to Inverness
A day mostly spent dealing with major and minor hassles, and more packed with frustrations than sightseeing. Check out of the inn, drive into Oxford, get lost, and spend a half-hour or so driving around before finally finding the train station. We offload the luggage, then find that none of the lockers at the station are even remotely large enough to check our suitcases in, thus ending our plan to leave the luggage there and go to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford this morning before taking the train for London. Reload the luggage into the car, and then spend almost two hours of escalating annoyance driving back and forth through the streets of Oxford trying to locate the car rental company, at one point missing a turn and driving a good deal of the distance out to Blenheim Palace before we can find an exit on the highway that lets us turn around in a tiny village called Wigham and get headed back in the right direction again. Finally do find the car rental place, which turns out to be quite some distance from town, so that we need an expensive cab ride back into Oxford, where we miss our train by seconds, forcing us to wait more than an hour for the next one. Then a hot ride into London, with our suitcases jammed into the aisle of the fortunately nearly empty train car, since they won’t fit in any of the available luggage-storage spaces. Then another cab ride, from Paddington Station to Euston.
Find, to our relief, that there is an actual left-luggage department at Euston Station, and gladly pay the money to leave our luggage there. We are too limp and exhausted from all of this to want to do much, so we give up on our half-formed alternate plan to tour the Victoria and Albert Museum, and decide to take one of the city bus tours instead; at least we won’t have to walk to do that. Take a cab to Russell Square, where we know we can catch such a tour, and get there just a second or two after the bus pulls away. I find it oddly pleasing to be standing in front of the Russell Hotel again, and I decide that this feeling comes from the fact that, after a week of navigating mostly new and unfamiliar territory, here I know where everything is: the American Express office is just down the block, as is the newsstand where you can buy bottled water, the Night and Day, where you can get an ice-cream cone, the Italian place with the outdoor tables where you can get dessert, the little cafe near the British Museum where you can get a scone for breakfast, and so on. Somehow this makes it seem almost like stepping back into last week. (Later learn that George R.R. Martin was probably in the Russell while we were standing out in front of it, since he was staying there that day, but we had no way of knowing that at the time.)
Catch a cab to Victoria, hoping to catch up with a tour bus there, but, near Trafalgar Square, we spot a London double-decker tour bus waiting by the curb, hop out of the cab, and board it—or rather, board one we’re directed to a few blocks away, in front of Charing Cross Station. Sit up on the top deck, of course, in the open air. The tour drives us by nothing we’re not already familiar with, but it’s a pleasant way to kill an hour and a half, and one that doesn’t involve walking or carrying huge suitcases. Susan becomes noticeably more relaxed and cheerful, now that she no longer has the responsibility of driving, which has clearly been weighing heavily on her. We pass the Statue of Eros (actually, the Spirit of Christian Charity, although no one will call it that) in Piccadilly Circus, where I’d once spent a night sitting on the fountain steps, decades ago, and although the fountain itself is the same (as are the hordes of shabbily romantic/Byronic kids sitting in romantic gloom on the steps), the surrounding Circus has changed so much as to be almost unrecognizable. Pass the grounds of Buckingham Palace, noticing the very heavy-duty and sincere barbed wire that tops the high surrounding walls and fences. Pass Green Park, which has been baked nearly brown by the sun.
We get out across from Charing Cross, walk up to Covent Gardens, where the little streets in front of the pubs are completely blocked by loitering customers, foaming pints in hand; later, we peek into the end of Leicester Square, and that’s so crowded that the tourists are literally standing packed-in shoulder-to-shoulder, as though they are at some kind of political rally or free rock concert—but they’re just taking in the night. I don’t recall London being quite this jammed with tourists twenty-five years ago, and I wonder if the tourist density level is this high every year now . . . or is this just another effect of the unusually hot and dry and prolonged (and very un-English) summer weather? Perhaps all the crowds who usually go to Spain or Italy or Florida “seeking the sun” have stayed home instead this year. (Florida, by the way, is by far the most popular destination in the States for British tourists; just about every British person we met had been to Florida, although most of them had been nowhere else in the States during their trip, and in several bookstores guides to Florida were the only travel books on U.S. destinations available—the Brits may not have seen New York City or L.A. or Washington, D.C. or Seattle, but they’ve seen Disney World . . . which must offer a somewhat distorted view of what the life in the States is like!) Have a decent if unexciting Indian meal, then have coffee and strawberry pie down the street in a little place named Crank’s. As we eat, I look out the open window-wall of the restaurant at the bustling sidewalk traffic, mostly young people out looking for one sort of action or another, and again think of myself here when I was young. Feel a pang when I think that this may well be my last glimpse of London for many years, or perhaps ever in this life.
Go back to Euston Station, pick up our luggage, drag it to the sleeper train for Inverness. Have tea in the lounge car, and, while we are sipping it, London slips silently away behind us, without any fuss, and is gone.
Saturday, August 19th—Inverness, Moray Firth & Polmaily House, Drumnadrochit, Urquhart Castle
Slept fitfully, woke about 6:40. Rugged Scottish hills sliding by the train window. Stony high hills, very bleak, with purple heather on their sides. In the valleys and below the tree-line, what appear to be spruce or fir forests, with here and there trees that look like silver birches, glinting like bone in the dull green body of the woods. Lots of rabbits running away across the fields. Sit down to have a cup of coffee in the lounge car as we arrive at Aviemore. Brief drizzle later at Slough Summit, where the grey clouds clamp down overhead like an iron skillet lid, obscuring the tops of highest hills. It’s what the Irish call a “soft day”—fine constant mist, not quite rain—by the time we get to Inverness, where we get off the train.
Check out the various posters advertising boat rides and bus and taxi tours, and then catch a cab to the car rental place, where we pick up our new car, a blue Ford Mondeo this time, which proves to be nowhere near as comfortable as our faithful Daewoo (no air conditioning, for one thing; it’s been an amusement to me throughout our trip that although our rooms weren’t air-conditioned, our car was. The Brits tend to sneer at or at least be extremely patronizing to Americans about their dependency on air-conditioning, but a few more summers like this one in Britain, and they may find themselves putting air-conditioners in as well; already, in London, we were seeing hand-lettered signs on some restaurants promising that it was “Air-conditioned inside!” or “Fully air-conditioned!” or just “Cool inside!” . . . and I remember the movie theaters using the same ploy to attract customers back in the ‘50s—remember the Chilly Willy signs outside movie houses?—when Americans didn’t have home air-conditioners either).
Drive through town and down to the harbor, where we park at dockside and book passage on the Moray Firth Dolphin-Watching Cruise. Inverness doesn’t seem to be a terribly pretty or terribly interesting town, striking me as an unpretentious no-nonsense no-frills working-class town, an impression confirmed or at least emphasized for me when we walk around the harbor area while waiting for the cruise to leave, strolling around the corner and over a bridge to a quiet, working-class neighborhood: a sleeping pub, a laundromat, a take-away fish-and-chips shop, and a bakery, where I buy a “potato pie” (something like an inferior Cornish Pastie) and a “battery,” which turns out to be a greasy lump of cold fried dough or batter (hence the name), served plain, without even powdered sugar on it, the dough itself not even remotely sweet—it tastes mostly like cold congealed grease.
Back at the dock, the harbor-cruise ship has arrived, and we file on board. Swans have formed a queue in the water alongside the ship, and are begging the tourists for food, and I regret not bringing the largely-uneaten remnants of my “battery” back for them; perhaps, as Scottish birds, they would appreciate it more than I did. One little girl is teasing a swan by pretending to be about to feed it a potato chip (sorry, crisp!), getting it to arch its neck up excitedly, and then snatching the chip away from it at the last moment—after a few minutes of this, the swan gives up and swims away in disgust. The drizzle has largely stopped by the time we set out, which makes the trip more pleasant, but I don’t expect that we’re going to see much except for the scenery of the Firth itself (a not-inconsiderable attraction in its own right, of course), and that turns out to be true (I become suspicious when they offer us the tour tickets at a considerable discount; whenever they offer something to tourists during tourist season for less money than it says they’re going to charge you for it, something’s wrong—in this case, I suspect, they know that we’re too late in the year to really have a good chance of seeing a lot of wildlife). During our hour-long cruise, we see exactly one—count ‘em, one—dolphin, which we dutifully watch for the minute or so that it’s visible above the surface of the water. Still, it’s a pleasant cruise on Moray Firth, enjoyable for its own sake, just for the pleasure of being out on the water in the open air in a small boat. By the time we get back to Inverness, the skies have cleared, and the sun is out.
Drive down the A82 to Drumnadrochit, along the shores of Loch Ness. It’s a bright day by now, the narrow waters of Loch Ness sparkling with sunlight and whitecaps, and I’m amused to see that the road alongside the loch is lined with people hopefully watching the loch with binoculars, waiting for the Monster to show up. I do exactly the same thing for a few minutes (without success, alas!), then we continue to Drumnadrochit—which consists mostly of a couple of hotels and gift shops and The Official Loch Ness Monster Center, which has a big plaster statue of Nessie outside—and on out the other side of town to Polmaily House, our next inn. This turns out to be a nicely rambling old wooden house, not as pretty or imposing as Fallowfields; the room is nice, although a bit smaller and not quite as elegant as our room at Fallowfields; the bathroom is considerably larger and more conveniently arranged than at Fallowfields, though, where we had a toilet and shower set in one tiny closet-sized cubicle and the sink all the way on the other side of the room, tucked away in a cabinet. And the grounds are about as extensive, or perhaps even more extensive, with tables set out under a nice expanse of tree-shaded lawn that leads over to the swimming pool, and grazing horses visible in the field below, before the ground climbs up to the hill on the other side of the road.
We drop our luggage in our room (which is hot, so we open all the windows . . . which turns out to be a fateful decision) and drive back through Drumnadrochit to the ruins of Urquhart Castle on the shores of Loch Ness, the castle they always show in movies that have a Loch Ness locale. We’re both so tired by this point that we end up driving on the wrong side of the road for more than a mile before either of us notices! Fortunately, the road that leads to the inn is not a heavily trafficked road, so we manage to get away with it. Perhaps we’re a bit too tired to really enjoy the castle, either, probably we should have just stayed at the inn, but we buy our tickets and dutifully trudge down the hill to tour it, with only a few groans about how steep the hill is going to be coming back up. There’s not really a lot of Urquhart Castle left to tour, actually, it being mostly ruined, but the views out over the loch are splendid, especially with the broken castle walls in the foreground, and there’s a kilted piper playing continuously near the gate, for atmosphere (they have a tip jar set up for him, so, on the way out, we literally pay the piper). Looking out over Loch Ness, it’s easy to see how the Monster legends got started—there are lots of odd currents running through the loch, producing lines of ripples that could easily look like serpentine humps in a row from a distance. In fact, the problem is not in seeing the Monster, but that at any given moment you can see six or seven of them—every movement of the currents, every wake, every boat moving far enough away in the distance to have dwindled to a black dot, every wind-generated pattern of ripples: all of them could be a Monster, and most of these phenomena would look no less convincing than the classic Monster photos if you took a picture of them. Actually seeing Loch Ness, though, makes it even plainer how absurd the idea is that there’s a herd of plesiosaurs swimming around in it—the loch may be very deep, true, but it’s also extremely narrow. If there were plesiosaurs swimming around in it, people would be seeing them all the time, not just every once in a rare while.
Drive back to the inn, take a swim in the pool (which is much less eccentric than the one at Fallowfields, with the deep end where it usually is), take a nap, and then have dinner; roast duck, one of the best meals of the entire trip. Back to the room, and try to sleep . . . but the midges are pestering us, so that the choice becomes leave the covers pulled up to your chin and swelter, or throw them off and be annoyed by midges. Eventually, it either gets cold enough for them to stop flying around, or I get tired enough not to care, because I fall asleep.
Sunday, August 20th—Cowdor Castle, Glen Cannich
Get a late start, leaving about 10:30 A.M. driving back to Inverness on the A82, and then drive east toward Nairn on the A96, past fields full of round bales of hay like circular yellow cows. Turn off on a smaller road to visit Cawdor Castle, the home of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the Thane of Cawdor.
Tour the castle, which is not all that spectacular as a castle, but which is interestingly furnished and decorated, and has a nice lived-in feel—not surprising, since the family apparently does still live here part of the year, from November to May. In spite of the antique furniture and the richness of the tapestries and the decorations, the place manages to look comfortable somehow, as though it would be pleasant to live there, and I find myself able to imagine actually living there and enjoying doing so, unlike most of these lordly piles of stone, which tend to look cold and unfriendly and uncomfortable, and which usually seem as though they would not be particularly welcoming to live in. Lord Cawdor’s posted descriptions of each room are pleasantly amusing in a dry, ironic way, and contain the phrase “And now for something completely different”—the Lord is a Monty Python fan! Have lunch at the castle (I am amused by the “wholewheat hoagie” they offer—which looks awful; I have scones, but, while I eat them, muse about how far the term “hoagie” has spread from its Philadelphia/New Jersey origins . . . it seems to be slowly winning over “submarine sandwich,” which was what we called hoagies back in New England when I was a boy, and also over other variants such as “torpedo”), then check out the castle gardens, which are the healthiest-looking we’ve seen in Britain so far (I suspect that the drought has not been as severe or as prolonged in Scotland), then visit the castle woolens shop, the castle book shop (where we notice that no copies of Shakespeare’s Macbeth are on sale), and the immense castle gift shop, where I buy the bloody history of the Clan Gunn as a gift for Eileen Gunn. (Later, I look into Macbeth again and am surprised to see that the play contains no mention at all of the castle gift shop; you’d think, being such an extensive and important part of the castle, that it would certainly have been used for the setting of at least a scene or two, wouldn’t you?)
