Slow lane

In this age where we are coerced into going ever faster in all aspects of our lives, even the media and the arts are reduced to ‘skinny’ bite size chunks (in media speak ‘glancability’) that appeals to people who are in a hurry with getting on with something else. When we go traveling we remain locked in this mind set, manically ticking off the list of things to do before racing on to the next. One of the advantages of having an old car that looks like a brick, drives like a brick and is a brick, is that by slowing down it gives you time to comprehend and internalise the significance of the surroundings you are looking at, be it beautiful or not. It was the poet W.H. Davies that wrote: “What is this life, full of care - We have no time to stand and stare”. 

This was the situation on a recent trip to the north east of Scotland and the stretch of the Banffshire coastline that looks out over the North Sea. This is an area immortalised by the film Local Hero, where the village scenes of Bill Forsyth’s movie were shot. In the film the beach shack living hermit played by Fulton Mackay saves a stunning section of coastline from the corporate greed of an American played by Burt Lancaster. Even taking into account a large slice of romantic idealism, these days life can be truer than fiction.  Along this coastline are the villages of Cullen (home of the smoked haddock chowder Cullen Skink) Sandend, Gardenstown, Covie and Pennan, the village used in the film and home to the red telephone box that was pivotal in the film’s subterfuge. A series of picturesque villages each clinging onto tiny strips of land, sandwiched between rugged grassy cliff tops and the menacing North Sea. Their ‘raison d’être’ of fishing long since relocated to the nearby industro-fishing towns of Fraserburgh and Peterhead, beset by their own problems related to quotas and decommissioning.  (One doctor in Fraserburgh has treated more than 30 mothers whose babies were born addicted to drugs in the past two years).  Sadly these villages are increasingly devoid of indigenous families having being priced out by the professional classes from Aberdeen for weekend cottages and holiday lets. Two sets of people with diametrically opposed outlooks on life, not in keeping with the authoritarian presbyterian ethos that is the norm around here.  But taking some time out from our ever onward rush it’s not difficult to see the attraction.  Quintessential child-like cottages shoehorned into their narrow strip of land, creating out of place geometric roof top landscapes of silvery blue that you would normally associate with post industrial back to back housing.  Most of the houses are unique in their orientation in that the gables of the houses all face towards the sea, to minimise their exposure to raging winter gales. In Sandend some houses even had their own smokeries, each over the years developing its own patina, a combination of the effects of tempestuous seas and the heat from their fiery hearts. Unique structures standing proud, less windmills in shape more Quixotesque complete with hat astride his charger; just no sign of Sancho Panza.

One thing I like about these types of old fishing villages is that due to lack of space, the washing lines are squeezed in between the houses and the harbour walls. Cellerdyke in the East Neuk of Fife being another example where the washing lines are located within the harbour walls. Freshly laundered clothes bellowing in the wind creating all sorts of body shapes. It reminds me of a few lines from a poem by Andrew Young:

             Where was the shepherd’s wife
             Who left those clothes to dry
             Taking no thought of the family
             For as they bellied out
             And limbs took shape and waved about
             I thought, she little knows
             That ghosts are trying on her children’s clothes

Walking along wonderful beaches to sit and stare over the sea and listening to the crash of the incoming waves. Even better when conditions are dark and brooding, watching the way the wind creates watery wisps off the tops of the waves as they break, or as the local fisherman call it ‘white smoke’. Nanosecond abstract splashes of white that last long in the memory after their all too brief performance. Sometimes it pays to travel in the slow lane.

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