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| Messing around in a boat off the coast of Scotland – this was my perfect day | Messing around in a boat off the coast of Scotland – this was my perfect day |
| (17 days later) | |
| On the Sunday of last weekend's bank holiday I had what I think of as a perfect day. Some of my pleasure in it is easily explained, with causes that would make sense to anyone. There wasn't a cloud in the sky from dawn to dusk, nor a breath of wind to ruffle the sea. Our little boat motored through islands that looked as though they'd been mounted on a mirror, and at our outdoor lunch table the butter in the dish turned to ghee. In southern England this kind of weather might attract a nod of approval, but in western Scotland, even in the fine summer now ending, it wins an Oscar for best direction. | On the Sunday of last weekend's bank holiday I had what I think of as a perfect day. Some of my pleasure in it is easily explained, with causes that would make sense to anyone. There wasn't a cloud in the sky from dawn to dusk, nor a breath of wind to ruffle the sea. Our little boat motored through islands that looked as though they'd been mounted on a mirror, and at our outdoor lunch table the butter in the dish turned to ghee. In southern England this kind of weather might attract a nod of approval, but in western Scotland, even in the fine summer now ending, it wins an Oscar for best direction. |
| On such a day people never tire of comparing foreign places unfavourably to the familiar-yet-new scenery set before us, as though a deceptively plain secretary had taken off her glasses and loosened her hair in the cliche of old Hollywood. Greece, the Seychelles, Bali, the Grand-Hotel du Cap Ferrat? "Why would you want to go there?" someone will say. "You can't beat Scotland on a day like this." In the Kyles of Bute last weekend, that seemed undeniable. The narrows between the island and mainland Argyll had an unreal beauty. Knobbly green hills were flecked with sheep and patterned with bracken, cottages shone white among the rhododendrons and twisted little oaks along the shore, precipitous stands of pine trees looked down on a shaded anchorage, the occasional sail hung limply in the disappointed hope of wind. | On such a day people never tire of comparing foreign places unfavourably to the familiar-yet-new scenery set before us, as though a deceptively plain secretary had taken off her glasses and loosened her hair in the cliche of old Hollywood. Greece, the Seychelles, Bali, the Grand-Hotel du Cap Ferrat? "Why would you want to go there?" someone will say. "You can't beat Scotland on a day like this." In the Kyles of Bute last weekend, that seemed undeniable. The narrows between the island and mainland Argyll had an unreal beauty. Knobbly green hills were flecked with sheep and patterned with bracken, cottages shone white among the rhododendrons and twisted little oaks along the shore, precipitous stands of pine trees looked down on a shaded anchorage, the occasional sail hung limply in the disappointed hope of wind. |
| But if the weather came first in this reckoning of perfection, the company wasn't far behind. Four of us – me, wife and daughter plus an old friend – know each other as well as anyone can and relish the same things. We baled out our aluminium skiff, which is a boat as basic as my boating skills, and I prepared for the terrible moments when it seems the outboard will never start; the fear of public humiliation is never far away in marinas. But it started at the fourth tug and I managed to steer us astern without hitting anything – we were berthed awkwardly – and soon we were chugging north out of the bay. I've done this journey dozens of times, as a passenger on pleasure steamers, mail boats, yachts and coasters, but only recently under my own command (our son is the sailor in the family), and rarely as slowly. | But if the weather came first in this reckoning of perfection, the company wasn't far behind. Four of us – me, wife and daughter plus an old friend – know each other as well as anyone can and relish the same things. We baled out our aluminium skiff, which is a boat as basic as my boating skills, and I prepared for the terrible moments when it seems the outboard will never start; the fear of public humiliation is never far away in marinas. But it started at the fourth tug and I managed to steer us astern without hitting anything – we were berthed awkwardly – and soon we were chugging north out of the bay. I've done this journey dozens of times, as a passenger on pleasure steamers, mail boats, yachts and coasters, but only recently under my own command (our son is the sailor in the family), and rarely as slowly. |