Drive back to Inverness, then take the A862 back west to its junction with the A831 just south of Beauly. Follow the A831 south through Glen Cannich, a narrow, tree-choked valley following the course of the Beauly River, and one that seems just barely wide enough for the river it contains, with a wee bit of space left on the side for the road, which is not much wider than the car. Had originally intended to drive on through Glen Affric, but get tired and turn off at the road that leads back to the inn.
Back at Polmaily House, we go for a swim, sharing the pool with a group of splashing and shouting German children who keep throwing things at each other (swim fins, diving masks, plastic swords) and exploding shrill language-bombs full of harsh-sounding gutturals as they chase each other from the deep end to the shallow end and back again, but we manage to ignore all this primate territoriality practice and blob lazily around the pool anyway for a half-hour or so.
Later, go upstairs and change, come down and have a drink at a table just outside the bar, and then go sit at the round plastic tables on the lawn, under the trees. Visited by Honey, the big yellow inn dog, who sniffs at us for a moment, but who really isn’t very interested in us, and soon wanders away. This seems typical of Polmaily House, where the host is polite but rather remote and chilly—we spend less time interacting with the host here than we do almost anywhere else, and only get one glimpse of the hostess; mostly, they keep themselves to themselves, spending much of the day sitting around a plastic table of their own way across the lawn, and keeping interaction with the customers to a minimum. It is tempting to attribute this to “typical Highland reserve,” except that, it turns out, the host and his family are from England! There are lots of children—of several different nationalities—here, far more than at anyplace else we’ve stayed so far this trip, and it’s clear that, unlike, say, Fallowfields or Trebrea Lodge, this inn gets lots of its business by deliberately catering to the family trade. You can see why families with lots of children would find it attractive, too: people can bring their kids here and find lots of things to keep them entertained: the pool, the hutch/petting zoo full of fat rabbits and the occasional guinea pig, the playground area, an indoor “playroom,” the “nature walk” trail up the hill, all the plastic toys scattered over the lawn, the availability of horseback-riding, and so on. While we sit out under the trees in the gathering dusk, we see two hawks hunting overhead, one patrolling low, to flush prey out of cover, while the second one patrols high, to swoop down on them when they move (a similar pattern was used by fighter pilots in World War II). Until the hawks appear, the lawn has been full of small birds, mostly sparrows, hopping and squawking and squabbling, but as soon as the hawks swim into the sky above, they all flee to the bushes and the eaves of the outbuildings and hide, shrilly complaining about having to do so. They continue to gripe about it from the bushes for some time, but they don’t come back out, even after the hawks have left.
Dinner is (for me, anyway) venison in a berry sauce—quite good, although not as good as the previous night’s roast duck, which may have been my favorite meal of the trip, or close to it; at least the food here is good, even if the host is somewhat distant.
To bed, again having to cope with the midges. Dream of being in a building which is rapidly filling up with bugs, billions of them, from the bottom up, so that we have to keep running upstairs, and then up another level, and then up another, to get away from them.
Monday, August 21”—Drumnadrochit, Eilean Donan Castle, Kyle of Lochalsh & Viewfield House, Portree
Wake up covered with itchy bug bites, which may explain the dream. Susan is covered with bites from head to toe; they’ve even bitten her on her scalp. Most of my bites are concentrated on my arms, but it’s unusual that bugs will bother to bite me at all (Susan is the mosquito magnet—usually they’ll swarm right past me to get at her, ignoring me altogether), so these must have been particularly hungry little devils. We later learn that “the secret” to leaving your windows open (which you pretty much have to do, in this heat) without getting bitten to pieces by the midges is not to open your windows until after you’ve turned out all the lights in the room—although, as our informants admit, even this doesn’t mean that you won’t get bitten: just that you’ll get bitten less often than you will if you turn the lights on while the windows are open. (I grumpily wonder why, in a country where it is customary to leave the windows open all summer—because of the lack of air-conditioning—and where they have swarms of midges and other biting bugs, nobody has yet thought of inventing or importing such a simple technology as a window-screen. But we don’t see a single window-screen in all of Britain, even though, as the dozens of joke postcards about midges testify, we can hardly be the first people to have had a problem with them, and they bedevil the natives too, by the natives’ own testimony. Both the English and the Scots seem to feel that there’s something effete, unmanly, about window-screens, just as they disdain air-conditioning, and you get the feeling that they consider it a testimony to their hardiness that they can walk around covered with itchy festering midge bites all summer and survive it uncomplainingly—we hear an anecdote later about an English woman who insists on continuing with a lawn party as scheduled in spite of a torrential downpour and swarms of midges, standing at her barbecue grill in the pouring rain—as her American guests run for cover—and announcing with proud disdain, “You’ve got to be tough to be British.” Still don’t think it would unman them all that much to put in a couple of window-screens, though.)
Check out, scratching, and drive into Drumnadrochit, where we stop at the Monster Center, taking pictures of each other posing next to the plaster Nessie, and spend lots of money at the Monster Gift Shop (where you can buy just about anything with Nessie on it, from ties to coffeemugs to underwear) and the nearby craft shop, buying, among other things, a leather Celtic pocketbook for Susan. Drive south on the A82, and then slowly west and a bit north on the A887 and the A87, stopping three times along the way to look at the marvelous mountain scenery, once along the A82, overlooking a rushing forest stream and a little waterfall, once behind the dam near Loch Moriston, looking out over the bleak pale shore of the loch, and once in a high mountain pass overlooked by the Five Sisters, somewhere east of Sheil Bridge. The mountains are especially bleak and rocky here—there’s not even heather on the sides of the Five Sisters, just bracken, so that the hills are the nappy green of a pool table, with the bones of the hill breaking through in knobs of granite where the felt is stretched too tight. Frowning dark-grey clouds rush by overhead, and you can feel the wetness in the wind, although it never does quite rain. So bleak that the bleakness itself is beautiful. This stretch of road, from where we turn away west from Loch Ness all the way to the Kyle of Lochalsh, is one of the most imposing and scenically splendid parts of the whole trip.
Coming down from the high mountain pass, we stop to tour Eilean Donan Castle, a strikingly beautiful castle on an islet in Loch Duitch, just east of Dornie. The castle, which is connected to the mainland only by a narrow causeway, and which is so picturesque that it’s pictured on the cover of a good number of Scottish guide-books and travel brochures, is such a dramatically perfect symbol of the Wild Romance and Savage Beauty of the Old Highlands that it comes as something of a disappointment to find that the castle was actually built in 1937. (Although, to be fair, they made an attempt to follow old pictures and drawings in the reconstruction of the castle, which had been destroyed in its original form hundreds of years before.) After touring the castle, have lunch in the bar at the Loch Duitch Hotel. While we’re sitting in the bar, Susan drinking Diet Coke®, The Rockford Files comes on on the bar TV. Diet Coke® and The Rockford Files—gee, all the comforts of home in a tiny village in a remote part of Scotland. Next will come the Loch Duitch McDonalds, no doubt, perhaps set on another islet, next to the castle.
Pressed on to the Kyle of Lochalsh, from which a dramatic view of the Isle of Skye is visible across a surprisingly narrow tongue of water (which is why they’re building the bridge connecting Skye and the mainland here, I suppose, although it’s not quite finished yet—the Skye natives are already up in arms about it, fearing that the bridge will make it enough easier for tourists to get across to Skye that their cultural identity will be washed away by ever-increasing hordes of outlanders; they may have a point). From here, Skye looks like it consists of nothing but big, saw-toothed peaks, packed-in shoulder-to-shoulder, so that it seems they’re almost touching each other; no wonder the phrase “a tight little island” has been used to describe Skye. We board the car ferry to Skye, and, before we even quite realize that we’re moving, we’re there—can hardly take more than five minutes, if that, one of the shortest ferry rides I’ve ever taken.
On Skye, we drive up the A850 to Portree, with the weather becoming more misty and clouding over more the further north and the higher up in elevation we go, until, at last, we drive through a brief rain-squall. By the time we are on the road that climbs up from Sconser, the rain has stopped, and there is a beautifully clear rainbow stretching from the mountainside down to the sea below, the colors seeming to be etched into the sky in raised, vibrant bands. The weather continues to worsen as we climb higher into the hills, though, until by the time we get to Portree, it is raining, our first sustained rain of the trip—a fine rain at first, growing slowly heavier and more soaking throughout the afternoon and into the evening.
We reach the Viewfield House in Portree, at about 4:20 that afternoon, driving up a long, steep driveway to the inn, rabbits dashing suicidally across the road in front of us, as though suddenly seized with some mad rodent ennui; there are chickens strutting around in front of the house, and they also pay no attention to the car, so that we have to drive slowly and gingerly to avoid running them over. Park in front of the house, drag Susan’s bag inside and up a steep winding staircase; decide I’m not up to dragging my own even heavier bag up the stairs, and leave it in the trunk after fishing out some toilet articles and a change of clothes. The Viewfield House turns out to be an imposing old wooden building, both more eccentric and more distinguished-looking than Polmaily House, very eccentrically decorated in Late Victorian Gormenghast . . . or perhaps it is Late Victorian Charles Addams or Gahan Wilson. Everything looks like an Edward Gorey drawing. There are skulls and skeletons and dead stuffed animals of one sort or another in dusty glass cases wherever you look, and the wall in the entrance hall is decorated with stuffed tiger heads and water-buffalo skulls. Skulls, in fact, seem to be a motif here—skulls are everywhere, most of them with huge curling horns. This is the most stereotypical “English” PBS Mystery/Masterpiece Theater overstuffed-chairs-in-the library-sherry-in-the-drawing-room-elephant’s-foot-umbrella-stand-in-the-hall-looking place we’ve seen yet—so, of course, it’s in Scotland.
Drive into Portree, park, and are walking down the main shopping street in the rain when Susan suddenly lets out a whoop and points—and there is Amy Thompson, coming the other way! We all whoop and hug in the middle of the sidewalk, earning odd looks from the passersby. Not only have we all ended up in Portree at the same time, completely by chance, but it turns out that she is also staying at the Viewfield House! We burble the usual cliches about what a small world it is, then separate briefly, Amy and Susan going off on separate shopping expeditions, while I go to the Tourist Information Office to find out about guided tours of the region; I spot a poster for one called “Skyetrek Safari” that looks interesting, and write the number down.
We give Amy a ride back to the Viewfield House, after a side-trip to a woolen mart that turns out to be already closed for the evening. It’s raining much more heavily now, and I wonder if there’s any possibility the weather will clear enough tomorrow for a guided tour to be possible. Give a call to Skyetrek Safaris anyway, and make a tentative reservation for tomorrow’s tour, which will only go if enough people reserve. Have drinks in the sitting room before the fire—even in August it’s chilly enough here on Skye at night that you don’t mind it—and then go in to dinner, sitting at a table with Amy and Angus, a young working-class Scot from Glasgow in boots and blue jeans who has pretty clearly been trying to chat Amy up in the sitting room. (I have a lamb chop, Susan has chicken. Tomato soup and mackerel pate first.) Coffee afterward back in the sitting room, after which Amy goes up to bed, and Angus, obviously disappointed—I get the feeling he would have liked to have gotten to know Amy much better—leaves the inn and goes into Portree for a pub-crawl, staying out until after 2 a.m., drowning his sorrows; we see him the next morning, massively hungover, having a solitary breakfast in the dining room, long after everyone else has finished.
When the group in the sitting room has dwindled to just us and another American couple (also from Pennsylvania, as it turns out; from right outside Philadelphia, in fact), the host, who is referred to invariably by all as Mr. MacDonald (you can almost hear the forelock-tug that accompanies this phrase), and who looks something like a muscular Ron Howard, tells us a long story about a friend of his grandfather who was mauled by a tiger he was hunting in India (for the Politically Correct reason that it was terrorizing the native villagers, of course), when the mahout panicked during the tiger’s attack and slammed the howdah into an overhanging tree-branch, knocking both it and the Great White Hunter off the elephant to the ground. The mahout ran away and climbed a tree, while the host’s grandfather’s friend, whose leg had been shattered by the elephant stepping on it after he’d fallen to the ground, tried to fend the tiger off with the butt end of his rifle. The tiger had apparently bitten completely through the wooden stock of the rifle, and was shaking it back and forth in his jaws, while the hunter clung desperately to the other end, when the rifle went off, scaring the tiger away and fortunately not managing to shoot the hunter in the process. The mahout was too scared to tell anybody about this incident apparently, because he was afraid that he’d be punished because it was his fault, so he ran off and left the hunter behind, where he remained sprawled helplessly in the jungle, badly mauled and with his leg crushed to dust, for more than 24 hours before he was found by a rescue party. He had to have his leg amputated, of course, and Our Host tells us how later, when he himself was a small child, the grandfather’s friend would encourage him to kick his tin leg so that he could hear it clang, which they both found amusing. Apparently the grandfather’s friend also kept the rifle with the bitten-through stock, and would produce it as proof of this experience. (I have no idea whether this story is true or not, of course—it does strike me that perhaps he’s having a bit of fun putting on the Gullible Colonials . . . and yet, the story is no intrinsically more bizarre than other well-documented things that did happen to other Victorian Adventurers of the day, so who knows? Maybe it is true.) Our Host adds that by rights the grandfather’s friend should have died of septicemia, which claimed almost everyone who suffered such wounds in those days in that climate, but, in the 24 hours before he was found, maggots had gotten at his wounds, and the natural antibiotics released by the maggots as they fed had ultimately saved his life.
