chapter Twenty-Six
SO LET'S TALK ABOUT SOMETHING HEARTENING. LET'S TALK ABOUT John Fallows. One day in 1987 Fallows was standing at a window in a London bank waiting to be served when a would-be robber named Douglas Bath stepped in front of him, brandished a handgun and demanded money from the cashier. Outraged, Fallows told Bath to 'bugger off to the back of the line and wait his turn, to the presumed approving nods of others in the queue. Unprepared for this turn of events, Bath meekly departed from the bank empty-handed and was arrested a short distance away.
I bring this up here to make the point that if there is one golden quality that characterizes the British it is an innate sense of good manners and you defy it at your peril. Deference and a quiet consideration for others are such a fundamental part of British life, in fact, that few conversations could even start without them. Almost any encounter with a stranger begins with the words 'I'm terribly sorry but' followed by a request of some sort - 'could you tell me the way to Brighton,' 'help me find a shirt my size,' 'get your steamer trunk off my foot.' And when you've fulfilled their request, they invariably offer a hesitant, apologetic smile and say sorry again, begging forgiveness for taking up your time or carelessly leaving their foot where your steamer trunk clearly needed to go. I just love that.
As if to illustrate my point, when I checked out of the Caledonian late the next morning, I arrived to find a woman ahead of me wearing a helpless look and saying to the receptionist: 'I'm terribly sorry but I can't seem to get the television in my room to work.' She had come all the way downstairs, you understand, to apologize to them for their TV not working. My heart swelled with feelings of warmth and fondness for this strange and unfathomable country.
And it is all done so instinctively, that's the other thing. I remember when I was still new to the country arriving at a railway station one day to find that just two of the dozen or so ticket windows were open. (For the benefit of foreign readers, I should explain that as a rule in Britain no matter how many windows there are in a bank, post office or rail station, only two of them will be open, except at very busy times, when just one will be open.) Both ticket windows were occupied. Now, in other countries one of two things would have happened. Either there would be a crush of customers at each window, all demanding simultaneous attention, or else there would be two slow-moving lines, each full of gloomy people convinced that the other line was moving faster.
Here in Britain, however, the waiting customers had spontaneously come up with a much more sensible and ingenious arrangement. They had formed a single line a few feet back from both windows. When either position became vacant, the customer at the head of the line would step up to it and the rest of the line would shuffle forward a space. It was a wonderfully fair and democratic approach and the remarkable thing was that no-one had commanded it or even suggested it. It just happened.
Much the same sort of thing occurred now, for when the lady with the recalcitrant TV set had finished with her apology (which the receptionist, I must say, accepted with uncommonly good grace, going so far as to hint that if anything else in the woman's room was found to be out of order, she wasn't to blame herself for a minute), the receptionist turned to me and another gentleman who was also waiting and said, 'Who's next?' and he and I went through an elaborate after-you, no-after-you, but-I-insist, well-that's-most-gracious-of-you routine, which made my heart swell further.
And so, on my second morning in Edinburgh, I stepped from the hotel in happy spirits, at one with the world, buoyed by this cheerful and civilized encounter, to find the sun shining and the city transformed yet again. On this day, George Street and Queen Street looked positively ravishing, their stone fronts burnished with sunlight, the damp, brooding darkness that had suffused them the day before banished utterly. The Firth of Forth gleamed in the distance and the little parks and squares seemed alive with green. I trudged UP The Mound to the Old Town terraces to take in the view andwas astonished to see how different the city looked. Princes Street was still a scar of architectural regrettabilities, but beyond it the hills were thronged with jaunty roofs and thrusting steeples that gave the city a character and graciousness that had entirely escaped me the day before.
I spent the morning doing touristy things - I went to St Giles' Cathedral and had a look at Holyroodhouse, climbed to the top of Calton Hill - and finally fetched my pack and returned to the station, happy to have made my peace with Edinburgh and pleased to be on the move again.
