104. Snowy Scotland

The chap in the little shoe repair place in the Savoy Centre – an incongruously named 1960s retail development off Sauchiehall St that vaguely recalls a Central American covered market – promises to reunite the toe and the sole of my fur-lined boots within the hour, ‘Nae bother!’ When I return, the boots are fixed and he refuses to take any money – ‘Na, na, nae bother’, he says again. The taxi driver who takes us from St Andrews to Dundee tells us – in broadest, mildly incomprehensible Fifeshire – about his childhood, the restaurant in a tiny hamlet formerly run by a great DJ who would cook whatever he felt like, and the principal features of the route between Dumferline and Cupar; he shakes our hands at the end of the journey. The waiters in the very nice Italian restaurant two doors down from our hotel switch seamlessly between Italian (to one another) and the broadest Glaswegian (to customers). The drinks trolley lady at Queen St station at 6:45pm on a Tuesday evening, with the temperature below zero and not a train in a platform — 6:30pm to Edinburgh cancelled, 6:41 to Aberdeen nowhere in sight, the 7pm to Edinburgh promised but not counted on – takes it upon herself to wander up and down the platform offering shivering travellers free tea and coffee. These are some of the reasons why I like Scotland very much indeed. Even when the blizzards are blowing.

On the headland below the ruins of the cathedral in St Andrews, I look back to the snow-covered hills of Fife, sleet rattling around my head and the sea all whitecaps– a blizzard-scape in white and storm-grey. I walk a little further and look down to the town from a hillside as the sun comes out and shines blue and pale gold on a big, untouched snowy field. (Just for fun I plunge into it and see how far the snow comes up; when it’s knee-high I reckon it’s best to get back on the road.) Late afternoon, walking around the coast and the golf course and I turn back to the town again – looking up at it now – with the evening snow-clouds behind it, blue and green light streaming from a gap in the clouds on the dark stone buildings, huddled on their peninsula, and in the other direction, the palest blues and pinks of early sunset on the snowy hills.

This morning the Scotrail website declares that there are no trains running on the Edinburgh-Dundee-Aberdeen line, but leaves the Dundee-Glasgow link optimistically unmentioned. We take a taxi from St Andrews to Dundee –the first tendrils of light just starting to creep over the snowfields, little ice-floes on the Tay – and skid and slide into the station carpark. Just before 8am we wander into the station and look at the departure board: every single train is cancelled – Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen – nothing going anywhere. Glasgow – where Roy is due to play a concert at 1pm – suddenly feels a very long way away. ‘The website didn’t tell us this!’ we lament to the ticket clerk. ‘It’s minus twenty in some places, the diesel’s all frozen’, he says; ‘there’s not a train running in Scotland north of the Edinburgh-Glasgow line’. So we haul our cases through the streets of Dundee to the bus station (ever tried lugging a 24kg suitcase through 30cm of snowy slush?). A bus to Glasgow is meant to be leaving in a moment but it hasn’t arrived yet and nobody’s quite sure where it is; after quarter of an hour or so it heaves into view.

The beginning of the journey is stunningly beautiful. The sun is up now, and on both sides of the road the snow is turning pink and blue, but mostly gold. The deciduous trees are lace sculptures; snowy highland cattle stand stoically in the fields. But as we’re coming into Perth, suddenly our blue sky is grey again and it starts to snow – heavily, really flying past the windows. For the rest of the journey – which takes two hours, just 45 minutes longer than normal – these heavy snow flurries come and go and come again. Now we’re passing plantations of fir trees, all the branches heavy with snow, and the landscape is utterly without colour – just white and black and misty grey. It is cold and beautiful now, almost grim – and Grimm perhaps too, with the dark fairytale snowy woods. And the snow flies past the window, and the bus toilet has blocked and I really hope that there are no ten-mile tailbacks heading into Glasgow and that we won’t share the fate of those other bus passengers, a day or two ago, stuck just out of the city for five hours… Then suddenly, miraculously, we’re in; it’s stopped snowing and we can see the edges of the heavy grey clouds that stretch almost to the horizon. At their edges the sky is yellow – real yellow – and light is filtering around and through and onto the snow. And the journey becomes a memory of a slightly eccentric adventure, happily untainted by the failure actually to get to where we’re going: Roy plays his concert after all.

‘…Fauré piano solos (and duets with Emily Kilpatrick)’ the woman sitting behind me reads off her programme. ‘Emily… that’s his latest lady’, her husband comments.

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