A dozen ways you’ll know you’re in the ‘Best Small Country In The World’

By Sylvia Patterson

Seeing as you live in Scotland, most of you don’t have your big, once-a-year, real-deal holiday in Scotland. As a public service, therefore, for those of you thinking about it for next year, what with there being less chance of being bombed out the sky on the way to America, etc, here are some exclusive findings from a 17-day sojourn through the officially bugled ‘Best Small Country In The World’.

Your hospitality is second to none. Friends of friends you met once for 10 minutes two months ago will put you up in their sturdy granite homestead, fill you with booze they refuse to let you pay for, poured not so much into a wine glass as a cauldron the size of your head and not so much ‘half full’ as ‘permanently overflowing’. Satisfied, they’ll then cook you abundant gourmet barbecues and two-course full cooked breakfasts while you sit on your expanding backside and wonder why all mankind can’t adopt the gracious, gregarious, spectacular generosity at the core of the Scottish soul. Even if they do make you wear a two-foot comedy ‘Nessie’ hat while watching a Travis DVD at 1am. And it’s only day three and you’re definitely, already, a bit ill.

Small towns are well sketchy. There’s a pub in Dunbar where the barman is unable to pour your drink because he has The Shakes. “Eh… and that’s withoot a drink!” he’ll chuckle, Possibly because he really really needs one.

Kids don’t think Dunnottar Castle is much cop. The 14th-17th-Century ruin, two miles along a formidable coastal pathway from Stonehaven – is a cultural thrill for adults, all stirring contemplations on torture, religious warfare and pesky Oliver Cromwell. Kids, however, think it’s “boring!” Take an eight-year-old who’s grown up in a twinkling urban sprawl in the United Arab Emirates and she will ask you, because she is “all light-headed!” after the two-mile trek, “is there a food court here?” No, hen, not even a touristy ‘Cromwell’s Kiosk’ or anything. Mel Gibson, who filmed his version of Hamlet here, would, as we did, head straight for the harbour pub at midday for copious chips and pints (and, in his case, possibly foregoing the chips).

Standing in the battlefields of Culloden, stretching beyond like a stormy purple ocean of full-bloom springy heather, is what the word “heebie-jeebies” was invented for.

Even though there is something about Scotland which is forever Seventies (and there just is), in 2006 you can enjoy every culinary fare known to global man. But you just don’t, because you are in Scotland. So your day is run on dough. And tablet and crisps, and the puddings descriptively known as black, white and red. Introducing a visiting Englishman to the joy of the white pudding supper, he declared: “So it’s oats and fat in batter?” That’s right. Yum! Fearing a coronary embolism by day 10, if you ask in a pub if there are any vegetables on offer, you may also be told the following: “Aye. There’s peas. Or beans.” The undisputed titan of Most-Scottish Fare Of All, though, goes to the conceptually unique ‘Mince Pie. With Mince.’ You know, mince on the plate as well. In case you haven’t had enough mince.

A bus journey in the sunshine, white fluffy clouds overhead like the title sequence in The Simpsons, through Inverness, Fort William, Glencoe, the Trossachs and into Crianlarich is a spectacle so life-stirringly, dramatically, profoundly dawn-of-time, the Swiss Alps by comparison are poncing peaks of overwrought pretension. Sitting in Crianlarich – only hitherto known as a road-sign out of Perth – is like sitting at the bottom of Mount Fuji, in Japan, a crimson-streaked sunset creating pink clouds perched on mountaintops like colossal, sugar-spun marshmallows. With a 19-year-old Australian barman in the lone Village Pub declaring the place “a hell-hole”.

Glasgow and Edinburgh: so this is what history, architecture, proper builders and cultural defiance can do. Some people live in Milton Keynes, you know.

You’re coping well without the snouts. Even if pub-life now seems to run, weirdly, at half its former speed. And you worry about the old fellas standing next to you in the rain. Of course, I was only smoking temporary ‘holiday snouts’ (cough).

Everything is permissible by the phrase, “Och, yer on yer holidays.”

Standing, staring, across lochs, oceans and mountainous ridges by day, in pals’ back gardens by night, with the sky overhead an oil-black glitter-bed of galactic constellations, you could almost believe there is truly Peace on Earth. Until you go to the airport.

After a 17-day sojourn in Scotland, you will be, as they say in Auchinblae, jiggered. You will be one stone heavier, with a 1000-yard stare, pandimensionally toxic, slathered in slime in your fitful non-sleep with a liver the size of a deflated dinghy, kidneys pulsating like two molten lava rocks trapped in a spinal ravine yet brimming within with the infinite skirl of pals, pubs, mince and giggling while hearing in your soul the words of Rabbie Burns Himself: “From scenes like these old Scotia’s grandeur springs/That makes her loved at home, revered abroad;/ Princes and lords are but the breath of kings/An honest man’s the noblest work of God!”

And you’re all mad. Which may be the greatest reason of them all to go on a real-deal holiday to The Best Small Country In The World.

Even if it’s enough to give Dr Gillian McKeith a heart attack.

This article was printed in Sunday Herald on 03 September 2006