I’m on a
train, heading north to Inverness, near Greenland. The journey will take 3 ½ hours and I could
have travelled first class if I’d read the expenses policy properly. I’ve got the table to myself until Pitlochry,
when the train is expected to fill up with tourists and other chancers. It’s a uniformly grey, drab and cold day,
just what you might expect in Scotland in December. I’m off to meet a chap from the Highland
Council, and my mind is preoccupied with the worry that he might be off ill,
on holiday, or called away and cannot see me, in which case I shall have spent
seven hours on a train for nothing. I
cannot help but think negatively; it’s in my nature.
Train travel is wonderful; so relaxing,
provided that the train isn’t full, which it isn’t at the moment. Low cloud skirts the tops of the pine
forests; gently undulating hills and bare brown fields greet the curious
observer. I am much
more interested in the passengers. They
are almost all female. One woman, of
fairly advanced years and the face of a pug dog, is wearing a diaphanous green
creation through which one can clearly see her smalls. It turns out she
is on her way to a corporate Christmas party in Perth, or so she tells another
female passenger who had the temerity to query her attire.
As we move
further inland, a heavy ground frost is apparent, icing sugar on the naked
fields. Walkers in the countryside wear woollen bobble-hats and thick
gloves. Jack Frost cannot touch the vast
swathes of water that lie in the fields and copses, a testament to recent heavy
rain. Streams and burns are swollen and
threatening to swamp surrounding areas.
I am tired,
having arisen at 06:15. A cup of coffee
refreshes me but my eyelids grow heavy.
The train fills up with backpackers at Pitlochry and two such sit
opposite me. They are young, barely out
of their teens, brash, female and Australian.
They place some of their bags at my feet under the table, so that I can
no longer move my legs. They chew gum
incessantly. One is ginger-haired,
except one side of her head is shaven at the temple and the other falls on her
shoulder in a luxuriant pigtail. Her
friend is blonde, but so plain as to have no clear features at all.
As the train
roars on, I see snow lying at the base of the railway embankments. The snow thickens and starts to dominate the
landscape. Everywhere there are
coniferous forests and hills. The low
cloud turns to mist, swirling above the snowy landscape. There are scattered hamlets along the
way. I wonder why anyone would want to
live out here. It is starkly beautiful,
but even stark beauty becomes wearisome if you encounter it day after day. There
is no longer a digital signal, so I cannot listen to my radio. The fields turn into lakes surrounded by odd
patches of stubble, through which pheasants run clumsily, panicked by the
throbbing of the train engines. Crows
flap their wings languidly as they meander from one drier portion of a field to
another. Mile after long mile of emptiness. It would empty your soul. We hug the A9 road for a stretch. Cars and vans have their headlights full on,
stabbing shards of light into the barely penetrable dullness. Grass, snow, trees, Blair Atholl. The snow is lying really thickly here, and
the streams are angry torrents.
Rumbling on,
we encounter what appears at first glance to be a moonscape – black hills
undulating like baskets of eggs, with snow lying in the hollows, utterly devoid
of any vegetation, with, at their base, a swollen and raging river. The effect is extraordinary, and passengers
race to the windows to take photographs with their tablets and mobile
phones. It’s chilling and frightening –
no wonder people get lost and die up here.
Goodness knows how they managed to build a railway. As suddenly as the moonscape appears, it
vanishes, as does the snow, and we’re back in the world of moor and
forest. The Aussie girls disembark at
Aviemore – they must be ski-ing, though they’re so young, skateboarding might
be more appropriate. The station is
fantastic, frozen in Victorian time along with the sturdy little signal boxes
and the quadrant signals on this section of track. I eat my sandwiches. They have grown soggy and have stuck
together. I should never have added
tomatoes to the chopped pork and cheese. I peel the sandwiches apart. I leave two for the return journey. The landscape continues to soften, and silver
birch replaces pine and fir. The low
cloud is still with us, but not the mist.
It’s staggering to remember that it’s another 200 miles from Inverness
to Wick and Thurso.
At long
last, a few minutes short of midday, we drift into Inverness station and I am
able stiffly to disembark. To think, I have this whole process to go through
again, only in the dark, when my meeting finishes in a few hours. Goodness alone knows what state my knees will
be in then, not to mention my two remaining sandwiches.
