Bleak: The Mundane Comedy - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

R.M. Murray is Head of Visual Art & Literature at An Lanntair Arts Centre in Stornoway, on the Isle of Lewis. Having grown up on Lewis, he studied in Aberdeen and then at the Glasgow School of Art―where he was in a punk band with Craig Ferguson and Peter Capaldi―before returning to Stornoway.

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And then there’s the weather factor. Miles Kington once wrote a column questioning as to why, in Britain of all places, there was not the equivalent of a Beaufort Scale for rain, as here was for wind. And went on to suggest one, ranging from a barely perceptible dampness in the air to rain running up the windows, where a newspaper read on a park bench would turn to pulp in your hands. Hurricane-force rain.

What can I say of the weather visited upon us that memorable morning? A reliable signature of severity is when the ferries are cancelled. As they were. And that it was a freezing, gale-force wind from the north, mercifully (but only marginally) at our backs. The effect was like being trailed mile after mile by someone with a pressure-hose trained on you at full power.

I had a cycling jacket on, which had served me in good stead in extreme conditions. But it might as well have been made of kitchen paper. Moira’s showerproof cagoule was even more useless. Had I known what was ahead of me I might have worn neoprene.

An hour or so after we had passed the first stop, my feet were already beginning to hurt. I checked for blisters. None. Surprisingly. It just felt like it. I began to understand why beating the soles of a prisoner’s feet was such an effective and popular means of torture. There were long stretches along narrow, quiet roads and early on we gravitated to the soft verge. Preferable to the unrelenting smack and whack of tarmac. Moira had gone utterly silent. Never a good sign.

As a fairly serious cyclist, I was physically, aerobically, in good nick and I cannot say that at any time I was ever exhausted, or even very tired. It was the one punishment I was spared. But I was plodding with unconscious determination further and further away from my comfort zone.

The day assembled with a cabinet maker’s precision into a compendium of misery. The cold, sopping wet and increasing foot pain, turbocharged by an interior, involuntary, unwelcome and intrusive litany of self-inflicted goading. Personal bulletins: “You’re not even a quarter of the way yet.” “This isn’t going to get any less painful, you know, it’s just going to get worse.” “If it’s this bad now, can you imagine what it will be like at the end?” “You can’t force your way through this.” Each signpost seemed to say, “Suffering 10 miles”; “More Suffering 25 miles”; “SUFFERING-on-Sea 40 miles” ... And so on, all the way to Hell-to-Pay.

The last section of the morning took us through a forest and to lunch at the Strathpeffer village hall. Adorned with stags’ heads, I feel certain it’s been featured in Vogue. It now resembled a prison camp. Moira was shaking so much in the toilet that she could barely get her clothes off. Plastered to her back. Stripped out of our wet gear, even the change of clothes in the rucksacks had to be dried in front of gas heaters. We ate hot food, gulped coffee and warmed up. The rain eased off. In an hour, morale had lifted: we weren’t going to give up that easily. We were suited, booted, refuelled, ready to rock again.

It took about two minutes up the road for us to be jerked back to sure and sore reality, like a dog on a lead.

By late afternoon, we were among the stragglers. Tail-end Charlies. The last section was ten miles off-road, following a river up the Strath to an overnight lodge. Stepping gingerly, we followed the river, fairly regularly crossing the little tributaries that fed into it from the high surrounding mountains. A couple of miles upriver, we met some Duke of Edinburgh Award students with their Group Leader. He told us that further up, a feeder stream was in spate and that they had only just managed to cross. Shortly afterwards, we came to said stream. Evidently, there had been some dramatic exaggeration going on because we waded across easily, at the expense of little more than wet feet. By now, a steely commitment had set in; the end of the day was in sight. Food, sleep, maybe even a drink. So we continued up the river. And stopped. In front of us a downsized thundering Niagara disgorged into the river. It was impossible. Impassable. But if we followed it up the mountain, there would be less volume and we might be able to cross. We climbed for half a mile and still couldn’t do it. Back down by the river the last few stragglers had now bunched up by the torrent. Among them an older, evidently more experienced walker took charge and determined that we could find a shallower shoal of the main river downstream and could cross by linking arms in a human chain. What else could we do? Damned if I know.