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June 2002 |
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Wednesday 5 June After ten days on the road (four days in Edinburgh, two days in London, four days in Oslo), I was very glad to get home on Monday and have been taking it easy since then. The highlight of the Scottish trip was the Sunday, when my friend Allan and I, with three other people, had a day's climbing in the Highlands. The original plan was to climb Ben Vorlich and Stuc a' Chroin, two mountains to the south of Loch Earn. But even before we left Edinburgh we had decided that this was probably too ambitious and that we would only have time for one of them. We drove in Allan's car to the starting point for the walk, at Ardvorlich on the south shore of Loch Earn, somewhere near where it is rumoured that J K Rowling has bought a mansion with the proceeds of her Harry Potter books. By this time the weather had taken a turn for the worse, and it was starting to rain. I left my wallet in the car so that it wouldn't get wet, and put on my waterproof overtrousers. The rain eased off after we had climbed about 1,000 feet and I took off the overtrousers. They weren't doing much good anyway, because the trousers underneath were as wet with sweat as they would have been from rain. By the time we reached the 2,000 foot level we were in cloud, and the rain started again. We reached the summit at lunchtime, by which time we were all soaked to the skin. It was too cold, windy and wet to stop for lunch so we kept on walking, down to the bealach (that's a Gaelic word for a pass, or col) between Ben Vorlich and Stuc a' Chroin. As we reached the bealach, the cloud lifted for a bit, and we saw the massive buttress of Stuc a' Chroin ahead of us. But we had already decided to give that a miss, and we contoured across to the path leading back to Ardvorlich. Stuc a' Chroin will have to wait for another day. I have had other wet days in the Highlands, but this came close to being one of the worst. I shouldn't say "worst", though, because I love being in the hills whatever the weather. We all enjoyed our damp outing, and I guess Allan's car will eventually dry out from the effects of its dripping passengers. That evening, after going back to Allan's place for a shower and a change of clothes, we were invited to dinner with another of our climbing friends, Freda, who has a fantastic Georgian house in Edinburgh New Town. ("New", in an Edinburgh context, means 18th Century.) Freda's husband Ron is not a walker, and I only met him once before. He is a very nice guy, seriously overweight and seriously rich. He is a wine connoisseur, and during the course of the evening he served us five bottles of wine which must have cost at least £50 each. I have to admit it made a very nice change from the supermarket plonk I normally drink. After getting soaked on the mountain, and soaking up booze all evening, I slept very soundly that night. In fact, I think I did well to stay awake through the lectures the following day. On Wednesday and Thursday, I had two days of meetings in London. On Wednesday evening I went to Chariots gay sauna (you may be surprised to hear), where I ran into the same Chinese guy Kelvin that I met there last month. The Thursday meeting did not start until the afternoon, and in the morning I went to the Picasso and Matisse exhibition at the Tate Modern gallery. It is an excellent exhibition, well worth a visit if you're in London in the next couple of months. (That means you, Tim!) I thought the most memorable picture in the exhibition was one of Picasso's earliest works, Boy leading a horse. The naked boy, just entering puberty, walks along, followed by a powerful stallion, which must symbolise the overwhelming force of sexuality that is about to overtake the boy in adolescence. Some of Picasso's later, less naturalistic, paintings, like Weeping woman, have just as much emotional power. Poor old Matisse just isn't in Picasso's league, and most of his paintings look lame in comparison. To get to the exhibition, I walked across the city from my hotel in Russell Square, past St Paul's Cathedral and over the new Millennium Footbridge. I knew the area around St Paul's 40 years ago, when I had a vacation job in an office there, after my first year at university. Then, parts of the city had still not been rebuilt after the war, and there were several bomb sites, vacant lots with willow herb growing among the rubble. Now it is all steel and glass office buildings. As you approach St Paul's from the west, coming up Ludgate Hill, there is yet another massive office block under construction. In front of it is a huge advertising hoarding with a picture of the architect of St Paul's, Christopher Wren, inscribed with his famous Latin epitaph Si monumentum requiris, circumspice (if you would see his monument, look around). Whoever put it there had no sense of irony, because the hoarding itself completely obscures the view of the cathedral. Okay, that covers Edinburgh and London. Oslo will have to wait until next time.
