Boswell's Bus Pass (23 page)

On the car deck of the Oban ferry I made eye contact with one of many sheep peering expectantly through the slats on its lorry. Despite the frequent tender ministrations of the driver it was not going to end well.

In the lounge we listened to the tannoy announcement insisting that all dogs must stay in The Designated Area. Somewhere on board there was a tumble of yelping defecating dogs, sea dogs obviously, at least 101 Dalmatians, dogs of war, lap dogs with nothing to lap, St Bernards desperate to get to the bar for a refill, and just possibly, the very unloved metaphorical black dog of Johnson’s depression.

A subsequent, more cheerful announcement asked for the woman who had handed her spectacles in for repair to make her way to the purser’s office. You have to hand it to CalMac. Other services included tattooing, Reki massage, fortune telling, colonic irrigation and cornea transplants.

We had warned our latest Oban B & B landlady that we would arrive late. This was evidently one of the funniest things she had ever heard judging by her howls of laughter. After a mystifying sequence of nudges and winks she said the front door would be open, and so it proved. We were both apprehensive lest she was planning to alarm us by leaping naked from the wardrobe by way of a welcoming surprise or had liberally laced the towels with itching powder. I left Roy in the House of Fun and walked to find a cash machine, having spent my entire budget on the cornea transplant.

Oban at night was disconcerting. For one thing there was no money left in the ATMs which had been emptied by the now disintegrating army of underage boy drinkers, its wounded stragglers still lurching between the kebab shop and the all-night newsagent. Within hours the urge to read the
Highland Free Press
could become so all-consuming that a queue of night-shirted news addicts would jostle with Fisherman’s Friend junkies. The ferry terminal, still fairground bright, hummed adjacent to the dark streets. A space station fallen from the sky but still functioning.

After a night, mercifully undisturbed by jokes, japes, ruses, squirting flowers or leaping clowns, we tiptoed out early to catch the early morning ferry back to Mull, leaving money on the bed. This seemed an oddly immoral thing to do as if we were paying for services rendered.

It was comforting to be back on a bus bound for Iona. Being a pilgrim bus the seats were upholstered with sackcloth and the public address system played muted psalms. Most of the passengers were crippled and bent by disease and guilt. One or two of them stood at intervals in the aisles and scourged themselves with knotted ropes. Most suitcases had faded blue Lourdes and Fatima stickers.

It was comforting to be back on a bus bound for Iona. Half full, it sped through tourist web pages of touched-up vistas and perfectly framed landscapes. From the window we saw a huge bird of prey; talons outstretched braking hard, half dreaming, as if it had not realized until the last moment that its intended victim was in fact a large bus.

St Columba walked languidly down the ramp towards the small boat at Craignure and sighed deeply. Could he really be bothered to conquer a small island, found a monastery, and a nunnery (not too close mind to the monks mind), build a church, dig a well, the odd farm, all this while keeping the natives happy with the promise of eternal life? It felt like hard work and all because of a small war he started over the copyright of a book he fancied. It didn’t seem fair somehow.

Johnson describes landing on Iona, ‘Our boat could not be forced very near the dry ground, and our Highlanders carried us over the water.’

They stayed at Neil Macdonald’s house near the shore where according to Boswell Johnson managed to eat a single potato and
drink a mug of sweet milk. Oral tradition again has it otherwise. Still steaming from his paddle ashore Dr Johnson is alleged to have eaten a whole chicken. Fat dribbling down his waistcoat, he tossed the gnawed bones over his shoulder and, after belching loudly, licked his lips. For some reason he was also outraged at the lack of a fork.

The woman in the corner shop pointed out the original house. Our knock was answered by an obliging young man who apologised for not inviting us in but explained that all his children had been stricken with … chicken pox.

The early tourists were shocked to discover that the nun’s chapel was ‘covered a foot deep with cow-dung’ and were disappointed by the simplicity of the gravestones while Boswell decided that St Martin’s cross did not ‘come up to my expectations.’ They did though drink from the well. Like every known well in Christendom and presumably Islamdom too, the well was covered in a
health-and-safety
mesh through which generations of tourists have nevertheless managed to push coins. What is it with wells, ponds and money? Which penny-pinching gods sheath their thunderbolts on receiving a scattering of someone’s loose change? Fair enough, I’ll let you off this time! These wells must be a numismatist’s delight; launderette tokens, washers, a trove of Victorian pennies with Britannia on a bicycle on the reverse, and who knows, the odd farthing.

We snacked outside the main chapel and watched a party of immaculately dressed Italians paying homage to the God Gucci. We listened wincing to the happy-clappy sounds emanating from an adjacent building from which young virgins with seraphic
expressions
and worthy full-length socks would emerge at intervals, bouncing to a holy beat we couldn’t hear.

