Fort William (Scotland)

...towards our actual destination of Fort William, to have a gander at Ben Nevis.

As we drove it got cloudier and cloudier and then it started to rain. I had expected it to be raining and I think it really added to the effect of it being Scotland. If it was bright and clear I don’t think it would have been quite so, well, authentic an experience. The scenery had begun to be more dramatic. The hills had become taller and the woods thicker. ...
...Linnhe is the loch that Fort William overlooks and when we arrived at the town, it was a very comforting feeling that even though the wilderness can be dangerous, all the mod-cons are still available as long as you can get to a sizeable town like Fort William.

We saw numerous guest houses, hotels and hostels and I had it very much in my intentions to stay in a fair-sized hotel with a bar and a roaring fire; a hotel that we could make ... more

Ask anyone other than my dad and they’ll tell you that working sucks. The humdrum daily routine erodes the soul of the average person until something snaps and you either end up like Michael Douglas in Falling Down or you just have to take a break to get out of it all. An easy weekend just vegging out simply won’t do. We’ve had a few of those and they just don’t cut it anymore, so over a year ago we floated the idea of driving to Scotland for a weekend. On the Friday after the Easter weekend I had to go to see the doctor because I thought I may have had an insect interloping in my ear, so I took it off, the day that is.

Tommy finished work relatively early and after his bath and my fretting because I thought we were never going to make it anywhere, we got into the car and began our journey at about ten past seven. It didn’t seem long before the South coast was a distant memory and we were negotiating the M25. We passed Milton Keynes, Luton, Birmingham and passed between Liverpool and Manchester, Blackpool, Morecambe and Carlisle, all the while faffing around with the radio so that we could continue listening to the Ministry of Sound’s Hall of Fame programme that chronicled the history of the best dance music.

It took hours of motorway in the darkness and it passed slowly and quietly. We’ve done the motorways over and over and we seemed to just slip into a semi-comatose state where the only sounds audible were those of the miles passing beneath the car and the fuzzy radio, punctuated by comforting noises from Tommy to me and back again just to let one another know we’re not dead.

Following a text conversation with my mother, who went to bed at around 12.30am, we stopped for something to nosh at a service station at Carlisle or there abouts. “They’re all northern,” Tommy said in amazement as we passed Harry Ramsdens, which was unfortunately closed. We had a cup of coffee, an all-day breakfast sandwich and a slice of something-red-and-sticky and almond tart each and it all came to the exorbitant amount of £15.04. The guy who served us was nowhere near as jolly as the people who flitted between the stalls moving bits of fruit from one to the other and joking around and gossiping about her, who’d told him what his best friend had done last Saturday at the club. Or something.

We pressed on and not long afterwards we found a large sign that said “Scotland welcomes you”. We were there and it was really quite exciting. We got out and took pictures before I had a look at the laptop and checked where there was to stay in the area.

I called the Days Inn at Gretna Green and made a reservation and the Scottish-accented man on the other end of the phone told me that he’d hold the room until 3am. It was, he said, the last room, for forty-nine pounds exactly.

We checked in, took in some TV and tea and retired to bed. The place was very modern (all walls were cream, except one, which was a coffee colour) and the bed was fluffy and bouncy with a big white duvet and minimal-but-pointless red pillows.

We woke up, showered and left the hotel to be met with the sound of bagpipes. It was all very Scottish. On we went towards our actual destination of Fort William, to have a gander at Ben Nevis.

As we drove it got cloudier and cloudier and then it started to rain. I had expected it to be raining and I think it really added to the effect of it being Scotland. If it was bright and clear I don’t think it would have been quite so, well, authentic an experience. The scenery had begun to be more dramatic. The hills had become taller and the woods thicker. They had clouds hanging around the summits and it all looked very picturesque.

Just after Glasgow, we stopped for something to nibble and drink at a Little Chef then we got briefly lost. We pulled into a cul-de-sac so that the laptop could get its bearings and guide us onward into the Highlands and nothing can prepare you for the sights there. The colossal pine trees are worlds away from the woods we’re used to in the South and the mountains are so verdant that Iceland’s volcanic ranges are simply desolate in comparison to the scenery that passed around us. The mountains were surrounded by thick low cloud with wisps that reached out in all directions and the rain fell in waves in front of the valley-laden mountain faces. It was beautiful.

