Tues 4th Sept 2001
North-West Highlands
North-West Highlands
It never fails to surprise us how you can be in the wildest of places, and still bump into someone from back home, odder still, how close to home! And the small stories that are their lives.
We were staying up in Ullapool in Scotland’s Western Highlands, and had spent the day exploring some distance northwards, and about morning-tea-time we found ourselves in the little town of Scourie in Sutherland, once the stronghold of the MacKay clans.
There's not much to this frontier town except the scenery and the fishing, as it’s only a Post Office, a pub, a shop, a ‘Surgery’, and a scatter of houses, most of them B+Bs. But by then we were hanging out for coffee, and maybe a toasted sanger or two, and geez it was fairly crisp outside and wouldn’t some hot soup go nice too. So, it’s into the pub.
It’s a wonderfully old-fashioned Victorian era style - you half expect to see Wilfred Hyde White in a winged collar, chatting to David Niven over fine bone china and crustless sandwiches, all in sepia tones. But it’s well fitted out, discreet signs saying it does accommodation and meals. And it has a great little lounge. That was empty and waiting just for us.
Us being her only customers, she has time on her hands, and starts by wanting blow-by-blow news of how the old joint has changed since she left two years ago, then settles in to telling us a little about herself, with that wonderful sort of youthful energy that comes with – well, being bright-eyed and 20 and not yet trammelled by Life. Well, not much anyway.
For openers she says her Mum is Welsh and her Dad is English and her and her elder sister were actually born in Wales, and the family emigrated to our neighbourhood a long time back ... and before we know it we’ve become a captive audience in the soap opera of her young life.
Seems like she's been everywhere man, crossed the deserts bare man, of travel I've had my share man ... (trust me, it was a big Aus hit song back in the 60s!) ... and all that. And apparently she’s already done most things that the rest of us take several decades to get through, stuff that starts tumbling out like she's been saving it up till we got there.
She’s been married and divorced, is now living with a Scot who has one kid by an earlier relationship in Inverness, plus another kid he's never seen, from a ‘one night stand’ in Derry while he was there with the British Army in Ulster (this bloke obviously likes to live on the edge!), and her sister and her don't get on at all. But then tells us her sister lives only 25 miles up the road from her here, in Durness, and although this kid has been to most places in the world, and could’ve found anywhere to settle, she’s been living here in Scourie since November, and is now steeling herself to go through another hard winter! Because she doesn’t get on with her sister. Just up the road.
But apparently her sister has a dog and (until recently) a live-in bloke, and they’d bought a local house together, and she’d changed her surname to his rather than get married (?!) but she moved out when she found out her boyfriend was having it off with the next door neighbour, but then the bastard wouldn’t give her dog back to her. Which she loves more than the bloke and probably always did. And now she can’t sell the house with him in it so she’s renting a place. And she needs her furniture but he won’t give it up unless she pays him five hundred quid. So he can re-furnish. Well, we think that’s how it went.
Then this kid tells us that she thinks her own boyfriend is likely to move on soon but hopes they’ll last at least until the winter is over, and finally finishes by saying, rather plaintively, as if it’s a whole new philosophical concept that the world hasn’t as yet grasped, is that all she's looking for in a man and in life is ‘happiness and satisfaction’. Says it like she thinks we might have some magic answer for her. But we wouldn't like to put money on this kid's current relationship lasting till four o’clock this afternoon let alone the onset of Spring!
Coffees and scones done we say our goodbyes and give her a hug and wish her well, it’s been entertaining love, but... we have to be off. The landscape out there is to die for.
Coffees and scones done we say our goodbyes and give her a hug and wish her well, it’s been entertaining love, but... we have to be off. The landscape out there is to die for.
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