Fifty Years Ago, Tuesday, 10 August 1976
(Loch Maree Hotel, Age 14:10)
I slept very badly and woke at 6.45. The dust in the hotel was probably affecting me, though nobody yet knew I had an allergy. I got out my sketch pad and soft pencil and drew the hills and loch from the bedroom window: the view across Loch Maree from the hotel.
It was a challenge. Landscape is so nuanced that the more closely I looked, the less certain I became about how to draw it.
The tea tray arrived at 7.30. I was already up when it was left outside the bedroom door. Apparently, this is standard hotel practice, although it was new to me: tea delivered without anybody entering the room.
I went round to Dad at eight. He was still in bed, complaining about the man in the next room, who had been snoring and then put his radio on. Dad has always had a thing about noises made by other people or things. He will get up at night and search for the source so that he can shut it down. He hates any noise he cannot identify and control.
We got up for breakfast and I continued my drawing.
Apparently, the loch had become too calm to bother with dapping for sea trout. Dapping depends upon the wind. A long, light rod is fitted with a short length of floss that catches the breeze, allowing a large bushy fly to dance and bounce across the surface. The fly resembles a daddy-long-legs or dragonfly, skittering above the water until a trout rises and sometimes leaps clear of the loch to take it.
Without a little wind, none of this would work.
Instead of rowing, Gilley, our boatman, started his modest old outboard, probably from the 1950s, and took us on a short tour of Loch Maree. It did not exactly roar. It quietly chugged us along.
We stopped for lunch on a sandy island and ate sandwiches.
Something gave me earache. It may have been the exhaust fumes from the outboard, although I also suspected some additive in the chutney. Either way, the grand Highland expedition had been reduced to a boy sitting on an island with an aching ear and a sandwich.
Dad then caught a one-pound sea trout.
He considered it a good start to the week.
My turn next
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