And so the long ride to Thurso passed. We rattled on through an increasingly remote and barren landscape, treeless and cold, with heather clinging to the hillsides like lichen on rock and thinly scattered with sheep that took fright and scampered off when the train passed. Now and then we passed through winding valleysspeckled with farms that looked romantic and pretty from a distance, but bleak and comfortless up close. Mostly they were smallholdings with lots of rusted tin everywhere tin sheds, tin hen huts, tin fences looking rickety and weatherbattered. We were entering one of those weird zones, always a sign of remoteness from the known world, where nothing is ever thrown away. Every farmyard was cluttered with piles of castoffs, as if the owner thought that one day he might need 132 halfrotted fenceposts, a ton of broken bricks and the shell of a 1964 Ford Zodiac.
Two hours after leaving Inverness, we came to a place called Golspie. It was a goodsized town with big council estates and winding streets of those grey pebbledash bungalows that seem to have been modelled on public toilets and for which they have a strange fondness in Scotland, but no sign of factories or workplaces. What, I wondered, do all the people in all those houses do for a living in a place like Golspie? Then came Brora, another goodsized community, with a seafront but no harbour, as far as I could see, and no factories. What do they do in these little places in the middle of nowhere?
After that, the landscape became quite empty, with neither farmhouses nor field animals. We rode for a seeming eternity through a great Scottish void, full of miles of nothingness, until, in the middle of this great emptiness, we came to a place called Forsinard, with two houses, a railway station and an inexplicably large hotel. What a strange lost world this was. And then at long last we arrived in Thurso, the northernmost town on the British mainland, the end of the line in every sense of the word. I stepped from the little station on slightly unsteady legs and set off down the long main street towards the centre.
I had no idea what to expect, but my initial impressions were favourable. It seemed a tidy, wellordered place, comfortable rather than showy, considerably larger than I had expected, and with several small hotels. I took a room in the Pentland Hotel, which seemed a nice enough place in a deathly quiet, endoftheworld sort of way. I accepted a key from the pleasant receptionist, conveyed my things to a distant room reached through spooky, winding corridors, then went out to have a look around.
The big event in Thurso, according to civic records, was in 1834 when Sir John Sinclair, a local worthy, coined the term 'statistics' in the town, though things have calmed down pretty considerably since. When he wasn't contriving neologisms, Sinclair also extensively rebuilt the town, endowing it with a splendid library in cautiously baroque style and a small square with a little park in the middle. Around the square today stands a modest district of small, useful, friendly looking shops chemists and butchers, a wine merchant, a ladies' boutique or two, a scattering of banks, lots of hair salons (why is there always an abundance of hair salons in little outoftheway communities?) pretty well everything, in short you would hope to find in a model community. There was a small' oldfashioned Woolworth's, but apart from that and the banks, nearly everything else appeared to be locally owned, which gave Thurso a nice, homey feel. It had the air of a real, selfcontained community. I liked it very much.
I pottered about for a bit among the shopping streets, then followed some back lanes down to the waterfront, where there was a lonely fish warehouse marooned in an acre of empty car park and a vast empty beach with thunderous crashing waves. The air was fresh and vigorously abundant in the blowy way of the seaside, and the world was bathed in an ethereal northern light that gave the sea a curious luminescence indeed, gave everything an odd, faint bluish cast that intensified my sense of being a long way from home.
At the far end of the beach there stood a spectral tower, a fragment of old castle, and I set off to investigate. A rocky stream stood between me and it, so I had to backtrack to a footbridge some distance from the beach, then pick my way along a muddy path liberally strewn with litter. The castle tower was derelict, its lower windows and door openings bricked over. A notice beside it announced that the coastal path was closed because of soil erosion. I stood for a long time by this little headland gazing out to sea, then turned to face the town and wondered what to do next.
Thurso was to be my home for the next three days and I wasn't at all sure how I was going to fill such an expanse of empty time. Between the smell of sea air and the sense of utter remoteness, I had a moment of quiet panic at finding myself alone here at the top of the earth, where there was noone to talk to and the most exciting diversion was an old brickedup tower. I wandered back into town the way I had come and, for want of anything better to do, had another pottering look in the shop windows. And then, outside a greengrocer's, it happened something that sooner or later always happens to me on a long trip away from home. It is a moment I dread.I started asking myself unanswerable questions.
Prolonged solitary travel, you see, affects people in different ways. It is an unnatural business to find yourself in a strange place with an underutilized brain and no particular reason for being there, and eventually it makes you go a little crazy. I've seen it in others often. Some solitary travellers start talking to themselves: little silently murmured conversations that they think noone else notices. Some desperately seek the company of strangers, striking up small talk at shop counters and hotel reception desks and then lingering for an uncomfortably long period before finally departing. Some become ravenous, obsessive sightseers, tramping from sight to sight with a guidebook in a lonely quest to see everything. Me, I get a sort of interrogative diarrhoea. I ask private, internal questions scores and scores of them for which I cannot supply answers. And so as I stood by a greengrocer's in Thurso, looking at its darkened interior with pursed lips and a more or less empty head, from out of nowhere I thought, Why do they call it a grapefruit? and I knew that the process had started.
It's not a bad question, as these things go. I mean to say, why do they call it a grapefruit? I don't know about you, but if someone presented me with an unfamiliar fruit that was yellow, the size of a cannonball and tasted sour I don't believe I would think: Well, you know, it rather puts me in mind of a grape.
The trouble is that once these things start there is no stopping them. A couple of doors away was a shop that sold jumpers and I thought: Why do the British call them jumpers? I've actually been wondering this for years, off and on, usually in lonely places like Thurso, and I would sincerely like to know. Do they make you want to jump? Do you think to yourself when you put one on in the morning: Now not only shall I be warm all day, no small consideration in a nation where central heating still cannot be assumed, but if I should be required to do some jumping I shall be suitably attired.
And so it went on. I proceeded through the streets under a meteor shower of interrogations. Why do they call them milk floats? They don't float at all. Why do we foot a bill rather than, say, head it? Why do we say that our nose is running'} (Mine slides.) Who ate the first oyster and how on earth did anyone ever figure out that ambergris would make an excellent fixative for perfumes?
When this happens, I know from years of experience, it takes a special distraction to shock the mind from this solitary torment, H fortunately Thurso had one. On a sidestreet, as I was just beginning to wonder why we say we are head over heels when we rehappy when in fact our head normally is over our heels, I happened on an extraordinary little establishment called the Fountain Restaurant, which offered three complete but different menus a Chinese menu, an Indian menu and a 'European' menu. Thurso evidently couldn't maintain three separate restaurants, so it had one restaurant offering three kinds of cuisines.