Not quite the North Sea view, but a trip along Loch Leven and its farmland showed off the beautiful northern sky
I have recently returned from my annual trip to Scotland to visit my friends up in Kinross and to see the wonderful T In The Park festival. I’ll write a bit more about it later, as I now have tons of work to do, tons of folk to talk to on the dog and bone, and lots and lots to write up. But I needed to note what a cold and warm and inviting and daunting place it is up there.
Being no fan of flying I elected to use the train after a lovely tip that National Express had a £9 one-way deal on. So I got to Scotland and back for £18, which isn’t bad at all, I reckon. It beats the hell out of trundling to some god-awful suburban airport on a rattling old train to be cattle-herded onto a pokey 737 to be scuttled across the sky for 50 nerve-wracking minutes. You ease over to Kings Cross station, find your seat, grab a book and sit for four-and-a-half hours, gliding through the British countryside on sleek silver rails. Sort of.
On the way back, lightning struck the track, which knocked out a whole raft load of points, meaning we sat stewing in a leaning carriage for an additional 50 arse-anaesthetising minutes. But as one guy on the journey noted to his correspondent via mobile phone “It’s British Rail, isn’t it?”
And so I sat and read on the way there, not a volt of lightning to be seen, head stuck into a terrible bit of chick fic I bought in a Cosmopolitan magazine as a research exercise, thinking, cripes, is this really what it’s like to be a woman? Luckily I had to take pause just as we were zipping past the Angel of the North, and so for the first time ever, I got to see that magnificent monument just before it went back into hiding beyond the hills.
You also get to look out over the North Sea as you make your way between Newcastle and Berwick-upon-Tweed, which is uncannily serene. It always reminds me of looking out over the Atlantic when I visit my parents in Antigua. There is literally an ocean of blue gently curving in the distance, smudged and dotted with Joni Mitchell’s little fluffy clouds. There’s craggy beach, the occasional walker looking out, perhaps a ship in the distance, and, to sound a little bit cheesy, the wonder of it all. There’s a realisation that all this London, its sirens and houses of chicken selling and its clack and hum and howl, crowbarred doors and rude citizens really means very, very little in the grand scheme of things. That sea has been there longer than there has been a London and it will remain, long after this place has turned to dust. Until the last leg of chicken has been sold to the last chubby teenager who carelessly chucks the red cardboard box of remains into the streets for the London rats and London pigeons and London foxes to tidy up.
Oddly, I found it comforting.