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Authors: Stuart Campbell
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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.
Montrose – Laurencekirk – Aberdeen
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 babymouthed 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:
A single red flower
shone fiercely against gray stones
in a church yard.
A garden overlooking
the swollen sea basin
a wind turbine and a pony.
‘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
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.
Montrose – Laurencekirk – Aberdeen
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 babymouthed 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:
A single red flower
shone fiercely against gray stones
in a church yard.
A garden overlooking
the swollen sea basin
a wind turbine and a pony.
‘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
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