And so it went on. I proceeded through the streets under a meteor shower of interrogations. Why do they call them milk floats? They don't float at all. Why do we foot a bill rather than, say, head it? Why do we say that our nose is running'} (Mine slides.) Who ate the first oyster and how on earth did anyone ever figure out that ambergris would make an excellent fixative for perfumes?
When this happens, I know from years of experience, it takes a special distraction to shock the mind from this solitary torment, H fortunately Thurso had one. On a sidestreet, as I was just beginning to wonder why we say we are head over heels when we rehappy when in fact our head normally is over our heels, I happened on an extraordinary little establishment called the Fountain Restaurant, which offered three complete but different menus a Chinese menu, an Indian menu and a 'European' menu. Thurso evidently couldn't maintain three separate restaurants, so it had one restaurant offering three kinds of cuisines.
Immediately taken with this concept, I went in and was shown to a table by a pretty young lady who left me with a menu that ran to many pages. It was apparent from the title page that all three kinds of meals were cooked by a single Scottish chef, so I pored through the entries hoping to find 'sweetandsour oatcakes' or 'haggis vindaloo', but the dishes were strictly conventional. I opted for Chinese, then sat back and enjoyed a state of blissful mindlessness.
When it came, the food tasted, I have to say, like a Chinese meal cooked by a Scottish chef which is not to say that it wasn't good. It was just curiously unlike any Chinese meal I had ever had. The more I ate it the more I liked it. At least it was different, and that, by this stage of the trip, was all I craved.
When I emerged, I felt much better. Lacking anything better to do, I strolled back down to the vicinity of the fish warehouse to take the evening air. As I stood there in the darkness, listening to the pounding surf and gazing contentedly at the great starry dome of sky above me, I thought, Who decided that Hereford and Worcester would make a zippy name for a county? and I knew then that it was time for bed.
In the morning, I was roused early by my alarm clock and rose reluctantly, for I was having my favourite dream the one where I own a large, remote island, not unlike those off this section of Scottish coast, to which I invite carefully selected people, like the guy who invented the Christmas tree lights that go out when one bulb blows, the person in charge of escalator maintenance at Heathrow Airport, nearly anyone who has ever written a user's manual for a personal computer, and of course John Selwyn Gummer, let them loose with a very small amount of survival rations, and then go out with braying dogs and mercilessly hunt them down but then I remembered that I had a big, exciting day in front of me. I was going to John O'Groats. I had been hearing about John O'Groats for years, but I had notthe faintest idea of what it would be like. It seemed exotic beyond words and I ached to see it. So I breakfasted in a spirit of keenness at the Pentland Hotel, the only person in the dining room, and then repaired at the stroke of nine to William Dunnet's, the local Ford dealer, where I had arranged by phone some days earlier to hire a car for the day, since there was no other way to get to John O'Groats at this time of year.
It took the man in the showroom a moment to recall the arrangement. 'Ah, you're the chap from down south,' he said, remembering, which threw me a little. It isn't often you hear Yorkshire referred to as down south.
'Isn't every place down south from here?' I asked.
'Yes. Why, yes, I suppose it is,' he said as if I had stumbled on a rare profundity.
He was a friendly fellow everyone in Thurso is friendly and while he scratched away at the voluminous paperwork that would put me in charge of two tons of dangerous metal, we chatted amiably about life in this remote outpost of civilization. He told me it took sixteen hours to drive to London, not that anyone much ever did. For most people, Inverness, four hours to the south by car, was the southern limit of the known world.
It seemed like months since I had had a conversation, and I babbled away at him with questions. What did people in Thurso do for a living? How did the castle come to be derelict? Where did they go if they wanted to buy a sofa, see a movie, have a Chinese meal not cooked by a Scotsman or otherwise experience something beyond the modest range of pleasures available locally?
Thus I learned that the local economy was underpinned by the Dounreay nuclear reactor down the road, that the castle had once been a thing of wellmaintained beauty but had been allowed to fall into decrepitude by an eccentric owner, that Inverness was the seat of all forms of excitement. I must have betrayed a flutter of astonishment at this because he smiled and said drily, 'Well, it has a Marks 8c Spencer.'
Then he took me outside, sat me in the driver's seat of a Ford Thesaurus (or something; I'm not very good at car names), gave me a quick rundown on all the many moveable stalks and dashboard buttons, and then stood by with a kind of nervous frozen smile while I activated controls that made the seatback jettison away from my back, the boot pop open and the windscreen wipers go into monsoon mode. And then, with a worrisome grinding of gears and several jerky movements, I blazed a trail from the car park by a novel and lavishly bumpy route and took to the road.
Moments later, for such is Thurso's diminutive size, I was out on the open highway and cruising with a light heart towards John O'Groats. It was an arrestingly empty landscape, with nothing much but fields of billowy winterbleached grass running down to a choppy sea and the hazy Orkneys beyond, but the feeling of spaciousness was exhilarating and for the first time in years I felt comparatively safe behind a wheel. There was absolutely nothing to crash into.
You really are on the edge of a great deal of emptiness when you ' reach the far north of Scotland. Only 27,000 people live in the whole of Caithness roughly the population of Haywards Heath or Eastleigh in an area considerably larger than most English counties. More than half of that population is accounted for by just two towns, Thurso and Wick, and none of it by John O'Groats since John O'Groats isn't a community at all but just a place to stop and buy postcards and icecreams.
It is named for Jan de Groot, a Dutchman who ran a ferry service from there to somewhere else (Amsterdam if he had any sense) in the fifteenth century. He charged 4d a trip apparently, and they will tell you in these parts that that sum became known ever after as a groat, but alas it is a pathetic fiction. It is more probable that Groot was named Groat after the money rather than it for he. But anyway who gives a shit?
Today John O'Groats consists of a capacious car park, a little harbour, a lonely white hotel, a couple of icecream kiosks and three or four shops selling postcards, sweaters and videos by a singer named Tommy Scott. I thought there was supposed to be a famous fingersign telling you how far it was to Sydney and Los Angeles, but I couldn't find it; perhaps they take it in out of season so that people like me don't carry it off as a souvenir. Only one of the shops was open. I went in and was surprised to find that there were three middleaged ladies working there, which seemed a bit excessive as I was obviously the only tourist for 400 miles. The ladies were exceedingly cheerful and chipper and greeted me warmly with those wonderful Highland accents so clinically precise and yet so dulcet. I unfolded some jumpers so that they would have something to do after I left, watched openmouthed a demo video for Tommy Scott singing perky Scottish tunes on various blowy headlands (I'm saying nothing), bought some postcards, had a lingering cup of coffee, chatted with the ladies about the weather, then stepped out into thegusty car park and realized that I had about exhausted the possibilities presented by John O'Groats.