Boswell slunk off on a couple of occasions to wallow in the spectacle of himself, role playing at being a Christian as he knelt at prayer, ‘I offered up my adorations to GOD. I again addressed a few words to Saint Columba; and I warmed my soul with religious resolutions.’

Had they visited the craft shop adjacent to the abbey they may have had a better time. Dr Johnson could have chosen a present for Mrs Thrale from a huge array of silver Celtic crosses and charms attached to bangles, bracelets and chastity belts while Boswell could have sent Margaret a piece of drift wood carved to look like one of the serpents that Columba sent packing from the island.

Like Dr Johnson, Roy and I would not like anyone to think that
we had looked on the ruins ‘without some emotion’. Even more spiritually uplifting though was the walk to the far shore of the island and the view across the Atlantic. We climbed adjacent hills and lay in the sun watching as the first pilgrim boat rose and fell with the tide. It eventually came ashore in the cove beneath us. A thin aesthetic man crossed himself and drove his staff into the sand. His companions lay exhausted on the wet shore. The thin man went round each of them and gave them water from a skin vessel round his waist. Eventually they revived sufficiently to drag the boat into the undergrowth where they disguised it with branches and sea-weed.

On the return journey the bus shook with the ecstatic thanks of the cured. The road behind was covered with walking sticks and single crutches which had been taken down from the overhead racks and hurled triumphantly from the windows. The driver joined in the Halleluiah chorus and beat out the rhythm on his steering wheel.

On the return journey most of the passengers slept. There were several elderly men sitting with their spouses and wearing baseball hats. It is a strange fashion for old men. By aping youth they appear at least ten times older than they are. Adorned with care home logos and transatlantic street slogans they sit on top of white heads like a mocking reproach. Behind them as if to complete the painful tableau of passing time a young foreign couple snogged without drawing breath for many miles.

We saw several rabbits scampering gleefully through the heather celebrating their release from the conjurer’s top hat. (He had fallen on hard times and couldn’t face putting them down).

Boswell celebrated his last night on Mull by drinking himself senseless with the Laird of Lochbuie who ‘had admirable port. Sir Allan and he drank each a bottle of it. Then we drank a bowl of punch. I was seized with an avidity for drinking, and Lochbuie and I became mighty social. Another bowl was made. Mr Johnson had gone to bed as the first was finished, and had admonished me, “Don’t drink any more
poonch
.’’ I must own that I was resolved to drink more, for I was by this time a good deal intoxicated; and I gave no answer but slunk from him. But luckily before I had tasted the second bowl, I grew very sick, and was forced to perform the operation that
Anthony did in the Senate house, if Cicero is to be credited.’

Roy and I each enjoyed a bottle of aptly named Black Dog ale on the last of our ferries.

On the road south from Oban the travellers were drenched to the skin. Johnson recalled, ‘The night came on while we had yet a great part of the way to go though not so dark, but that we could discern the cataracts which poured down the hills, on one side, and fell into one general channel that ran with great violence on the other. The wind was loud, the rain was heavy, and the whistling of the blast, the fall of the shower, the rush of the cataracts, and the roar of the torrent, made a nobler chorus of the rough musick of nature than it had ever been my chance to hear before.’

David’s stint of supply teaching had finished and despite his best efforts he had failed to conjure sufficient reasons why he shouldn’t travel with me from Oban to Glasgow.

The weather looked fine from the window of the bus to Taynuilt. The journey passed without incident or interest until it came to getting off the bus. I approached the driver confident that my hovering presence would remind him that we would like him to stop when it was safe to do so. This was, after all, the established etiquette for the journey so far. This bus was different. An unexpected acceleration had me clutching at the thinnest of air having failed to find any sort of restraining rail; I made a split second decision not to
grasp the folded disabled chair lest it ballooned open and enveloped the front seat passengers like an unloved, over-effusive relative. After a balletic realignment I managed to stay upright while clouting the driver round the head with a swinging rucksack. He did not enjoy the experience and subjected me to a detailed and humiliating lecture on how to leave his bus safely, which the other passengers enjoyed immensely.

Boswell and Johnson had followed the drove road to Taychreggan before crossing Loch Awe by ferry to Portsonachan. Previously David had phoned the owner of the Creggan Inn and charmed her into agreeing to provide some sort of boat to take us across. This offer was dependent on both the prevailing wind and the amount of daylight. There was precious little of the latter as we yomped in the path of untold thousands of cattle and their minders. An elderly couple stopped their car and kindly offered to take us the rest of the way. Mentally flicking through the unwritten rule book for the jaunt (and choosing not to remember the illicit taxi ride in the Mearns) I decided that in the circumstances and bearing in mind that refusal might cause offence, we could accept.

We were graciously received at the hotel though we soon
understood
why Boswell and Johnson had opted to cross to the inn on the other side of the water. For two bottles of beer we were charged £9. ‘Boogah that for a game of soldiers!’ said the Doctor in an unguarded moment.

