Bill Bryson - Notes from a small Island

On top of that, I couldn't settle on a place to eat. I hankered for something different, something I hadn't encountered a hundred times already on this trip Thai or Mexican, perhaps, or maybe Indonesian or even Scottish but there seemed nothing but the usual scattering of Chinese and Indian establishments, usually on a sidestreet, usually up a flight of stairs that looked as if they had been recently used for a motorcycle rally, and I couldn't bring myself to make that terrible climb into the unknown. In any case, I knew exactly what would be up there low lighting, a reception area with a padded bar, twangy Asian music, tables covered with glasses of lager and stainlesssteel plate warmers. I couldn't face it. In the end, I engaged in a desperate session of eenie meenie minie mo on a street corner and opted for an Indian. It was, in every degree, exactly like every Indian meal I had had in the previous weeks. Even the postdinner burp tasted exactly the same. I returned to my hotel in a dim and restless frame of mind.

In the morning, I went for a walk around the town sincerely hoping that I would like it better, but alas, alas. It wasn't that there was anything wrong with Aberdeen exactly, more that it suffered from a surfeit of innocuousness. I had a shuffle round the new shopping centre and ranged some distance out into the surrounding streets, but they all seemed equally colourless and forgettable. And then I realized that the problem really wasn't with Aberdeen so much as with the nature of modern Britain. British towns are like a deck of cards that have been shuffled and endlessly redealt same cards, different order. If I had come to Aberdeen fresh from another country, it would probably have seemed pleasant and agreeable. It was prosperous and clean. It had bookshops and cinemas and a university and pretty much everything else you could want in a community. It is, I've no doubt, a nice place to live. It's just that it was so much like everywhere else. It was a British city. How could it be otherwise?

Once I had packed this small thought into my head I liked Aberdeen much better. I can't say I ached to up sticks and move there but then why should I when I could get exactly the same things, the same shops and libraries and leisure centres, the same pubs and television programmes, the same phone boxes, post offices, traffic lights, park benches, zebra crossings, marine air and postIndiandinner burps anywhere else? In an odd way the very things that had made Aberdeen seem so dull and predictable the night before now made it seem comfortable and rather homey. But I still never had the slightest sense that I was in the midst of a lot of granite, and it was without regret that I fetched my things from the hotel and returned to the station to resume my stately progress north.

The train was again very clean and nearly empty, with more • S0othing blues and greys. It was just two carriages, but it had a trolley service, which impressed me. The difficulty was that the young chap in charge was obviously keen I had the impression that he had just started the job and was still at the point where it was fun to dispense teas and make change but as there were only two other passengers and just sixty yards of carriage to patrol, he came by about once every three minutes. Still, the constant ruckus of the passing trolley kept me from nodding off and falling into a state of embarrassing hypersalivation.

We rode through a pleasant but unexciting landscape. All my previous experience of the Highlands was up the more dramatic west coast, and this was decidedly muted in comparison rounded hills, flat farms, occasional glimpses of an empty, steelgrey sea but by no means disagreeable. Nothing of incident happened except that at Nairn a big plane took off and did all kinds of astonishing things in the sky, climbing vertically for hundreds of feet, then slowly tipping over and plunging towards earth before pulling out in a steep bank at nearly the last moment. I supposed it was some sort of a test base for RAF planes, but it was more exciting to imagine that it had been hijacked by a suicidal madman. And then an arresting thing happened. The plane began coming towards the train, really bearing down on it, as if the pilot had spotted us and thought that it would be interesting to take us with him. It got larger and larger and nearer and nearer I looked around uneasily but there was noone to share the experience with until it nearly filled the window and then the train went into a cutting and the plane disappeared from view. I bought a cup of coffee and a packet of biscuits from the trolley to steady my nerves and waited for Inverness to appear.

I liked Inverness immediately. It is never going to win any beauty contests, but it has some likeable features an oldfashioned littlecinema called La Scala, a wellpreserved market arcade, a large and adorably overthetop nineteenthcentury sandstone castle on a hill, some splendid river walks. I was particularly taken with the dimlit market arcade, an undercover thoroughfare apparently locked in a perpetual 1953. It had a barbershop with a revolving pole out front and pictures inside of people who looked like they had modelled their hairstyles on Thunderbirds characters. There was even a joke shop selling useful and interesting items that I hadn't seen for years: sneezing powder and plastic vomit (very handy for saving seats on trains) and chewinggum that turns the teeth black. It was shut, but I made a mental note to return in the morning to stock up.

Above all, Inverness has an especially fine river, green and sedate and charmingly overhung with trees, lined on one side by big houses, trim little parks and the old sandstone castle (now the home of the regional sheriff's courts) and on the other by old hotels with steeppitched roofs, more big houses and the stolid, Notre Damelike grandeur of the cathedral, standing on a broad lawn beside the river. I checked into a hotel at random and immediately set off for a walk through the gathering twilight. The river was lined on both sides by gracious promenades thoughtfully punctuated with benches, which made it very agreeable for an evening stroll. I walked for some distance, perhaps two miles, on the Haugh Road side of the river, past little islands reached by Victorian suspension footbridges.

Nearly all the houses on both sides of the river were rambling places built for an age of servants. What, I wondered, had brought all this late Victorian wealth to Inverness, and who supported these handsome heaps today? Not far from the castle, on spacious grounds in what I suppose a developer would call a prime location, stood a particularly grand and elaborate mansion, with turrets and towers. It was a wonderful, spacious house, the kind you could imagine riding a bicycle around in, and it was boarded, derelict and up for sale. I couldn't think how such a likeable place could have ended up in such a neglected state. As I walked along, I lost myself in a reverie of buying it for a song, doing it up, and living happily ever after on these large grounds beside this deeply fetching river, until I realized what my family would say if I told them we weren't after all going to the land of shopping malls, 100channel television and hamburgers the size of a baby's head, but instead to the damp north of Scotland.

And anyway, I regret to say that I could never live in Inverness because of two sensationally ugly modern office buildings that stand by the central bridge and blot the town centre beyond any hope of redemption. I came upon them now as I returned to the town centre and was positively riveted with astonishment to realize that an entire town could be ruined by two inanimate structures. Everything about them scale, materials, design was madly inappropriate to the surrounding scene. They weren't just ugly and large but so illdesigned that you could actually walk around them at least twice without ever finding the front entrance. In the larger of the two, on the river side where there might have been a restaurant or terrace or at least shops or offices with a view, much of the road frontage had been given over to a huge delivery bay with overhead metal doors. This in a building that overlooked one of the handsomest rivers in Britain. It was awful, awful beyond words.