| It took two hours to reach Tighnabruaich. We saw the usual sights on the way. The hillside where a 19th-century landlord planted trees in the shape of the British formation at Waterloo; Sir Richard Attenborough's holiday farmhouse; the group of Edwardian villas that look as though they've been transplanted from Muswell Hill; the beautiful little harbour where one of George Stephenson's nephews built his now vanished castle. A large ketch lay at anchor off a small island in the narrows, so we sailed around it and called out to the owner, whom we knew, and were happy when one of his passengers shouted back that at that very moment he was reading a book written by one of us. | It took two hours to reach Tighnabruaich. We saw the usual sights on the way. The hillside where a 19th-century landlord planted trees in the shape of the British formation at Waterloo; Sir Richard Attenborough's holiday farmhouse; the group of Edwardian villas that look as though they've been transplanted from Muswell Hill; the beautiful little harbour where one of George Stephenson's nephews built his now vanished castle. A large ketch lay at anchor off a small island in the narrows, so we sailed around it and called out to the owner, whom we knew, and were happy when one of his passengers shouted back that at that very moment he was reading a book written by one of us. |
| So we were all in a fine mood when we reached the stone jetty opposite the Royal Hotel and pulled our skiff up the pebbled beach, fussing over the reliability of its mooring in the face of a rising tide. Then we walked 50 yards to an empty table, where we had fish and chips and watched the butter melt. "What a cracker, eh?" said a yachtsman as he passed us, nodding towards the sky. "Perfect," we agreed then, and went on agreeing among ourselves for the rest of the day. It wasn't just the weather, the landscape and the company, it was the sense of freedom and achievement that messing about in a boat can give you, and in my case something else, both larger and vaguer, that had to do with a book I read as a teenager. | So we were all in a fine mood when we reached the stone jetty opposite the Royal Hotel and pulled our skiff up the pebbled beach, fussing over the reliability of its mooring in the face of a rising tide. Then we walked 50 yards to an empty table, where we had fish and chips and watched the butter melt. "What a cracker, eh?" said a yachtsman as he passed us, nodding towards the sky. "Perfect," we agreed then, and went on agreeing among ourselves for the rest of the day. It wasn't just the weather, the landscape and the company, it was the sense of freedom and achievement that messing about in a boat can give you, and in my case something else, both larger and vaguer, that had to do with a book I read as a teenager. |
| At our lunch table I remembered that I first stepped ashore in Tighnabruaich in the summer of 1959, at the end of a complicated journey I'd persuaded my big brother we should make across Scotland from Fife so that I could travel by as many as possible of the Clyde's still fairly extensive fleet of pleasure steamers in the course of a single day. In fact, we managed only four – a poor show by the steamer cult's fanatical standards – but as we sat on a bench at the side of the shore road, the number hardly seemed to matter. Then as now, the sun blazed down on a sparkling sea. It was, said my brother, using a word new to me, "idyllic", which confirmed my own feeling that this small collection of stone villas tiered picturesquely on their wooded slope (a sign on the pier said Tighnabruaich was the Gaelic for "the house on the brow of the hill") was somehow paradisiacal, or came from a paradisiacal time. | At our lunch table I remembered that I first stepped ashore in Tighnabruaich in the summer of 1959, at the end of a complicated journey I'd persuaded my big brother we should make across Scotland from Fife so that I could travel by as many as possible of the Clyde's still fairly extensive fleet of pleasure steamers in the course of a single day. In fact, we managed only four – a poor show by the steamer cult's fanatical standards – but as we sat on a bench at the side of the shore road, the number hardly seemed to matter. Then as now, the sun blazed down on a sparkling sea. It was, said my brother, using a word new to me, "idyllic", which confirmed my own feeling that this small collection of stone villas tiered picturesquely on their wooded slope (a sign on the pier said Tighnabruaich was the Gaelic for "the house on the brow of the hill") was somehow paradisiacal, or came from a paradisiacal time. |
