I AM DELIGHTED to advise readers I am in Scotland; having driven up from Yorkshire during the day, my first stop is the underrated (and relatively unknown, in Australia) town of Portpatrick, on the south-west Scottish coast. This gorgeous seaside town is never going to attract fake, artificial people looking for a glamour strip, or for glitz and gratuitous luxury, and that’s precisely one of the reasons to recommend it.

It’s raining as I write (some hours after starting the post, sitting in the restaurant of the Mount Stewart Hotel, for I was distracted), and even though I’m back in my hotel room, I would still like to share the view out the window when I sat down with a fine Scottish ale to begin the job.

Can I simply say…it’s GREAT TO BE BACK IN SCOTLAND!

I feel like I’m at home…and even though I was born in Australia, like so many people of other ethnicities born away from their ancestral root, this country feels every bit as much my own as Australia does. I “get” it, and its inhabitants “get” me in my experience, and my tinder-dry humour has never proven lost on a Scotsman: it’s not difficult to see where I got it from.

I have had an enormous dose of fresh Scottish salt air this afternoon, wandering for a couple of hours around the town: its high street, its foreshore, its beach and its rock formations, absorbing it as if by osmosis. I make no apology for sounding wanky, if that’s how I sound: I am just so…desperately and belatedly sated…by being on Scottish soil again.

In seriousness, what about Scotland is either readily known and/or promoted in Australia? Glasgow, Edinburgh, the islands, the Highlands, and golf at St Andrews. The Proclaimers and deep-fried Mars bars. Oh, and the bloody Loch Ness Monster: a complete (albeit charming) pile of shit of a story if ever there was one, to be sure.

The fact of the matter — unless you’re from Scotland (directly or by ancestry) or have another connection to it in some way — is that very little is known about this country in Australia and, it pains me to say, nobody has much interest in finding out. They crap on disgustedly about Haggis (which, if properly prepared, is a taste sensation that will blow a lamb roast out of the water any day). Other than that, Scots are regarded as some wild band of eccentrics emanating from somewhere north of Hadrian’s Wall.

The reason I raise this is that a seaside hamlet like Portpatrick — which deserves a place alongside any other boutique seaside destination anywhere in the world — is probably so foreign a concept to most Australians as to elicit a blank stare at its mention. I have always known it was here, but today is the first time I’ve been, and in truth I’m sorry I’m not staying longer.

I don’t as yet have any photographs looking out over the sea (save for the one out the hotel restaurant window I’ve already posted): by the time I got here this afternoon the sun was beginning to slide into the west, and this means that trying to photograph the water would record more glare than image. I will get some pictures of this in the morning and include them tomorrow night when I post in Glasgow, for this really is a gorgeous spot.

But in the meantime, check out this picnic table. Is this not the best place in the world to have a picnic? What a view…although given Autumn is extending its chilly fingers into the mornings in Britain now, it’s not long before such an enterprise would be a freezing, windy mess. But on its day…

I met a group of local fishermen on my walk this afternoon, and having seen some fish in the waves where the water got deeper — these would be ten to twelve inches in length — I asked them what they usually caught around here.

One salty-looking dude offered me a wriggling fry of about three inches in length that I thought he’d been trying to bait his hook with; apparently it was all they had caught in two hours, and he was throwing it back.

But my intel about the fish in the waves sparked a furious, profanity-laden debate. How big were they? I told them. What colour were they? Plain grey-silver, I said. The vigorous argument ensued from there. “They’re fucking sea bass,” one said confrontationally. “No, they’re mackerel, you shithead,” came the curt response. Apparently my information was very sound, for they immediately set about adjusting the tackle they had rigged their lines with. The eventual consensus, after heated debate and a lot more swearing, was that these were sea mackerel, and that there was a feast to be had if they could catch some. I smiled to myself as I walked away.

Portpatrick was the scene of Britain’s worst maritime disaster since World War Two; the MV Princess Victoria sank off the coast from here, in heavy weather, on 31 January 1953, with the loss of 135 of the 179 souls on board. The Court of Inquiry, held in Belfast, found multiple factors to blame for the disaster, but the HM Coastguard Rescue Team Portpatrick was instrumental in ensuring the carnage wasn’t even worse.

Anyhow, that’s me for the night, at the risk of truncating this post; I have lost four hours to a job relating to my usual work — the “distraction” I mentioned — and at 2am I need to go to bed to ensure I get out of my hotel on time!

Tomorrow I am going to Glasgow.

There will be tweed.

There will be haggis.

There will be all types of fun.

Tattoo or not tattoo…that is the question… 🙂