On this cheery note, we go up to bed. I whistle the Beatles’ “Bungalow Bill” as I climb the stairs, but, if Our Host notices, he is not moved to comment.
Tuesday, August 22nd—Slegachan, Loch Brittle, Loch Harport, Dunvegan, Trotternish Peninsula
Wake up about 7:30, after having spent one of the most uneasy nights of the trip. We both sleep fitfully, awakening often to scratch the itchy bug bites we had gotten the night before—which have now formed into lumpy red welts—and, although the room is somewhat hot, we don’t dare to open the window, for fear of letting more midges in to bite us, and the stuffiness doesn’t make it any easier to sleep.
Yawning, we go downstairs for breakfast. Amy is just finishing up as we come into the breakfast room, and leaves almost immediately for her tour of the woolen markets on the nearby island of Harris. We sit with the American couple from Wallingford, who are going to spend the day hunting up a doctor to take a look at the husband’s sore throat. I hope that we will have a somewhat more enjoyable day than that, but since it’s raining outside, a fine steady rain that shows no sign of stopping, I’m not sanguine that we actually will.
After breakfast, Susan drives into Portree to buy something at the chemists, while I wait by the door of the inn to see if our tour is actually going to show up. By the time Susan returns, a few minutes later, I’m beginning to be gloomily sure that it is not going to show up, that they’ve cancelled it, either because of lack of bookings or because of the weather. A few minutes later, though, just as the steady rain begins to sputter and slacken, the Land Rover for the “Skyetrek Safari” does show up—a few minutes late, but there. We climb aboard, me in the front seat, next to the driver (there are advantages to being too big to fit in the back!), with Susan squeezed into the back with the two other passengers, two young Dutch girls, and we are off on our tour of Skye.
As we drive south back toward Sligachan, with the rain beginning to lift, I chat with the driver, whose name is Cameron, a tree-surgeon who works part-time for the Forestry Service, and who started this tour business two months ago as another sideline, in order to make ends meet; originally born on Colonsay, another small Scottish island (he tells us how, as a young man, he used to drive his family’s tractor to the local ceilidhs—folk dances—in order to try to meet girls, but the girls weren’t impressed by the tractor, so he had no luck; the tractor would come in handy the next day, though, when he and his brother would, for a fee, use it to pull out of the roadside ditches the cars that homeward-bound revelers had drunkenly driven into the ditches the night before), he’s lived on Skye for three years, and has three children (eventually someone was impressed by the tractor, I guess), the youngest of whom was born only two weeks ago. The two young Dutch girls are Marguerite, the hardy big-breasted blond one who keeps running ahead of everyone with childlike enthusiasm, whooping and pointing at things, and who still lives in Holland, and Martina, the older, quieter, darker and more intense one, who lives in London, where she works for the railroad in connection with the operation of the Channel Tunnel, and with whom Marguerite is visiting; I come to the conclusion by the end of the afternoon that they are lovers, although they’re fairly discrete about it—something about the way they touch each other’s hands, though—brushingly, as if by accident—and speak in soft voices while leaning close to each other, especially when we are at some romantic place, like a deserted coral beach that stretches away into a haze of sea and sky, seems to give them away . . . although I suppose that this could be only my own romanticism coming to the fore.
By the time we reach Sligachan, the rain has mostly lifted, giving us a good view of the Red Cuillin and the Black Cuillin, two mountain ranges which are both named after the predominant color of their rock—reddish rock to our left (Red Cuillin), shiny black rock to the right (Black Cuillin); we also learn that Cuillin is pronounced something like Kool-in, far from the way we were pronouncing it . . . but then, we’re probably mispronouncing the name of just about everything on Skye, just as we did on a previous trip in that other Celtic homeland, Wales. We turn away from the main road, which leads south toward the ferry slip, and take a network of small back roads across the width of the island to Loch Brittle, where we park and walk up a muddy hillside alongside a rushing runoff stream to see a small waterfall; the water is snarling along quite vigorously, obviously fed by the recent heavy rains, and, although not terribly high, the waterfall is picture-postcard pretty.
By the time we get back down to the Land Rover, the rain-clouds have lifted and the sky is a brilliant fresh-washed blue; it will remain sunny and clear for the rest of the day. Cameron opens a forest gate, and we drive up into a forest plantation, up a hill through ranks of closely planted trees, and down the other side to Loch Harport, which, from the hillside, is full of boats that could easily be Lake Monsters; I point out how a few Monster sightings could probably triple his tourist trade, and, after thinking this over and squinting at the boats a little, Cameron decides that they do look a bit like Lake Monsters after all, now that he thinks of it. After all, what worked for Loch Ness—remember the Monster Center, full of tourists who were all buying things?—ought to work for Loch Harport too.
We stop briefly at a grocery store, and then drive up the road toward Dunvegan, turning off the road entirely—which, of course, is the advantage of being in a Land Rover—and driving up a steep and rugged slope to the crest, where we have scones and coffee from a flask in the ruins of a ruined Celtic hill-fort—a broch, according to Cameron—on top of the hill. The broch is an irregular stone ring broken open on one end; inside, it’s about eight or nine feet across, the center covered with grass, sheepberries, knobs of rock, and bits of heather, the surrounding walls just a bit too high for me to see over without climbing up on them; when we do climb up on them, we get a magnificent view over the rolling, mostly-treeless hills of Skye—several ancient volcanic cones, flat as tables on top, are visible from here, with a gleaming arm of the sea, and the sharp silhouettes of mountain peaks on other islands, beyond. According to Cameron, the broch has never been excavated, so as we walk around inside it, it’s possible that just under our feet, a few dozen feet down under the grass and the sheepberries, are unknown and undisturbed Celtic treasures, golden torcs, silver necklaces, swords, jeweled harps, who knows what? Most likely it’s bones and skulls and broken pieces of pottery, but even that has its allure—perhaps there’s some piece of evidence here, buried beneath our scuffling feet, that will, in some future age, help to unravel some archaeological mystery that has been puzzling scholars for centuries. Perhaps the key that will unlock knowledge of a lost race or a vanished civilization is here, buried in the flinty soil, down under the roots of the heather and the butt-ends of worms. Cameron’s mind is obviously musing on lost civilizations too, because, as we munch scones, he tells us of another ancient remnant not far from here, a souterrain, which (according to Cameron, anyway) is a complex of prehistoric tunnels and rooms under the ground, with very low ceilings and an entrance so low that you have to crawl though it; once inside, the rooms are too low for a man of normal height to stand up in, and it’s Cameron’s speculation that these structures were left behind by a race of men of diminutive size, non-supernatural but much smaller than ordinary men, who were the origin of the legends of fairies and elves that persist everywhere in the Celtic world. I’ve heard this speculation before; I heard it for the first time, I believe, from G.C. Edmondson, who, a couple of decades ago, theorized that the Good Folk were actually Bushmen, whose range had once extended over Europe until they were hunted and hounded by normal-sized folk back into their African heartland. I’m not sure that I entirely buy this, but it is an attractive theory—and one thing I am fairly sure of is that there was much more going on up here in these Northern lands than most archaeologists, whose focus of interest has traditionally been centered on the Mediterranean, have even yet begun to imagine. Who knows what was going on up here in Scotland at the time that the Egyptians were building the Pyramids, let alone back when the people of Sumer were baking the first mud bricks for Ur? Whatever it was, I’ll bet it would turn out to be surprising, if you could somehow open up a window through time and look.
After lunch, we press on, past Dunvegan Castle, past fields full of shaggy Highland cattle (who look like they ought to be grazing at the foot of a glacier, along with other Ice Age animals such as Mastodons and Wooly Rhinos), and park at a gate at the end of a winding road. We walk along a shore path, over a hill, and down to the sea, past a beach full of resting cows (they lounge on the sand above the waterline and watch us incuriously as we pass, discovering as we go that having cows on a beach does make for interesting obstacles for walking there), over a rise, past the ruins of a “black house” (named for the color of the rock used in its construction) that once belonged to Cameron’s wife’s family, and then down to a long coral beach that stretches away almost endlessly until, at the edge of vision, it curves around a headland and is lost to sight. Rugged, mountainous offshore islands loom up out of the glinting, restless, cold-looking water, like Stegosauruses sunk to their snouts in the sea; one of them is Harris, where, at this very moment, Amy is touring the woolen markets. Cameron and I sprawl on the beach, whose pale sands are made of impacted plant coral (and whose pale sands are also strewn with huge, spiral-shaped cow pats), laid down—the coral, not, as far as I know, the cow pats—in a time of intense volcanic activity when the temperature was warm enough here for lush tropical vegetation to grow. While we sprawl, Susan and the Dutch girls take off their shoes and wade in the ocean; Susan wades around fairly sedately, but, after a while, the Dutch girls begin to laugh and splash each other, playing like schoolgirls. I don’t go wading, but, before we leave, I go down to the water’s edge and dabble my hand in the North Sea, just to be able to say I did. The water is cold, but I was brought up on the shores of the chilly North Atlantic, and I don’t think it would be too cold for me to go swimming in it—although, in all the huge sweep of beach we can see, only one other person is. (Another cultural difference between Britain and the States: in this kind of hot weather, at home, the lakes and rivers and the seaside would be packed with swimmers, and with people fishing, and sailing, and paddling canoes and kayaks, and (alas) jetskiing (if Loch Ness was in upstate New York, it would be so thickly covered with waterborne tourists that you would hardly be able to see the water, let alone the Monster), but we see very few people doing any of these things on the bodies of water we pass, especially swimming; except for a few hotel swimming pools, on the whole trip, in all of Britain, in the hottest summer in decades—it’s the hottest summer in recorded history in Scotland—we see only two or three people actually swimming in the water, although we see lots of people standing on the shore, or sitting on the rocky beaches looking—wistfully, perhaps? Wishing the water were warmer? Or that they knew how to swim?—out to sea.
Leave the coral beach at last—somewhat reluctantly, for it is one of the loveliest spots of the trip—and return to the Land Rover, driving briefly to a lookout spot where we can get a somewhat closer view of Dunvegan Castle (we don’t get to go inside it, but I’ve hit that part of the trip where Castle Ennui has set in—yeah, yeah, it’s a castle, very nice—and don’t really care much), and then heading back to Portree. On the way back, Cameron, who’s a bit of a New Ager, goes on about holistic healing, crystals, how if you get cancer it’s your own fault for indulging in Negative Thinking, telepathy, astrology, the upcoming Alignment of the Planets as an omen of Cosmic Change, Nostradamus, and so forth. To distract him from discussing the Celestine Prophecies in depth, I ask him about his other tours, and end up booking with him for an early evening tour of the Trotternish Peninsula, the northernmost peninsula of Skye, which will be leaving that very night; I arrange for him to pick us up at the inn after dinner.
Back at Viewfield House, I go down for a drink while Susan naps, and convince Amy, who has returned flushed with enthusiasm from her tour of Harris, to take the tour of the Trotternish Peninsula with us tonight. At dinner, a somewhat hurried affair, since we have to be ready to leave for the tour by 8:30, I am interested to note that they have seated all of the Americans, four couples and Amy, at one long table, along with our sole working-class Scot, Angus from Glasgow, who, as far as I can tell, anyway, is still dressed in the same blue jeans, boots, and wrinkled work shirt. All the other tables in the room are taken up by quietly murmuring well-dressed English people, who work hard at ignoring our table. I think the message is clear, especially as, in spite of our having asked to be served as fast as possible so that we can catch our tour, every single English person in the room, about six other tables of them, is served before a bite of food reaches our own table. Earlier, in the Land Rover, Cameron had talked bitterly about the inequities of the British class-system, and the prejudice and the glass-walls you ran into everywhere if you were on the wrong side of the line, far worse and more blatant than even the class-barriers in the States (where such things are far from unknown, I can assure you, having, as a working-class boy, run into many such barriers myself in my life), and here is an example of such class distinctions still working in the world today. (Cameron and Our Host have an interesting relationship, by the way, obviously loathing each other deeply for reasons of class and race—Cameron is a working-class Scot; Our Host, although a Scot by birth, has been raised and educated as a rich man in England, and Cameron clearly considers him to be “really” a Sassenach—but manifesting it in the very British way of being intensely polite to each other. When we had asked Our Host the previous evening if Cameron’s tour was worth taking, Our Host had frowned, and then, with infinite icy scorn, said quietly “He is not a Skye man.” And, although he displays the brochures for Cameron’s tour in his inn—some of the servant staff seem to be friendly with Cameron, and urged us to book with him—I can’t help but wonder if some of the chill I feel from Our Host on our last night here has something to do with the fact that we did go on Cameron’s tour after all. When Cameron and Our Host chat briefly about the weather in front of the inn while we’re disembarking from our first tour, they are perfectly cordial—but you can feel the ice forming in the air between them.) So we eat, with all these class distinctions and ancient enmities swirling around us. I do think it somewhat unfair that poor Angus is forced in his own country to eat in exile at a table full of Rude and Obnoxious Colonials, but clearly the fact that he is loud and raucous and wears boots and blue jeans outweighs the fact that he is a Scot . . . so he must sit in purdah with the Yanks.
