So we scuttled off down a narrow backwater road and passed through Embo Street, Embo and Fourpenny heading toward Skelbo Castle. Along the backwater road we saw the most beautiful vista; a railway line crossing the loch. The bed of the rails stretched across it, rich on either side with shrubbery, reflected in the mirror of the water. The sun once more shining through the break in the clouds.
    At one point we saw a shaft of light, straight as a die slanting between two peaks. It was as if God was lining up a celestial pool cue to pot the eighth ball into the corner pocket.
    The shaft of light looked like you could walk on it. Everywhere we looked, the scenery was breathtaking. Like taking a tour through the cover of a Yes album. A rainbow arced across the sky; an extravagant thing of intense, well defined, vibrant colour. It was so sharp you could have shaved with it, had you the luck to find the end of it.
    Loch Fleet to our right was as still as a summer night, shining like glass; a mirror the Mother of Creation could see her face in. In the middle, an island, reflected in incredible detail. I almost felt as if I was upside down. Looking at it with the rainbow arched, cathedral like and so still above it, an intensity of feeling welled up in me and reverence for the beautiful world we live on. My heart lifted into the sky with the curve of the colourful apparition. A heron, standing on one skinny leg, caught like a picture in the web of the moment, broke free and flew off across the lake.
    The whole scene became almost too intense, like an acid trip. I had to keep stopping the car to look. This concerned Lesley somewhat. We had yet to find any accommodation for the night. Though it was past nine in the evening, and still retained a soft light to see by, night would fall soon enough.

    We tore ourselves away from the visions around us. Travelled on and found ourselves on the A9 again. On to Golspie.
    When we got there, we slowly meandered up the main street. There was no traffic. Twilight had settled like a blanket and lights were twinkling in the windows. One set of windows in particular belonged to a place called The Sutherland Arms. It looked nice. We decided to stop and see if they had a vacancy. I waited in the car while Lesley popped into Reception to ask. I always send Lesley to enquire about rooms; I had been refused accommodation in Ireland too many times because of my colour to risk losing a room.   Besides, Lesley also looked a lot more respectable than I did. I also still had some cheese stuck to my bum. Incidentally, I'm a rather fetching shade of brown in case you hadn't noticed, a bit like Lesley's comfy shoes.
    Lesley returned to the car with a key and a big smile.
    It would be the only night we could afford to sleep indoors but at least, by the look of it, we would be comfortable.

    Having secured a room, we decided to explore the road we were on further out of town. It would help us wind down. We were still quite excited at being away. We got even more excited at a sign which told us there was a castle up ahead. True enough, there was; sort of.
    It was called Dun Robin. The gates to the estate were open so we drove in for a look. We weren't very impressed when we saw it. It looked like Walt Disney's idea of a French chateau in Disneyland. It had pointy turrets for fucks sake! Who lives in a castle with pointy turrets? Sir Mickey Bloody Mouse? I could imagine people with bouffant hair, smelling of lavender and waving fans in front of their pasty faces; a bit like Elton John in the seventies. (Judge for yourself: right).
    It wasn't a castle as far as we were concerned. When you look at a Scottish castle you want to see, in your mind’s eye, hairy arsed Scottish giants screaming profanities at the English invaders from the battlements. Dun Robin looked like a castle designed by a committee of homosexual hairdressers with a not so secret yearning to be Cher. In fact, if it were a dog it would have been a poodle on which someone had been practising their topiary skills.
    Speaking of which, when mankind disappears off the face of the earth and is being called to account for what its done to the animals, poodles are on the list; just in front of those pug nosed dogs that look like they were chasing a car when it suddenly braked.
    I turned Elvis around and we drove off to find a spot more conducive to a cup of tea and a ginger nut.
    And we found it; a little harbour in a place called Brora.
    It was magical.
   In the cold moonlit semi darkness, the tide ran like quicksilver. Most colours had bedded down for the night, others were simply slipping into shadows. We parked by a house on the waterfront. The narrow mouth of the harbour seemed to be drinking the tide; a mercurial potion with otherworldly qualities. Across the Moray Firth, we could see hills, and beyond them even bigger hills, mountains even, deeply dark and rising to peer over the huddled shoulders of their lesser brethren; mist floated behind the first of them; majestic; ghostlike; ethereal.
    The sound of the waves only led to a deeper silence.
    Further out, the waves curled over, lazy, indolent, with a motion more suited to palm trees.
   
