Great Glen Way Day 0

The Great Glen Way

By Mark Walford Fort William      Next

Fort William ....

I was in the basement of a department store on Fort William's high street, in the stationery department, looking for luggage labels. The lady running the department — single-handedly, with the composed authority of someone who has been doing this for a long time and finds the work perfectly satisfying — looked mildly surprised at the request.
"Luggage labels?"
"Yes," I said, and stated the obvious. "The sort you tie onto luggage."
She bustled off to search the shelves with the air of a woman consulting a memory that goes back further than the current stock arrangements. "Not been asked about those for many a year," she announced from somewhere behind a display of ring binders, "but we do have some left."
She found them in an obscure corner of the store, completed the transaction, and asked where I was going that required luggage labels. I explained that I was walking to Inverness along the Great Glen Way.
"Oh aye?" she said, with the polite interest of someone receiving information that is perfectly reasonable without being especially surprising. Then she brightened. "Well I'm leaving for New Zealand tomorrow — for the rugby, y'know."
I considered this for a moment. She was about to travel eight thousand miles to watch large Scottish men kick an oddly shaped ball around a field in the company of tens of thousands, flying in air-conditioned comfort for twenty-four hours. I was about to walk eighty miles to Inverness in the company of two others, in various states of meteorological uncertainty, which would take six days and involve blisters.

A bit of Fort William

On paper, she had the better arrangement. In practice — and I am aware this says something about me — I preferred mine.
This is the thing about walking long distances. I have done enough of it to be a veteran of blisters and embarrassing chafing, of wobbly legs and the particular weariness that arrives around mile twelve and stays until the pub. None of it, somehow, sticks in the memory with anything like the persistence of the other things — the freedom, the fresh air, the scenery that appears around corners and stops you in your tracks. The discomfort fades. The rest doesn't. Which is why I keep returning, and why I was in a basement stationery department in Fort William on a drizzly Saturday afternoon, shopping for luggage labels that the travel company had supplied six months earlier in a welcome pack I had since mislaid entirely.
No labels meant no baggage forwarding. It was just as well this lady had remembered where she had put her stock back in approximately 1983. I wished her a wonderful trip and the Scottish team the very best of luck — as I felt they would need it — and made my way back upstairs to find my companions for the week.
My brother Colin and my old friend Bod. Between us we had shared a few hundred miles over the years — the West Highland Way, the Offa's Dyke southern section, various other expeditions — and we were, if anything, slightly more experienced than when we started, and considerably creakier. Cousin Jo had excused himself early in the planning process, leaving us a trio rather than a quartet this year. Were we eager? Absolutely. Were we fit enough? Almost certainly not — but this had never been a prerequisite and we saw no reason to establish one now.
Colin, it transpired, had an errand to run. A canoeing accident on the River Wye earlier in the year had claimed both his phone and his digital camera — drowned, despite his heroic retrieval of them from the riverbed — and he needed to register a new mobile and acquire some disposable cameras. This sounded straightforward. It proved not to be. The phone card rejected his SIM. The SIM needed registering with Twitter. Twitter required internet access. Internet access required cash. Cash required — and at this point I stopped tracking the chain of dependencies and suggested to Bod that we find somewhere to sit.
We settled on the grassy area at the top of Fraser Square and watched Colin stride purposefully along the parade and out of sight, in the manner of a man who has a plan. Bod and I sat in the weak sunshine that kept appearing briefly between rain clouds, as though conducting a reconnaissance before committing to anything, and caught up on nearly two years' worth of news. This, as is so often the case with old friends, amounted to less than one might expect — we were two years older, things had happened, the world had continued — but the conversation was easy and unhurried and the square was pleasant enough company.
Colin reappeared eventually with all gadgets operational, which was both impressive and a slight relief. We had the rest of the afternoon to account for, so we drifted to the Highland Centre, where I demonstrated admirable restraint by not purchasing a bottle of malt whisky, while still availing myself comprehensively of the free samples at the tasting table. We circulated briefly among the tins of shortbread, the Tam o'Shanters, the tartan socks, and the general abundance of tourist flim-flam before concluding that we were not in the market for any of it and jostling back out past the mostly American clientele into the fresh air.
The end of the West Highland Way — that rather disappointing wooden marker I have written about in a previous journal — stood nearby, and we wandered over on the off-chance that someone might be completing their walk. Sure enough, two bearded and weathered men were making their final yards and asked Colin to take their photograph. He raised the camera. One of the men produced a flag and they unfurled it between them with the pride of people who have carried it a long way.
Colin lowered the camera briefly. "What flag is that?"
"Russia," I said, with confidence.
It was Texas.
We wished the Texans well, made a mental note of the

A lot more of Fort William

Great Glen Way start point for the morning, and eventually settled on dinner at the Nevis Bar — last visited on the final night of our West Highland Way walk, several years and several hundred miles ago. The Texans were already there and we exchanged a few words about their week. They had loved all of it: Scotland, the walking, even the rain. They wanted to know about what we had ahead of us. Nice guys. We wished them a safe journey home.
Our Bed and Breakfast for the night was a large, busy establishment — more small hotel than B&B — and we had already noticed, with the attentiveness that long-distance walkers develop for these things, that it was licensed. The discovery that the lounge bar was just opening its shutters as we returned effectively ended any discussion about further exploration of the high street. We settled into the lounge with the contentment of people who have found what they were looking for without having to look very hard. I used the time productively, filling in the luggage labels with careful attention while Colin and Bod ordered the first round of the week. The lounge had a fine view over Fort William, the River Lochy visible in the distance, and the terrace was inviting in the soft evening light. We went out. We were reminded, within about three minutes, of the specific and personal nature of the Scottish midge's interest in human beings. We went back in, scratching our heads and raking our forearms, to the poorly concealed amusement of the girl behind the bar.
At some point Bod announced, with the gravity of a man delivering relevant intelligence, that his stomach trouble appeared to be under control.
This was welcome news. Every long walk we had taken together had commenced with Bod arriving in possession of some ailment — a sore ankle, athlete's foot, a chest infection — so it was entirely consistent with established pattern that his opening words when we had collected him from Chorley services that morning had been: *"I've got the squits."*
His theory, delivered with the dry equanimity of a man who has given this some thought, is that he doesn't actually like walking and his body generates these complaints as a form of honest protest. Whether or not this is true, the stomach had apparently been persuaded to stand down, which given the amount of personal space the three of us would be sharing over the next six days, was a matter of some collective relief.
We called it a night after a couple of beers. I retired to my room — neat, clean, and indisputably single, for which the travel company had apparently charged the rate of a double on single occupancy, a discrepancy of twenty pounds that I noted and then decided not to think about further.
I had, at least, won the coin toss to determine who got the single room, which meant no snoring to contend with — either as recipient or, a possibility I cannot rule out, as perpetrator.
I slept well. Tomorrow: the Great Glen.
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