Hurry outside after the main course, before we have a chance to have dessert, and climb aboard the familiar Land Rover again, me in front, Susan and Amy crawling in back with three giggling Polish girls who, as far as I can tell, speak no English at all. Then we’re off. Although Cameron drives unnervingly fast, attempting to make it to a scenic overlook near Duntulm Castle before sunset, the light is already failing, and it’s clear that we’re not really going to see all that much on this tour—but still, it’s a pleasant way to spend a couple of hours, and no more expensive than, say, going to a play—which we certainly would have been willing to pay for—would have been, so I don’t feel that we’re being cheated; we do get to see some more of Skye this way, a part we wouldn’t have gotten a look at otherwise, even if we’re not seeing it under the best of viewing conditions. After a wild, swaying ride, during most of which Cameron is doing at least eighty on these narrow, twisting roads, we do manage to arrive at Duntulm Castle in time for the last of the sunset, which, as advertised, is spectacular, the light bleeding out of the sky in a swirl of red and purple and gold, out over the expanse of the North Sea and its freight of hump-backed islands. We stop for a second outside the now-closed Skye Cottage Museum to look at the various styles of old buildings once prevalent on Skye, and to be stared at by curious Highland cattle in the adjacent field, who look more prehistoric than ever with their shaggy, horned heads silhouetted against the darkening, blood-red evening sky. Around the end of the peninsula in the fading light. There’s just enough light left in the sky in these Northern latitudes—although it’s almost ten by now—to make out the oddly sculpted landscape of the Quiraing, rocky pinnacles and cliff faces that have been blasted by the constant howling wind into a thousand fantastic shapes. As full dark closes in, we turn up into the hills, climbing up a steep, sharply hairpinning road and across a high moor before turning down again to join the main road to Portree. Cameron is still driving very fast, in spite of the now almost total darkness, the steepness of the road and the sharpness of the turns, and the fact that there are sheep sprawled at the margin of the road, so close to the speeding Land Rover that we almost seem to graze them on a few occasions. They don’t flinch, however, gazing at us incuriously as we hurtle by; you’d think that having several tons of metal roar by a couple of inches from your nose at seventy miles an hour, especially at night with the headlights blazing, would be enough to startle any animal—it would sure as hell be enough to startle me—but the sheep seem as placid and undisturbed as ever; I suppose that this is the reason why we refer to those who blindly and unquestioningly follow a leader as “sheep” instead of calling them after some more skittish and wary animal such as coyotes or cats. When we hit the main road to Portree, Cameron, who has been driving very fast, now begins to drive very fast, driving like a madman, in fact, and I begin to get a bit nervous, although, as someone who once chased tanks across fields and up steep hills at high speeds in a jeep, I’m not an easy person to unnerve in these matters. Still, Cameron is going well over ninety at a few points during the trip home, in spite of the black night and the tiny twisting roads, going fast enough that we on occasion begin to hydroplane, with the rear end starting to swing a bit, fishtailing, as the wheels start to lose their grip on the road, and I think ironically that Our Host will probably feel a grim satisfaction if we’re all killed on the way back, shaking his head sadly and saying to the other guests, “I told them he wasn’t a Skye man.” We cruelly deprive him of this satisfaction, though, by actually making it back to Viewfield House alive.
Back at the inn, we have drinks and coffee and a belated dessert, which Our Host has been kind enough to save for us, in the sitting room, in front of the blazing fire. Among the new guests are a very young American girl, who has been studying at Oxford, and her mother, who is visiting her; they are vacationing together, touring Scotland, before the girl goes back to Oxford and the mother goes back to America. In spite of only having been at Oxford for six months, the young girl is now affecting a Teddibly Teddibly refined British upper-class accent, like a noblewoman or a high-born lady in a BBC production, and she sits solemnly by the fire discussing scholarly matters, being Very British and Very Intellectual and Very Solemn, straining to make her every gesture elegant and graceful and aristocratic, while her mother, who speaks with a broad Midwestern twang, watches her in wonder and bewilderment, obviously very proud of the rare and rarified creature that her daughter has turned herself into, while at the same time a bit uncertain as to how to relate to her now, and perhaps a bit afraid of no longer measuring up. Angus makes a half-hearted pass at the daughter, inviting her to go out dancing with him, but even he seems to realize that she’s not really for the likes of him—she’s waiting to be swept away by some wild-haired, wild-eyed, Byronic young poet who will take her on long melancholy walks on the moors in the mist and ply her with love-poems and long-stemmed roses and romantic existential angst about the blackness of the world, and with whom she can talk about Shelley and Baudelaire long into the night, between candle-lit bouts of leisurely but passionate and fevered lovemaking; no working-class, unshaven Scot with mud on his boots who merely wants to buy her a beer as the price of a quick hump in the back seat of his car need apply. I am amused by her pretensions, yes, but in a very tender way. She is so solemn and earnest and so pretentious, and trying so hard to be something that she is not but that she desperately wants to be, like a girl playing grown-up in her mother’s old clothes and begging you with her eyes to play along and not shatter the pretense, that it is rather sweet, actually. She reminds me of myself when I was that age, also full of callow poses and pretensions and burning with the ambition to be something other than what everybody else expected me to be, making up my role in life as I went along, made brave by the knowledge that wherever I did end up, it had to be better than where I was supposed to end up. Yes, I was that young once.
Angus gives up—no nookie for him tonight, at least not from among the guests at the Viewfield House—and goes off into Portree for another pub-crawl. The rest of us finish our drinks, and then go up to bed.
Wednesday, August 23rd—Armsdate & Gaelic College, Crianlarich
Up about 7:45, have breakfast, check out, and then pack the car with our suitcases and Amy’s stuff; we’re giving Amy a lift to the train station at Mallaig on the mainland, since the road to our next inn goes right by there anyway.
The weather today turns out to be the exact opposite of yesterday’s weather—when we come down for breakfast, it is brilliantly clear and sunny, and looks like it’s going to be great weather for driving, but by the time we’re actually ready to leave, it’s raining, and the weather worsens from then on for most of the day, with an occasional half-clear patch here and there where the rain sinks to a sporadically spitting drizzle. Everything packed aboard, with a few mostly empty spots left so that we can peer out through the windows, we take off.
By the time we near the Red Cuillin, it is pouring, the hardest rain of the whole trip, with each lorry that passes us going the other way throwing a sheet of water across the windshield with a heavy thwack, blinding us for a moment. Unnerving driving conditions, particularly on these small and twisty mountain roads. The downpour has dwindled to an intermittent drizzle by the time we get to the Gaelic College, where Amy stops briefly to buy some Gaelic language audio-tapes (she is bravely attempting to teach herself Gaelic, one of the most difficult languages in the world, and talks wistfully about coming back here some day and actually staying in the college while taking a Gaelic language course in person, from live instructors; for now, she’ll settle for the tapes). We continue on to the Clan Donald Center, where we tour the Clan History Museum. Notice some Scots here who are reading the displays with actual tears glistening in their eyes, obviously deeply moved by this chance to get in touch with their roots; also hear an American woman behind us, when faced with the same wall-displays, exclaim “Oh, no! I’m not going to read about Bonnie Prince Charlie again!” . . . and must say that, to some extent, I sympathize—you tend to run into the same bits of Scottish history again and again and again as you follow the tourist routes; in Edinburgh, for instance, last trip, we had gotten tremendously tired of hearing about Mary, Queen of Scots, whom everyone talked of constantly, to the point where it seemed like they were saying things like “Mary, Queen of Scots once walked past this street-corner, on a day in July, hundreds of years ago . . . She also stopped here, next to this tree . . .” Still, the details of the Clan Donald’s history are interesting, if dismayingly bloody, and it’s clear that this is a much more profound and moving experience for the Scots themselves than it is for us Ignorant Outlanders.
Hit the inevitable Gift Shop—there are two of them here, in fact, both very large and extensive—and then walk down to the restaurant for lunch, passing on the way a sign on a building that reads “THIS BUILDING IS ALARMED!”, although, to our untutored eyes, it looked no more nervous than any of the other buildings in the complex; still, we steer clear of it. In the restaurant, we run into Angus from Glasgow—looking, if possible, even more massively hungover than he had the morning before—and one of the other older American couples from the Viewfield House; the tourist routes funnel everybody to the same attractions eventually, I guess. Angus sits gloomily by himself while he eats, making no attempt to join us; perhaps he’s too hungover, or perhaps he’s sulking over his failure to score with Amy. We have a quick lunch; I have a venison stew in which the meat is so tough that it can’t even be cut with a knife, let alone chewed. Perhaps Angus is having the same thing, and this is why he looks gloomy. (No McDonalds yet, at the Clan Donald center! Surely someone is missing a bet, here! And, actually, the food would be an improvement. (They could put up tartan arches, in the Clan Donald tartan, instead of the usual golden ones . . .))
After lunch, we drive down to the ferry slip at Armsdale, get our tickets, and then wait in a long line of cars for the ferry, which arrives about a half hour later. On board the ferry, we go up to the upper deck and stand by the rail as we cross to the mainland (this crossing takes about a half-hour, covering a much greater expanse of water). We stand there by the rail in the sharp cold wind, me holding my hat on my head with one hand to keep it from blowing away, watching military jets swoop by as they play chase-and-hunt games overhead, one screaming by us quite near to the water, as though it was about to strafe us, probably targeting us for practice (the air war in Bosnia is heating up at just this time, after all).
Back on the Scottish mainland, at Mallaig, we drop Amy off at the station to catch the train for Glasgow, telling her to warm the convention up for us; we have another night on the road before we’re scheduled to get to Glasgow, on Thursday, and plunge into the chaotic swirl of the Worldcon. Waving at Amy as we leave—she’s already found someone else she knows, waiting for the same train, before we’re even out of sight—we drive on down the twisting A830, past the coves and beaches of the Sound of Arisaig, and up into the mountains, where it begins raining lightly again. Down into a pocket of clear weather in the valley. At Fort Williams, the west bank of Loch Linnhe, where we just came from, is in dazzling sunlight, while the east bank is grey and threatening, with ominous black clouds swirling up where Ben Nevis is, although the mountain itself is invisible. Turn on to our old friend, the A82 (we would have ended up in just this spot if we’d continued south from Drumnadrochit a few days ago, instead of turning west toward the Kyle of Lochalsh), and climb sharply up into the mountains again, past the still-invisible Ben Nevis, which is buried in grumbling clouds, past Glencoe, through Rannoch Moor. At last, two-and-a-half hours after leaving Mallaig, we come to our last inn of the pre-convention part of the trip, the Alt-Chorrin House (which, we learn, is pronounced Alt HOOR-in House), situated right off the A82 between Tyndrum and Crianlarich.
The inn is a little closer to the road than I’d thought it would be—the train line to Glasgow is clearly visible from here, so that Amy, if she’d looked out the train window at the right time during her journey south, could have seen us standing in front of the inn—and there’s no lake here, as the photo in the brochure seems to indicate that there is (it turns out that the photo was taken in extremely forced-perspective by someone laying on their belly next to a small pond, making the pond look like an extensive mountain lake), but the view from the glassed-in front porch out over the mountains is very nice, including a fine view of Ben More with its head lost in clouds. The sun is struggling to come out here at the end of the day—although it never entirely succeeds—and we sit for a while on the front porch, watching the patterns of light and darkness shift dramatically along the hillsides, waves of shadow sweeping over the hills as clouds rush by, swallowing the sun for a moment, and then setting it free again, sending fans of brilliant light scything across the mountains; because of the way the light falls, it’s possible to see one peak picked out in dazzling white sunlight while an adjacent peak is half-lost in gloom and shadow. Light and shadow wash back and forth, up the hills and then down again, like some sort of tide.
