Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
tracks an enemy would know much better than you. So the sea - and Scotland's multi-
tudinous lochs - provided an easier highway, if you had the talent for it.
Finlaggan was the centre of a small maritime empire for a time; you can stand in the
old chapel, in the remains of the old houses and fortifications, and look around in the si-
lence at the rushes bowing in the wind and the swans gliding by, and stare down at the old
carved stones capping the graves and try to imagine the people who've passed this way.
The gravestones, with their staring images of the long-time dead, are covered with
sparklingly clean perspex supported by thick little metal legs, to keep the weather off.
They look like very low and slightly surreal coffee tables, and oddly like art.
Back home, we watch the continuing war on TV. Still no nukes turning up, still no bio-
logical agents, still no chemical weapons. The ugly mutations, the poisons, the corros-
iveness are present though, just not where people are looking for them. Gary Younge, an
award-winning
Guardian
journalist who's just moved to the States, is on Channel 4 in a
short programme about the effects of the war in the US homeland. He reports on a lawyer
who wore a T-shirt saying Give Peace a Chance to a shopping mall in mid America. The
other side of the man's T-shirt displayed a peace symbol.
He was told by a security guard either to take the T-shirt off or to leave the mall imme-
diately. The lawyer protested that his right to free speech was enshrined in the US Con-
stitution (for all my many issues with present-day America, I've always admired the ser-
iousness and genuineness with which Americans take, uphold and believe in this right).
But no dice these days. The security guard summoned a cop, who promptly arrested the
lawyer.
And so we bid farewell to the Land of the Free …
