On the Eastern Airways flight from Bristol to Aberdeen I spotted a shiny £2 coin lying in the aisle. The businessman in the seat opposite saw me lean down and retrieve it. ‘Toss you for it — heads,’ he said. It came down tails. I trousered the coin and returned triumphantly to the complimentary copy of the current Spectator I’d found in the seat pocket.
At Aberdeen airport I said to the taxi driver, ‘Rothes, please.’ I pronounced it to rhyme with clothes and I assumed the town was just around the corner. ‘Ya mean Roth-ess?’ he rasped. It was about 60 miles away. It was the longest and perhaps the most scenic taxi ride I’ve ever taken. As we passed between stark, smoothly curvaceous hills, the taxi driver reminisced about a particular brothel in Durban, South Africa, that he’d once lived next door to and patronised daily. He enjoyed going there so much, he said, he’d found it rather addictive. Did I know what he meant? I could well imagine, I said. At Rothes House, I was introduced to the four other members of our party over a memorable slice of quiche, and then we drove out into the Mannoch hills for an afternoon of competitive sports.
First on the programme was clay-pigeon shooting. I’d never fired a gun in my life and I assumed that this would put me at a disadvantage. But to my and everyone else’s surprise I couldn’t miss. I was a natural. Admittedly, I was calmly and expertly led through every step of the process of loading, aiming and firing by Jamie, a gamekeeper. And instead of going across, the clays rose straight ahead into the sky, then drifted very slowly, it seemed to me, and at a perfectly convenient height, neatly framed in the landscape by tawny hills sloping in from either side.
With my first ten shots I obliterated nine — the top score. The clay I missed rose, dipped, then unexpectedly rose again as I pulled the trigger. Cheeky. Hitting the others was such a simple accomplishment that ejecting the spent cartridges in a short arc directly into the collecting bucket behind me became the greater and more satisfying achievement. When I asked Jamie whether I might be allowed to shoot from the hip instead of from the shoulder, he shook his head in genuine sorrow.
After the clay-pigeon shooting, we drank whisky slightly older than Lewis Hamilton, made from water that had filtered down through the hills we were standing on, at the Glenrothes distillery just over the hill. Then we took it in turns to drive a Land Rover as fast as possible around a sharply undulating, gated course, while blindfold and being screamed at by everyone else. I won that as well, apparently. After that we lay in the heather and shot at targets with a rifle armed with a telescopic sight and I won that.
Then we drove back down the valley and went to a pub that had a pool table in the back room. I won the toss for who was first on, then I won the toss for the break. I used to play a lot of pool, I boasted, as I blue-chalked the top of my cue like a pro, but hadn’t been near a pool table for years. Then I smashed the white into the pack. Three yellows went down: plop, plop, plop. I snicked another into the middle pocket: plop. Then I rolled one three quarters of the length of the cushion and plop, that fell in as well. I was in potting heaven. The angles were irrelevant. To be successful, a shot had only to fall within, or on the boundaries of, the laws of geometry.
After yet another sporting triumph by the low-life correspondent of The Spectator, we went back to Rothes House and ate a formal dinner washed down with old whiskies, ancient wines and pre-historic sherries. It was during the pudding, I think, that my amazing run of effortless sporting supremacy and Corinthian good-naturedness spectacularly hit the buffers and I turned into a blithering, blathering idiot.
During the guided tour of the Glenrothes distillery next morning I was still swaying. It was the beer I’d drunk at the pub, they told me, quite seriously, that was causing me to feel unwell. It certainly wasn’t the vintage wines or whiskies. They’d seen it happen like that to journalists before, they said, sounding remarkably like clinicians giving evidence at a post-mortem.
I returned to Aberdeen airport after lunch. In the Eastern Airways lounge, I met the businessman who had tossed me for the two pounds coin on the way up. ‘Double or quits?’ said the affable sportsman. The coin was still in my trouser pocket. I took it out and feebly flipped it. ‘Heads,’ he said. It was heads. The tide had definitely turned.
Comments