Have dinner at the inn—good thing we booked for it; there’s nowhere else to eat within dozens of miles, except for a Happy Eater fast-food place way back up the road near Tyndrum—and then sit up for an hour or so on the front porch with a few of the English couples who are staying here, discussing small cultural differences. We talk about how you can’t seem to get real custard in America anymore, of the sort that’s served on pies here, and, for their part, they lament that you can’t get really good ironing-board covers in England, of the sort that you can buy in America. In fact, these ironing-board covers—made of “a sort of fabric we don’t have over here,” probably Teflon, is my guess—are really all that seems to impress them about American culture; they go on for some while about how wonderful these ironing-board covers are, and how they never wrinkle or need to be replaced, and we work out a mutually profitable scheme that involves them sending tank-cars full of custard to America in exchange for boatloads of the wonderful and invulnerable ironing-board covers. Then, with future international amity thus ensured, we go to bed.
You can tell that it gets cold here in the mountains, particularly in the winter. The room is equipped with electric blankets, the only ones we see in Scotland, as well as piles of more conventional blankets. The Alt-Chorrin House is also the only place in Scotland we visit that has double-glazed storm windows (still no screens, though).
Thursday, August 24th—Monday, August 28th—Glasgow
Up about 7:30, pack, have breakfast, check out. The weather is miserable and grey, the wind occasionally gusting so that sheets of rain sweep by. The drive into Glasgow Airport takes about an hour, past the choppy waters of Loch Lomond, where the tour boats are out in spite of the stormy weather. At the airport, we have difficulty—as usual—finding the car rental place, but finally do, turn our car in, and take a taxi into the city, discovering that we have no cash left on us to pay for the ride. The driver very courteously (the Glasgow cab-drivers turn out to be almost uniformly polite and considerate) waits outside the Glasgow Marriott while I run inside and borrow twenty pounds from Lee Wood, who is almost the first person I see, with which to pay the fare.
Check in to the Marriott, and the Worldcon begins.
It would be more than usually tedious to detail a day-by-day report of the convention—although I did keep up with my diary every day, it’s mostly filled with such things as what panels we did and which publishing parties we went to when—so I’ll just give a series of brief impressions instead.
My first impression of the cavernous space of the Scottish Exhibition and Convention Center, with its high, latticework glass roofs, is that it’s like having a Worldcon in a train station, an impression reinforced by the little stands along the walls selling hot-dogs and pizza. The acoustics are so bad in the program area, because of those high ceilings, that it’s more like trying to do a panel in a bus station, with the voices spilling over from adjacent panels (no interior walls, just partitions) constantly rolling around under the roof, like an announcer with a bad PA system continually calling out the destinations for which buses are about to depart. I’ve never heard worse acoustics at any Worldcon anywhere—even people in the front two or three rows can’t hear what the panelists are saying, in spite of the functioning microphones.
A pall is cast over the convention, for the professionals, anyway, by the death of John Brunner on Friday afternoon. We speak to him briefly on Thursday afternoon when we arrive at the SECC, and I see him again in the SFWA Suite that night, noticing, when I leave about midnight, that he looks unusually tired and depressed (this isn’t retrospective foreshadowing, by the way, because I mention it to Susan when I get back to the room that night, long before we hear anything about John’s stroke). In the morning, Friday morning, we hear that John has had a stroke in the early hours of the morning, and is in critical condition at the hospital. By the afternoon, he is dead, and word of his death passes like a shock wave from person to person throughout the HarperCollins party—which is being held in a barge anchored in the River Clyde—leaving small thoughtful silences behind. Odd to be chatting to someone one moment and have him dead only a few hours later; it’s spooky, and it puts the thought of our own mortality into everyone’s minds, where it lingers like a morbid background hum for the rest of the convention.
Of course, the British professionals seem gloomy enough even before Brunner dies, and for good reason—the British science fiction industry is in ruins, with one major publisher openly stating that the science fiction market in Britain is “no longer big enough to bother with.” This impression is reinforced by the American writers who talk with British publishers about British editions of their SF novels, and who are more or less told that if they’re not writing Celtic fantasy trilogies, no British publisher is going to bother with them. One well-known middle-level British writer says that the only way he can get a science fiction book into print in Britain any more is by disguising it as fantasy, changing what otherwise would have been aliens into vampires or werewolves. In spite of the rush to fill the shelves with nothing but fantasy and horror, the dealers in the huckster room who run bookstores in Britain tell me that their customers keep telling them that they’re sick of Celtic fantasy trilogies and vampire novels and want more science fiction instead. Something is wrong here somewhere. But if the perception of the publishers that no one wants to read science fiction is wrong, there seems no way to convince the publishers of it. And the result, especially for the younger British writers, is that it’s impossible to make even a mediocre living writing science fiction unless you can sell a healthy proportion of your work to the American market. No wonder the British professionals look gloomy.
“Gloomy” is perhaps too strong a word to be used to characterize the convention in general, but “quiet” is probably moderately fair. For me, it seems like an even quieter Worldcon than last year’s convention in Winnipeg, although I think it’s technically bigger. Although there are a fairly large number of people in attendance, they’re stretched out over five or six hotels that are miles apart, much too far to walk, and so little party-hopping goes on, people tending to congregate at the bar of whatever hotel they’re staying at, and not venturing out into the dark and rainy Glasgow streets looking for other parties. We make it to the SFWA Suite in the Trusthouse Forte Hotel several times, which is probably the place where you are most likely to find at least some other professionals on any given night, but we never make it to the Central Hotel, for instance, where several big bidding parties take place, or to several of the other hotels where convention parties are going on; it’s just too much of a hassle to get there and then get back. The only night we do any real party-hopping is Friday night, when there are several publisher parties scheduled back-to-back-to-back. These have mostly blurred, although I do recall that the Orbit party, held in a grotto-like bar called The Arches, which is under the train-station, so that the whole place quakes when a train rumbles by overhead, features, on sale at the bar, a drink called a “slippery nipple,” which nobody has the nerve to ask the pretty young barmaid to give them. And that Susan and Michael Swanwick and I walk out singing “Oh, show me the way to the next whiskey bar!”, getting a very odd look from the doorman, and then get in a cab and go to the Tor party.
Glasgow itself strikes me as a grey and fairly uninteresting city, considered as a tourist destination (although, to be fair, we don’t do as much touring here as we’ve done elsewhere); much the same could be said about Philadelphia, after all, which is a pleasant enough place in which to live, but which doesn’t have all that much to really interest the tourist, once you’ve seen the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. The weather may help to give me this impression of Glasgow, since it remains overcast and raining throughout most of the convention, and few cities are at their best when seen under these conditions. Still, I have occasion to walk into Center Square one afternoon, and, when I get there, find myself surrounded by Woolworths, Burger Kings, Tie Racks, Baskin-Robbins, McDonalds, Pizza Huts . . . almost nothing of real interest to a tourist, nothing that is quintessentially Scottish, and much of the rest of the city, as we shuttle in cabs past a maze of highway interchanges and overpasses from one hotel to another (it’s almost impossible to walk from one to the other, in some cases, even if the hotel is in plain view a block or two away, because of the Motorways you’d have to cross), seems similarly plain and utilitarian. On the other hand, the people of Glasgow seem almost universally cheerful, friendly, and helpful, which probably counts for a lot more in the long run than how many interesting ancient monuments the city has. Glasgow might well be a nice place to live, but, to invert the old cliche, I’m not sure you’d want to visit there.
When I go over to give my condolences to John Brunner’s widow, several days after his death, she breaks into sudden hysterical tears, seizes my hand, puts her head down on it, and sobs on it for several minutes.
A piper starts playing in the SFWA Suite one night—at least one thing I’ve never seen in a SFWA Suite before. His bagpipes are almost—not quite—as loud as the voices of some of the SFWA members.
At one point, one of the Glasgow newspapers runs a story about the convention under a headline that reads something like “GROTTY WEIRDOS INVADE GLASGOW!!!!” Inside, they run a photograph of a transvestite dressed in a Las Vegas-style cat costume, his five-o’clock shadow clearly visible, with a line under the photo that says “TYPICAL SCI-FI READER.”
We have a good dinner with Mike and Carol Resnick at an Indian place called Mr. Singh’s, which had been recommended by George R.R. Martin, and where the waiter’s accent, a heavy Indian accent overlaid with a strong Glaswegian accent, is so impenetrable that we finally give up trying to comprehend what it is he’s trying to recommend to us and just gesture for him to bring it (fortunately, it doesn’t turn out to be flambéed rat head in octopus sauce, or somesuch). We have another good dinner, at a place called the Thai Royale, recommended by Daniel Korn and others, with Joe and Gay Haldeman, John D. Berry, and Eileen Gunn, during which I give Eileen her present, the Clan Gunn history, and she immediately begins to make plans to send everybody strange missives decorated with the “Weathered Gunn” tartan. Have an overpriced but congenial dinner in the French restaurant in the Marriott with Ellen Datlow and Scott and Suzi Baker.
In the midst of all this merrymaking, about half-way through the convention, Susan gets sick, the stress of the trip finally catching up with her. She spends parts of several evenings and almost all of Monday in bed, while I bring her infusions of new Brother Cadfael books.
At the Hugo Awards ceremony, Bob Silverberg gives a memorial to John Brunner which I think is heartfelt and very tastefully handled, with an especially nice touch being Silverberg’s request that the audience rise and give John a standing ovation rather than observing a moment of silence for him. Wonder which I’ll get when I go? If either.
Joe Haldeman wins a Hugo for Asimov’s with his story “None So Blind,” and Mike Resnick looks very relieved not to have lost four Hugos on the same night when he wins for Best Novella. I am very pleased to win the Hugo for Best Editor, my seventh (and no, to answer the question I’m most often asked at Worldcons, you don’t get bored with winning them after a while. Trust me on this.).
The fireworks display over the River Clyde, after the Hugo ceremony, adds a nice touch of class to the night.
Susan spends much of Monday in our room, still sick, but she stumbles out to join me, Jane Jewell and Peter Heck, George R.R. Martin, and Walter Jon Williams for dinner at a restaurant called The Ubiquitous Chip, so called because they don’t serve any chips there, the idea being that chips are ubiquitous everyplace else. Or something like that. None of the local people have been able to describe the interior of this place to us, just saying that it was “strange” or “bizarre,” and as soon as we get there, I see why; it’s a place outside of their experience, and so hard for them to get a mental grip on, although familiar enough to all of us—it’s a fern bar, perhaps the only one in Britain, almost certainly the only one in Scotland. They serve Nouveau Cuisine Scottish, which I find an odd and not entirely satisfactory combination. George and I, in fact, keep complaining that the meal isn’t “hearty” enough—Scottish food is supposed to be hearty, isn’t it?—although George, who loves turnips, is somewhat placated by being served a big bowl of “neeps & tatties.” Walter entertains us during dinner by describing a delicacy he came across in England, a “chipbuttey”—which turns out to be a french-fry sandwich, the cold french-fries placed on a slice of bread, mashed down a bit, slathered with butter, and with another slice of bread then placed on top to complete the sandwich.
This sounds sufficiently “hearty” even for George and me, but it’s also something you can’t order in The Ubiquitous Chip, where chips have, if you recall, been banned. We try not to be too disappointed over this . . .
On this note, the Worldcon ends.
Tuesday, August 29th—Glasgow, Dumbarton Castle, & Tarbert
Up about 8 A.M., go down to breakfast, chat briefly with Andy Porter, who is all agog, understandably enough, about the hotel right next door to his apartment in Brooklyn having burned down the night before, which news he has just discovered in the local Glasgow paper. The lobby is full of people checking out of the Marriott, and we chat briefly with folks such as Paul McAuley, Stephen Jones, Kim Jones, Mandy Slater, Janis O’Conner and her husband Bob, Marti McKenna, Charles de Lint and his wife, Norman Spinrad, Lee Wood, and so on. Go upstairs and get our suitcases, which are heavier and more bulging-at-the-seams than ever, check out ourselves, and then sit in the Marriott lobby waiting for David Kogelman to come over from the Moat House in his newly rented car and pick us up.
Susan is sicker than ever, at the stage where she’s stumbling around like a zombie, seeming only partially conscious and practically bumping into the walls, and I’m having severe doubts about the wisdom of taking this post-convention trip with her in the state that she’s in. I’m exhausted myself, and in that bleakly depressed state that conventions usually leave me in these days, so it seems as if, all things considered, we might be better off just staying in the Marriott for the few days between now and Friday, when our flight home is scheduled to leave from Glasgow Airport. We committed ourselves before we left home, however, to this trip up to Tarbert in Argyll, where Lisa Tuttle and Colin Murray live, and we already have reservations at the Tarbert Hotel there; George R.R. Martin and Parris and David Kogelman are also headed up to Tarbert today, Scott and Suzi Baker are already there, staying with Lisa and Colin, and the idea is that we’re all going to get together for a post-Worldcon party . . . an idea that looked a lot more desirable before the trip than it does now. But Susan says that she may as well be sick there, with friends nearby, than sick here in the hotel by herself after everyone we know has left, which makes a certain amount of sense, and David has made a car rental reservation based on the idea that we’re going to share driving and expenses with him, so I guess we are going to be going to Tarbert after all, in spite of everything—although I doubt that Susan, who can barely lift her head, is going to be doing all that much of the driving.