And what a fine thing a train journey is. I was instantly lulled by the motion of the train as we lumbered out through Edinburgh and its quiet suburbs and over the Forth Bridge. (And, gosh, what a mighty structure it is; suddenly I understood why the Scots are always on about it.) The train was mostly empty and rather splendidly posh. It was done up in restful blues and greys, which provided a sharp contrast to all the Sprinters I had been on in recent days and proved so deeply soothing that soon my eyelids were growing unsustainably heavy and my neck seemed to be turning to a rubbery material. In no time at all, my head was slumped on my chest and I was engaged in the quiet, steady manufacture of several gallons of saliva - all of them, alas, spare.
Some people simply should not be allowed to fall asleep on a train, or, having fallen asleep, should be discreetly covered with a tarpaulin, and I'm afraid I am one of them. I awoke, some indeterminate time later, with a rutting snort and a brief, wild flail and lifted my head from my chest to find myself mired in a cobweb of drool from beard to belt buckle, and with three people gazing at me in a curiously dispassionate manner. At least I was spared the usual experience of waking to find myself stared at open-mouthed by a group of small children who would flee with shrieks at the discovery that the dribbling hulk was alive.
Shrinking from my audience and daubing myself discreetly with the sleeve of my jacket, I attended to the view. We were rattling through an open landscape that was pleasant rather than dramatic - arable farmland running off to big round hills - under a sky that seemed ready to collapse under its own weight of grey. From time to time we stopped in some inert little town with a dead little station - Ladybank, Cupar, Leuchars - before eventually entering a larger, fractionally more active world at Dundee, Arbroath and Montrose. And then, some three hours after leaving
Edinburgh, we were sliding into Aberdeen in a thin and fast-fading light.
I pressed my face to the glass keenly. I had never been to Aberdeen before and didn't know anyone who had. I knew almost nothing about it, other than that it was dominated by the North Sea oil industry and proudly called itself the 'Granite City'. It had always seemed to me exotically remote, a place I was unlikely ever to get to, so I was eager to see it.
I had booked into a hotel which was warmly described in my guidebook (a tome that later went for kindling), but turned out to ' be a dreary, overpriced back-street block. My room was small and ill-lit, with battered furniture, a narrow, prison-cell bed with a thin blanket and a single grudging pillow, and wallpaper doing its best to flee a damp wall. Once, in a moment of ambition, the management had installed a bedside console that operated lights, radio and TV, and incorporated an alarm clock, but none of these appeared to work. The alarm clock knob came off in my hand. With a sigh, I dumped my stuff on the bed and returned to the dark streets of Aberdeen looking for food, drink and granite splendour.
One thing I have learned over the years is that your impressions of a city are necessarily coloured by the route you take into it. Enter London by way of the leafy suburbs of Richmond, Barnes and Putney and alight at, say, Kensington Gardens or Green Park and you would think that you were in the midst of some vast, well-tended Arcadia. Enter it by way of Southend, Romford and Liverpool Street and you would perceive it in another way altogether. So perhaps it was simply the route I took from my hotel. All I know is that I walked for nearly three hours up streets and down and I couldn't find anything remotely adorable about Aberdeen. There were some briefly diverting vignettes - an open pedestrianized space around the Mercat Cross, an interesting-looking little museum called John Dun's House, some imposing university buildings - but no matter how many times I crisscrossed through its heart, all I seemed to encounter was a vast, glossy new shopping centre that was a damnable nuisance to circumnavigate (I kept ending up, muttering and lost, in dead-end delivery bays and collecting compounds for cardboard boxes) and a single broad endless street lined with precisely the same stores I had seen in every other city for the last six weeks. It was like anywhere and nowhere - like a small Manchester or a random fragment of Leeds. In vain I sought a single place where I could stand with hands on hips andsay, 'Aha, so this is Aberdeen.' Perhaps, too, it was the dreary time of year. I had read somewhere that Aberdeen had won the Britain in Bloom competition nine times, but I saw hardly any gardens or green spaces. Above all, I had scant sense of being in the midst of a rich, proud city built of granite.