So, what's to be said about the trip to Oslo? I was away for four days, Friday to Monday, but two of these were travelling days, so I was only really there for Saturday and Sunday. Both days were taken up with the meeting of the Council of the European Math Soc. I used to be the Secretary of the EMS, and there were several old friends from those days at the Council meeting. It was nice to see them again, but it did not leave me with much free time. Last time I was in Oslo was in January 1977, when I spent a week working with a colleague at the university there. Norway in January is an acquired taste. There are about six hours of daylight, it is cold, windy and snowy. Everyone stopped work at dusk, around 3 in the afternoon, and went straight home for dinner. After dinner, they all put on their skis and headed out along the floodlit ski trails criss-crossing the city until they found a trail-side pub where they could spend the evening drinking before skiing back into town. Despite being a total beginner at cross-country skiing, I quite enjoyed this routine. The weekend was another matter, however. In those days, Oslo closed completely for the weekend. The shops shut promptly at midday on Saturday and did not open again until Monday morning. In that bleak midwinter of 1977 the only event in the whole city that I could find to pass the time on Saturday afternoon was an international speed skating match, Norway versus Holland. Speed skating, seen from way up in the stands of an open air stadium on a January day in Oslo, comes high on my all time list of un-favourite sporting spectacles. But Oslo in June 2002 is so different that I didn't recognise a single thing from that previous visit a quarter of a century ago. It might as well have been a different city. The main street, Karl Johans Gate, has been pedestrianised. In the evening it was warm enough to sit outside at a pavement cafe and have a beer while watching the boyz go by. Norwegian boys are blond, tall and hefty. They are raised on a diet consisting mainly of potatoes and they spend every spare waking hour either skiing or rollerblading according to the time of year, so they have a naturally muscular physique that you can't help but admire. That makes an evening spent at a cafe on Karl Johans Gate a pleasantly rewarding experience. [Linguistic note: Gate means Street in Norwegian. It is not pronounced "gate" as in English, but something more like "garter" (if you're British), or "gahtuh" (if you're American). Just think how many little gems of trivia you learn by reading this journal.] Also recommended in Oslo: two friendly gay saunas, "My Friend Club" at Calmeyers Gate 15, and "Hercules Club" at Storgate 41. Yes, I found time to visit both of them, one on Friday evening and the other on Sunday. That's all I'm saying about that.
I have been in Ireland for the past couple of days, earning an honest Euro or two by acting as external examiner for a small university a few miles west of Dublin. I flew to Dublin on Tuesday afternoon and stayed there overnight at a small hotel in the Temple Bar district, just around the corner from the Boilerhouse. A few hours before I arrived, Ireland had won their way through to the second stage of the World Cup by beating Saudi Arabia 3-0, and the whole country had erupted into celebrations. There were flags flying everywhere, and some people were dressed from head to toe in patriotic green, white and orange, with big furry top hats in the same colours. When I came out of the Boilerhouse that evening, all of the many pubs in the Temple Bar area were overflowing with customers, many of whom had obviously been drinking all day. Sometimes the celebrations got too boisterous and fights broke out in the narrow alleys. But even these seemed relatively good-natured. I saw two men having a heated argument. One of them punched the other one in the face and he sprawled backwards on the ground. But he picked himself up and went lurching off after his friends to the next pub as though nothing had happened. Most of the pubs were throbbing with music, with the customers raucously singing along. I noticed that a lot of them were playing old Beatles songs, possibly in honour of Paul McCartney's wedding in Ireland the following day. I wasn't in the mood for joining in the celebrations, and went back to the hotel for an early night. Next morning I took the train out to Maynooth and spent the day hard at work. In the evening they took me out for a meal at an excellent Thai restaurant. This morning one of them drove me to Dublin airport for the flight back to Leeds. The planes that British Airways uses for this route are tiny little old twin-prop thingies seating about 30 people. This morning's flight was almost empty, with just four passengers including me. The other three were all elderly women, but that didn't stop the flight attendant from going through the whole standard pre-flight spiel about safety procedures. When she got to the bit about special life jackets for infants being available on demand, I pointed out that this hardly applied to the present company. After that, she became more relaxed and went through the rest of the routine in a much more informal way. I don't much like flying in a plane that small. Every time it flies through the smallest cloud, the turbulence is enough to make it bump and judder alarmingly. Leeds-Bradford airport only has the one runway, and if there is a gusty cross wind it can be quite scary coming in to land there in a light plane. Fortunately there was no wind today, and the landing was uneventful.
