This is hot off the press. Bronwyn, who we first met in the GANTOB Kompanion Volume between the first and second books, and who was important in identifying some of the deceptions by The Foundation Doktor and The Benefaktor, has had a flying visit to the croft. It was lovely to meet her. She had quite a few tales about Ali and Curt that I hadn’t heard before.
I wish her every success on her retirement and travels.
The A9 drags. I take it gently. I have to protect my consignment of papers. Not from accidents – though the road has a litany of tragic tales no doubt – but from prying hands. When I stop, I make sure that the box is covered in the footwell behind the passenger seat, and my old Land Rover properly locked. It is proving an expensive journey at 15mpg. That retirement lump sum is not going to go very far at this rate. I do not stop at Blair Atholl to refuel. The following stretch – the climb to Drumochter – grinds on, so I take my foot off the pedal on the descent and limp into Dalwhinnie. Luckily they have diesel.
I pause to take stock. It is my first time this far north. I have left the waterfowl of the East Anglian fens far behind. They will be in somebody else’s charge once they have filled my position. I have been given some directions by Ali. “Watch out for the Sow of Atholl and the Boar of Badenoch on your left”. He has asked me to take a photo, for his wife. There was no mobile reception when I took it, but down in civilisation, with its familiar takeaway cups and wraps, I have a couple of bars. Ali’s email gives some context: His wife Gillian has been doing some writing. She has also been working too hard. Sadly, they have had a bad flood. She has no time to come this far south for a photo to illustrate a blog she has been working on. The quote that she is looking to mirror is from American author Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, from the 1960s. She is “rather obsessed”. I have the quote written in my notepad. I need to keep my mobile for navigation.
“Mountains arose abruptly to the north of Bolivar, crowding the remainder of the island with their brutal humps. They are called the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, but they looked like pigs at a trough to me”.
I cannot find an angle that accentuates the porcine connection. My snatched photo of the two mountains reminds me more of a scene from the introduction to Twin Peaks. Bum. Ba Dum. No matter. I send the photo and disconnect.
Back onto the A9. Alternating single and dual carriageway. More dodgy overtaking by red Audis. Duelling. There is nowhere to stop for a bit of a break, some refreshment. I burrow down into my memories of the trip so far. Three days and counting. A stop in Chester-Le-Street for a bit of a chinwag over birdwatching with Pat followed by a night on her surprisingly comfortable sofa bed. And then a rather awful afternoon with The Photographer in Edinburgh. It has been decades since I last saw him [Ed: as described in the second GANTOB book, in the Muir Trance series]. At his request we have agreed to meet at a local nature reserve, rather than his house. I park beside some modern flats and follow my nose to the dovecot (“doocot” apparently in these northern climes) agreed as our rendezvous.
I recognise him at once. He is sitting, head down at a picnic bench, peering at his phone. He has hardly changed in all the intervening years. He stands to attention as I call his name, and eases himself out of the wooden assault course. Limbs tangled in struts. He seems nervy and distant, but I remember that he was never a particularly good listener.
Striding away after our snatched greeting he explains that he wants to take me to see an unfamiliar duck. I cannot work out how this might be the source of his angst. I follow on. In the centre of the park is a huge natural lake with dozens of submerged trees. It is like a scene from a dinosaur movie: a surprise in the middle of the city. The grey herons at the water’s edge, on branches and in flight appear to confirm the primordial hypothesis. As we walk, the peace is interrupted by an unseen coot’s call and we glimpse a water rat, which scurries away to watch us in safety from under a branch. A flotilla of mute swans glides parallel with the shore, approaching a viewing platform where there are dozens of tufted ducks living up to their name in glorious submerging monochrome. We make little small talk while walk. We barely know each other, apart from the Curt Finks connection. And then he stops, and starts whispering as we approach a pair of colourful ducks. They are in a quiet corner away from the clamour of Canada geese and black-headed gulls. The Photographer is clearly excited. He splutters his question, and I answer as gently as I can. I decide against using the term “common teal”, which I suspect would be a letdown, opting instead for Anas crecca, speaking it gently, like an anacrusis, before emphasising its familiar name of Eurasian teal. “Lovely, colourful pair”, I enthuse. The flash of green on the female’s wing, the brown and black markings with rim of yellow on the male’s head. The Photographer types into his phone – an aide memoire I imagine initially, but then I realise that he is googling my opinion – checking it.
“I love how they stick together, probably coming back to the same spot year after year”, I comment, to break back into his consciousness. Ill judged. I learn over the course of the next thirty minutes of monologue that The Photographer has three wives and counting, with numerous (never quite quantified) dependents. “Number 3” (wife) is proving rather more demanding than he had first imagined. He must be at least 80. Expenses are mounting and home is not a happy place. She has been signed off work with severe morning sickness for a couple of weeks. He is grateful for the warmer weather and longer days. He is out and about much of the time.
When we are back at the doocot The Photographer sheds his morose side and asks me, with his first sustained period of eye contact, “Do you know the work of Bill Drummond?” I have to admit that I do not. He goes on to explain that his recent exploits with his school acquaintance, the former Rev K______ (AKA The Benefaktor) have led him to do some “research”. He flicks up the Wikipedia page for this Drummond character on his phone, and scrolls down to a bit about burying $20,000 in a stone circle in Iceland. This, The Photographer, contends, is his way back to recapturing the intense period of happiness that he and Number 3 had last year. He has a cheap flight booked and is heading out in the morning. He will buy a map and spade when he arrives.
