There's snow place like home

"Trust me, I’ve been there"

I lived in Scotland for a little while, in the early part of this century. I can’t now remember why, it was either to write a novel or to give up smoking. In the event, I gave up the novel and took up smoking more, but you can’t blame Scotland for that.

It was the most peerlessly beautiful place in Perthshire, and had a strange quality where the weather in the morning was never the same as the weather in the afternoon. But the uniting feature of this weather, as changeable as it was, was that it was always bad. It just tended to go from bad to worse. It was not unusual to take the dog out for a walk and for him to spontaneously go home without me. If you have heard anything on your travels about the loyalty of dogs, this should tell you a lot. Or maybe I just have a really rubbish dog.

And yet there was not that much snow. There was ice, there was black ice, there was scary ice, there was the kind of ice you can’t see but makes you drive into a ditch and then the Scottish electricity board has to tow you out. There was cold, there was dry cold, there was wet cold, there was the kind of cold that blows the power lines and makes the person in the village with the Aga the only one who can have a cup of tea all day. There was wind, don’t get me started on the wind. But the snow was only a smattering, something to accent the pretty rabbits and make them easier to chase. You wouldn’t ski on this snow.

Nevertheless, every morning, off I’d go to Blairgowrie for a newspaper, and there would pass the snow-sport cars, packed with young’uns, skis piled on top like spellicans, on their way to Braemar as if seriously intending to ski. This myth is openly promulgated by the inhabitants of the region. Just look at the websites. Oh yes, we ski. There’s a picture of a person with skis on, skiing as if on snow.

“But it’s not even snowy,” I said to the guy in the shop. “Yes it is,” he said, pointing to a plucky yard of snow. “What do you call that, Scotch mist?”

“I can see the ground through it,” I protested.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said, staring fixedly at the till. When I left, I understood – people don’t ski there for the skiing, it’s an act of love for the country of Scotland. They would ski there even if it wasn’t hilly (though I wonder if they would love it so?). They would scooch themselves along scrubland if they had to – it’s blind romance. So maybe I needn’t have been so literal-minded.