Boswell's Bus Pass (6 page)

When David and I resumed our journey North from Leuchars we had both survived Christmas and Scotland was in the throes of its worst winter for fifty years. Gas supplies were being rationed, roads closed, the prospect of ever being able to watch football again had become a distant fantasy. The transformation of Cowdenbeath into an Alpine haven was a miracle only normally achieved with the aid of Class A drugs or a psychotic episode. Even Sodom and Gomorrah would look attractive in these circumstances, dependent of course on their proximity to good schools.

A small sense of euphoria was enhanced by sitting in the front upstairs seat with the hip-flask strategically positioned on the window ledge, presumably in breach of numerous by-laws and regulations; repeat offending would render the perpetrators liable to having their bus passes publicly shredded and their bits cut off.

Either way it was a far cry from the days when only Nicotinics and dogs climbed upstairs to suffocate in the heavy green fug of fags. Did buses have ash trays then or did everyone stand in a mulch of damp discarded filters, a foul carpet of yellow scarabs? Certainly, small children regularly disappeared into the acrid pea soupers never to be seen again and the life expectancy of conductors was approximately
three journeys. Even Y-fronts had to be fumigated after a journey upstairs.

There would have been no stopping at snowy woods and
speculating
as to their ownership for Johnson for whom the lack of trees on the East coast of Scotland, despite my dream, remained both a source of perplexity and a confirmation of England’s innate
superiority
.

‘The roads of Scotland afford little diversion to the traveller, who seldom sees himself either encountered or overtaken, and who has nothing to contemplate but grounds that have no visible boundary, or are separated by walls of loose stone. From the bank of the Tweed to St. Andrews I had never seen a single tree … The variety of sun and shade is here utterly unknown. There is no tree for either shelter or timber. The oak and the thorn is equally a stranger, and the whole country is extended in uniform nakedness, except that in the road between Kirkcaldy and Cowpar, I passed for a few yards between two hedges. A tree might be a show in Scotland as a horse in Venice. At St. Andrews Mr. Boswell found only one, and recommended it to my notice …’

He would have been pleasantly surprised then to gaze on the fir plantations laden with their white and heavy harvest of snow. He would have been even more surprised to have seen the single palm tree which was plonked in the middle of a strange complex, well off the beaten track but obviously on the itinerary of the 96A, which apart from the tree consisted of a Dobbies Garden Centre, a
MacDonald
’s and a David Lloyd Sports Complex. Why would anyone want to explore the wider world beyond this consumerist oasis? By accident we had stumbled on the inspiration behind Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs.

Elsewhere an entire field was sown with geese resting on their flight across oceans to warm lands only glimpsed in dreams and toddlers’ story books. Their grey messiness was an affront to the unspoiled whiteness. There were two other cameos that had not featured on anyone’s Christmas card: for some reason a plantation of sprouts had refused to succumb to the snow, the stumpy growths flaunting their anomalous greenness; in the adjacent field the worlds of rumination, defecation and fertiliser were evidenced by three monstrous yellow steaming heaps of dung.

From the bus it was possible to spot other occasional violations
caused by foot and hoof prints. There were long lines of indentations mostly leading nowhere or etched like Spiralgraph patterns round the occasional swing park. There was a surprising lack of children; there were no sledges, no cold tantrums. This was conclusive evidence that we live in a cosseted age where children are kept indoors by anxious parents swayed by
Daily Mail
tales of a world peopled in the main by paedophiles and predators. The lure of virtual snow on
Winter Apocalypse
, or whatever computer software Santa had brought, proved greater than the real thing. There is much more fun to be had from staining the landscape with the blood of slaughtered Yetis and nomad Zombies.

In a lay-by a lorry driver was glimpsed kneeling down and scooping up handfuls of snow. Was it his first trip abroad from his native Namibia? Can you develop a snow fetish?

Johnson and Boswell paid four shillings to have their chaise ferried over the Tay which when we swept over the bridge was floating with ice and providing temporary shelter to two North Sea oil rigs.

Neither traveller had been especially impressed with the city: ‘We stopped a while at Dundee, where I remember nothing remarkable’ from the one and ‘Came to Dundee about three. Good busy town’ from the other. Johnson was less neutral in his letter to Mrs Thrale in which he describes the town as ‘dirty, despicable’.

The connecting bus to Arbroath arrived so promptly as to fuel speculation that the SNP nurse Mussolini inspired aspirations for the country’s transport system. The bus’s card reading system, so efficient that it could spot a pensioner’s pass through an inch thick wallet, is a prototype for the full body scanners being installed at airports to enhance security. Angus drivers are also undertaking trauma training to prepare them for the shock of viewing the unclothed outlines of their fellow citizens.

We were privy, if that is the best word, to the staccato conversation of a three generation family who crowded noisily into several seats. As their enthusiastic discussion embraced the topics of theft,
imprisonment
, beatings, arson attempts and sundry judicial proceedings it was important not to make eye contact with any of them in case it was construed as an affront to the family honour, an action which would, in turn, lead inexorably to the aforementioned eyes being gouged from their owners’ respective sockets and eaten.

Once they left I told David that at this point on the original journey
Boswell had sounded Johnson out about his views on
transubstantiation
. Despite Boswell’s self deprecating disclaimer, ‘This is an awful subject,’ I asked David for his thoughts. After an impressive atheistic rant about all world religions he said the debate was as pointless as discussing whether fairy eyes were pink or green. I saw his point but read to him Johnson’s observation that ‘If God had never spoken figuratively, we might hold that he speaks literally when he says “This is my body’’’. This gave rise to speculation, as Boswell might have said, about the precise number of words directly spoken by Christ in the New Testament. Apart from the Sermon on the Mount we couldn’t think of many between us and both agreed, without any real conviction, that we would look up the answer.

