Climbing over rocky mountains (IV)

We were fortunate enough to experience one of the modern feats of engineering, a bridge on the scale of no other, at least according to the locals. From Kyle of Lochalsh (which sounded more and more like Courtney Walsh as the days progressed) we bussed over the bridge and into the Isle of Skye: a land where the buses don't so much run irregularly, they are certainly regular (thanks Derren) but perhaps only once or twice a day.

Nevertheless, we made it down to the hostel in Portree the unoffical capital of the island. Thence we met George, the proprietor, who had two and a half hairs on his head, and was wont to have a yarn on matters trivial for two and a half hours at a time. Some of the more memorable moments were:

1) Will and I were into another bottle of whisky one night, the Glenlivet which we picked up at the local shop. Amidst the drinking we were playing trivial pursuit, but without the board, since that grew tiresome very quickly. [As I recall, there was a point of contestation in our penalty shootout tiebreaker system, a Nobel Prize for x, where x was not one of the 5 (+1) categories.] He [George] sauntered up and spoke, inter alia, of deer in and around the island. Well, around the island not in the strictest sense, unless they are aquadeer: one could create a cunning skit in which a husband at the breakfast table says, 'Can you pass the water, dear?' and his wife hands him one of these aquatic cervidae (that's right).

Apparently there is a water-deer, mit tusks!


Anyway, the deer, they are a bit of a pest and some farms have high fences on their perimeters. This is fine in and of itself, and I thought the conversation had reached a suitable trough for us to get back to our pursuits. Will, seeing that George was still keen to whittle away the hours with trivialities, mentioned the similar problem in Australia with kangaroos, accentuated by the height to which they can jump. George agreed, and said that some of the 8 foot high fences were not high enough, but that '12 feet should be high enough, I have never seen a deer jump a 12 foot high fence.' Indeed.

12 feet? Tell him he's dreaming.

2)On the morning of departure, some Canadian mavericks had left a laptop behind. I've heard of the double-take and the even rarer triple-take, but this was a first taste of the quaternary level. He seemed fine with the idea that someone may leave something behind, but the concept of a laptop blew his mind away. This perhaps compounded his distaste for the Canadians as they left a mess of coffee grounds in his kitchen which he locked after 10pm ( like the coordinators on year 5 camp do, after you have had your slightly stale ginger nut biscuit and the cup of hot chocolate, or rather, the PMHC - the poor man's hot chocholate, which was inevitably Milo with some Boer-War era milk powder and hot water from The Urn (always capitalised).)

Some interesting use of brackets and full stops there, but never mind.

3) Despite being a frugal man of the parsimonious school he insisted that he despised Islay malts so much so, that after tasting a mouthful of Laphroaig, he empited the rest out into the sink. Advice of a similar mental-ity was given by his 2ic, who said that only people with questionable masculinity would add a bit of water to whisky. But then he was also missing a tooth, which made him look a bit like Long John Silver, which in turn reminded me of Charlton Heston (from Treasure Island, where a young Christian Bale makes a debut onto the Holywood scene as the care-free cabin boy Jim Dawkins), and... well I don't quite know where that was headed, but we all learned something.

4) A bloke from China was sleeping in our room, and on the day he arrived he appeared knackered, and fair enough, after kicking off his shoes went straight to bed. In the morning, George's Radio Picks were played (featuring some sort of redux [or should we say reflux - think of the levels... that's the bet!] version of "I can't help falling in love with you.") and as he walked past our room he gave a nod to Will and me who were getting ready for the day, but then gave a tertiary-take to our Chinese roommate. Laptops, and sleeping in jeans.... erstwhile unbeknownst to the good people on Skye.

5) Time travel and pub crawls... I wasn't privy to the first of these, but Will tells me George has plans for teleportation in the future, and arriving at the same time, if not before one leaves. This came about since George found it intolerable to deal with the jetlag when flying from Scotland to Cypress, which is equivalent to flying from Brisbane to Perth.
When he was younger he used to visit some pubs on a hill, he would start at the top and walk down, visiting as he went, then walk back up the hill to his house. Perfectly sound, as you don't want to be stumbling down the hill after a few - but this was explained to us time and time again, just in case we either missed it earlier, or were not listening. Me? Never.

So he was a character - but we were all richer for the experience.

Given the buses were a bit maverick we had the option to go out to Talisker distillery or to Dunvegan Castle. With the possibility that the distillery could be closed, and that it would be a long walk back, the castle was chosen. Amongst the paraphernalia was a large drinking horn, which the current chieftain would need to drink (or at least make an attempt to do so) upon his inauguration. There was, regrettably, no advertisement from Merv Hughes encouraging responsible drinking - the poetry is Wordsworthian when we are told that this is the Serve from Merv. Ah yes.



In the local pub (which fortunately wasn't a local pub for local people) we had a run in with the law, Cops and Robbers, quiz machine esque - naturally there were a few doggings, I can't remember most of them though. There were (changing to the imperfect tense now) a few the other day:
Who drove the fastest milkcart in the west?

Benny,
Johnny,
Ernie.

This was one of the 'easy questions', indeed it was second out of the blocks. Apparently the answer is Ernie, and this is enshrined in English culture because of some joker called Benny Hill, who is not a TV evangelist, but rather a TV comedian, in the loosest possible sense,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLKaLvrtn-8

classic - right up with with 'Are you being served?' and 'Some mothers do 'ave 'em'. That title does not warrant the reaching for the " key.

On our second day there we went on a walk around some of the mountainous regions. It was indeed during the titular expedition that I found out that one RA Townson was suing his former employer with Stonno as a legal aid, which drew both my eyebrows up for a good few steps.

In full Riemann-hypothesis contemplation.

After Skye we caught the bus over that architectural marvel and back to the mainland, whence we were bound for Fort William.