On top of that, I couldn't settle on a place to eat. I hankered for something different, something I hadn't encountered a hundred times already on this trip - Thai or Mexican, perhaps, or maybe Indonesian or even Scottish - but there seemed nothing but the usual scattering of Chinese and Indian establishments, usually on a side-street, usually up a flight of stairs that looked as if they had been recently used for a motorcycle rally, and I couldn't bring myself to make that terrible climb into the unknown. In any case, I knew exactly what would be up there - low lighting, a reception area with a padded bar, twangy Asian music, tables covered with glasses of lager and stainless-steel plate warmers. I couldn't face it. In the end, I engaged in a desperate session of eenie meenie minie mo on a street corner and opted for an Indian. It was, in every degree, exactly like every Indian meal I had had in the previous weeks. Even the post-dinner burp tasted exactly the same. I returned to my hotel in a dim and restless frame of mind.
In the morning, I went for a walk around the town sincerely hoping that I would like it better, but alas, alas. It wasn't that there was anything wrong with Aberdeen exactly, more that it suffered from a surfeit of innocuousness. I had a shuffle round the new shopping centre and ranged some distance out into the surrounding streets, but they all seemed equally colourless and forgettable. And then I realized that the problem really wasn't with Aberdeen so much as with the nature of modern Britain. British towns are like a deck of cards that have been shuffled and endlessly redealt - same cards, different order. If I had come to Aberdeen fresh from another country, it would probably have seemed pleasant and agreeable. It was prosperous and clean. It had bookshops and cinemas and a university and pretty much everything else you could want in a community. It is, I've no doubt, a nice place to live. It's just that it was so much like everywhere else. It was a British city. How could it be otherwise?
Once I had packed this small thought into my head I liked Aberdeen much better. I can't say I ached to up sticks and move there - but then why should I when I could get exactly the same things, the same shops and libraries and leisure centres, the same pubs and television programmes, the same phone boxes, post offices, traffic lights, park benches, zebra crossings, marine air and post-Indian-dinner burps anywhere else? In an odd way the very things that had made Aberdeen seem so dull and predictable the night before now made it seem comfortable and rather homey. But I still never had the slightest sense that I was in the midst of a lot of granite, and it was without regret that I fetched my things from the hotel and returned to the station to resume my stately progress north.
The train was again very clean and nearly empty, with more • S0othing blues and greys. It was just two carriages, but it had a trolley service, which impressed me. The difficulty was that the young chap in charge was obviously keen - I had the impression that he had just started the job and was still at the point where it was fun to dispense teas and make change - but as there were only two other passengers and just sixty yards of carriage to patrol, he came by about once every three minutes. Still, the constant ruckus of the passing trolley kept me from nodding off and falling into a state of embarrassing hyper-salivation.
We rode through a pleasant but unexciting landscape. All my previous experience of the Highlands was up the more dramatic west coast, and this was decidedly muted in comparison - rounded hills, flat farms, occasional glimpses of an empty, steel-grey sea -but by no means disagreeable. Nothing of incident happened except that at Nairn a big plane took off and did all kinds of astonishing things in the sky, climbing vertically for hundreds of feet, then slowly tipping over and plunging towards earth before pulling out in a steep bank at nearly the last moment. I supposed it was some sort of a test base for RAF planes, but it was more exciting to imagine that it had been hijacked by a suicidal madman. And then an arresting thing happened. The plane began coming towards the train, really bearing down on it, as if the pilot had spotted us and thought that it would be interesting to take us with him. It got larger and larger and nearer and nearer - I looked around uneasily but there was no-one to share the experience with - until it nearly filled the window and then the train went into a cutting and the plane disappeared from view. I bought a cup of coffee and a packet of biscuits from the trolley to steady my nerves and waited for Inverness to appear.
