Inverness to Evanton – 20 miles
Even if we didn’t physically partake in the mayhem of downtown Inverness that Saturday night, we were subjected to its soundtrack–laughter, cries, bawling arguments, screams–full bore until the wee wee hours. It sounded as if several people were murdered, or at least garrotted to within an inch of their lives, right outside our window. I fell asleep well before silence returned, but when I awoke, all was quiet and sedate, as if it had all been crazy, maybe enviable dream.
Opposite the Mercure hotel, on the corner of Union St and Church St, there was a café called Coffee Affair. Travelling for 26 days and spending every day and night in different places exposes you to a lot of cafés, restaurants, hotels, BnBs, campsites etc etc. It gives you a wide range of places to compare and new perspectives on the merits and failings of such places. Coffee Affair came out pretty near the top of the café league – wonderful coffee, great sandwiches, cakes, breakfast dishes, really attentive cheerful staff. In fact the top 10 in our café chart was dominated by Scottish cafés: Coffee Affair, Braco Coffee, Cisco’s in Stirling, Escape route in Pitlochry. Phil and Tim came over from the Premier Inn and we gathered at a table and ate heartily, watching Inverness wake up through the window.
My account of Day 22 will be short of words and pictures because it was a strange ‘half’ day. Phil might be tempted to call it a ‘wedgie’, which is Aussie slang for a drink that you slip in between two rounds. Even the feature image is an imposter. It’s a fine image of Loch Ness, taken by Jools, but we were no where near Loch Ness that day.
After leaving Inverness through the industrial sprawl to the north, on the right bank of the Ness, we rode alongside the A9, over Moray Firth, and into the rolling farmland beyond. Sometimes, often, Scotland looks very like England, with the same basic building blocks of landscape–fields, trees, hedges, houses, churches, garages, cows, copses, sky, clouds-all arranged pretty much the same way as they are in Devon or Derbyshire. I often reflected on this similarity. We’re a small nation with roughly the same ecosystem and climactic zone from one end to the other. There are moments where the scenery changes radically–the Welsh hills, the Lake District, the West Coast of Scotland, the Cairngorms–but so much of it, from Land’s End to John O’Groats, is the same. Vernacular architecture, the design of road signs, the ‘shape’ of villages and towns, the brand names and chains on high streets, the types and make of car, the layout of shopping centres, of fuel stations, none of these things change that much as you ride from one end of the country to the other. The weather changes, but not radically. Accents change. They’re about the only thing that really changes. Like I said, we’re a small nation. Perhaps we should be more mindful of that.
I remember little about crossing the Black Isle, the peninsula that lies between the Moray Firth and the Cromarty Firth. Strange name that. It feels like such a gentle, domesticated place. I remember we took a break near a junction just south of Tore, and cracked jokes about a gloomy, abandoned house we could see at the crossroads, with a huge shipping container in the back garden, and wooden pallets stacked up against the wall. I remember the traffic on the main road to Conon Bridge, the lack of people on the street when we cycled through Dingwall (it was Sunday morning). I remember how the name Dingwall put one of my favourite songs by the Dundee singer / songwriter Michael Marra into my head, and I hummed it as I pedalled along. The song in question is called ‘Gael’s Blue’ and it’s about Scottish people feeling homesick in London. It goes something like:
We were talking to a fella in a room last night
Came down from Elgin with an appetite
Somebody told him he would be alright
Among the millions.
He began to sing, he took the place apart.
He was dealing aces from the very start.
Was a gift from heaven to a humble heart,
We were embracing.
Oh, he told me his papa was a rolling stone
Who had a gig at Dingwalls, so he felt at home.
And all he really needed was a telephone
To be in business…
Marra’s a genius by my reckoning.
I remember the wide views across the Cromarty Firth as we cycled north east to Evanton. There was grandeur there and wide horizons, but the view was domesticated by the fields and hedges and bales of hay all wrapped up in their black liners. I remembered feeling more and more dispirited and fed up with my bike, with its multiplying headaches. Despite the ordeal of the day before, the chain was still jumping on the bottom rear cog. Something was wrong with the rear cassette itself, a graver problem. And when I shifted between the three front cogs, or chainrings, the chain, instead of gliding smoothly from one cog to the other, was falling in between the cogs, turning uselessly and transmitting no power to the wheels. I harboured darker and darker thoughts of having to live with these defects all the way to John O’Groats, still three days ride away, in the wilderness of the far north, along the notoriously hilly north coast. Like Captain Haddock or Tintin, I had a devil on one shoulder, an angel on the other. The devil was saying ‘Oh, woe is me…this is terrible! How can I be expected to cycle another 150 miles on this piece of shit. This is really intolerable and unfair.’ And the angel, who wore the robes of a Buddhist monk, was saying ‘Andy, shit happens. Don’t take it personally. Don’t make it worse by whining. You’ll drive your compadres nuts. Just bear it, enjoy it, deal with it.’ And so on.
Evanton is a one horse town with the redeeming advantage of having a Co-op mini market that’s open to 10pm on its main street. Evanton is also the home of the Black Rock Caravan Park, which is just on the edge of town, near the Allt Graad river, with its riverside walks and waterfalls. We went to the Co-op first and stocked up on lunch material. It was Sunday and Evanton’s three eateries, the Cornerstone Café, the Balconie Inn and the Novar Arms Hotel, were all closed.
The woman at the reception of the Black Rock Caravan Park didn’t look pleased to see us. She gave the impression that she wouldn’t be pleased to see anyone, except Father Christmas perhaps, or the Dalai Lama, or the man from The National Lottery. Due to our mishaps in Inverness the day before, we’d blown out our booking at the Black Rock the previous night, but we’d paid for it in full, so no cause for resentment there. She showed us the bunkhouse accommodation (which we had all to ourselves), and took Jools to his pod, without saying a single word more than strictly necessary. All our requests-where to put our bikes, how to connect the electricity in Jools’ pod-were met with gestures and looks that assured us we had just added more weight, however small, to the woman’s already heavy burden. If the owners of the Parkfield B&B in St Arvans gave us a masterclass in the all important art of welcoming guests, the woman at Black Rock Caravan gave us a salutory lesson in how not to do it. I concluded that she’d lost all interest in people, and should perhaps look to change her profession, since she was clearly in a people-orientated business. Or perhaps had suffered some recent tragic loss, in which case, I apologise and take it all back.
We spent the rest of the day doing what you do on days off – laundry, bike fixing, blogging, lounging, lazing. I gave my bike a closer examination and discovered that the teeth of the bottom rear cog had been bent out of shape, hence the jumping chain. Since I had already despaired of finding any bike repair service between here and John O’Groats, I resigned myself to not using that cog, annoying but just about possible. My angel slowly gained the upper hand, and I repaired to my bunk to blog. Phil and Tim went to the Co-op to buy food for dinner. In fact, they bought two dinners, for reasons we never fully understood. One involved sausages, that much I remember. We cooked and ate. Phil watch a Bond movie on the TV, followed by football. The evening was quiet, restful, anonymous. Just the way it needed to be.
Andy Morgan.