MedicAlert: This entry is all about unsavoury diseases. Skip it if you are of a squeamish disposition. This started a couple of weeks ago, while I was in Oslo. I noticed fresh blood on the loo paper [American: bathroom tissue]. I don't like the idea of internal bleeding; it's kind of worrying. And it persisted for the next few days. Then I noticed another symptom, just the same as happened three years ago, when I was ill with prostatitis. To be specific, I was finding it harder and harder to empty the bladder. It's no fun to have an uncomfortably full bladder and yet be totally unable to piss. I don't think there is even a word for this condition—it's the opposite of incontinence, whatever that may be. "Continence"? These two symptoms had me seriously concerned. I told Mary, and she was equally worried. You can't help feeling nervous when you look up symptoms in the medical encyclopedia and it refers you to entries about rectal cancer. Another symptom was that I had an irritating rash around the base of the spine and, er, downwards from there. I didn't pay a lot of attention to this because I am used to getting allergic rashes from time to time. But it seemed to get worse, developing into quite large painful blisters. This happened last weekend, and on Monday morning I went to see the doctor. (I hate going to the doctor, and I always postpone it for much longer than I should.) He carried out the usual internal examination and said that the prostate was not at all enlarged. After looking at the rash, he said that it looked like shingles or herpes. He explained that these are essentially the same virus, and it didn't really matter which it was because the treatment for both is the same. He prescribed a course of an antiviral drug, Aciclovir. He wasn't worried about the bleeding, which he said was not internal at all, but was caused by me wiping the scabs off the blisters of the rash. As for the "continence", he said that there was no sign of any disease in the prostate or bladder, and that the trouble was caused by the shingles virus disrupting the nerves that control the muscles in that part of the body. But just in case there was any infection in the prostate he put me on a course of an antibiotic, Trimethoprim. Since then, things have slowly improved. The rash has virtually gone, though I am still having some problems with the "continence". I have been feeling a bit tired and drained of energy, but I haven't let all this interrupt my life or stop me going to Ireland, for example. I had better be totally recovered by next weekend, when I leave for my annual walking holiday in Scotland. There is just one essential difference between shingles and herpes, which the doctor tactfully omitted to mention. Shingles (herpes zoster) is usually a long delayed reaction to a childhood bout of chickenpox, whereas plain herpes (herpes simplex) is a sexually transmitted disease. In fact, I did have a severe dose of chickenpox when I was 12, so it seems entirely natural to think that this is the explanation of my present illness. On the other hand, I can't entirely rule out the possibility that the episode with my Chinese friend Kelvin in Chariots a few weeks ago may be responsible (even though we didn't do anything "unsafe"). I'll choose to believe that I have shingles, but I'll also take this as a warning to be even more careful in future to play safe. Either way, I have been lucky. Shingles can be a serious and painful disease. I have obviously had a very mild case of it, and I'm grateful that it hasn't been any worse.
