Above all, Inverness has an especially fine river, green and sedate and charmingly overhung with trees, lined on one side by big houses, trim little parks and the old sandstone castle (now the home of the regional sheriff's courts) and on the other by old hotels with steeppitched roofs, more big houses and the stolid, Notre Damelike grandeur of the cathedral, standing on a broad lawn beside the river. I checked into a hotel at random and immediately set off for a walk through the gathering twilight. The river was lined on both sides by gracious promenades thoughtfully punctuated with benches, which made it very agreeable for an evening stroll. I walked for some distance, perhaps two miles, on the Haugh Road side of the river, past little islands reached by Victorian suspension footbridges.

 Nearly all the houses on both sides of the river were rambling places built for an age of servants. What, I wondered, had brought all this late Victorian wealth to Inverness, and who supported these handsome heaps today? Not far from the castle, on spacious grounds in what I suppose a developer would call a prime location, stood a particularly grand and elaborate mansion, with turrets and towers. It was a wonderful, spacious house, the kind you could imagine riding a bicycle around in, and it was boarded, derelict and up for sale. I couldn't think how such a likeable place could have ended up in such a neglected state. As I walked along, I lost myself in a reverie of buying it for a song, doing it up, and living happily ever after on these large grounds beside this deeply fetching river, until I realized what my family would say if I told them we weren't after all going to the land of shopping malls, 100channel television and hamburgers the size of a baby's head, but instead to the damp north of Scotland.

 And anyway, I regret to say that I could never live in Inverness because of two sensationally ugly modern office buildings that stand by the central bridge and blot the town centre beyond any hope of redemption. I came upon them now as I returned to the town centre and was positively riveted with astonishment to realize that an entire town could be ruined by two inanimate structures. Everything about them scale, materials, design was madly inappropriate to the surrounding scene. They weren't just ugly and large but so illdesigned that you could actually walk around them at least twice without ever finding the front entrance. In the larger of the two, on the river side where there might have been a restaurant or terrace or at least shops or offices with a view, much of the road frontage had been given over to a huge delivery bay with overhead metal doors. This in a building that overlooked one of the handsomest rivers in Britain. It was awful, awful beyond words.

 I had recently been to Hobart in Tasmania, where the Sheraton chain had built a hotel of stunning plainness on its lovely waterfront. I had been told that the architect hadn't actually visited the site and had put the hotel restaurant at the back, where diners couldn't see the harbour. Since then, I had thought that was the most brainless thing I had ever heard of architecturally. I don't suppose this pair could possibly have been designed by the same architect it was terrifying to think that there could be two architects in the world this bad but he could certainly have worked for the firm.

 Of all the buildings that I would deeply love to blow up in Britain the Maples building in Harrogate, the Hilton Hotel in London, the Post Office building in Leeds, a lucky dip among almost any structure owned by British Telecom 1 have no hesitation in saying that my first choice would be either of these two.

 And here is the cruncher. Guess who inhabits these two piles of heartbreak? Well, I'll tell you. The larger is the regional headquarters of the Highland Enterprise Board and the other is the home of Inverness and Nairn Enterprise Board, the two bodies entrusted with the attractiveness and wellbeing of this lovely and vital corner of the country. God.

 CHAPTER TWENTYSEVEN

 I HAD BIG PLANS FOR THE MORNING: I WAS GOING TO GO TO THE BANK, buy some plastic vomit, have a look at the local art gallery, perhaps take another stroll along the lovely River Ness, but I woke late and had no time to do anything but fumble my way into clothes, check out of the hotel and waddle in a sweat to the station. Beyond Inverness trains run infrequently just three times a day to Thurso and Wick so I couldn't afford to be late.

 As it happened, the train was waiting, humming quietly, and left right on time. We slid out of Inverness against a backdrop of round mountains and the cold flatness of the Beauly Firth. The train was soon rattling along at a fair old clip. There were more passengers this time, and there was a trolley service again all credit to BR but noone wanted anything from it because the other passengers were almost all pensioners and they had brought their own provisions.

 I bought a tandoori chicken sandwich and a coffee. How far things have come. I can remember when you couldn't buy a British Rail sandwich without wondering if this was your last act before a long period on a lifesupport machine. And anyway you couldn't buy one because the buffet car was nearly always closed. And now here I was sitting eating a tandoori chicken sandwich and drinking a creditable cup of coffee brought to me in my seat by a friendly and presentable young man on a twocarriage train across the Highlands.

 Here's an interesting statistic for you, which is kind of boring but must be taken in. Rail infrastructure spending per person per year in Europe is .20 in Belgium and Germany, .31 in France, more than .50 m Switzerland, and in Britain a slightly less than munificent .5Britain spends less per capita on rail improvements than any other country in the European Union except Greece and Ireland. Even Portugal spends more. And the thing is, despite this paucity of support you actually have an excellent train service in this country, all things considered. Trains are now much cleaner than they used to be and staff generally more patient and helpful. Ticket people always say please and thank you, bless them, and you can eat the food.

 So I ate my tandoori chicken sandwich and drank my cup of coffee with pleasure and gratification, and passed the time between nibbles watching a whitehaired couple at a table across the way delving among their travelling fare, setting out little plastic boxes of pork pies and hardboiled eggs, lifting out flasks, unscrewing lids, finding little salt and pepper shakers. It's amazing, isn't it, how you can give a couple of old people a canvas holdall, an assortment of Tupperware containers and a Thermos flask and they can amuse . themselves for hours. They worked away with wellordered precision and total silence, as if they had been preparing for this event for years. When the food was laid out, they ate for four minutes with great delicacy, then spent most of the rest of the morning quietly packing everything away. They looked very happy.

 They reminded me in an odd but heartwarming way of my mother, as she is something of a Tupperware devotee herself. She doesn't picnic on trains, since there are no passenger trains in her part of the country any more, but she does like to put stray items of food in plastic containers of various sizes and file them away in the fridge. It's an odd thing about mothers generally, I believe. As soon as you leave home they merrily throw away everything that you cherished through childhood and adolescence your valuable collection of baseball cards, a complete set of Playboys from 196675, your highschool yearbooks but give them half a peach or a spoonful of leftover peas and they will put it in a Tupperware container at the back of the fridge and treasure it more or less for ever.