LITMIR.BIZ

      These car journeys had a several curious effects on the infant Brian. The most significant was that it spurred me on with a desire to experience these foreign places at first hand. Secondly it meant that even to this day I find it almost impossible to go to sleep before 1.00 AM. Unless of course my wife is prepared to drive me round town in the dark for 2 hours telling me interesting stories. Most unlikely as she doesn’t drive.

      A curious side effect was the distorted perspective I developed of the world outside the immediate area of my home. As I was so small (I could hardly be described as a potential high jump champ now, either) it was impossible to see directly out of the car windows. Consequently I became convinced that the world in between the places where the car stopped and I got out; consisted almost entirely of clouds, starry skies, street lights and the occasional disembodied church steeple or high rise apartment block. My head spent so much time at an angle of 65 degrees; it’s a wonder I didn’t decide to become an astronomer.

      At the tender age of three, I now had a baby brother and sister for company, and was about to set off on my first long haul travel experience. My father’s best friend from the army had managed to get a job as the manager of a famous hotel on the shore of Loch Ness. The family was invited to be his guests.

      Back in the early 1960`s there were no motorways or even major roads in that direction. The trip North from Manchester was set out on with much the same sense of adventure as Marco Polo set out for China. As it turned out, he got there much quicker.

      To this day my father insists that mother acts as map reader and navigator on long journeys. I have no idea why. Perhaps it’s because she is so nearly perfect he needs an excuse to shout at her occasionally. God love her, she has absolutely no sense of direction whatsoever. She could get lost in a telephone kiosk. Have you ever done that when you have been really drunk? You know, phoned for a taxi then forgotten which wall to push against to get out. No? Must just be me then.

      Anyway take my word for it, Mum is hopeless with directions and she knows it. The time to set off had arrived and Dad handed mum an out of date tourist map of Scotland. She held it in trembling fingers, uncomfortably aware of her total inability to tell a road from a train line. She seemed vaguely aware that anything coloured blue was likely to represent a form of water. A river or a lake maybe. The rest of it could have been in ancient Sanskrit for all the sense it made to her. She studiously poured over the map for about 20 minutes before eventually announcing that she had located our destination on the map and was ready to go. It was felt at the time that the cartoon monster with the name Nessie beside it should have helped her locate Loch Ness sooner. But it didn’t.

      Off we went on the roughly 350-mile trip north. We crossed into Scotland near Gretna Green to a big cheer. My first foreign country! Even if it is, albeit somewhat reluctantly, part of Britain.

      Then things started to go awry. The British government seems to be pathologically against spending money in Scotland. While the rest of the UK is blessed (some would say cursed) with an extensive motorway network, Scotland has until recently missed out on any such expensive public works, especially the further North you go.

      You would think that it was long term Government policy to make travel around Scotland as difficult as possible and thereby keep the semi naked, wide painted hordes of barbarian Scots away from the civilised south. Anybody who has ever visited the holiday resorts of Blackpool or Morecombe during Glasgow holiday weeks would realise the plan was doomed to failure.

      Back then the roads were lousy with few signposts. We seemed to be perpetually stuck behind slow moving lorries. It was slow going indeed.

      Despite our early morning start, darkness had descended and the weather had closed in. Heavy rain affected visibility so that it was easy to miss a signpost on the unlit roads.

      Every town or village we came to dad would bark out the place name and the phrase “which way next?” Mother was clearly becoming more and more flustered and less sure of our position.

      At one point we had reached quite a large town. As we drove through the center we noticed mother looking frantically about the place through the windows. Dad assumed she was looking for a place name so that she could tell him exactly where we were and how far we had to go.

      Dream on sucker!

      She had actually spotted a bus terminus and was desperately praying that she could locate a bus showing “INVERNESS” as its destination that she could follow. Obviously she was not praying hard enough. We were still 200 miles from our destination and inexplicably heading West instead of North.

      Two hours later with the rain beating a heavy metal drum solo on the roof, the road got even worse. At least before it had been fairly straight. Now it twisted and turned and became even narrower. We were the only vehicle on the road, no longer hindered by lumbering wagons.

      “Are we lost?” I asked unhelpfully.

      My father was muttering under his breath and glancing daggers at the map bearer in the front passenger seat.

      “Have you any bloody idea where we are woman?”

      “Yes, yes I think so”, she said with a definite lack of conviction.

      “We should be coming up to a major junction where you take the left turn.”

      “There, there it is!” she announced, a note of unexpected triumph in her voice.

      The car turned sharply left, descended a steeply sloping concrete slipway, and came to rest axle deep in the icy waters of the Irish Sea.

      Oh, how we all laughed! Actually nobody laughed. Dad was banging his head monotonously on the steering wheel (at least he wasn’t banging mums head on the steering wheel) and we were contemplating life as part of a one-parent family. Mum was pretending not to exist. Well you would, wouldn’t you?

      We did eventually make it to Loch Ness and my parents did eventually start speaking to each other again. Nine months later I had another baby sister. Sandy has also inherited our taste for travel. As a research doctor and lecturer she travels the world, attending symposiums and presenting research papers. This has helped her to amass the finest collection of Hard Rock Café commemorative cocktail glasses known to man, and I am very proud of her.

      In the following few years we discovered much of Britain together as a family. Mostly it was by way of days out at the weekend, blackberry picking, and picnics

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