David arrives, we load our stuff into his rental car, and we drive over to the Moat House hotel, where we have a quick lunch in the lobby bar with George and Parris. Finally, in the usual Glasgow drizzle, we all set off, Susan and I in David’s car (David has good-humoredly agreed that Susan is probably not in the best shape in the world for driving at the moment, so he does all the driving himself—but, as he says, he’s an ex-cab-driver, and so is used to long uninterrupted stretches of driving . . . although this is the first time he’s ever driven in Britain before, which makes for a few unnerving moments), following George and Parris in their car. The idea is that we’re going to drive to Tarbert caravan-style, led by George and Parris, who have been there before, with a stop just outside of Glasgow at Dumbarton Castle. Unfortunately, we overshoot Dumbarton Castle, going almost all the way to Helensburgh before we realize that we’ve missed the turn. Determinedly, George turns around and we all caravan back through Dumbarton, this time spotting both the turn-off and the Castle itself, which, coming south, dominates the horizon, looming up as it does on the top of a very high hill; it’s amazing we all managed to miss it coming the other way.
We drive down to the car park at the foot of Dumbarton Castle. Susan decides that she is too sick and exhausted to climb up the several long flights of very steep stairs to the castle ruins on top of the hill, so she stays behind in the car, reading a Brother Cadfael book, while the rest of us set off up the stairs, through a steep and narrow passageway where the portcullis once was, and so up to the open grassy area on top of Dumbarton Rock, where the castle’s artillery batteries were once set into the side of the hill, and several huge old cannons still point their mutely gaping mouths out over the wide estuary of the River Clyde, commanding the approach from the sea. George says that he likes “manly” castles, grim foreboding fortresses and frowning military strongpoints rather than places full of tapestries and fancy furniture, like Cawdor, and he seems pleased with Dumbarton; although there’s not really much of the original structure left intact, the castle—or what’s left of it—does have an impressive location, perched several hundred feet up in the air on top of dome-shaped Dumbarton Rock (said to be the last bit of their homeland many Scottish refugees from the Highland Clearances saw as they sailed into exile, never to return)—it’s not difficult to imagine the castle defenders pouring boiling oil and flaming pitch down on unfortunate Vikings or Englishmen or whoever might be trying to scramble up the steep cliffs in order to press home an attack. I doubt that many of them made it—and, indeed, I don’t think that Dumbarton Castle was ever taken by direct assault.
Leaving the Castle behind, we stop for a snack at a little pub in Helensburgh—George finally finding someplace where the food is hearty enough for him, having a steak pie that he raves about for the next three days, whenever we eat somewhere else—and then make the long but extremely pretty drive to Tarbert, through a high mountain pass and then south along the side of Loch Fyne, where, after having hidden all afternoon, the sun comes out at the end of the day long enough to paint the water with orange and gold.
At Tarbert, a small fishing village set along either arm of a V-shaped harbor, we find that the Tarbert Hotel is being used as a location for the filming of a BBC mini-series called A Mug’s Game; the downstairs pub, where a scene in the show is being shot as we arrive, is full of actors and cameramen, and the only flight of stairs leading up to the guest rooms, a steep and narrow one, is snarled with wires and lights and blocked by loitering members of the technical crew, who also spill over into and have taken over much of the cramped and tiny hotel lobby, where the registration desk is. We have trouble even getting into the hotel, as a member of the tech crew is stationed outside to refuse anyone entry, then have trouble getting anyone to come out to the registration desk to give us our rooms, as the hotel proprietor is off somewhere seeing to the needs of the TV crew. Then we have to wait, impatiently, in order to be able to get up to our rooms, since there’s no way to get up the stairs while the scene in the pub is actually being shot. (For most of the next two days, the TV crew will swarm over the hotel, making it difficult to get in and out of it as we wish, and visiting on us a host of other inconveniences—probably we should all spurn the Tarbet and go to another hotel somewhere, but we’re too tired to deal with that, especially Susan, who, by this point, can barely stay on her feet.) George, who has worked extensively for the movies and TV at home for the past decade or so, is boggled by the fact that he has traveled thousands of miles to a small and very isolated village in rural Scotland only to run into, of all things . . . a TV shoot! I tell George that he should tell everyone that he’s a real Hollywood producer, instead of a mere BBC TV producer, and then all the local people who are swarming worshipfully around the TV producer, especially the wide-eyed local girls, will swarm worshipfully around him, instead. He doesn’t act on this suggestion, though, although it probably would have worked.
At last, we take advantage of a break in the shooting to get upstairs to our rooms. I very nearly kill (or at least herniate) myself hauling Susan’s suitcase up to the third floor (as usual at small British hotels, there’s no one to help with the bags, and the hotel proprietor, an old woman in her seventies, seems sensibly disinclined to lend a hand), and only get my own suitcase up there because David volunteers to help, and we both haul it upstairs by its straps (the handle is broken off, remember?) like Army corpsmen hauling a wounded soldier to safety in an old World War II movie. When I get up there, I find that our room is almost literally the size of the proverbial broom-closet, the smallest room of our trip, with just enough space in it for the bed, from which you can touch the wall on either side without needing to straighten your arm; somehow I manage to jam the suitcases in there too, although this leaves almost no place in the room where you can stand, and you have to crawl over one of the suitcases to get to the toilet.
Susan crashes hard, falling onto the bed and into a heavy sleep almost immediately, telling me, before she topples over, to bring her a sandwich from somewhere; she has no interest in going out to dinner, or going anywhere—she’s down for the night. Parris also says that she’s not interested in dinner, and also goes to bed immediately, which leaves George and David and me on our own, three wild and crazy guys, free to seek adventure in the streets of swinging Tarbert! . . . which, unfortunately, are by this point almost completely shuttered and deserted, although it’s only about eight o’ clock by now, and there’s still light in the sky. Tarbert folds up early. Except for a swirl of activity around the TV shoot at the Tarbert Hotel, everything is closed down, except for another pub up the street and one restaurant, and, once you get a few blocks away from our hotel, there’s almost no one around on the streets.
We walk up the road along the shuttered seafront, looking for a restaurant, and finally make a reservation at a tiny place called The Anchorage, where they kindly agree to sit us late, at nine o’clock, although they’re technically closed by then; since the pub at the Tarbert Hotel is being used by the TV crew, there’s really no place else in town to eat, except for the somewhat seedy looking other pub, so we count ourselves very lucky to get into The Anchorage, even if we will have to wait an hour.
To kill time, we walk further up the road and sit for awhile in the gathering dusk on a bench overlooking the harbor and, past a few small humped islands bristling with trees, like miniature versions of the offshore islands near Skye, out over Loch Fyne itself. Seagulls wheel and scream overhead, returning to rest on the harbor mud flats for the night, occasionally sweeping low over the water in hopes of a last-minute fish to snack on before going to sleep. We discuss whether or not we could live in a tiny village like this. George thinks that it would be a wonderful place to live, so remote and quiet and picturesque, but I think that it would drive me crazy to live here in hardly any time at all, and David, a big-city boy, tends to agree with me. George counters by waxing eloquent about the peace and solitude and serenity to be found here, and how inspiring and uplifting that would be, pointing at a seagull that is skimming the surface of the waves and crying repeatedly as it flies and saying, “Listen to that! Where else could you hear something like that? You couldn’t hear it in the city!”, and I reply, “I’ll make a tape.” It’s almost full-dark by now, and we think we see a seal swimming along below, on its way out of the harbor into the deeper waters of the open loch, although, in the dusk, it could be anything from a seabird to a selkie. Perhaps it’s a Lake Monster.
Dinner at the Anchorage is quite good, although the dinner conversation is a bit gloomy. The recent deaths of Roger Zelazny and John Brunner have left us all a bit somber, and the talk turns to the economically ravaged scene of the British science fiction publishing world, and whether the same thing is likely to happen in the States. Whether it does or not, we all agree that it’s gotten tougher to make even a marginal living as an SF writer in the last decade or so, and that it’s likely to get even tougher in the future—that, in fact, it may now be impossible for all but a very fortunate few to make any sort of decent money at all out of writing SF. We all know five or six SF writers, in fact, who are only a step or two away from having to sleep out on a hot-air vent. This depresses George. Although he has a yen to live in baronial splendor, and to this end is planning to build a luxurious house on a private mesa of his own in New Mexico, he is soft-hearted enough to wish that everybody else could live in baronial splendor as well—or at least that his friends could do so. Instead, although George himself is moderately financially secure, many of his friends probably will end up living on hot-air vents, or the next thing to it, and this distresses him. I’m quite likely to end up on a hot-air vent myself, sooner or later—editors don’t have retirement plans. We suggest that perhaps George should prudently make provisions for his soon-to-be-indigent friends by thoughtfully providing a row of hot-air vents for us outside his baronial manor . . .
The proprietors of the Anchorage very thoughtfully make up a sandwich for me to take back to Susan, since there’s no place else in town I could get one, although all they have to make a sandwich out of is cheese. They even, in spite of my protests, give me a plate to carry the sandwich on, saying that I can bring it back to them later, or not, as the chance occurs—which strikes me as kindness above and beyond the call of duty, especially as, by seating us late and letting us linger long over our dinners, talking of gloomy matters, they’ve had to stay open at least an hour or two after their usual closing time. I thank them profusely, and we leave, walking back through the dark streets of Tarbert, by the side of the now mostly invisible sea, past one or two young people leaning aimlessly up against the walls, or strolling restlessly around in the empty streets, which is really all there is to do in Tarbert by night, except drink or listen to the tape you’ve made of the lonely cry of a gull.
Back at the Tarbert Hotel, the ever-energetic David sets off for a pub-crawl, now that the hotel pub is open again after the shoot has wrapped for the day and is once more full of its usual customers, but George and I throw in the towel for the night and go upstairs. Back in the room, Susan wakes up long enough to sniff at her sandwich disdainfully—it does, I admit, look pretty unappetizing—and then go back to sleep. I follow her as quickly as I can.
Wednesday, August 30th—Tarbert & Loch Awe
We’re woken by a call from the front desk; they’ve arranged for a hotel down the road to give us breakfast, since their own breakfast room is being used by the TV crew, but we have to be there before ten A.M. if we want to eat. We get dressed hurriedly, walk down the seafront road and up the other arm of the V-shaped harbor to the Victoria Hotel, where we have breakfast with George and Parris and David. On our way back to the Tarbert Hotel, we run into Scott and Suzi, coming out of the local chemists, where they have been dropped by Lisa, who is now on her way to pick up her young daughter, Emily. We stand on the sidewalk chatting with them until Lisa comes by to pick them up; they are all on the way to Campbeltown, where Emily has an appointment with the optometrist; Scott and Suzi are going along for the ride. We make arrangements to meet them all later for dinner, and then they are off for Campbeltown, me reminding them not to miss the big statue of John W. in a heroic pose, blue-pencil held proudly aloft, that dominates the town square.
Susan has stumbled over to breakfast with us, but now she has run out of steam and goes back to the room to take a nap. David and Parris set out to drive all the way back up to Inveraray to browse in the little craft shops there, and George goes back to his room to get some work in on his Big Fat Fantasy Novel (you can hear the initial capitals each time he mentions the phrase), leaving me on my own for the moment, although I make arrangements to drive up to Loch Awe with George later in the afternoon.
In the meanwhile, I explore Tarbert, looking into every store in town, all five or six of them, for the gold charm that Susan wants for her charm bracelet, without success. I come back to a bench at the harborside, next to the hotel, and sit down to work on these notes. The tide is out—Loch Fyne is a sea-loch, open to the sea on its south side through the Sound of Bute and the Firth of Clyde—and the point of the V or arrowhead-shaped harbor directly in front of me is now all dry ground and mud-flats, with the sour smell of the mud in the air, and with seagulls walking around on the mud-flats, mewling and squawking and squabbling over some tasty bit of garbage they’ve found. In the deeper part of the harbor, perhaps a hundred yards away, many small sailing boats are moored, making a forest of masts. Most of them seem to be pleasure-craft, and I wonder how much of a commercial fishing-fleet the town has anymore, although there clearly are still at least a few commercial fishing craft here. A ridge of low, rocky hills, covered with bracken and brownish heather, rises up from just behind the houses that line the sea-front on the far arm of the V, on the road that leads back north toward Inveraray. When I walk over to that side of the harbor, the same kind of hills are visible rising up from behind the buildings on this side too, plus the ruins of Tarbert Castle, which, covered in vines as it is, looks like a topiary sculpture. Except for the castle ruins, and the architectural style of the houses, Tarbert isn’t all that different from some small New England fishing towns I’ve known, all of them centered around their harbors, with the sailing boats riding at mooring and the flights of seagulls wheeling and screaming, and the landscape changing dramatically depending on whether the tide is in or out, the sea changing the whole look of the town, as though investing it with a different identity, when it comes flooding back in again.