    Like Cinderella, but without the Ugly Sisters, we returned to our hotel by midnight. Wouldn't have wanted Elvis turning into a pumpkin.
    The Sutherland Arms had, according to the inscription above the door, been established in 1808. That was also the last time the decorators were in. Now don’t get me wrong. It was very nice and I would certainly recommend it to anyone. Okay, I exaggerate about the 1800s, but our room was stuck in the 1970s. The last time I had seen anything like it was on UK Gold, on one of the 70s sitcoms. I had a look to make sure there wasn't a vicar hiding in the huge mirror fronted wardrobe.
    There wasn't, but the night was young.
    Lesley went for a bath.
    I switched on the bedside light, turned off the overhead light and did a belly flop onto the bed.
    And was nearly launched out the window by the pneumatic springs. Picking myself up off the floor, I got back onto the bed, this time, rather more carefully. If one of those springs were to go in the night it would be like the scene in Alien where the creature bursts out of that guy’s chest.
    Beside the bed, there was some literature provided for tourists. It was a glossy ‘Welcome to the Northern Highlands Brochure’. On the cover was a notice saying Please leave this for the next guest to use your room. I obviously didn't notice at the time, because it's ended up on my desk when I'm writing this months later.
    I dipped into it, eager to see what treats lay ahead of us on the morrow.
    My eye fell upon “witch burning”.
    I’d have to remind Lesley not to park her broomstick outside.
    It read:
    ‘The Royal Burgh of Durnoch Famous for the 13th Century Cathedral, Golf course and as the execution spot for the last witch to be burned in Scotland. The old woman was accused of turning her daughter into a pony and riding her around town in 1772’
    Why on earth would anybody turn their daughter into a horse? Mind you, public transport being what it was in the 18th Century...
    I imagined the trial of the poor woman, bless her. One of the witnesses would have been the daughter. I had a feeling she would be called something suitably old fashioned like Winifred, 'Whinny,' for short. The judge would have asked her, ' are you a woman or a horse? Answer Yea or Nay.’
    And as soon as she said ‘neighhhhh’ her poor mother would have gone up in a puff of smoke. Terrible thing to be saddled with. Unless of course she actually was a horse, in which case, taking account of her sudden tragic loss, she would have had people going up to her and asking 'why the long face?'
    It reminded me of the place where I work. The shop sells medicinal remedies of an herbal nature; laxatives being among the products. A man came in once and during the course of a very boring conversation with one of the female assistants, bragged about having passed an extremely long, unbroken stool. It was at this point I always thought she should have said, in reference to the horse pun, ‘why the long faece?’
    That was my thought as I snuggled down into my pillow, waiting on Lesley to come out of the bathroom.

    The bed was actually very soft, despite the vigorous reaction of the springs to a belly flop. Too soft in fact. I woke up during the night, face down, with my testicles about six inches from the floor. My head and feet were bent up and backwards. The springs in the middle of the bed were giving no support at all so I was lying in a hollow; a tortured human banana; a sort of cupid's bow, sleepy, disgruntled and dribbling onto the pillow.
    Or had my testicles suddenly increased in weight a hundredfold, dragging me down like two cannonballs? I muttered a few grumpy words and rolled over to the edge of the bed. It must have been made by the ‘Bendi Back Company.’ Or maybe it was one of those companies who have the legend ‘By appointment to Her Majesty, the Queen’? Only in this case the monarch must have been an earlier one.
    ‘By appointment to His Majesty, Richard the III, and His fucking Hump’.
    As I grumpily turned over and prepared to settle back down into the warm arms of sleep,  I discovered the duvet had disappeared. Ugh!? Well, not disappeared totally, just off me. I had uncovered Lesley with my moving about and she had dragged it back. I gave it a gentle tug to get it back. It didn't budge. I pulled again, a little harder but she had somehow managed to nail it to her side of the bed while I wasn't looking.
    Oh well, It suited me.
    I snuggled up to her, and soon, was sleeping like Richard the III.
    Without the hump, naturally.

