We have just seen American friends off on a tour of the Highlands. It's always a nervous business when visitors to your country for the first time arrive, particularly when it's here in Scotland.
I want them to get a good impression but being Scots in this situation is a bit like being the mother of a difficult child who can be quite amazingly charming when it wants to but which may equally sulk, brood, or even throw a spectacular tantrum. I have studied the weather forecast for weeks with fingers crossed and muttering ancient Celtic spells for sunshine.
It worked. Today it is the absolutely perfect autumn (fall) day, sharp first thing with just the sort of hint of frost in the air so that it tingles as if you were inhaling champagne, and the sky is clear and eggshell blue. The leaves are showing orange and flame and red in windless sunshine and I know the lochs they pass with be mirror-smooth and making perfect reflections of the hills and dark pine forests round about.
We are promised the same for the rest of the week, when our guests will return by way of the west coast, which has scenery to rival the best in the world. Looking out to the Summer Isles, a string of tiny islands that on a calm sea look as if they are floating is, on a sunny day, almost unreal in its perfection.
Phew! Relief. Because, as every Scot knows, it can be quite different. Rain can come down in steady torrents, mist can obscure the majesty of the scenery for days on end; the first time I visited mountainous Skye, it could have been a flat plain for all the evidence I saw of anything above sea level.
And then there is the darkness. Already the nights are lengthening and until the winter solstice it's a journey into shorter and shorter days, less and less light. Perhaps it's no suprise that the novels written in the northern countries tend to have a very dark side – Tartan Noir, Nordic Noir.
I've just been reading one of Andrea Camilleri's brilliant Inspector Montalbano series where you feel you're basking in Sicilian sunshine. Perhaps it is our environment that makes up the sort of writers we are.
Still, it looks as if our American friends will go home wondering why on earth people moan about Scottish weather.
3 comments:
I have a friend, a Scot from Edinburgh as it turns out, whose description of the land of his birth goes thusly (in explaining it to outsiders): "You're born. It's cold and dark and wet. Eventually you die."
Personally, in my three visits to the country (mind you on the other side near that large city on the Clyde), I've enjoyed fantastic weather. As far as I'm concerned, Scotland has fantastic weather, sunny, warm with very little rain.
Go figure...
In defence of Edinburgh versus Glasgow -you've touched a nerve here, Rick!- we get FAR less rain than they do on the west coast! (And it's still sunny today, 20C ess predicted for this afternoon. Shane our guests have gone to Englansd wher it's WET!)
In defence of Edinburgh versus Glasgow -you've touched a nerve here, Rick!- we get FAR less rain than they do on the west coast! (And it's still sunny today, 20C predicted for this afternoon. Shame our guests have gone to Englansd wher it's WET!)
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