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as we pack the car's boot. 'This is like living in southern California. The good weather's
getting almost boring.'
Aileen passes by, toting bags and laughing. 'Are you mad?'
'Is this a piece of your brain?' Les asks.
Les and Aileen are sun worshippers; the ideal year for them consists of three holidays
in somewhere very hot indeed - the Canaries, Portugal, Greece, Egypt - with a very hot
(for Scotland) Glenfinnan summer thrown in. The way their holidays work they can just
about manage this. We've been on holiday abroad with them a few times but I'm usu-
ally far too hot - red-faced, lathered in sweat, coated in sunblock with the sun protection
factor of kitchen foil and wearing a broad-brimmed hat even when I'm in the swimming
pool. Meanwhile the McFarlanes are just about comfortable.
It's not my fault; I'm a cold climate person. Anything much above sixteen centigrade
and I think I'm in a heatwave. Weather that has everybody else shivering, blowing into
their fists, stamping their feet and pulling on extra layers of clothing will see me, in a T
shirt or shirt-sleeved, clapping my hands and declaring the temperature 'just nice'. Les,
on the other hand, ideally likes to have worked up a berry-brown suntan before he even
leaves for his hols and has, as I can attest, been mistaken for a Greek guy. In Greece.
By Greek people. This does not normally happen to Greenock-born Caucasian chaps who
live in Lochaber.
We head north again, passing Brechin. This is where Glencadam used to be made,
beside Brechin City's football ground. The 15-year-old I have is quite fresh and tastes
a bit like full-cream milk poured over strawberries; interesting but not that inspiring. At
Montrose we end up by the seaside, by a funny little water park on the esplanade. I am
convinced I see a soliton.
The water park is part of a larger fun-and-games area with slides and climbing frames
and so on, but you can find that sort of stuff anywhere; what fascinates me is this set of
broad, gently sloped, interconnecting concrete channels, with little taps, gates and con-
trollable fountains. To a long-time incorrigible dam builder like me this is something like
heaven, albeit a sort of restricted one. There are about a dozen kids splashing around in
it, shoving the little dam-gates this way and that, turning taps on and off or ferrying wa-
ter from one channel to another by bucket, and a couple of young boys - maybe eight or
nine years old - who are throwing themselves into the shallow pools and dancing over
the fountains spraying water at each other, getting utterly soaked. This looks, the four of
us agree, cold. It's sunny, but there's a breeze coming off the North Sea and even I'm glad
I put my jacket on before we got out of the car. What a great place though; like having
a dam/channel system you'd have to work for days to create, all set up in concrete with
water on tap. Whoever designed this was a genius, I tell myself, then I see the soliton and
just whoop for joy, because I've never seen one before.
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