Tomorrow is the day when the new carpets are being fitted. I shall take the day off work to keep an eye on proceedings and to help shift furniture. In fact, I have already spent a lot of time doing preparatory work. I mentioned last month that I needed to dismantle the large bookcase in the study. I did this a couple of weeks ago, after carrying all the books up to Liz's bedroom to store them out of the way. Yesterday evening I emptied and shifted the hi-fi cabinet, taking care to draw a little diagram to remind me where all the wiring connections from the amplifier to the record player, CD player, tape deck, radio receiver and speakers should be plugged in. This evening I shall have to do the same with the computer desk, where there is a similar problem of getting the cables into the correct sockets for the monitor, keyboard, printer, scanner and internet connections. That leaves the piano. At least there are no wiring problems with that, but I can't possibly move it on my own, so the carpet fitters will have to deal with that. I hope to get the computer wired up again tomorrow evening, but I won't have time for a journal entry because I have to pack for yet another trip. I have to go to London for the day on Friday, and then early on Saturday morning I set off for my annual walking holiday in Scotland. I'll be going with the same group of friends as usual, and this year we are renting a cottage in Barrisdale on the Knoydart peninsula. This must be just about the remotest place on the British mainland. It is eight miles from the nearest road, at Kinlochhourn, and even this is just a little single track lane that winds its way for 20 miles alongside Loch Quoich and Loch Garry before connecting with a main road. We have arranged for a local fisherman to take us in his boat along Loch Hourn from Kinlochhourn to Barrisdale Bay, and from there it is only a couple of miles to the cottage. We have to take all our supplies for the week, and once there we'll be marooned for the week as though on a desert island, just like one of those Survivor programmes on TV. I hope we don't start voting on who to throw out of the cottage. The cottage sleeps ten, but I think there will be eight of us staying there. There is a gamekeeper's cottage somewhere nearby, where the stalker has a radio telephone for use in emergencies. Apart from that we'll be totally out of reach of any means of communication, except that from the tops of some of the hills it may be possible to make contact with the mobile phone transmitter on Skye. So I'll take Mary's mobile with me, and I may be able to call her from a mountain top occasionally. I'm really looking forward to this trip. There are some spectacular mountains to climb on Knoydart, and it will be great to see all my old friends again. You may remember that I had to miss last year's holiday because Mary was so ill, so it's two years since I last had a holiday in the Highlands. This will be the remotest place I have ever stayed in, and it should be a memorable week.
Nobody goes to the Western Highlands of Scotland in order to sunbathe. It's an area that gets far more than its fair share of rain, and even on a summer's day it's liable to be cold and windy, with low cloud over the hills. Even so, I think we were a bit unlucky this year to get only one day of reasonably good weather during our week's stay. The cottage we were staying in last week, at Barrisdale in Knoydart, was so remote and primitive that not all of our group wanted to come, and we were reduced to 7 hardened veterans: Allan, Bob, Barbara, Freda, me, Allan's son Andrew and his friend (also called Andrew). Four of us had left spouses at home, and the other three are unattached. Knoydart is a peninsula in northwest Scotland, with no roads and hardly any inhabitants, cut off from the rest of the mainland by a range of wild, desolate hills known as the Rough Bounds of Knoydart (one of those impossibly romantic Scottish place names). The water supply to the cottage was a pipe from a mountain burn. The only electricity came from a diesel generator that supplied enough power for lighting but not for anything else. Heating was by an open coal fire in the sitting room and a coal-fired stove in the kitchen which also (sort of) heated the hot water tank. There were no shops anywhere within reach, so we had to bring all our food for the week in the little open boat that brought us to Barrisdale Bay. The cottage had no fridge, so we could only bring fresh food for the first few days. After that, we had to use powdered milk and bake our own bread. Allan did a great job in planning our supplies, and we had just about enough food and drink to last the week. The whole experience was a bit like moving back into a previous century, and that was a big part of the attraction of the holiday. I said in the previous entry that we would be marooned on Knoydart for the week, and that was truer than I realised. When we arrived on Saturday a week ago, we found that they had had several days of heavy rain there, and all the little mountain streams had turned into raging torrents. All the trails and footpaths cross several of these streams, and when we arrived they had all become completely impassible. Fortunately the water levels soon subsided, but the weather was still much too bad for us to climb any of the spectacular mountains on Knoydart, with low cloud and heavy showers day after day. It didn't help to know that the rest of the country was enjoying summer weather. The only contact we had with the outside world was a little portable radio I brought with me, which could just about receive Radio 4 if you stood by a window and used your body as an extension of the aerial. We only used it to hear the weather forecast, which was saying things like "It looks like another fine day for most of us, with long spells of sun at Wimbledon, where they ran out of suncream yesterday." Humph. For the first few days, we stayed in the cottage until lunch time, and spent the mornings reading or playing Scrabble. After lunch we put on our wet weather gear and went for a low level walk along one of the many beautiful, desolate glens in the area. Then on Wednesday the weather finally started to improve just a bit. It stopped raining and the cloud lifted so that we could see the tops of some of the lower hills. The rest of the week was much better, and more than made up for the disappointing start of the holiday. But I've run out of time to write any more this evening, so I'll finish the story tomorrow.
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