While waiting for the boat to be salvaged we savoured each mouthful of the world’s most expensive ale and inspected the monstrous fish in glass cases along the wall. Things stuffed and mounted were to prove a motif on this part of the journey. The 56 pound salmon, the size of a small pony, had been hooked at 1.00 on June 12
^th
1923 and killed at 3.30 below the Ash Trees. The fish still looked vengeful, exhausted and undeniably dead.

We were summoned to the jetty guarded by a lurching, sun-faded pink telephone box and given rigid life belts that had evolved from village stocks. Our principle ferryman was Jacob, a pony-tailed lad from Eastern Europe with few words of English. His nautical mentor was Fergus, a graduate from Fagin’s den who shook a lot and licked nervously at orange-tinged lips. I asked him if he missed London. ‘This is great in it? I can drink ‘ere and at the pub up the road when it’s open.’

The dinghy was still semi-submerged when we stepped aboard. David assisted the baling operation by adding his weight to the front causing the water to slosh where it could more easily be scooped out. From the shore Fergus enacted an angular mime and shouted some indecipherable instructions to Jacob about the outboard motor. Jacob smiled benignly before accelerating suicidally towards the rocks we had just left. On balance he decided that life might after all be worth living and we soon faced the right direction although still sitting ominously low in the choppy loch waters.

The sack-clothed drovers rowed up against the sodden bony flanks of the cattle, pushing them with both hands, hitting the most errant and scared with staves. The acquiescent beast at the front was being towed by the lead boat while the rest of the herd swam behind in an impressive display of bovine loyalty. The surface of the loch was obscured by a mist of cattle breath and the air was rent with bellowing.

On the other side Boswell and Johnson sheltered in a hut which had delusions of being an inn. ‘We were much wet’, Boswell records, ‘I changed my clothes in part, and was at pains to get myself well dried. Mr Johnson resolutely kept on all his clothes, wet as they were, letting them steam before the smoky turf fire.’

The Sonachan Inn, determined to put one over on its neighbour across the water, makes a feature of its large mouldy moulting collection of dead birds and animals. Behind the glass they cling to branches by their claw tips in a rigid and literal pecking order. The tawny owl lords it above the ptarmigan and the red grouse who looks disdainfully at the fieldfare. They all ignore the magpie. Creeping up the sides of the case are a mangy polecat and a moth-eaten stoat with a glass eye hanging out.

Having failed to capture the public imagination with its bestial taxidermy rank, the owners are putting the finishing touches to a new display in an adjacent room. By lifting the corner of the tarpaulin we catch sight of a stuffed ghillie circa 1920, a tinker with swollen poacher’s bags and visible gunshot wounds, early road-kill in the form of a little old lady in a tweed jacket, and an obese American child who went missing a decade previously.

David completely miscalculated how long it would take us to walk the four miles to get the early morning bus to Inveraray. Mercifully no
one witnessed the unedifying sight of two overheated pensioners practising a death rattle duet as they lumbered up hill and down dale with barely breath to whistle the theme tune to
The Bridge Over the River Kwai
.

Reading between his lines Boswell also found the novelty of the journey wearing thin, ‘I recollect nothing of the country through which we passed … I remember but little of our conversation.’ His depression was returning.

At least our day was dry. On the summit of one of the many hills the sun broke from the sky and landed on our path in welding arcs of sparks and bouncing light, a blinding exhilarating encounter with an extraterrestrial force. The transient warmth activated the scent from an adjacent mountain of freshly sawn logs.

Even this Damascus moment would not have saved David from being garrotted and dumped in a ditch if the bus had not been ten minutes late.

Dr Johnson declared that the inn at Inveraray, now the Argyll Hotel, was ‘not only commodious but magnificent’. Boswell concurred, ‘a most excellent inn’ though he notes ruefully that ‘even here Mr Johnson would not change his clothes.’ Given his thrall to superstition and magical thinking Johnson may have struck a deal with his psyche, the terms of which guaranteed respite from some unspecified torment if he kept his clothes on. Perhaps he was just a manky old tosspot at heart.

Although the receptionist had not heard of the earlier guests she helpfully pointed us towards the massive leather bound visitors’ book that covered at least the last three years.

‘The proximity to the water and the attentive servility of the staff have greatly contributed to a creative indolence conducive to
intimations
of conviviality not often encountered in such a primitive country.’ Sam Johnson 25
^th
October 1773.

Instead we read, ‘Thank you for sending on my gold ear ring’ and ‘Thank you for looking after us when my sister collapsed unwell.’