Later, Susan decides to skip lunch and continue napping. George and I have a mediocre lunch at the town’s other pub, The Frigate—tough, stringy beefsteak; I’m glad we didn’t have dinner here last night—and then we set off in George’s car to drive around nearby Loch Awe, something that Scott had recommended to us that morning as a particularly scenic and interesting drive. We drive back up the A83 north toward Inveraray, then turn off at Lochgilphead (which we both find ourselves pronouncing as Lochgliphead) onto the road to Oban, turning off that on to a small B road that runs alongside Loch Awe. I’ve seen small roads by now all over Britain, but this is a small road, one of the narrowest I’ve seen, and George is understandably somewhat nervous about driving this less-than-single-track road, particularly when we met local cars being driven in the other direction at the typical seventy or eighty miles an hour. We drive slowly north along the shores of Loch Awe, listening as we drive to a tape of “Picnic-Time for Potato-Heads,” cars zooming impatiently past us from time to time when we stubbornly refuse to do eighty ourselves. Somewhere up the road, we see in the flesh the prototype for the cover art for a hundred Celtic fantasy novels: a pure white horse running in a lush green field next to an old stone building, above the gleaming waters of Loch Awe. The sight is so powerful that it takes the breath away from you for a moment, and reminds you of the potency of this kind of archetypical image, which is why it has been used enough times to turn it into a cliche in the first place, of course; the power still lurks there somewhere behind the overfamiliarity and overuse, though, if you can see it again for a moment with new eyes, as we just have been granted the privilege of doing.
We stop once to walk down to the lake shore; George, remembering my anecdote about Chysauster, keeps calling “Come out, little adders!” as we peer under gnarled tree-roots and piles of logs, but they refuse to come out and play with us. I take the opportunity to dabble my fingers in the loch, noticing, as I do, that the pebble beach is covered with foam along the waterline; dismaying to think that a remote lake in a rural part of Scotland could be heavily polluted enough (with detergents, perhaps?) that the water foams as it washes up on to the shingle beach. We drive on to the northern end of Loch Awe, but then, rather than turn south again on an even smaller road that hugs the other side of the lake, the route Scott recommended, and one that would clearly take a couple of hours more to drive, we decide that although Loch Awe is pretty, it’s not all that much prettier intrinsically than Loch Fyne, and so turn east, taking a—somewhat, at least—larger A road back into Inveraray. On the way, we are buzzed startlingly at one point by a military jet that seems to appear out of nowhere and screams by overhead only about twenty or thirty feet above the road, actually shaking the car with the force of its passage, before hopping up and over a hill on the other side of the road and disappearing. Practicing strafing runs again, is my guess. In Inveraray, George, in an antic mood, drives around and around and around the same traffic circle eight or nine times, while the locals stand on streetcorners and solemnly watch us go by, dourly shaking their heads.
Back at Tarbert, George goes to get ready for dinner while I go for a walk along Harbor Street, the street that runs along the seaside, with Susan, who is obviously feeling much better. We sit for awhile on the same bench by the curve of the road away from town, overlooking the loch, where George and David and I had sat the night before, watching a dog swimming quite happily in the water as his master beaches a boat, watching other boats glide like ghosts into the shelter of the harbor at dusk, watching seagulls swoop and dart out across the water. We walk back, and meet David as he is returning from another expedition, one that he set out on after returning from this morning’s trip to Inveraray; this time he’s driven halfway to Campbeltown, on the west side of the peninsula alongside the Sound of Gigha, and returned with a bagful of sea-shells. We sit with him on the same bench where I wrote up my notes this morning and talk with windy eloquence about the uncertainties of life. I watch a swan who is using his own body for a pillow, twisting his head around in a way that looks uncomfortable if not downright impossible to rest it on his own flank. After a minute, he rouses from his nap and picks his way hesitantly over the mud flats toward the sea, waddling and comically awkward on the land, but suddenly becoming smooth and flowing and incredibly graceful when he gets into the water and glides serenely away—he looks back scornfully at us as though to say, you may have seen me being awkward and clumsy for a minute, but now I’m elegant and graceful . . . when are you going to be able to say the same?
Susan feels well enough to be up to going out that night, and so we have a loud dinner back at the Anchorage—I give them back their plate, all neatly washed and dried—with George and Parris, David, Scott and Suzi, and Lisa (Colin has stayed behind to baby-sit Emily), the other patrons eyeing us in surprise (or perhaps alarm) as we break into a chorus of “One Meatball (But No Spaghetti).” After dinner, we say goodbye to Scott and Suzi, who are going to be returning to Glasgow for their flight to Paris early in the morning; they drive off with Lisa, with whom we’ve made arrangements to get together tomorrow.
We return to the Tarbert Hotel, where Parris goes up to bed, while George, Susan, David, and I go into the hotel pub for a drink. David, who stayed up here all last night drinking with the locals, knows everyone by name already, and exchanges shouted and exuberant greetings with several of the patrons crowded around the bar. He asks one of the locals, who is very large and very drunk, to take a group photo of us. The local takes the camera, and keeps urging George to smile, without effect. I finally tickle George clandestinely, which gets a smile out of him just in time for the photo. The local man bellows, “Ah, ya smiled, ya great bastid! I finally got a smile out of ya, ya old bastid!” and joyfully seizes George in a celebratory headlock, shouting “Ya smiled, ya great bastid!” and squeezing George’s neck until George starts to turn blue, and I am afraid that we are going to see a murder done here in the pub, right in front of our faces. I can already see the headline in Locus: “HUGO-WINNER STRANGLED TO DEATH IN BIZARRE PUB INCIDENT,” followed by the sub-heading “GREAT BASTID SMILED BEFORE HE DIED.” The giant bellowing drunk lets George go before George can quite die, though, and stumbles back to the bar for another drink, still throwing an occasional “Ya smiled!” across at George and lifting a glass of whiskey to him in a toast to this remarkable accomplishment.
We decide to beat a retreat before someone casually rips our arms out of their sockets, just to see how they’re fixed on, or perhaps tears George’s head clean off in an attempt to get him to actually laugh. We say goodbye to David, who is going to stay up all night again, drinking with the boisterous locals, and then take off for Glasgow Airport at six o’clock in the morning, and hurry upstairs to bed.
Thursday, August 31st—Tarbert, Torinturk, Stonefield Castle, Skipness Castle & Glasgow Airport
Up about 8 A.M., go down to breakfast, at the Tarbert Hotel this time, the BBC crew having finally departed. David has either departed also, as planned, or else perhaps has been completely torn into small shreds by the locals with whom he was drinking last night, the shreds hidden away in the trash, or perhaps ground fine and made into the greasy breakfast sausages we’re served; at any rate, he’s gone. We eat alone, in an empty breakfast room, joined after a while by George; Parris is sleeping in this morning, and won’t be joining us on this morning’s expedition.
After breakfast, Lisa picks us up in her car and drives George, Susan, and me out to her house in Torinturk, a small village about ten miles outside of Tarbert. On the way, we pass deer grazing in a fenced enclosure, and, at the edge of a farmer’s field, the Firestone, an ancient Celtic standing stone that is said by the locals to glow in the dark with otherworldly energies—a sort of Celtic night-light, I guess. (Lisa says that she hasn’t seen the Firestone glowing, although she’s passed here many times at night—I guess that it won’t perform in the presence of Unbelievers and Infidels.)
Lisa and Colin’s place is a small white house at the end of a country lane, adjoined by a connecting wall to an identical small white house next door; except for these twinned houses, there are no other houses in sight, although I assume that there’s more to Torinturk tucked away somewhere else (maybe not, though!). There’s a rowan tree in front of the house, ablaze with red blossoms; Lisa tells us that rowans are supposed to keep witches away, and it must work, since we see no witches there.
Inside, Lisa and Colin’s place is fairly typical of the house of a writer or fan with small children—toys and books scattered everywhere, especially books, which clearly will always proliferate here far beyond the ability to find bookshelf space for them; our own apartment looks much the same, except there are fewer toys and an even greater number of books, and I suspect that no matter how large George makes the baronial manor he’s planning, he too will run out of shelf space after only a relatively short respite. Books accrue. They seem to appear in odd corners even when you don’t remember buying them—which is one thing that inclines me emotionally toward the Steady-State Theory of Creation. We sit in the living room and have coffee, stared at incuriously by ranks of dolls and stuffed animals. (Lisa tells us that her daughter, Emily, won’t let her throw any of her toys or clothes away because she’s saving all of them “for my baby.” Obviously a child who plans ahead!) Colin, who is working upstairs on a book of political memoirs he’s editing, pops in from time to time to ask us things such as “Is there a Post Office on Fifth Avenue in New York City?”—things you’d think that, as Americans, we’d know . . . but even though I travel along Fifth Avenue almost every week, I can’t remember, and neither can anyone else; shows you how little attention you pay to your own surroundings, something Sherlock Holmes pointed out almost a century ago (Quick! What’s the color of the house across the street from you? No, I couldn’t remember either). Eventually, we all troop upstairs for the ritual Viewing Of The Office, an odd rite that is often a feature of a visit to a writer’s home—Lisa’s office, which is considerably tidier than mine, is upstairs in the attic, under slanted ceilings, with a laptop sitting neatly on a desk in place of the more usual full-size computer. There’s an odd, waist-high door in one wall, which, George suggests, is where the dwarves come out of at midnight when they write Lisa’s stories for her in exchange for a saucer of milk ... or perhaps of Scotch, considering that Lisa mostly writes horror stories these days. I notice that, not surprisingly, she has many of the same books in her office that we have up on the shelves at home—a touch of fannish continuity in two homes thousands of miles apart.
We say goodbye to Colin, who has too much work to do to be able to accompany us on this afternoon’s tourist expedition—I quote the wise ancient dictum “Writers work from sun to sun/But an editor’s work is never done,” but none of the others, writers all, seem terribly impressed or grateful, the swine—and Lisa drives us back into Tarbert, dropping us off in front of the Tarbert Hotel while she goes off to pick Emily up at school.
George consults with Parris, who decides to stay in and skip lunch as well, although she wants to go on the actual tourist expedition later in the afternoon. We then all wait for Lisa in front of the Tarbert Hotel. She arrives a few minutes later with her daughter Emily, a timid but sweet little girl with big owl glasses, dressed in a British schoolgirl’s costume. She stares at us apprehensively as we’re introduced, obviously not sure whether she should burst into tears or not. When asked which of us she’d rather have go with her in her car, me or Susan, she looks at me in alarm and immediately says “Her!”, pointing at Susan. So I go with George in his car, while Lisa, Emily, and Susan go in Lisa’s car, Emily keeping a wary eye on me until we pull away and out of sight, just in case I should change my mind and suddenly leap into Lisa’s car with her instead.
We all meet at Stonefield Castle, just north of Tarbert, for lunch. This isn’t really a “castle,” of course, but rather a big stone Victorian mansion, a bit rundown, but still moderately grand and baronial, with sitting-rooms paneled in dark wood and overlooked glassily by mounted deer heads (it reminds me a bit in this regard of the Viewfield House in Skye, although it is less fantastical than that strange Victorian Gormenghast had been—no tiger heads, no water-buffalo skulls, no unidentifiable stuffed creatures snarling defiance in nearly opaque glass cases), and with libraries of the sort that you see in period-piece British movies, complete with dusty old books in tall glass-fronted cases and big overstuffed armchairs. It’s clear that this place immediately appeals to George, who now seems to regret that he’s staying at the Tarbert when he could be staying here instead, getting to practice living in baronial splendor, to prepare him for when his own stately home is actually built. The place does look more inviting than the Tarbert, shifting the balance of opinion in our minds even more away from “quaint” toward “cramped and tiny.” (Of course, Stonefield Castle is also more expensive than the Tarbert . . . and, to be fair, the others have rooms at the Tarbert that are somewhat more comfortable than ours, rooms into which, for instance, you have space to squeeze items of furniture other than the bed.)
We have a mediocre lunch—so what else is new?—there, sitting outside at picnic tables that do at least offer a splendid overview of Loch Fyne. During lunch, Emily wanders away up the flagstone path that leads up the hill toward the swimming pool, occasionally pausing to peer owlishly back at us and say “help” in a small calm voice. When Lisa tells her that she doesn’t need any help, she seems to consider this gravely for a moment, and then accept it, continuing to hop solemnly away along the flagstone path, one flagstone per hop. We also learn, by dedicated scientific experimentation, that English robins only eat bread, not chips or crisps . . . although Emily, who has by now come hopping back, generously continues to share her chips with them long after this important scientific principle has been established. Finally, even though Emily keeps looking up at Lisa and solemnly demanding “More food!”, lunch is over, all the food either eaten or thrown to the unappreciative robins. While Lisa and Emily visit the loo (apparently Emily collects a life-list of loos she’s visited, the way birders collect a life-list of birds they’ve seen, and often makes her mother take her to one even when it turns out that she doesn’t actually have to go to the bathroom), George and I get back in the car and drive back to the hotel.
When Susan and Emily and Lisa arrive, Emily wearing the satisfied look of a connoisseur who’s just gotten to see a rare and elusive loo she’s never seen before, I get in the car with George and Parris, who has come down to join us, and we follow Lisa’s car a few miles out of Tarbert to Skipness Castle, past a beach with a stunning view of the rugged offshore island of Arran, and past a strange vertical forest of tortured upthrust rock formations, looking more like something you’d be likely to run into in New Mexico or Colorado or Arizona than here in Scotland.
