Training 5
They found a very nice thing one day. It was a little king from a chess set. It was really, really exciting to find the king, not a pawn or a bishop, for example. They were really lucky that it came out in a lump, and they didn’t scrape his head off. Somebody had cut off his nose by mistake, but the rest of him was intact. The find more than made up for Tomas’s losing his own king so many times!
When I was a teenager, my pals and I went off camping in Arran, which is an island off the west coast of Scotland. We arrived by ferry at Brodick and went off looking for a place to camp. We found a very nice place along the sea front to put up our tents, which was a peninsula, next to a golf course. We pitched our tents there, and spent some time beachcombing and playing football, if I remember well, and then when it got dark, we decided to go to the local town for a drink. We decided to take a short cut across the golf course, and it was completely black, and none of us had a torch. We set off anyway, across this completely dark golf course, which we didn’t know had some burns – ditches with little streams at the bottom – running across it. So we were marching along merrily towards the pub, when splish!, splash!, splosh!, we found ourselves knee-deep in water after falling into one of the streams. We dragged ourselves out and continued onwards to the pub.
The pub was nothing special, but we had a few drinks there, and when we finally got back, taking the road instead of returning across the golf course, we couldn’t find the tents, or even the peninsula on which we’d camped. “What’s going on? What’s happened? Where are our tents?” we asked ourselves. It turned out that the area where we’d set up the tents wasn’t really a peninsula at all, but that when the tide came in it became an island. So, the tide had come in and cut us off from our tents. For the second time that evening we got wet feet, as to reach our tents we had to roll up our trousers, take off our shoes and socks and wade across to them.
At the time I was living in Elgin in the district of Moray, which is quite a nice area in the East of Scotland. It’s famous for not having any thunderstorms. It has the fewest thunderstorms of anywhere in Britain, and is also well known for its whisky, as it is in the heart of the whisky distilling area, and has much fertile land for growing barley, and nearby there are hills where there is peat and fresh spring water, which you need to make whisky. So, all of the famous whiskies come from there, like Glenfiddich and Glengrant, for example. There’s a shop there where many of them are bottled, called Gordon Simpson’s or something like that, and this shop sells about five hundred types of whisky, all from local producers. They have really special whiskies there, some thirty years old. In this shop we found a bottle which was produced at a distillery which I used to live next door to, called the Longmorne distillery, and even though we lived right next to this distillery we had never sampled its produce, so we bought a bottle. It was awful. It tasted like paint-stripper!