We stopped in Glencoe, a little village-with-a-Shell-garage (strangely named Claymore) for a widdle and took in some of the surroundings. It’s so… well, big and green, wild and fresh. It was like being in the middle of an episode of Due South (occasionally filmed in Canada, for those who’ve never fancied Benton Fraser). The air was so fresh and moist, raining as it was and we could see our breath. We were so far from home and it was as though we had broken into another life. Tommy wasn’t worried about Mrs Cousins claiming he’d stolen her plates, or about his mum and her boyfriend’s troubles; I wasn’t remotely thinking about the area safety report or how boring it is fighting the paper away, we were so far from that world and we were free to do what we wanted for just a few days.

We drove on through green fields that were plagued by rusty red bushes and boulders that would be ideal to drop on Wile E. Coyote. The mountains got higher and the crevices that ran down them ran with white, cold water. At one point, we were so high up and the road sliced through the top of a mountain. We stopped the car in a lay-by to view a waterfall. It was beautiful crashing against the pool of water below through the craggy rocks. Just then, the cold, the water we’d been drinking and the sound of the waterfall became all too much for Tommy. He desperately needed to pee, so he began to jump over the railing and down the steep slope towards the waterfall’s pool. He wasn’t going to pee in that, people probably get all of their water from it, so he faced the road and stopped. “Betty Turner 1946 – 2002 Sadly missed by all who loved her.” An engraved plaque lay there pleading not to be peed on and so Tommy didn’t pee. Not then, at least. You can’t pee on Betty.

We took some pictures for as long as we could stand the cold, said goodbye to Ms Turner and got back in the car, driving off. All at once, we rounded a sheep-infested bend and went over a huge metal bridge. Tommy told me to film and as I fumbled for the cameras a loch breezed into view, the shoreline littered with lay-bys with picnic benches and huge, dark rocks. We pulled in and filmed, took pictures and got soaked, but happily, breezily, vibrantly wet. Negative ions are electrically charged particles that float around in the air and help increase our mood.

Negative ions really promote wellbeing and also purify the air by being attracted to positive ions, which make us feel sluggish, lethargic and generally not too bright. Sources of the unpleasant positive ions include computers, TVs, dust, exhaust fumes and people in tweed called Jeremy and exposure to these can, over time, get you down. Negative ions are released when water crashes on water or rocks, when lightning strikes or naturally around trees so standing at the shore of a loch when it’s raining was invigorating and we felt so alive, even though we were bloody cold.

We got back in the car, warmed up and resumed our journey, but stopped pretty soon when we were surrounded by almost unfeasibly tall trees. As we looked into the denseness, we saw it was dark, with a maze of thick columns of wood beneath the canopy which refused admittance to the light. It was pissing down so hard and the radio had long since given up, what with all the thick rock of the mountains surrounding us, so the sound of the rain hammering the chassis was both imposing and comforting, especially as Tommy and I were in the warm with our heater doing its job well.

We passed what I though was a dead deer and through morbid intrigue, Tommy turned the car around to have a look but as we drove, we couldn’t see it. I was mocked for having seen a ‘magical disappearing dead deer’, but fortuitously there was a lay-by allowing us to brave the wet again and take some pictures of the dense trees. When we got out, we saw that rubbish had been dumped down the embankment, so we avoided capturing that for our pictures. We got back into the car not exactly soaked through, but somewhere approaching there and it occurred to me that in Britain weather like this was termed as miserable, but somehow here it was revitalising and strangely romantic.

We turned the car around and carried on our journey, passing the dead deer, which Tommy scrunched his face up at.

We stopped at Loch Linnhe for some more pictures and it was beautiful, the mountains brooding and shrouded with cloud, looming across the still, deep waters. Loch Linnhe is the loch that Fort William overlooks and when we arrived at the town, it was a very comforting feeling that even though the wilderness can be dangerous, all the mod-cons are still available as long as you can get to a sizeable town like Fort William.

We saw numerous guest houses, hotels and hostels and I had it very much in my intentions to stay in a fair-sized hotel with a bar and a roaring fire; a hotel that we could make ourselves comfortable in for the night, but Tommy wasn’t thinking of accommodation at this point. He was determined to find Ben Nevis. Before we’d arrived at the Glen Nevis visitor’s centre, Tommy was unimpressed with the mountain. We couldn’t see it all from where we were and I had to impress that we weren’t realistically going to be able to see it all unless we climbed the sodding great thing.

We entered the centre and we were met with a large display of a man with a beard who reminded me somewhat of my doctor, and a woman both having a bad time about climbing the mountain. It detailed some of the obvious and less obvious dangers of climbing Ben Nevis. Clearly a lot of people enjoy climbing the mountain and this display was there to help protect them, warning of adverse weather that is often vastly different at the summit to that of the foot, slippery rocks that will happily give way if you stray from the set path and the like.