The Sutherland Arms below:

There was no smoking allowed in the hotel. So, when morning came we sat outside in the cool air and had a cup of tea and a cigarette, before breakfast.
    There was an old drill hall across the road from the hotel. It was actually the largest surviving, timber clad building in Scotland. I had spent many years in drill halls when I was younger. I could virtually smell the oil from the rifles and the odour of damp khaki; the warmth of the wood from the .303 Lee Enfield: good days.
    The building had a vacant, haunted look. I wouldn't have been surprised to see a soldier in the uniform of the First World War stepping out of it. The 1/5th (Sutherland and Caithness) Battalion had drilled there before going off to the killing fields in Europe. How many of them came across the road to sup in the Sutherland Arms, I wondered? I looked up some of the names when we returned to Manchester; Benjamin Donn, Peter Duchart and James Dunnet to name a few.
    They could quite possibly have sat where Lesley and I sipped out tea. They may never have sat together over a warm beer, but all of their names would end up together on the Golspie Memorial, carved and cold upon the rock. Benjamin (MM) and Peter were killed in action 1917 and 1915 respectively. James died of wounds, aged 32, a few weeks before the war ended in August 15th 1918.
    I wondered what they made of the huge tree in the courtyard of the hotel. Lesley said it was a monkey puzzle tree. The base of the tree trunk looked like a vast elephant’s foot sunk deep into the earth. It could have been there possibly since Regency times. I wondered about the name, Monkey Puzzle?
    ‘It’s easier to say than Araucariaceae Araucaria Araucana’ Lesley replied. At least I think that's what she said. She might have just been trying to clear her throat. She likes gardening, but rarely does it in Latin with me because I haven't got a clue what she's talking about.

    John O’Groats.
    That was the name of our next destination. There was no particular reason for us to go there other than it was the the furthest point you could travel from Lands End, to the other end of Britain. Of course, we had only travelled from Manchester but I thought it would be a shame not to go and have a look at such a world famous location.
    Lesley wasn’t too convinced. She had been told there was nothing to see. I found that hard to believe. Everybody had heard of John O'Groats. There was bound to be something there to make the trip worthwhile; all 100 miles of it.
    So off we went up the A9. At first, the landscape was quite interesting; until a mist out of some B-movie descended. It sat on the road, as the road did its best to rise above it, climbing through the hills. At one point we saw, tractors and diggers moving about, excavating rocks from cliffs at the side of the road. They looked like metal dinosaurs moved ponderously as if at a prehistoric watering hole, eating rocks.
    However, after a while the mist thickened and closed in and we couldn’t see anything at all, interesting or otherwise. Still, the art of conversation wasn't beyond us, so we had stimulating discussions on many diverse topics. Such as:
    The mysteries of life:
    ‘Where the fuck is the road?’
    The local transport system:
    ‘Look out! There’s a truck coming toward us!’
    And religion:
    ’Jesus Christ! Where did that sheep come from?’
    Bird watching:
    ‘Oh shit! I think you just ran over a duck.’
    The human condition:
    ‘Lesley, I’m hungry, can I have a sticky bun?’
    Food matters:
    ‘Get your head out of the picnic basket and keep your hands on the steering wheel!’
    Health concerns:
    ‘I think I’m sitting on one of my testicles.’
    The female point of view:
    ‘Keep your eyes on the bloody road!’
    The male point of view:
    ‘Those hills look like enormous breasts.’
    This last was as the mist cleared.