| A library book had given me this idea. I borrowed George Blake's The Firth of Clyde, published in 1952, soon after our first family holiday there, and was immediately seduced with its evocation of a golden age that had been assassinated by the first world war, which chimed with the anecdotage inside my own family and perhaps of many families with a parent who could remember the Edwardian age. Blake was a good writer – a Glasgow newspaper editor but also a novelist published by Faber – and his fanciful opening chapter imagined a well-to-do Glasgow family travelling to Tighnabruaich for their summer holiday in the early years of the last century. I don't have the book with me, but as a 14-year-old I read the opening chapter often enough to remember the details for life. It was called, I think, "Rhapsody by way of introduction to the Firth" and it followed two boys, twins perhaps, as their father explained each sight to be seen from the steamer's deck, ending with them falling asleep in their rented villa to the sound of a banjo floating through the dusk from a distant yacht. Some years later, when one of these fictional boys is dying on the Somme at Beaumont-Hamel, he imagines the Kyles of Bute as his sustaining version of eternal beauty: heaven, in a way. | A library book had given me this idea. I borrowed George Blake's The Firth of Clyde, published in 1952, soon after our first family holiday there, and was immediately seduced with its evocation of a golden age that had been assassinated by the first world war, which chimed with the anecdotage inside my own family and perhaps of many families with a parent who could remember the Edwardian age. Blake was a good writer – a Glasgow newspaper editor but also a novelist published by Faber – and his fanciful opening chapter imagined a well-to-do Glasgow family travelling to Tighnabruaich for their summer holiday in the early years of the last century. I don't have the book with me, but as a 14-year-old I read the opening chapter often enough to remember the details for life. It was called, I think, "Rhapsody by way of introduction to the Firth" and it followed two boys, twins perhaps, as their father explained each sight to be seen from the steamer's deck, ending with them falling asleep in their rented villa to the sound of a banjo floating through the dusk from a distant yacht. Some years later, when one of these fictional boys is dying on the Somme at Beaumont-Hamel, he imagines the Kyles of Bute as his sustaining version of eternal beauty: heaven, in a way. |
| I wonder now how I would react to the sentimentality of this opening – perhaps badly – but Blake had a lot to be sentimental about. The book was dedicated to his classmates at Greenock Academy who died in the 1914-18 war. It posed as a guidebook to the Firth and in many ways was a good one, but its spirit mourned an unreclaimable past, conflating time and place to produce an idealisation of the Kyles of Bute and its little village, Tighnabruaich, that of course I could never realise in my 1960s holidays there, when banjo players had fled their yachts and we all wore plastic macs and even the rain seemed modern. | I wonder now how I would react to the sentimentality of this opening – perhaps badly – but Blake had a lot to be sentimental about. The book was dedicated to his classmates at Greenock Academy who died in the 1914-18 war. It posed as a guidebook to the Firth and in many ways was a good one, but its spirit mourned an unreclaimable past, conflating time and place to produce an idealisation of the Kyles of Bute and its little village, Tighnabruaich, that of course I could never realise in my 1960s holidays there, when banjo players had fled their yachts and we all wore plastic macs and even the rain seemed modern. |
| My perfect day was perfect for this private reason, too. That at last I'd both fulfilled and exorcised a dream of Eden that had haunted me for 50 years. We had a day that even 1910 could hardly have improved. Hills, sea, trees, islands and islets: they can never have looked finer, and I hadn't died at Beaumont-Hamel in 1916. | My perfect day was perfect for this private reason, too. That at last I'd both fulfilled and exorcised a dream of Eden that had haunted me for 50 years. We had a day that even 1910 could hardly have improved. Hills, sea, trees, islands and islets: they can never have looked finer, and I hadn't died at Beaumont-Hamel in 1916. |
| Going home, I trailed my hand in our wake and felt it warm. An evening swim later gave the lie to this notion; still, it was warm enough. | Going home, I trailed my hand in our wake and felt it warm. An evening swim later gave the lie to this notion; still, it was warm enough. |
| • This article was amended on 2 September 2013. An earlier version referred to bailing out, rather than baling out, the aluminium skiff. | • This article was amended on 2 September 2013. An earlier version referred to bailing out, rather than baling out, the aluminium skiff. |
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