Rural Community Gateway

If you want a return ticket from Inverness, of course, they give you five of them which is a system designed to confuse the easily confusable, I concluded, as I handed the Ticket Inspector my seat reservation ticket, followed by my ticket receipt that looked remarkably like the correct ticket but wasn’t, then finally gave him the lot to sort out which he duly did in seconds.  Life is complicated, is it not?

I strolled out of Queens Street Station into a slightly damp George Square and past a police van with a cctv camera – ‘Global Eye’ - suspended from an hydraulic arm, then headed for the nearest Bakery Shop for an apple strudel and a coffee. This one had thirteen types of French, Italian and Moroccan coffee to choose from (how bewildering is that, eh?) when all I really wanted was a Nescafe 1980’s style.

I did well, though, because more often than not it’s my wife, Liz, who does the ordering. "I’ll have a white coffee and that bun thing over there," I might say, jabbing my finger at a tasty looking pastry, at which point she does the rest. What a marvellous woman, translating my jabberings into the correct pastry and coffee terminology as well as sorting out the size of the beverage which is very important in today’s society where tall is small, regular is "quite sufficient for anybody, thank you very much" and large is simply a bucket in disguise!  Good grief, is it any wonder we’re all getting a bit porky?

Now George Square is a fascinating place to be. I sat on a damp bench with my apple strudel and watched the world go by. Two nuns on bicycles – umbrellas hoisted – wizzed and weaved diagonally across the open space, a host of meandering folks meandered under the ever-watchful gaze of the ‘Global Eye’ and some Japanese tourists took photos of the statues, all of which, incidentally had a streaky white hair-do courtesy of the Glasgow rain and pigeon droppings.

Now I was studying Robert Burns’ ‘bonce’ closely for any traces of cleaning fluid and scrub marks (somebody must have the contract for scrubbing statue heads) when the extendable CCTV camera focused it’s ‘eye’ upon me. Did I look suspicious, I wondered, a solitary middle aged man eating apple strudel in the rain? I must have done. At which point a pigeon swooped as I cleaned the rain from my glasses and swiped the strudel off my knee. I was not pleased. Would a Princes Street pigeon do the same, I wonder?

Now what was I doing in Glasgow in the first place, you might ask? Well, I was down for a spot of lunch actually, to meet a few folk, have a chat, then home again, and why not, it’s the simple things in life that are important, only I couldn’t find the restaurant, so I popped into the Tourist Office and got directions from a friendly security guard who queried why I’d been gesticulating skywards in a frantic fashion some moments earlier. "Pigeon, apple strudel," I babbled, "apple strudel, pigeon," which clearly was enough to establish my sanity.

I returned home later that day with an image in my head of two nuns, umbrellas hoisted, wizzing through George Square on bicycles. Interestingly enough I’ve seen a spectacle like this before, twenty five years ago in London’s Greewich Park to be precise, when five cycling nuns wizzed by in the rain and all, without exception, had their umbrellas hoisted. If only they’d been singing "the hills are alive with the sound of music" whilst being pursued by a staff-wielding Bishop, now that would have been truly extraordinary, wouldn’t it?  Next time, perhaps? You never know.

Copyright Patrick Vickery 2008

Published in the Ross-shire Journal January 25th 2008

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