Caliban – Opinion and Righteous Anger

We’re now in Tobermory on the Isle of Mull, the second largest island in the Inner Hebrides, and it’s beautiful here. Tobermory’s Main Street was a finalist in Google’s Most Picturesque UK Street Awards. Having spent the late afternoon moseying along it, it’s not hard to understand why.

Two ferries were needed to get here, one from the Lochranza on the Isle of Arran to Claonaig on the sparsely populated and little-visited Kintyre peninsula (yes, the one whose mull was made famous by Wings), and another from Oban to Craignure on the Isle of Mull. It was a beautiful, winding drive.

Gaelic is the language of the local folk around here. All of the road signs are in both Gaelic and English. The island is pretty inaccessible, the morning papers arrive in the afternoon and the locals like it that way.

When we arrived at the hotel at 15:30, the proprietor said, “I’ll go and see whether your room is ready.”

Things happen more slowly here. The pace of life is a few gears lower than that of the mainland and that’s part of the island’s charm.

We’re looking forward to exploring the island tomorrow. There are more foreign tourists here than on Arran, but still very few. They were virtually non-existent on Arran and the few we encountered were, of course, almost all Dutch. You just can’t ever seem to get away from the Dutch.

We leave Arran in the morning, taking the ferry from Lochranza to Claonaig. From there, we drive north to Oban and then take another ferry across to Craignure on the Isle of Mull. Finally, we’ll drive west across the island to the town of Tobermory, where we’ll spend the next few nights. The drive isn’t all that long, but will take us most of the day, one way or another.

Arran has been great, really great. We’ve seen a lot of the island and even found time today to take the children to a swimming pool. We’ve seen deer, seals and birds of prey.

The weather has been very good and we feel as if we’ve experienced several seasons over the last few days.

The food, too, has been excellent. The Scottish diet, in general, really agrees with me, which isn’t to say it’s entirely healthy, but who can resist Ayrshire bacon, black pudding and apple bruschetta for breakfast? I don’t even really like black pudding, but it tasted very nice here.

I hope Mull is as nice as Arran.

Arran is beautiful. The saying goes that you can experience all of Scotland in miniature here and they might not be exaggerating. The island, the largest in the Firth of Clyde, really does have a lot to offer.

So far, we’ve beachcombed, hiked, gone on a tour of the local whisky distillery (concluded with a wee dram, of course), spotted seals around the coast and picked out deer on the hillsides.

We’ve endured some rain, but nothing too taxing. The forecast remains relentlessly gloomy, but reality continues to belie the meteorological pessimism. A satisfying diet of fish, coffee and shortbread will hopefully fend off the ill effects of inclement weather, anyway, should any pass our way.

The drive to Ardrossan from Glasgow was short, taking less than an hour. From there, we took the ferry to Brodick, a journey of 55 minutes.

We’ll be here for four nights in total, which should give us enough time to do some hiking and get around to the western side of the island.

The places we’re going to on this holiday lend themselves to longer stays than many of the places we’ve been to on previous trips. Consequently, we’re spending four nights in almost every location, which means we’re also clocking up fewer kilometres in the car. It’s amazing to think how little driving we’ve had to do to reach the west coast of Scotland and even make it onto one of the islands. Car ferries really are a great invention.

Since we arrived in Scotland, the five day forecast has predicted rain on every single day except for one. In that, it’s woefully reminiscent of our ill-fated Italian jaunt back in May. Unlike that troubled itinerary, however, the forecast for this region of the world has been off on more than one occasion. We’re grateful for small mercies.

Today again, we escaped the rain, although, like yesterday, it came down in buckets in the evening. Fortuitously, then as this evening, we were ensconced in the hotel, lazily eating dinner in the hotel bar. Well, it’s not only easy with the children, but the hotel had given us 12 free drink coupons and we were doing our best to work our way through our surprisingly generous allotment, which even includes spirits and beers. Why go elsewhere to eat when the drink flows freely (in both senses) here?

The Millennium has been a bit of a mixed bag. Its location would suggest top quality, but once inside, the tell-tale signs of faded grandeur slowly start to reveal themselves. I’m not talking about the décor, although that, too, is tired and ready to be tackled. No, my gripe is more about room key cards that constantly fail and need reprogramming, staff that don’t know on which terms Internet access is available in the rooms, placebo air-conditioning (in rooms that wouldn’t even need it, if properly ventilated), empty trays at breakfast that aren’t noticed and replenished in a timely fashion, an exclusive lounge that has about as much to offer the peckish guest as the hotel’s boiler room (i.e. sweet fuck all: it’s the finger food and refreshments that have been excluded, not the lower tariff-paying guests), housekeeping staff too lackadaisical to restock your toilet rolls, and more minor pecadillos of a similar ilk.