The displays were informative and tactile with a unit filled with dead things’ remnants and samples of plant life particular to the region that children could handle and examine without the traditional museum hindrance of glass barriers. There was a video playing on a loop also dispensing advice and interesting facts about the site and how long it would take for the averagely fit person to reach the summit and return to the base. The music was really dodgy with power guitar throughout – eugh – and when we saw the video on sale for £6.99, the fact it was only eight minutes long encouraged us to pass it up. The other gifts had an equally disproportionate value to cost ratio, so Tommy only bought a few post cards depicting the mountain on that rare occasion, a sunny day (though with Photoshop, sunny days aren’t as difficult to render than you’d expect.

The woman who was manning the till was short and plump and had an aura of a social element I have named mumliness. She gave out a lot of what sounded like really useful information to the two oriental tourists who had come in after us and they soon departed, possibly to ascend the mountain. We approached to pay for our bits and bobs and started talking about the weather. We told her how we’d started off on the South coast of England in twenty-two-degree heat and were now cold and wet in the Highlands. She sounded suitably impressed and said, “so you’re not going to climb the Ben today, then?” We told her we would, some other time and she suggested that for a good view of the area, we should follow the road left of the car park exit until it becomes a single file road and on our way we could see so much “without even having to get out of the car.”

We took her advice and drove around and the views were truly breathtaking. Separating us from the Ben, the river Nevis flowed swiftly and situated between that and the road was a thick strip of tall-grass fields punctuated, often thickly with great pine trees. The fields were populated with a scattering of shaggy rams and tattered highland cattle that happily grazed away, looking up occasionally to ensure we were getting their best sides. The other side of us was just wilderness, stark, bold and beautiful, rugged and harsh. We drove over the winding, bounding road, our stomachs flipping with every other hump as if on a rollercoaster and we just soaked in the magnificence of it all. We’re partial to the outdoors just as much as we are to the urban, cosmopolitan metropolis and driving around Glen Nevis, getting out and taking photographs and getting wet felt so freeing and natural, I couldn’t think of a better place to be to take my mind off of what counts as real life. The world is truly varied, obviously, but for a pair of small islands like the UK to be this diverse is so incredible and I feel so lucky to live here at a time when there is such easy access to all there is on offer: the city and the country, the mountains and the beach, the country pub and the internet café. Okay, we don’t have deserts or jungles, but exploring those can wait until we’re familiar with our own back yard and because it’s so easy to get around now, our back yard has changed dramatically: It used to just mean, say, Hastings, but it grew to mean Sussex, then to mean the South-East, then to mean England, then the UK, but now I feel that our back yard also includes most of Europe; anywhere you can get away to for a weekend with only a couple of hours’ flight is your own back yard.

We got to the single-file road and turned around, our minds set on finding a hotel, food and a bar. Tommy said about somewhere he’d seen that he liked the look of and it said that rooms started at about twenty-four pounds. We found it pretty quickly: the Cruachan Hotel, an old-looking building that was, in fact, just a collection of extensions with only a hint of its original structure remaining. We went in to see about vacancies and were in luck. The short, plump carbon-copy of the woman in the Glen Nevis visitors’ centre asked if she could help and I enquired about a room. In fact, I inexplicably lost the power of speech and blurted in an incomprehensible fashion that I’d like a room. For two people. A double room. For two. She looked at me over her glasses and asked me, “well thart be a rroom weth twen bids orr a dobble bid?”
“A double bed would be lovely, please,” I said, having regained my ability to articulate my thoughts.
“Rayt,” she said, “a rroom weth a bath orr a rroom weth a sherwwer?” We went for the bath as I had enjoyed the shower at Gretna and it was Tommy’s turn.
She charged us forty-nine pounds and Tommy paid on his card.
“Do yeh harff yurr pen numbrr?” It was chip-and-PIN, the new, apparently more secure way of using your debit card that means I’ll never have to forge Tommy’s signature again. We said how this was the first time we’d used this ever and the lady said that it had only just arrived.

We went to our room (number 49) by going up some stairs, down some others, turning left and going up some more stairs, carrying on up the stairs, turning right, following it round and turning left. It was such a strange layout, but we entered the room and, though it wasn’t ultra-modern, it was quite lovely. Tommy got undressed and submerged himself while I took some time to write. We’d been given the times for dinner breakfast and went down to the restaurant for the former.

We waited a few moments in the warm and fairly dimly-lit lobby and were seated on a table adjacent to a bunch of people whose expressions were somewhat reminiscent of a person who’d recently discovered that their blood was blue and their shit didn’t stink, but the hotel they were staying in did.

