Holiday day 7
Saturday 30 October - Aberfeldy to Edinburgh (1hr 40)
Matt has also been writing daily posts about our trip. Full disclosure: they’re better than mine. He’s a better writer by some margin, and despite the fact that he writes later than me, his tired mind never succumbs to lazy metaphor or the minutiae of our day.
Inspired by the travel-writing section in Waterstones Cambridge (where we just had a lovely weekend with the Parsons) I suggested to Matt we both write 250 words a day on this trip. We’re both lapsed and lazy writers, and I thought the daily tyranny of having to write might help us come back to the page.
After reading Matt’s Day 1, I wanted to hang my pencil up and go home, but somehow here we are on our last night, and I’ve got 7 short posts on the page. Over dinner tonight (at the brilliant Gardener’s Cottage in Edinburgh) I made another suggestion. I’d been hinting all week at a collab - but he hadn’t taken the bait -so I proposed two questions to each other to act as prompts for tonight’s posts. I’ve not seen the questions he’s sent yet, but here we go:
Who is the favourite person we’ve come into contact with on this trip and why?
Oooh, hard one. There have been some brilliant characters. I absolutely loved the Skye bookseller, the quiet man with the big brain, who solemnly and carefully is trying to reinvent his business in the post-covid world. I loved the slightly frosty soap-maker lady who responded to my full-on charm offensive by gradually revealing the story of the two artisan families of Skye in as little detail as she was able to get away with. A story of soap and candle making, of young love and broken hearts, of crafting knowledge traded and exploited against a backdrop of mountains and mist. Yes, you can option the story - hit me up for a price.
But the person I liked the most was the older lady on reception at the Cuillin Hills Hotel on Skye. Two bedraggled damp travellers wandered in with their impossibly large bags, ruining her rather smart hotel. Every breath from her was one of kindness. She scooped us up in her warm welcome, checked us in and whisked us to our lovely room. She smiled and encouraged, soothing and relaxing us as she shut the door behind her. She was the perfect mother/grandmother/angel archetype, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t really exist in this harsh world at all.
2. What is the most Scottish thing to happen this trip?
It would be tempting to say the night Matt had to persuade the Highland cattle to leave the carriageway so we could continue our journey to the other side of Skye for dinner… or the horizontal rain that drenched us at regular intervals, finding its way into our otherwise waterproof trainers, but actually the most Scottish time on our holiday was in the outdoor spa pool on the first night.
It was dark, we’d had a long drive and we were eager to soak before dinner. There were a group of women in the spa pool, who immediately made us part of their party, and then when a couple of middle-aged club members got in, they immediately became part of the conversation, their gruff pronouncements about directions and distances dismissed by the women (who did in fact know better). Recommendations were swapped, routes were discussed, and these two Englishers trained from birth to ignore strangers, never make eye contact and definitely not speak to wet people wearing small amounts of lycra gradually became friendlier, more relaxed and perhaps even a little bit more Scottish.