Sandstone Press

Oban Bay

Posted by RLD on 19th October 2009

Ian MacDonald, the amiable Director of the Gaelic Books Council, opened proceedings in the Caledonian Hotel, Oban. Also present was our new author, Catriona Lexy Campbell and our own Iain Gordon. Our second Gaelic author, Iain MacLean, was unable to be present and so our Iain was to read in his place. Also present were one or two luminaries from the world of Gaelic Education and an otherwise full house.

Ian was witty as ever and Iain, as an advanced learner, was able not only to read but explain how our new books work – as books not only suitable for advanced learners of Gaelic like himself, but also as just-plain-great-reads for fluent speakers. Catriona Lexy though, was the undoubted star of the show. At just 25 she has now published three books and the book before this, a children’s book, has just picked up her first literary prize.

It was Mod week in Oban, the great Gaelic festival of Canan ‘is Ceol, language and music and our Iain was not only fresh from winning his solo competition but also looking forward to singing with the Nairn Gaelic Choir.  Oban was rich in colour. My old friend Finlay MacRae, an everyday kilt wearer, once pointed out to me that us Scots are a dour lot, men especially, and averse to brightness and flair. Yep, we like the dark. Most old photographs of Gaels in the islands are of men in dark suits, not bright tartan. The Lowlands were, probably are still, no different even now. Incidentally, the Highlands’ other national dress is accepted as a blue boiler suit and black wellies.

Away back in my mental filing cabinet I remember stretching on tip toe in our Harley Street living room (that was also my parents’ bedroom and, by the way, that is Harley Street, Ibrox, not Harley Street, Kensington) to watch thousands of dark suited, grey bunneted working men streaming along Paisley Road West on their way to watch the Rangers. In those days it was usual for men, and my father was one, to work five and a half days a week. This left just about enough time to get to the game on Saturday afternoon. Sunday meant church for some, for others it was a chance to sleep the day away, exhausted, done, defeated, and all too often embittered.

When I was fourteen I discovered Oban in sunshine, then Mull and Iona and they opened my eyes on colour for the first time. Outside of cinema, books, comics, it turned out that colour also existed in real life, or could. The world was not all black and grey, grime and smog. More than that, the immediate reaction of one human being to another was not necessarily anger and threat.

These two most recent days in Oban, launching Catriona Lexy’s and Iain’s books were like that again. The town, the Bay, the weather all cooperated and the colour and music of the Mod did the rest. The sky was Mediterranean all the time I was there. That is to say there was not a cloud to be seen in the two day period.

Oban and I have a long, rich experience together and I am familiar with the bars. In the Tartan Tavern I fell in with no end of people from here in Dingwall. A box player and a piper kept the place whirling with ceilidh music. After that I rejoined Iain Gordon and the Nairn Choir at their hotel, hoping the Dingwall Choir don’t take me for a traitor. When the Mod was in Inverness I was the kilted fool cheering them on from the Eden Court balcony in inappropriately competitive style. The choirs have a mutually supportive attitude between them with friendship as the key. My idea is that we should wipe the floor with the bastards. Dingwall won the coveted Lovat and Tullibardine Shield that day, as they did again this year in Oban. Nairn, I am delighted to report, won the Margaret Duncan Trophy.

After leaving Iain and company in close care of their tonsils for the following day’s singing I finished the night in Markie Dan’s singing my wee heart out to another ceilidh band. They had a piper too but, good as he was, another young fella joined them later and I think he must have been competing earlier in the day because his pipes were singing.  This happens. Warmed to perfection and played in competition the reeds, once rested, take a new lease of life. He was technically superb but what use is that if not in service of the level of musicality he also brought. Wow! I had forgotten how great this stuff can be. Later, when Catriona Lexy appeared on television to discuss her new book with Mary Ann Kennedy, a huge cheer went up from the middle of the crowd. They let me remain in spite of that.

My bus was due to leave at 12.30 next day so I had some time to kill that could in no way be better dispatched than, first, in a local bookshop and, second, around the town. By chance I learned that John Lowrie Morrison was beginning a two-week show that very day at the Kranenburg Gallery, which I was unfamiliar with. Colourless, grey miserable soul that I am I have always had a bit of a prejudice against Jolomo, not only for his popularity but also for his West Highland subject matter of lonely crofthouses and sunsets. The nostalgia is like the clanging of a bell, and nostalgia is an emotion to which I am very subject and which I hate. Life is too short.  This new show converted me though and, once again, it was the colour, the passionate, abandoned, just-beyond-reality of it. I almost spent an unaffordable sum.  Writing this now I rather regret that I didn’t.