The place probably had higher standards in its heyday, but someone has let the place slip and slide into casual, complacent mediocrity. The price, however, is bang on the nail. It’s surprisingly affordable here, especially given the location, which is smack on George Square. It doesn’t get any more central than that. And then there’s those 12 free drink vouchers, which could save you about half the cost of a night in the hotel, if you apply them sensibly.

So much for Glasgow. Tomorrow, we move on, westwards. We leave the mainland behind and take the ferry to the Isle of Arran, where we’ll sojourn for four nights.

Things start to take a decidedly rural turn at this point. With Edinburgh and Glasgow out of the way, the urban element of the holiday is already complete at the end of the first week. We’ll be in small towns and villages from this point forward.

This is where it starts to get tricky if the weather is seven shades of shite, which, of course, it is forecast to be. We’ve always had good luck in the northern latitudes, so we’re hoping for continued clemency. If the weather in the days ahead proves as steadfastly unpredictable as it has during the last few days, we’ll have the situation under control. Otherwise, we may struggle to busy ourselves and keep the small people amused.

That’s Scotland for you. If you want predictably fine weather, you go to Italy instead. Oh wait; we tried that, too, didn’t we?

The short drive from Edinburgh to Glasgow is a pretty dull one, but mercifully short at just under an hour.

Glasgow was sure to be a let-down after Edinburgh, but with our expectations appropriately set, our arrival here wasn’t the disappointment it might otherwise have been.

There’s no denying that we were very sorry to leave Edinburgh. It’s the kind of place to which you just never want to bid farewell. A full week there probably wouldn’t have exhausted the seemingly endless possibilities for walking the wynds, hiking in the hills and sipping machiatos in cosy cafés.

The weather during our last couple of days in Edinburgh defied the gloom-laden forecasts and treated us to radiant sunshine, mere speckles of rain arriving in the late afternoon. Edinburgh holds its own in the rain, but, pretty much like anywhere else on earth, is best enjoyed in warm sunshine. Highlights of the last couple of days were Calton Hill, Edinburgh Castle and Princes Street Gardens.

Glasgow is an altogether less idiosyncratic city. You could be air-dropped into Sauchiehall Street or Argyle Street and you’d be hard-pressed to tell your surroundings apart from the major thoroughfares of innumerable other British cities. It’s the same homogenised concoction of mobile phone shops, cheap and nasty high street fashion tat, post-modern coffee cognoscenti hang-outs, and fast food dens of iniquity. We all have the inexorable march of globalisation to thank for the privilege of being able to consume the same amorphous pulp at the far reaches of any given compass bearing.

One does wonder what British high streets looked like before the advent of mobile phones and the demise of that most British of gastronomic sins, instant coffee. Frankly, I can’t remember.

We visited the cathedral and the necropolis today, but didn’t do much else. Well, I say that, but I did, in fact, call a lot of hotels to make some bookings for the weeks ahead. This playing-it-by-ear thing is all well and good, but this ‘ere place called Scotland seems to have been discovered by the great unwashed and they’ve only gone and booked everything up in advance, haven’t they? I’m joking, of course. We knew it would be tough to wing it like this, but it’s turning out to be very hard, indeed. A lot of compromises are having to be worked out and made. One wonders if we wouldn’t have been better off if we hadn’t shirked the responsibility of timely planning.

That said, one way or another, most of the holiday is actually booked now, all the way through until 8th August. If I’m counting correctly, we have no fewer than eight ferry crossings booked for that period. In that regard, Scotland requires more logistical planning than many European destinations.

It’s already clear, alas, that we won’t have time for the Shetland Islands, so that will remain for a future trip. There’s only so much you can do in just over a month and that’s all the time we have available. And no matter how much time is at hand for a trip, it’s somehow never really enough. There’s always an extra level of detail in which one would like to travel, but for which there simply isn’t time.

We’ve started Eloïse on pocket money. She gets €1 per week, but while we’re in the UK, this has been converted, strongly in her favour, I might add, to £1. She bought a hair band today, after considerable deliberation. Sarah has expanded on this in her posting.

I had my first taste of haggis today, at breakfast in the hotel. I had expected it to taste, er, offal (fnarr, fnarr!), but it was actually OK. The only time I felt any unease was when I paused to recall the ingredients of the dish, a subject definitely best not dwelt upon.