Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
fact the Jag combines the thirst of an elephant with the fuel-carrying capacity of a gnat,
seemed very nice.
We decide it's a bit warm for trudging round distilleries and so head back to the
Lodges to play pool, lounge in the sun, test out Dave's simplified game (still confusing),
play Grass (it's a card game), drink and smoke.
Azshashoshz: that etymology in full
.
A few years ago now, a bunch of us were visiting Glenfinnan for Hogmanay. We were
staying at what became known as the Shilly Chalet - basically a wee fishermen's hut a
ten-minute or so walk from Les and Aileen's house. The previous day we'd met a slightly
misguided English guy on the train up to Glenfinnan. I seem to recall he was called Rollo;
if he wasn't, well, it was one of those slightly eccentric upper-class names very like it.
Wore a rugby shirt; very obviously public school. I'm sure you're getting the picture.
Anyway, Rollo - or whoever - had been trying to get to a tiny remote island off a slightly
larger but still remote island off a fairly remote bit of the not-really-all-that-nearby main-
land.
We'd explained to him that his idea that he could get off in the middle of the night
at Lochailort and hitch-hike to this back-of-the-back-of-beyond island was, frankly, daft,
so we offered to let him bunk down on the floor of the Shilly Chalet overnight before
resuming his journey in daylight, when his chances of arriving at his destination without
frostbite or the effects of terminal exhaustion would be far greater. Anyway, Rollo had
been waved off on the next leg of his expedition and we'd gone round to the McFarlanes'
for a party. We were all very drunk. Amongst our company was Jim, who has on occasion
been known to slur his words a little when he's drunk. On this occasion nobody could
understand a single word he was saying except, for some bizarre reason, me, and so I was
translating.
Jim would say something like, 'Ammeen sjussbeinpoligh ffyimesumbayontray cou-
beatrai duznhaftibeatray coubeona-buzorsumthin antheyhaven gorraplaystayoffrumabed
ffyougotspayone.'
And I'd sit there, frowning mightily with the sheer drunken concentration of it, then
nod and say, 'Jim says, he means, it's just being polite if you meet somebody on a train -
doesn't have to be a train, could be a bus or something - and they haven't got a place to
stay, to offer them a bed if you have a spare one.' (At which point Jim would generally
nod in confirmation, or sometimes offer a corrolaric explanation if he thought one was
required, though this too, of course, had then to be translated.)
This went on for some time and I felt I was doing really well until Jim launched
into this long paragraph of barely comprehensible drivel which ended with a sound I
just couldn't make out at all. It was quite an emphatic, climactic sort of sound, or set of