At the ironic wave of a wand Arbroath had become a bijou après ski resort. By municipal decree puffed out pastel-shaded anoraks and multi-coloured woollen hats were now mandatory. The seagulls lined up on a wall pecked at edelweiss instead of pizza. Shopkeepers dispensed Gluhwein and bonhomie before slapping each other’s thighs and humming the chorus of
Tomorrow Belongs to Me
.

The illusion was soon shattered by one of the ugliest sights
encountered
so far and for which there is no equivalent in the accounts of Johnson or Boswell. We were confronted by an obese man bending down beside his car. His trousers and underpants had surrendered to gravity and sunk to an area of his anatomy best defined as lower buttock, revealing a cleavage more suited to parking a bike. It was a brave, existential, but truly shocking gesture in these sub-arctic temperatures.

Dr Johnson declared ‘I should scarcely have regretted my journey, had it afforded nothing more than the sight of Aberbrothick.’ He was referring to the ruined abbey, the size of which astonished him. It was still impressive and timeless when we visited. Its brown stones stood stark against the turquoise winter sky glimpsed through the ancient round windows.

Johnson records how his travelling companion made a fool of himself by climbing over the ruin ‘Mr Boswell, whose inquisitiveness is seconded by great activity, scrambled in at a high window, but found the stairs within broken and could not reach the top.’ We were unable to emulate his childish enthusiasm as the abbey and grounds were closed. The sign told us that they only ever opened on a whim during very hot days, and only if the local porcine society were performing acrobatics in the sky.

Frozen to the very core we sidled into the Victoria Bar near the station. To have attempted any manoeuvre more ambitious than a sidle would have disrupted the snooker game in progress. The punter resting on his cue may have modelled his stance on a Vettriano print but any attempt at cool was compromised by the pit-bull lookalike at his feet ravaging a plastic toy.

On the train back to Edinburgh David realised that he had left his souvenir packet of Arbroath Smokies, a token gift for his wife Jan, in the pub close to the snooker table. Ever resourceful and generous he rang the barman suggesting that he give the fish to a deserving customer but not, under any circumstances, to the dog.

Something also needs to be said about bus shelters; they deserve closer scrutiny. The current trend is to install a sloping ledge as an alternative to a full blown seat. Sitting is clearly to be discouraged as conducive to sloth. This puritanical urge finds a precedent in the ropes slung across the dormitories of nineteenth-century doss houses where sleep was frowned on as an unnecessary indulgence.

The shop window behind the shelter carried adjacent messages, one encouraging all depressed passers-by to make contact with Angus Association for Mental Health and the other a warning to dog owners that the local vet will only treat previously registered animals. Melancholia and dogs again.

I was already regretting the decision to travel this section on my own. Other potential travelling companions had much better things to do involving families and pleasure.

The only other traveller on the M9 bus was being evacuated from a First World War sanatorium. The pulmonary dredging suggested that his tuberculosis was at an advanced stage. Mercifully, having
successfully
realigned his lungs, he lapsed into a coma. Great expectorations, Pip old boy.

We passed Pie Bob’s Cafe and the Ghurkha Tandoori in quick succession. Locals have to choose between two Little and Large posters, one showing a smiling fat man, presumably Bob and the other depicting a more austere and undeniably hungrier figure thin as a whippet and fierce as a fierce thing in the face of the enemy.

On a sign above the windows an unnaturally grinning baby
mouthed the imprecation
Let’s talk
. In anticipation of the campaign’s success and the challenge of an emerging army of articulate,
demanding
toddlers, MENSA waiting lists have already been capped and tenders invited to build new elite universities for the
under-fives
.

A potential passenger spat belligerently in the general direction of the slowing bus. Dressed in army fatigues and of pensionable age he occupied the seat in front of me, affording a close up of a large scar down the back of his head that had proved impressively
stubble-resistant
. All facial or head scars invite speculation. Accidents happen, so do muggings and general badness leading to insomnia, anger and flash-backs, thoughts of revenge and self-blame.

Spitting was going to be the theme of the day; through the window a workman in a high visibility vest tossed an arc of saliva over a ditch that he was inspecting for a reason known only to the Roads Department and God.

Like all good buses the M9 refused to adhere to the route of the ubiquitous flying crow and shot into housing estates whenever the chance arose. A road in a rundown suburb of Arbroath provided the answer to one of the great mysteries of the universe: where do boy racers go when they are not boy racing? Consecutive semi-detached driveways were hosting identically garish hybrid vehicles with a surfeit of fins, darkened windows and stencilled monikers. They looked impotent, all thunder stolen. The disillusion was comparable to finding Cinderella’s coach in a Tesco car park.

Two visual haikus from the outskirts of Montrose:

‘About eleven at night we arrived at Montrose. We found but a sorry inn, where we dined on haddocks, pickled salmon, veal cutlets and fowl, and I myself saw another waiter put a lump of sugar with his fingers into Dr Johnson’s lemonade, for which he called him “
Rascal
!’’ It put me in great glee that our landlord was an Englishman.’

The great lemonade scandal was turning into a national disaster. The Dishonourable Company of Waiters had been mobilised, and the word passed among them, ‘Put yer fingers in the big bastard’s lemonade and watch him go aff his heid!’

The offending hostelry was the Ship Inn at 107 High Street. The building is still there and is approached down a narrow close. I surprised myself by feeling a genuine frisson as I opened the gate between a Polish bakers and a bargain store. My reverential progress was observed by a friendly Irishman leaning out of an upper window in the close. His languid demeanour suggested that he might well have been leaning on his window sill for the last 250 years. The Ship Inn is now a private home with chintz curtains.