We ordered from the set £9.50 menu, both of us starting with the seafood platter. The platter consisted of mussels, which I don’t like, tuna and mayonnaise, which I don’t like, mackerel, which I don’t like and prawns in dressing, which I love. I munched on some of the salad before trying a mussel… and loved it. It was smoked and I’d never tried smoked mussels before, how delicious are they! I took a forkful of the tuna and mayo to find, to my delight, it was salmon in mayo and was absolutely scrummy, the mackerel was boneless and peppery, thus exceeding my expectations and the prawns were as one would expect: larrrvly. We ordered a carafe of red wine and used a glass to wash down the fish – how uncouth.

The main course was chicken and bacon in a cranberry gravy and, as the non-smelly poo brigade complained about having a few chips of a different colour (i.e., some were slightly browner than others), I was tucking in to a faultless meal. The chicken was tender and moist, the bacon was cooked to perfection and the potatoes were soft and hot. It came with carrot and peas as well, they too were no less than satisfactory.

We tucked into our puddings, a strawberry cheesecake for me and hot apple pie with custard for Tommy, as those on the other table got their money back, all the while with raised eyebrows and noses so far in the air they nudged the moon.

We retired to the lobby and talked in hushed tones about how lovely a country Scotland is. We were sitting next to a map and pointed out where we’d been and how we’d started off all the way down here, pointing to the skirting board beneath the heater. The couple that sat in front of the fire got up and went and we took their place. Much coveted, we presumed. It was cosy and the fire was significantly warmer at this proximity.

After finishing off our carafe of wine, we wandered into the bar where soft Gaelic folk music was playing. It was dimly lit and really quite cosy, if a little nippy away from the fire. Tommy and I sat at the bar and the barmaid approached to serve us. She asked us what we’d like and Tommy instantly asked for a whisky. “It would be silly not to have a whisky in Scotland,” he said. I agreed and the lady behind the bar pointed out their selection.

Now, in our local we have three whiskies, Bells, Aberlour and Jamesons. I told the barmaid this and she looked at me in pity. The shelves were stacked with about twelve varieties of different whiskies and I’ve recently been getting into whisky, so I was keen to sample one or two.

“Sor, yuv neavr trayed whusky?” Asked the barmaid.
“Well, not unless you count Bells and Teachers.” She turned her nose up in mock disgust. We started off with a Macallan and Tommy smelled his and flicked his eyes wide open.
“It smells like paintstripper,” he said, but to me it was a strange smell that didn’t fall under that category at all. I sipped the drink and my mouth briefly and figuratively caught fire. Every sip after that was smooth and flavoursome and for a whisky, rather easy to drink.

The evening passed too quickly for my liking, we were chatting to Nicky the barmaid and discussing the education of children nowadays, how it’s better that they go out and play instead of staying in and fiddling with a Playstation2 controller. We talked about writing, reading, books and holidays, insisting that she go to Iceland because it’s beautiful. Tommy went back to wine after that Macallan, which he persistently sipped, determined to have come away from Scotland having drunk a whisky. I tried a few more and found one I liked, Auchentoshan. Very nice it is, not as abrasive as the Highland Park but more distinctive than the weaker ones. I instantly wanted to buy a bottle, but since this was all on Tommy, I didn’t want to take the piss.

Nicky, Tommy and I talked about work, what we did and everything and she told us that she was in charge of a tourism department at Lochaber University. It all sounded very exciting. She’s worked on-and-off at the hotel for twenty years, though she didn’t actually look old enough to have legally been working anywhere for twenty years. As it turned out, she has a son of 16 (who skis too much) and went on holiday to one of our premiere destinations, Australia, because of her boyfriend who grew up in the punishing Northern Territory.

We discussed mums and their genetic predisposition to treat you like a child all of your life and how nice that can be. She guessed at our ages (about five years too old for Tommy and two years too old for me) and it was so very nice to be able to talk to someone who could clearly see we were a couple and didn’t make a fuss of it, didn’t say how nice it was to see two gay people, or didn’t find it necessary to say how some of their best friends are gay. We were just talking and drinking.

We talked about pubs and opening hours and how strict they are in England as opposed to Scotland, where pubs and hotels in smaller towns such as Fort William will serve until the barperson gets tired, pissed or pissed off. We enjoyed a few post-time drinks and then she said that this one will be the last. I was filled with whisky and had had a really great evening making a new friend and sitting with my lovely boyfriend, chatting and joking. I was surprised at how sober I felt, it was disproportionate to the amount of alcohol I’d consumed. I felt tired, though.

