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doom and after a few years watching from a flat in Upper Achintore as the rain clouds
drifted slowly up Loch Linnhe, Les and his wife-to-be Aileen decided to look for a house
to buy. Aileen, also a teacher, was brought up in Cumbernauld, where it rains so little that
the weather is probably only a few places higher on the average inhabitants' List of Con-
versational Standbys than it would be for your standard Scot.
Naturally, after all that rain, they were looking for a change, and so settled on a place
a mere fifteen miles down the road from Fort William but with a profoundly different
microclimate and in a wholly different league when it comes to heavy drizzle, lashing
rain, day-long downpours and sudden but prolonged thunderous tumults of water crash-
ing without respite from leaden skies; in Glenfinnan it really knows how to rain. People
notorious for having had the bad luck to have been born and raised in Fort William during
a particularly catastrophic sequence of above-averagely rainy decades of seriously god-
awful drenchingness - and hence no strangers to having apparently unending successions
of black, moisture-laden cumulonimbi queuing up above their town to deposit megatons
of water apparently targeted specifically on that individual's cagoule hood - have been
known to blanch and stagger when confronted with the prospect of spending longer in
Glenfinnan than the amount of time it takes to drive - splashing - through it.
Glenfinnan has been, for several proud sequences of years, officially the rainiest place
in Britain. There is, allegedly, a small village in the Lake District that occasionally beats
it in the We're Wetter Than You Are stakes, however this is only believed to happen when
the rain-measuring device in this sorry hamlet actually slips into the lake concerned and
thus gives a false and indeed unfair reading (or so the proud, damp, inhabitants of Glen-
finnan will tell you, loath to surrender a distinction which, while they are unable to work
to help achieve, they most certainly suffer for to be allowed to claim).
Having said all that, I've been going to Glenfinnan for nearly twenty years now. I ab-
solutely love the place and an amazingly high number of my memories of it seem to be of
stunning, glorious, breathtaking scenery baking under a high sun set in a totally cloudless
sky of surpassing blueness.
Yep, beats me too.
But, hey, if it didn't rain in Scotland, we wouldn't have all that water to make whisky
with, now would we? In fact, arguably, if all that at least partially rain-engendered Gaelic
misery hadn't needed relieving in the first place, whisky would never have been inven-
ted at all. Sitting in your cold, sodden hovel, wrapped in the ragged remains of a barely
glorified blanket, ankle deep in animal excrement and choking on peat smoke while your
wife wails a lament for her sisters who died giving birth and your children cough con-
sumptively as they quietly work out how soon they can run away to the Lowlands or
America and leave you with all the work to do is a pretty damn sure-fire way of turning a
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