Author: Moobs

I am on my holidays. P has a simple philosophy: she does not feel as if she is on holiday unless she is exhausted at the end of each day. However simple the philosophy, I simply cannot understand it. For me it is not a holiday unless at the end of the day I have a cold beer in my hand and somebody (anybody) is gently massaging the soles of my feet.

Since she was a girl, P’s family have been exhausting themselves in the pursuit of relaxation in Torridon; a village in the Western Highlands of Scotlands. The Glen leading to Loch Torridon has a certain grim magnificence, It looks like God ran out of time on a Friday afternoon and left it rough and unfinished. There is little vegetation and what there is is grass hardened against the weather and tough enough to slice through the sole of your shoe.

In this Glen once lived Highlanders. They were funnelled at gunpoint down the Glen and to the edge of the Loch by landowners who had concluded that the land was better used for feeding sheep than Scotsmen on the incontestable basis that the sheep were generally better behaved and had a higher retail value. Some of those dispossessed moved to Canada where, having previously been irascible and warlike because of an ill-founded insecurity that they were inferior to their English neighbours to the South, they became friendly and pacific because an ill-founded security that they were superior to their American neighbours to the South. Those who remained were made ever more surly and resentful by a combination of there being no Ice Hockey to watch and the presence of “the midge”. The singular is misleading. These tiny insects rise in stupefying swarms at dusk and suck either blood from your skin or the tears from your eyeballs (depending on how difficult a day they’ve had). Within a second of the sky beginning to darken you feel your scalp begin to crawl. Unfortunately, I mean that literally rather than merely figuratively. Immediately thereafter nerve endings in every exposed patch of skin start reporting in that all is not well and shortly thereafter you go mad.

Now I know no-one likes a know-it-all but one does feel like taking the Scots aside and saying “Why in Heaven’s name are you living here? Daily blood-suckings from insects too small to see?! You could be in California in under 24 hours. Go pack!” This is entirely to misunderstand the Scots who revel in misery. They are proud of the midge and can barely stifle their glee as another Japanese tourist in Burberry plus fours leaps into the peaty broth of the Loch in search of relief. Donnie, the owner of the tiny shop is a case in point. He is not a cheery Mormon with a dazzling smile and some irritating tuneful brothers. He is, instead, a flinty-eyed man with a history of ill-health that makes it unwise ever to ask him how he is. Somehow, though, through all the gruffness he makes you feel welcome and the fact that it seems hardwon somehow makes it seem all the truer and more valuable. That’s why I said yes to coming here again this year. Deep down I like the Scots. Can’t help it.

I have decided against revealing the petty acts of revenge I engaged in against my father, partly because a number of them carry potential criminal liability. Instead I propose to tell you about some of the unaccountable bad luck that my father suffered after he left us to shack up with the barmaid from the golf club. These misfortunes will seem minor and, to anyone but my father, they are. However, what you need to know about him is that he is a huge volcano of rage that is never more than a minor inconvenience away from a spectacular eruption. Missing a traffic light could have him thumping the steering wheel and baying like a doberman; spilt food could have him angry enough to throw his own plate at the wall; and filial defiance or perceived disobedience would result in a blow to my ear that would leave my head ringing like a bell for days. For more formal discipline he preferred the belt or cane.

In the month or so after he left, he was in a near permanent rage. Some little bastard went round to his house in the dead of night and removed the licence plates from his car. Then another little toerag let down his front offside and rear nearside tires while he was in a restaurant having a romantic meal out. And then he discovered someone had spray-painted an enormous penis on the side of his house. I could go on but it seems unfair. Indeed, I almost feel sorry for him and, of course, ashamed that the area I grew up in could harbour such delinquence.

Over the next few years he and I had our little run ins; the time I stole his accounts so that my mother’s lawyer would know the truth about his earnings only to have him threaten me with arrest; the time he tried to cut off my university funding and I had to threaten to sue him; the time he tried to persuade my Chambers not to take me on as a pupil – such jolly japes. Anyway rather than let it get me down, if I ever feel low about it I spend some time looking at the licence plate I have affixed to the wall of my study.