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People here are proud and they enjoy their individual freedom. They live with the land and the sea and the changing of the seasons, the fact that you need your next door neighbour, as he needs you and they definitely have their own hierarchy of values. My husband might be a physics professor and I might have made a career of my own, that doesn’t count very much here. We do not understand about sheep, so in the West Coast World we are some poor fellows!
Diabeg Harbour
The reason for the hard struggle for a living of course is, that there are not many permanent jobs here. Some people are employed by fishfarms. It is a hard and sometimes dangerous work, because the weather conditions can be very treacherous. There are a few jobs in the few hotels, mainly during the season. The local council might be an employer, doctors, teachers, shop assistants. Most of the people, however, are self-employed, each doing as many different jobs as possible. Still there is a nearly Mediterranean attitude to it. We were waiting for the electrician to put up the aerial for about nine months. Eventually we tempted him into an appointment for the very next day. Who did not come? The electrician! What did he say, when we called him in the evening? "But this was a perfect day for fishing!" And believe me, that was not supposed to be an excuse. It was not as if he wanted to say "sorry", what he actually wanted to indicate was: how could anybody be so stupid to expect anyone to come on a day like this!
Loch Torridon is a wonderful place for hillwalkers. So an important part of the women’s income is B&B and there are quite a few of them. However, this causes a conflict with the church (which is called kirk, again a very German expression) on a Sunday, as the Sabbath as they call it is holy. There are still enough families who will sit around the kitchen table and read the bible and you would not be welcome on that day, as much as you are welcome on every other day of the week. So they will hang a blanket over the "Vacancies" sign for the weekend and let the heathens have all the profit! They say that on Lewis they even lock in the cockerels on the Sabbath because they are not supposed to have fun. And our friend John says, out of the same reason the kirk would forbid soft toilet paper if only they could.
Still with all the influence of the kirk, like the observance of the Sunday, and the relative isolation of the area, this is far from being out of the world (the modern techniques are widely used) and the tolerance of the people is really astonishing. As everybody might need everybody’s help up here, they just can’t afford to exclude anyone from the community for good. So you will find a lot of weird people and eccentrics here and you realise that they are an accepted part of life, even when they sometimes make it a bit difficult. You just grow accustomed to it. Only when I come back to the continent or speak with visitors I realise that by now my values are slightly corrupted. I recognise that strange look on the face of the person I speak to, when he or she says: "Should that person rather not be behind bars?" (not meaning the pub, of course). No, they should not, we can deal with them! Even when our trees are cut down and the fire wood has disappeared. You know who did it, and you know, it was your own fault in a way to let him in in the first place!
Don’t get me wrong. This is a marvellous place to live in. You are so secure. You will only lock the door, when you leave for longer. And then you still will leave the key in the shed, because your neighbour might need something he wants to borrow from you. The greatest crime I know of is drunken driving. That indeed is nearly unavoidable. You don’t drive all these miles to the bar just for one pint or a dram. And there is no public transport here. Only the postbus which comes once a day and not at all on a Sunday. So it does happen! I plead guilty.
If you come to the bar tradition demands that you invite your friends to have a drink, and "friends" in a bar can include a hell of a lot of people. The ritual is, that you tell the chap behind the bar, who it is you want to invite. Then he goes around and asks people what they want. The answer will depend on who you are, as folks know your monetary possibilities very well and will not put to much a burden on your financial shoulder. Now, as this is the rule which applies to everybody that round you pay might be the only time your money goes over the counter, because in due time you will be rewarded by the one you invited first. At the end of the day you will end up with just too much booze and the wonderful feeling to be an accepted part of the lot.
Do they drink their very own Whisky at all? Certainly they do! Whisky is the Water of Life and as such it is everything from ritual for certain occasions to remedy for nearly every illness (Try a hot toddy: Whisky with hot water, a bit of sugar and a drop of milk!). Hogmanay (a very special Scottish new year celebration) would be totally lost without the wee dram or quite a few of them. But what about the special Malts? Well, it would be the same if you asked a French farmer, who never takes a meal without his litre of house red wine, if he liked the vintage Burgundy . He would grumble that he never could afford the stuff. And this is pretty much the same up here. The Malts are for the connoisseurs, the one who can really appreciate them. For the rest of us, it is just the dram!
Beinn Eighe from Glen Torridon
It is winter now, which is beautiful in itself. You have an enormous spectrum of colours, browns of the soil and the heather, greys of the rocks, yellows of the died grass of last summer and greens from the fern and the rhododendron. There is snow on the top of the mountains, although we very seldom get snow or ice down here, as the gulf stream keeps us astonishingly warm. You will see a lot of red deer at that time of the year, when the sun is down. They will appear in the headlights of your car, two, three, twelve or twenty and will disappear into the dark like passing ghosts. On a clear night you can watch the sky and the stars seem so much brighter and the moon so large and much nearer than anywhere else.
But if you wonder about visiting Scotland for the first time you should rather come in summer. On a beautiful sunny day when the grass is like a huge velvet carpet all over the hills and the wild rhododendron is in full bloom, there is no better place to be. Well, at least for me, there is not. As far as other people are concerned I only know of two reactions: either they don’t fit in, then they do not like it at all, will leave as soon as possible, because it frightens them, makes them feel small and feeble and a bit paranoid, and they will never come again. Or they get hooked up and then they will love it with all their hearts and will keep a secret longing for the place which grows and grows with time and will never completely vanish as long as they live. If you have been to Scotland you will know what I am talking about. And if you plan to come for the first time I very much hope, you will belong to the second group. Just call for B&B.
Renate Dietrich
(The author, a graduate in business management, has worked many years as a teacher and an administrator in the field of further education, i.e. vocational training for unemployed adults. In 1996 she retired from permanent employment to start a new career as a freelance writer, thus she is able to spend at least half of each year in Scotland.)