The whole evening, including the dinner (£9.50 each from the set menu), carafe of wine and many, many after-dinner drinkie-poos for two came to an agreeable £50-ish, which Tommy paid with on his card.

Nicky gave us her email address, home phone and mobile number and told us to let her know what junction it was that I threw up at on the way home. She was a really pleasant, funny and genuine person and had helped make our evening a good one.

At around six in the morning I awoke on my feet in the bathroom drinking a lot of water. I went back to bed and woke up a couple of hours later feeling dehydrated, but drank some more water and felt a lot better.

We went down for breakfast and had a fry-up. It’s a traditional kill-or-cure method for a hangover and I’m happy to say that despite the addition of the haggis on the side, it was a cure. I still felt the tiniest bit delicate, so when I found myself being thrown about my seat as we drove over the Glen Nevis road one last time, I wondered whether I was even going to make it to a junction to fulfil Nicky’s prophecy.

I videoed out of the window as Sophie Ellis-Bextor sang Groovejet (if this ain’t love) and there was something very euphoric about the experience. Ben Nevis, the great trees, the river and the sheep, it was all very primal, even though we were driving in a car, we were free from the constraints of our everyday lives and that’s what was so enlivening and gratifying about the whole holiday; that’s what made it worth the long drive there. As we set off having picked up some souvenirs at the Highland Visitors’ Centre (where I couldn’t buy my Auchentoshan until after 12.30), we hoped it would make it worth the long drive back.

We had departed at 11.10 and followed the road we’d come in on back. Hours later, when we hit the outskirts of Glasgow, it was clear that we were lost. We are good at getting lost, but we’re not good at coping with it. Tommy gets very annoyed and I feel very guilty because I’m distinctly aware that Tommy really doesn’t need the stress while he’s driving. I’m also very rational and calm and Tommy, well, isn’t. It’s very hard to put it to him when he’s understandably stressed that all we need to is find a road, residential is preferable, stop there, get our bearings on the laptop and plan a new route. Instead he tells me to discard the laptop altogether, suggesting that I throw it out of the window. Because it’s useless.

Granted, Autoroute didn’t let us know that the Birmingham bypass road would cost us £2 and, I realised, we’d come into Fort William on the wrong road and had therefore, that morning, left on the wrong road, which explained why we were lost at that moment, but it’s still a handy program.

Tommy took a random road and it was then that we found the M6 and drove down, down until, having stopped somewhere in Cheshire, we got lost again, looking for the road to Loughborough.

Phil and Arthur, our friends who live in Quorn, Loughborough had told us we couldn’t stay over at their house that very weekend, which is primarily how we’d come to the decision to go to Scotland. We’d texted one another at work saying that we were disappointed we couldn’t come and see them, what shall we do instead. Well, Phil and Arthur were going about their Sunday evening business when there was a knock at the door. Arthur opened it and found two young men who were two-hundred miles astray. He smiled, giggled and let us in. We chatted over a tea with them and their daughter, Hayley, and were pretty soon on our way back.

BBC Radio One had kept us company all the way down from Scotland and this was pretty usual for the station that seems to have alienated a large percentage of its audience, who now listen to Radio Two. All of the shows had been involving and the music wasn’t too R’n’B/rap for our liking and the chart show was good, even if Eamon did piss us off by going on about his being from Staten Island and full of himself for presuming he’d be number one. When Dave Pearce’s show started I was made up. Tommy and I both love trance music and Mr Pearce didn’t disappoint with his selection.

I filmed the lights of the traffic on the M25 for a music video I’d decided we’d make and wrote some of this very document. I was confident that Tommy could get us home from Phil and Arthur’s. He knows the way.

The rain got heavy and around Dartford crossing it was terribly hazardous. We saw accident sites every so often. We were fortunate not to be involved in one, or get caught up in the tailbacks. My stomach wibbled every time we passed an articulated lorry, but happily there were no accidents.

Until we were about nine miles from home, that is. We ended up on the wrong side of a traffic island following a traffic-light mix up that has been done time and again by many a motorist. The A21 is really dangerous and there’s no mistaking it, but fortunately we came out of that one with our lives, though the car makes a funny noise now.

We got home at 11.45pm and had something to eat. We picked through our souvenirs and looked at the pictures. How great this weekend had been. We’d done one-and-a-quarter thousand miles, most of them with my shoes off (my feet would have smelled bad otherwise).

As I lay in bed thinking about all we had done, I wished we were still there. A dark shadow fell over my thoughts that seemed was inescapably depressing:
Work tomorrow.
 

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