At 12.30, at the bus terminus, I learned with no great regret that I had failed to read the timetable correctly. The mid-day bus service had ended a couple of days before and I would have to wait until 4.30pm. In this I was in good company, no less a person than the MSP for the Western Isles had done exactly the same and I wonder if some measure of subconsciously deliberate incompetence had played its part. No one could want to leave Oban with still no cloud in the sky and a single mute swan paddling in the bay. The three big island ferries made their polite ways past each other in the limited space, possibly in deference to the swan’s notoriously bad temper.

The choirs were out early, making their way to the Corran Halls, various churches, around and about and I met Iain just as the Nairn Choir were going into their Margaret Duncan triumph. He pointed out where, at the front, that morning, an information plaque had been unveiled by a local politician, much aided by a young local piper. In Oban at the Mod spontaneous things happen and Iain, who as I mentioned had won his competition the previous day, found that his song was appropriate and sang it on the spot.

Down at the plaque I noted my old, late, friend Iain Crichton Smith quoted. Iain’s work, much loved by those who knew him, has still not found its rightful place. Now that he is gone it’s time will come, the duality, the feeling, his command of structure. His way was the way of the classicist, not that he was tied to classical means. Ah c’mon Bob, say it out loud. Not writing in metre is okay, but if you can’t do it you’re not a poet.

I drifted northwards. Few of my visits to Oban Bay go past without a visit to the War Monument. I can date precisely when I first discovered it, in 1972. Most people with any kind of West Highland sensibility will be more or less aware of Alexander Carrick’s great sculpture. The three kilted soldiers, two carrying their wounded brother, are classic not only by dint of Carrick’s classical methods but also because of the resonance in Gaelic history. World War I hit the islands hard. Look at the name lists not only here in Oban but also, and even more so, on the monument that brought it home most powerfully to me, on Benbecula.

The list is long for 1914-18, much shorter for 1939-45. If you ever find yourself standing there take a look around you at the small number of homes which generated and lost all that young male life. Between the trenches of the Somme and Ypres, and the much under-rated Battle of Loos, and the loss of the Iolaire in Stornoway bay within easy sight of home, the male survivors were in too small numbers quite simply to breed replacements. It all fits now into probably the most negative sector of any culture, Gaelic miserabilism, death and the religion of sin and damnation.

When I had my stab at learning the language I discovered an attitude that keeps the language for those who are ‘of Gaeldom’ and does not encourage those who would learn, but I think it is passing. The Gaelic playgroups and Gaelic medium education furth of the Highlands are doing a great job. So too are my friend Ian MacDonald and the Gaelic educationalists at our launch. The business of language, any language, is the expression of thoughts and emotions. It has much to do with inheritance, but nothing at all with the idea of ‘blood’. There are Gaelic pockets abroad that have nothing to do with diaspora. Germany is one such country, and I was delighted to meet a German friend of Iain’s, now resident in Glasgow, who was singing at this year’s Mod.

The secret of the sculpture though, is in its classical strokes, and also in the eyes. Carrick has only one of his soldiers looking down at the visitor. The visitor’s returning look naturally carries into the wounded soldier’s closed eyes and their colleague’s middle distance gaze and the result is the essential human connection that makes the difference between great skill and great art.

From here, as ever, I looked towards the Isle of Mull that was green and dun coloured and the island’s two Corbetts plain to those who have climbed them, Dun Da Ghaoithe and Beinn Talaidh. Between the two, on the far side is Glen Forsa and Tomsleibhe bothy. Someday I will return. Have I successfully refrained from giving the Oban Weather Report: if you can see Mull it’s going to rain, if you can’t see Mull it’s raining? Almost.

The bus left promptly and I was on it. Piloted, let us not say ‘driven’, by Donnie Crash there was no guarantee of survival far less safe arrival. We roared over the Connell Bridge and stormed up the west coast. Scots Pines and birch copses sculpted by the wind, stepped rock formations, the landscape had a strangeness about it, seemingly part Japanese, part Alpine, always irreducibly itself.

All of us passengers lapsed into silence as the sun went down behind Garbh Beinn although the one MSP present might report (I hope) his ears still ringing after repeated beratings on both Gaelic and English-language literacy. No such silence from Donnie Crash who cackled wildly as he swerved round blind corners. The Ardgour Penninsula stood on the flat calm outer reaches of Loch Linnhe and the cloudless sky darkened into purple with a lilac band outlining the hills, a last colourful flourish from the sun before it finally disappeared. The landscape provides as much healing as does music and I felt renewed by it, all of it. Home, home, it felt like coming home. I must either reduce my waist line or buy a new kilt.