“He was obsessed by the guy, buys his art, but fan boy turns foe over night. What a story!” The Photographer is cock-a-hoop. “Destroyed the photo in 20,000 cuts. More perhaps, depending on how you count them. Richard Long was the name of the photographer [Ed: but not The Photographer]”. He’s talking so much that he’s quite out of breath. “Drove up, all the way, up, the UK” to get it out of his system.
We go our separate ways. I wish him luck with his journey. He gives a thumbs up. I decide to hunt down a hotel rather than take up his offer of a bed for the night. I update Ali by text and ask about the arrangements for the following day. He replies with a What3Words reference.
The next morning, after a generic hotel breakfast, I set out from central Edinburgh, choosing my route to avoid the low emission zone signs on the advice of the concierge. They have just appeared. He is not sure if they mean anything. I make good time, allowing a stop near Kinross for a midmorning snack. So here I am, in the Cairngorms, listening to Julian Cope on the Land Rover’s CD player. His Black Sheep album. The Shipwreck of St. Paul. “The saddest place in the world for a heathen/ Is this place, let’s burn it down”.
Ali’s new house is apparently quite difficult to find. Inspired by my account of The Photographer’s story he has suggested that we meet at a four-thousand-year-old stone circle in a housing estate, and go from there. He thinks I will be interested by a site known only to the local, off the tourist trail.
I take the Aviemore turning, and then follow the Tripadvisor instructions. I do not know how to use what3words to navigate. The instructions are not difficult to remember. I am told to “look out for a residential road called Muirton (on your right hand side)”. I am thinking about renowned ornithologist Grayling Muir [Ed: GANTOB book 2] as I pull up, so am distracted and do not see Ali approaching. He laughs and gives me a huge hug. I have known him since he was a little boy. I shake myself out of my trance.
“Long journey?” he asks. Recovering, I explain that I am grateful to stretch my legs. We tromp around the circle. It is damp. And cold. Nearby houses provide a bit of shelter from the wind. The inner circle is pretty complete, but the stones are low and squat, unlike Stonehenge. It is low key. I like it. It is how I imagined Scotland to be. We head back to our cars. I follow up along tiny roads, the view opening out into a U-shaped valley obviously scraped out by glaciers. A different type of trough.
Ali’s wife – Gillian – welcomes us at the door. She has finished her day’s work and wants to get out for a bit. We follow, past the trees, avoiding the flooding, and come across the neighbouring crofter repairing his fencing. We do not get anywhere very fast. A little further down “the glen” we stop for the postmistress in her red van. Gillian whispers a story once she is out of earshot. The postie is apparently the great great great…. granddaughter of the man who killed the pirate Blackbeard in the Caribbean back in the early 1700s. Can trace her family, and the story, back 300 years. I search for the details when we get back to the croft and connect to the internet. I cannot find specifics – the name of the pirate slayer is never given. It just says: “When Blackbeard was about to deliver a killing blow to Maynard, another sailor, a Highlander, jumped on Blackbeard’s back and inflicted a deep wound.” But Gillian seems to believe it. “20 cuts, 5 musket shots and then he was decapitated, head on a spike”, she marvels. She really is as mad as a box of frogs. She grabs Vonnegut’s book Cat’s Cradle from the table and shows me the pigs at the trough section before reading out the following passage from later in the book: “His family’s wealth derived from the discovery by Bokonon’s grandfather of one quarter of a million dollars in buried pirate treasure, presumably a treasure of Blackbeard, of Edward Teach”.
Speaking of treasure, I rescue the box from the back of the car and bring it to Ali. Notepads of figures, maps, a lot of details about bird sightings, all in his father’s hand. A few loose-leaf pages of typed text – stories and journal entries from a dot matrix printer. They have been up in my loft for 30+ years, the letters BCG scrawled on the side of the box. We had worked for hours, Curt, me and Grayling. We had some successes, with mentions in the acknowledgement sections of Prof Muir’s papers. But never a paper with Curt’s or my name at the top. There is nothing in the technical writings that would be a surprise to anybody now. We have missed our chance. But I can give my friend Curt (RIP) – Ali’s Dad – a bit of a leg up with his stories. He would have loved that. Gillian agrees, noting her success with one of Curt’s stories in a literary magazine recently, and her labours of love with the GANTOB books.
After supper I make my excuses and settle into the tiny guest room. A box room with bare white walls. They are still doing the place up after their move. The confines of this space frame my memories of the past few days and allow me to plot my next steps. The world is my oyster. I have no ties. Perhaps I will pop up to the Moray Firth to see the whales and dolphins. And when do puffins arrive? I could head up to Orkney to catch them and the Ring of Brodgar, the isthmus separating salt and freshwater. How wonderful.
It has been a long day. That night I dream of stone circles and buried treasure. In the morning, I rise early and write down everything that I can remember from the past 3 days, for GANTOB (the project). If she does not like it, she can spike it or cut bits out.
I leave before Ali and Gillian wake, only stopping once I reach a snack van and toilet a few miles south of Inverness. A skein of geese flies over head, audible above the hum of the road. I book a ferry and a room in Stromness on my phone. Up, up and away.
Bronwyn, 20 March 2024
Pamphlet 18 of the #52Pamphlets
GANTOB blog 