I liked Inverness immediately. It is never going to win any beauty contests, but it has some likeable features - an old-fashioned littlecinema called La Scala, a well-preserved market arcade, a large and adorably over-the-top nineteenth-century sandstone castle on a hill, some splendid river walks. I was particularly taken with the dim-lit market arcade, an undercover thoroughfare apparently locked in a perpetual 1953. It had a barbershop with a revolving pole out front and pictures inside of people who looked like they had modelled their hairstyles on Thunderbirds characters. There was even a joke shop selling useful and interesting items that I hadn't seen for years: sneezing powder and plastic vomit (very handy for saving seats on trains) and chewing-gum that turns the teeth black. It was shut, but I made a mental note to return in the morning to stock up.
Above all, Inverness has an especially fine river, green and sedate and charmingly overhung with trees, lined on one side by big houses, trim little parks and the old sandstone castle (now the home of the regional sheriff's courts) and on the other by old hotels with steep-pitched roofs, more big houses and the stolid, Notre Dame-like grandeur of the cathedral, standing on a broad lawn beside the river. I checked into a hotel at random and immediately set off for a walk through the gathering twilight. The river was lined on both sides by gracious promenades thoughtfully punctuated with benches, which made it very agreeable for an evening stroll. I walked for some distance, perhaps two miles, on the Haugh Road side of the river, past little islands reached by Victorian suspension footbridges.
Nearly all the houses on both sides of the river were rambling places built for an age of servants. What, I wondered, had brought all this late Victorian wealth to Inverness, and who supported these handsome heaps today? Not far from the castle, on spacious grounds in what I suppose a developer would call a prime location, stood a particularly grand and elaborate mansion, with turrets and towers. It was a wonderful, spacious house, the kind you could imagine riding a bicycle around in, and it was boarded, derelict and up for sale. I couldn't think how such a likeable place could have ended up in such a neglected state. As I walked along, I lost myself in a reverie of buying it for a song, doing it up, and living happily ever after on these large grounds beside this deeply fetching river, until I realized what my family would say if I told them we weren't after all going to the land of shopping malls, 100-channel television and hamburgers the size of a baby's head, but instead to the damp north of Scotland.
And anyway, I regret to say that I could never live in Inverness because of two sensationally ugly modern office buildings that stand by the central bridge and blot the town centre beyond any hope of redemption. I came upon them now as I returned to the town centre and was positively riveted with astonishment to realize that an entire town could be ruined by two inanimate structures. Everything about them - scale, materials, design - was madly inappropriate to the surrounding scene. They weren't just ugly and large but so ill-designed that you could actually walk around them at least twice without ever finding the front entrance. In the larger of the two, on the river side where there might have been a restaurant or terrace or at least shops or offices with a view, much of the road frontage had been given over to a huge delivery bay with overhead metal doors. This in a building that overlooked one of the handsomest rivers in Britain. It was awful, awful beyond words.
I had recently been to Hobart in Tasmania, where the Sheraton chain had built a hotel of stunning plainness on its lovely waterfront. I had been told that the architect hadn't actually visited the site and had put the hotel restaurant at the back, where diners couldn't see the harbour. Since then, I had thought that was the most brainless thing I had ever heard of architecturally. I don't suppose this pair could possibly have been designed by the same architect - it was terrifying to think that there could be two architects in the world this bad - but he could certainly have worked for the firm.
Of all the buildings that I would deeply love to blow up in Britain - the Maples building in Harrogate, the Hilton Hotel in London, the Post Office building in Leeds, a lucky dip among almost any structure owned by British Telecom -I have no hesitation in saying that my first choice would be either of these two.
And here is the cruncher. Guess who inhabits these two piles of heartbreak? Well, I'll tell you. The larger is the regional headquarters of the Highland Enterprise Board and the other is the home of Inverness and Nairn Enterprise Board, the two bodies entrusted with the attractiveness and well-being of this lovely and vital corner of the country. God.