skip to main |
skip to sidebar
I don't care what anyone says, you can't beat a camping holiday. There is just something special about camping that makes up for the inconvenience of shared showers, shared toilets and/or mud outside your front door for a few days. Outside our front door last week, almost literally, was Loch Lomond - the Camping and Caravan Club site at Luss goes right down to the shore of the Loch and it is lovely.
What is best though is the privilege of being by the loch before the coach loads of old ladies bearing carrier bags from Edinburgh Woollen Mills, when there are the best views of the loch - the views you see when the dog has dragged you out of your sleeping bag at 7.15, when the mist is still on the water and it is perfectly still.
For these views I even forgave the site for having traffic howling past on the A82. If we are to compare C And C sites around the loch I think that its position wins hands down over the site at Milarrochy Bay on the Eastern shore. What made it even sweeter though was when strolling along the beach of an evening, we were sharing these views with the patrons of the Lodge on Loch Lomond, a hotel whose car park was packed with high end BMWs, a few Porsche Carreras and a Ferrari 350M and many of whose clientele were well heeled Americans who thought the beach was exclusively theirs:
"Hi there, we are staying here, are you here for the day?"
"No we are staying here too"
"Oh, which room are you in ?"
"Ours goes right down to the shore..."
To be fair, by this time they'd sussed that our clothing designers were more Primarni and Ebay than Dolce Gabbana, but still, I think they thought we were quaint when they stopped to consider that we might not be entirely serious. And in any case, I challenge them to say they had a better time than we did.
Further along the loch shore, just beyond the boundaries of our site, lived a chap who played the bagpipes. To hear the sound of his evening practice drift across the loch was just enough to forgive Scotland for the other pipers you might hear hanging around the tourist locations in clan tartan with a cap held out hopefully to the passers by. Try as I might I couldn't stop the hairs on the back of my neck standing up when I heard the skirl of the pipes; it was all I could do to stop myself shouting 'Freedom!' in a loud voice with an accent somewhere between Glasgow and Melbourne.
We're back from our week in Drummore, five miles from the Mull of Galloway in Scotland: no street lamps, barely any people and the sea metres from the front wall of our tiny fisherman's cottage. Bliss. But there's always coming back; and my goodness don't we do life quickly! It's taken me a week to regain speed after experiencing the pace and easy lilt of conversation that gently soothes you through your day rather than the machine gun chatter that whacks us through our city lives.
Dumfries and Galloway, or more specifically Wigtownshire, is the forgotten part of Scotland. As one local put it as he chatted whilst I bought a bottle of Robinson's Cordial - an act that took some fifteen minutes, not because the shop was busy, just that everyone had something to talk about at the till, and time to do it - he said, "Everyone gets to Carlisle and heads North for the 'real' Scotland; no one turns left. And by not doing so they miss out on this mellow stretch of land that is gently warmed by the Gulf Stream, giving it some of the loveliest gardens in the UK - more of that another day.
What this little finger of land - the Mull - also has, is a variety and richness of birdlife I have never seen before. I must have looked like a yokel: constantly pointing and dribbling as I saw another previously unrecognised bird (that is unrecognised by me - not a brand new species). But they just kept cropping up: Gannets performing their dramatic hunting dives 100metres from our front window, Razorbills bobbing in the bay, Sandwich Terns (which I was delighted to be able to identify - birders will understand), Guillemots (Black and Standard). I could go on, but at the risk of alienating my non anorak wearing readers I will desist, anyway it's not good for a man of my age to have his pulse racing like this.
Anyway, we are back amidst the concrete and steel and right slap bang back into the fray - I won't bore you with the details; suffice to say it is enough to prevent me from having time to write much at present, the long gaps between posts at the moment.
I love meeting people; I love rubbing shoulders with people from different backgrounds and with people who bring different things to life. It may sound counter-intuitive, but it is also why I love blogging. I have been in the virtual company of, and read about many different and interesting people.
After my discovery that I not only grew up alongside a fabulous artist but that I actually like his art - imagine growing up alongside Max Beckman! - my blog was visited by another artist, Katherine, who, had I not blogged, would have remained far away from my consciousness, on the far side of the world.
Mrs C and I are off to a far away place for a week: Scotland, Drummore to be precise. In the meantime, you can do worse than visit Katherine's blog in New Zealand where you can not only see her lovely interpretations of her native landscape but also learn some of the fascinating process of their creation.
See you all in a week or so.