Compared with all this scenic splendor, the castle itself, when we finally get there, is almost uninteresting—mostly ruined, with grass growing inside where the Grand Hall and the banquet rooms once were. We look briefly around the ruins, with George expressing disappointment that we can’t climb up onto the battlements, but they’re blocked off. In fact, the only part of the castle interior open to view is the latrine chamber, which looks like, well . . . a latrine chamber. At least it is not still full of ancient piss.
We return to the “Seafood Caravan” next to the car park, which, while we were gone, has dispensed smoked salmon sandwiches for Susan and Parris. I sit in a patch of shade and watch the rocky bulk of Arran through binoculars, tracing streams as they cut their way down from the crests of the hills to the sea, while the rest of the adults in our party sit in the broiling sun at picnic tables, and Emily is busy chasing all the chicks and ducklings in the yard to and fro, pointing to them and joyously shouting “Baby!”—chasing them eagerly but timidly, ready to flee instantly if they should turn on her.
On the way back, we drive down to the beach and stop for a moment to examine the strange rock formations, which obviously are made up of sediment laid down in horizontal layers over millions of years, then turned vertical and thrust up above the surface of the ground by some later violent movement of the earth. It’s strange, and almost frightening, to think what a huge amount of time is needed to lay down even one such layer of sediment and compress it into rock, let alone the hundreds and hundreds of such layers, one atop the other, that are clearly visible here—such a vast expanse of time that our little human lifespans are unnoticeable against it, less by far than the time it takes to blink your eye compared to all the hours and days and years of your life. Compared to the ages it took to lay down these tortured rock strata, life on earth—let alone human life—is less than a heartbeat old. Don’t even try to measure what an individual human life—yours, or mine—would be when set against that immense, alien, indifferent, inconceivable gulf of time. There’s probably no unit small enough.
After a brief stop at the Cultural Heritage Center (strange that the Vikings, who went through here raping and killing, and burning everything to the ground, are now considered to be part of Scotland’s Cultural Heritage: “Don’t mind those ten smelly Northerners gang-raping you, madam, your husband’s blood still on their hands—someday this will all be part of our rich Cultural Heritage! You’ll be able to buy the T-shirt!”), we go back to the Tarbert Hotel and sit in the bar and have tea, waiting for it to be time for our bus to leave for Glasgow. Parris says goodbye and goes up for a nap, and finally Emily begins to get fussy, and so Lisa says goodbye too, and leaves with her for home. George is going to have dinner with Lisa and Colin tonight, but he has kindly agreed to haul us and our stuff to the bus stop, so he waits with us for a while longer. We all keep a leery eye out for the huge bellowing drunk of the evening before, fearing that he might come back and tear George’s head off for a keepsake, but he’s probably in some other pub this evening, cheerfully strangling some other hapless tourist to death. We wonder how many tourists he goes through per month.
Finally, we load our huge groaning suitcases into George’s car—it sinks noticeably on its springs—and he drives us the half-mile or so up the hill to the bus-shelter across the street from the church. We wait there for the bus to Glasgow to arrive, me killing time by looking through the binoculars at what appear to be cairns on the crests of the hills on either side, wondering if they are positioned so as to allow a signal-fire lit on one to be seen from the other, the message thus being passed from cairn to cairn up the coast, or on inland. Finally, the Glasgow bus arrives. We say goodbye to George, load our stuff into the compartment under the bus (thank god we don’t have to try to jam it into the overhead racks!), and climb aboard. The bus starts with a sharp jolt and roars away unnervingly fast, before we’ve even gotten into our seats. Within seconds, Tarbert falls away behind, and is gone.
We climb into the bus at about 6:10 P.M., and it’s almost exactly a three-hour drive to Glasgow, with brief boarding stops at small villages along the way, and a somewhat longer stop at Inveraray, where I run out, fight my way through a queue of Japanese tourists, and get Susan some chewing gum and a bottle of water (a small bag of peanuts and a bottle of water for me)—this will have to do for dinner until we reach Glasgow. Susan falls asleep almost immediately after leaving Inveraray, thus missing the same scenery she missed on the way here, which is too bad, as some of it is very nice, especially the high mountain pass that the road climbs through outside of Inveraray, and the high plateau country beyond that contains Loch Long, with its surrounding fringe of huge old wooden luxury hotels. She also misses a spectacular sunset, perhaps the best one of the trip, with a thin silver crescent moon hanging over the darkening mountains, and bars of glowing pink clouds in the fading blue sky.
Later on, winding slowly through the outskirts of Glasgow, I keep getting glimpses of people walking around inside their apartments and houses, standing in a doorway, ironing a shirt, talking, sitting down to a formal dinner around a big table, drinking, sitting in front of the flickering blue eye of a TV set, cooking, waving their arms, leaning on windowsills and looking out the window at the night, or back at us as we pass, and I get a sudden perception of the sheer mass of humanity—there are millions of people out there, each one of them as quirky and individual, as unique and contradictory and strange, as anyone else we’ve met on this trip, or as anyone we know at home. No artist could possibly know them all. You could travel from house to house, from apartment to apartment, meeting everyone, talking to everyone, getting to know them all as individual human beings rather than strangers glimpsed in the night as you pass, learning their histories and their stories, and it would take you hundreds of years to work your way through this one suburb of Glasgow. To work your way through every neighborhood in every city in all the world would take a noticeable fraction of the time it took to lay down those rock formations back on the beach near Skipness. And, of course, as soon as you moved on from one place, new people would be being born and growing up behind you, people you didn’t know, had never met—so there would never be an ending to the process at all. I realize with a sudden swift sadness that somewhere in the back of my heart I would like to know them all, every one of them—and that, of course, I never will, that I will only ever know a tiny fraction of them, so miniscule as to be almost unnoticeable next to the sheer immense biomass of the human species, and that only a tiny fraction of them will ever know me. Instead, we will pass each other in silence, in the dark, rushing by each other with only the most fleeting of glimpses as we pass. Out there, turning from the window as the bus pulls away, falling away behind with just a glimpse of their arm swinging or their mouth opening to laugh, are people who might have been friends, lovers, enemies, teachers, colleagues. You’ll never meet them. They’ll never meet you. They fall away in the dark and are gone, along with a thousand alternate lives you could have lived but never will, a thousand roads you could have taken but did not, a thousand thousand alternate worlds dying unborn around you every second of every day, and you must say farewell constantly to people you’ll never meet. Then the bus moves on, and all is darkness and the wet echo of lights smeared across the windows of dusty rooms.
A few minutes later, we climb out of the bus at Buchanan bus station in Glasgow, and catch a cab to the Glasgow airport, catching brief glimpses of the Marriott and the Forte Crest as we pass. (The driver tells us as we go that he’s always wanted to go to America—although, on questioning, it turns out that he’s never even been to Skye, which is only a four-hour drive from here; one gets the impression that he’ll never go, either, to either place—and that he knows it.) We check into the Forte Crest at the Glasgow Airport, not the one downtown that the SFWA Suite was in, but another one. We have one of the worst meals of the trip, and one of the most expensive, in the Carvery restaurant in the hotel, dry, fatty slices of beef and browning juiceless pieces of pork and ham served buffet-style, along with all the limp, wilted vegetables you can eat, but we get in just before the restaurant closes, so I suppose we can count ourselves lucky—bad as it is, it is marginally better than chewing gum and peanuts for dinner. Sort of.
Go upstairs, and, just before I go to sleep, I look out the window at the main terminal at Glasgow Airport, which is literally right across the street, which, I hope, will make it easier to catch our flight tomorrow—our last day in Britain, and the last day of the trip.
Friday, September 1st—Glasgow Airport, Heathrow Airport & Philadelphia
Up about 8 A.M., go down and have our last British breakfast of the trip, the traditional Trusthouse Forte breakfast, considerably better than dinner had been the night before (I’m reminded again, though, how sharply the moderately wide variety of jams and jellies we were offered in most of the English hotels fell away as soon as we crossed the border into Scotland; no hotel in Scotland has offered anything other than Strawberry Jam (except for the ubiquitous Orange Marmalade, of course, which was served in every single place we stayed), and, if you ask for another flavor of jam, not only don’t they have it, but they look offended that you asked. They have a real Attitude about this, as if to say “Strawberry jam was good enough for me father, and me father’s father . . . and it’s sure as hell good enough for you, too!”)
Go upstairs, pack our travel-worn suitcases one last time, check out, and wheel our stuff on a luggage cart the short distance across the street to the main terminal. I’m carrying my Hugo in one hand by this point, out in the open, in plain sight—this is something I learned to do a few Worldcons ago, in Holland, when, during the midst of the build-up for the Gulf War and the terrorism scare that was generated by it, I walked into the airport carrying my Hugo and instantly had at least two automatic rifles trained on my chest by flak-jacketed security troops, who were no doubt considering the possibility that it was some kind of pipe bomb or hand-held rocket; I remember thinking, as the security people at the gate examined the Hugo very carefully, Thank God I didn’t put it in my suitcase, where it would have shown up on an X-ray and gotten the whole flight cancelled, or pull it out of a bag, so that they think I’m drawing some kind of weapon and shoot me. Since then, whenever I’ve had the occasion to go through an airport with a Hugo, I’ve been careful to carry it in plain sight, and am prepared to spend at least a few minutes at the security gate explaining what it is. This time, however, it quickly becomes apparent that the security people in Glasgow Airport have seen a Hugo go through here before—“Ah, that’s that award for science fiction, isn’t it?” one guard says jovially, and I wonder, Just how many Hugos have come through this very gate in the last week? Two couples in the waiting area at the gate also recognize the Hugo, as does someone on the plane, and another couple later at Heathrow, so obviously fans are still dribbling home from Glasgow, four full days after the convention ended. I wonder how long it will take before everybody is home again, and you’d no longer run into anyone who was also returning from the Worldcon?
We have an hour-long flight to Heathrow. At Heathrow, getting a brief glimpse of the outskirts of London as we break from the clouds that have enveloped us since leaving Glasgow, we make our way to the International Transfers area, where the customs official who checks our passports nods at the Hugo and says, “I thought that Arthur C. Clarke had all of those!” This is probably not a fan on the way home from Glasgow, but he not only knows what a Hugo is, but, from his remark, understands something of the history of it! I must admit that this boggles me, as, outside of this trip, I’ve never met any airport official who had the slightest idea what a Hugo was; I usually tell most of them that it is a bowling trophy that I’ve won while on vacation, and they nod and accept this at face value.
We climb on board the shuttle bus for the short ride to Terminal 4. There’s a little girl aboard with her parents, and she’s just delighted with the whole experience of being on this bus, squealing with happiness when the bus starts to move, laughing and clapping her hands, shouting joyously and pointing when she sees airplanes on the runway. I watch her thoughtfully. For most of us on the bus, this bus ride is just something that we endure, an uncomfortable inconvenience that we put up with because we want to get to someplace else where we’ll do something we really want to do—to her, the bus ride itself is a joy, a pleasure to be savored, a source of inexhaustible wonders. If we could only recapture that innocent, open-hearted experience of life, living with all pores open and savoring each moment for itself, experiencing each moment as it happens without anticipation or retrospect, drinking in the wonder of things we instead choose to consider trivial or boring or mundane, relishing just that moment, just that one moment, for its own sake, like a little child, how much better off we’d be, how much more enjoyable and tranquil our lives would be, no matter how long or how short they were.
We shop briefly at Terminal 4, Susan at last finding a charm for her bracelet, and then have to scamper to make our flight when they announce over the PA that the flight to Philadelphia is boarded except for the last five passengers—two of whom are us. Long, grueling, uncomfortable flight back, almost eight hours long, crammed in three-abreast this time, during which I try to apply the lesson I’ve learned from watching the little girl on the bus, with only partial success.
We finally touch down in Philadelphia, only to discover, on disembarking, that we have somehow lost the expensive blanket we’d bought for our son Christopher in Scotland, probably left behind on the luggage cart in Heathrow during our scramble to catch our flight. Wait in a long, slowly-inching line to get through Customs, watching another little kid who is dodging merrily around the line-dividers, as if he is skiing the giant slalom, having a wonderful time while his parents fret and grind their teeth impatiently and snarl at each other in frustration. The little boy clearly knows the lesson of the little girl on the bus, while the parents have clearly forgotten it. I think we all know it at one time; I wonder when we forget?
Pick up our suitcases, take a cab back to our apartment, where we are greeted at the door by a pair of hysterical cats, who are, at first, frantically glad to see us—later, they will remember that they’re supposed to be mad at us for leaving them, and become sulky and aloof, slowly thawing over the course of the next couple of days when they forget that they’re mad and are not supposed to want to get patted.
It’s four P.M. in Philadelphia, but by our body clocks, it’s nine o’ clock at night. It’ll take weeks for us to readjust.
There’s an immense pile of mail, and the answering machine is winking steadily, like an ominous red eye. Sighing, I reluctantly plunge into the shitstorm of bills and problems and emergencies that must be dealt with, including the news that, while we were gone, my mother has fallen and broken her hip, had surgery to have a bolt and plate put in, and is now in a rehab hospital.
The vacation is over.