Fifty Years Ago: Thursday, 12 August 1976
(Loch Maree — Age 14 years, 10 months)
The wind was quite strong. It started drizzling, and by breakfast fog had descended over Loch Maree.
A different woman served us. Until now, the owners seemed to have brought the meals themselves, making the Loch Maree Hotel feel more like a bed and breakfast than a grand old fishing hotel. I wonder if she might have been a cousin, or a girl from Gairloch with a holiday job. She was far too old for me at the tender age of fourteen – she was perhaps in her late teens or early twenties. We were so completely in the middle of nowhere that I wondered how she got there. Perhaps she had a moped, or a Lambretta. Perhaps she slept at the hotel for several nights while she was working.
I didn’t speak to her. I had nothing to say.
This is all plausible invention. She might just as easily have been a selkie who had emerged from the loch, put on an apron and begun serving breakfast.
The hotel belonged to the heyday of Loch Maree fly-fishing in the 1920s. Its walls displayed photographs, fishing records and replicas of enormous sea trout.
We went out in waders and thick waxed jackets, with the ghillie controlling the boat. The weather was so horrid that I wrapped a handkerchief around the fly to keep it dry. The flies would not be on the water in rain like this.
Fishing appeared futile. I might as well have been using a child’s fishing net to catch shooting stars.
Even so, there was something quietly relentless about dapping. Just one more dap and a fish would be mine. One more. One more. One more.
I had taken an interest in making my own flies after Dad took my brother and me fly-fishing a couple of years earlier. They were intricate little constructions, an advance on making model aeroplanes: feathers, thread and hooks assembled into something intended not merely to resemble life, but to deceive it.
When we reached Weedy—my phonetic spelling of a Gaelic name for that part of the loch—I had ten rises and four nibbles. It was a constant tease. The fish came close enough to promise everything, but not one took properly.
Dad caught three fish from the same place: one and a half pounds, one pound and half a pound. The smaller fish went back, whether because of conservation, the rules or because they were not worth keeping.
Dad was pleased but patient. I was a good pupil. For the life of me, I could not see what I was doing differently.
Perhaps it was not skill at all. Perhaps it was simply his luck.
We had lunch at Coree Beet, another Gaelic name written down as it sounded. I imagine a Scotch egg, a packet of crisps, a Penguin biscuit and perhaps a can of Irn-Bru.
Then the sun came out. We tried farther down and Dad caught another.
I was fed up. We had both had enough. Conditions for catching fish were not going to improve, so we went in.
The hotel records told of huge sea trout caught in the past. Now the great fishing seemed to have been consigned to history, like the two world wars, Rob Roy, Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobite rising.
We understood that industrial-sized trawlers fishing near the mouth of the loch were preventing sea trout from returning to spawn. The story must have come from somewhere—perhaps the ghillies or the hotel. Their work was drying up along with the fishing.
After supper, I went for a walk alone beside the loch as the sun set. With a shoreline of nearly a hundred kilometres, I was never going to complete a circuit.
The landscape made me think of Rob Roy, Bannockburn and Culloden. I liked stories of battles. Dad’s middle name was Stewart to show the family connection with Scotland, and his grandfather had been a Ferguson. He mentioned it. Decades later, a DNA test would describe me as sixty-eight per cent Scottish, which surprised me.
Later, Dad bought me a lager and I listened to some cassettes, perhaps on a small mono cassette player. We had a drink with meals. It was part of the meal and never considered wrong.
I simply jotted down what came to mind at the end of the day. I always began with waking up, which seems obvious, though no more so than Samuel Pepys ending his days by going to bed.
The older version of me now coils another idea around his fingers for possible use later:
This morning I never woke up. For me, today does not exist. This page should be left blank.
Yet here I am, somehow getting words onto the page
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