Every passenger on the Campbeltown West Coast Motors bus
(
Bringing people together since
1923
) stepped down and returned fifteen minutes later having looted every garage and corner shop in Inveraray of every last copy of the
Daily Record, Daily Mail, and Daily Express
not to mention all bakery products and confectionery. They had after all been travelling since 1923, deprived of all food and reading materials. As the smell of bacon and belches wafted down the aisle we negotiated the summit of the Rest and be Thankful.

It was here that we caught our next glimpse of the party travelling very slowly on the track a hundred feet or so beneath us. There were four very small horses, or shelties, as Johnson called them. Joseph led the way, a tall aristocratic figure staring straight ahead. Dr Johnson followed, a hill of a man, all in black, his feet almost touching the ground. Boswell was third in line, head bowed, perhaps nodding off, and a baggage horse at the rear. In an instant they were gone.

Dr Johnson described the same section of the journey. ‘After two days stay at Inverary we proceeded Southward over Glencroe, a black and dreary region, now made easily passable by a military road, which rises from either end of the glen by an acclivity not dangerously steep, but sufficiently laborious. In the middle, at the top of the hill, is a seat with this description,
Rest, and be Thankful
. Stones were placed to mark the distances, which the inhabitants have taken away, resolved, they said, “to have no new miles’’.’ An instinctive glance at the overhead storage racks showed no heavy stones smuggled aboard.

As we passed down the side of Loch Long David pointed out the remains of the pier that housed the Second World War torpedo testing site. In an instant everything was transformed into black and white, calibrated cross hair wires appeared on our periscoped eyes and shouts of
Achtung!
filled the bus. There were no survivors clinging to the debris on the ominously calm waters of the loch, just floating copies of
The Daily Record
and sweet-wrappers.

As Boswell and Johnson had enjoyed the hospitality of Sir James Colquhoun at Rossdhu House we left the bus at the start of the Luss by-pass. We stepped into the decidedly up-market gift shop. No clan tea towels or ceramic Nessie poos here. For only £120 (reduced from £150) we could be the proud owner of a fully cured reindeer hide. In case we were anxious about how to clean our hide were we to purchase it all was made clear. ‘Place the hide on the wall, use a vacuum cleaner but choose the lowest power, Vacuum hide from head to heel. Please avoid stepping, sitting or walking on the hide to
prevent shedding.’ David pointed out that such hides were still prized trophies among the Special Forces who would split them and use them as sleeping bags. Presumably shedding was not a problem for the SAS. If we were inclined to really show off we could purchase a zebra-print cow hide for the bargain price of £399.

We were soon lost in Luss which is an achievement given the size of the village more notorious as the location for
Take the Highway
. But
Lost in Luss
we were, bit players in a hastily titled, misspelled oriental porno movie, the sequel to
Big Lock Suckers
and several more. The consequences of our lost state were in fact more edifying as we had strayed into a pilgrimage trail dedicated to St Kessog, the patron saint of breakfast cereals.

We learned that the sixth century monk’s main claim to fame was averting war by raising various princes from the dead. He was killed abroad by some very bad druids and brought back to Scotland wrapped in a blanket of sweet-smelling herbs which promptly took root and made medieval Luss smell much better. Druids; sectarian scum. His name was evidently roared at Bannockburn to rally the troops. At this point David, a Richard Dawkins acolyte still
recovering
from the pope’s visit, was apoplectic with agnostic fury. An unfortunate consequence of his indignation was that he refused to ask directions to Rossdhu House, now the exclusive Loch Lomond golf course, and strode off in the wrong direction.

Hours later we crawled towards the electronic gates of the golf course. We were spotted by the security guard nonchalantly reading his paper one hundred yards from the entrance who phoned ahead to warn the lodge keeper that two bedraggleds were approaching. The warning was effective as the gate flunky flailed his arms in a doomed attempt to shoo us off the path. He listened sceptically as I explained that as the result of an earlier phone call the manager had agreed to grant us temporary access.

As we waited to be driven to the clubhouse David reminded me that the term ‘exclusive’ means keeping people out. After all its website makes clear that ‘It is a singular place to meet on the world stage … it is a sanctuary not just for golf aficionados but for world thinkers.’

Looking at the world through the tinted glass of the 4x4 was a novel experience. For one thing the manicured greens looked more like manicured greys and it was difficult to work out the colour of the
helicopter parked on the lawn or the livery of the caddies’ vests. By a subtle process of spectrum analysis we worked out that they were probably dressed in red. There were so many of them they would easily outnumber the entire Vatican Guard, whom they resembled and whom they would in all probability thrash at arm wrestling. As we passed, several golfers stared at the Range Rover, aching to spot celebrities even more celebrated than themselves.

‘Grant Oh Great God of Golfers that today I will stand in the gents next to someone truly famous; may our splash-guards be adjacent while, staring ahead in a manly sort of way, we exchange a few words. May I be able to drop his name into subsequent conversations with my bank manager, my annoying neighbour over the barbeque and the woman from the escort agency who I know likes me for being me.’