Ayr quality

In fact, what I think of most often when I think of Ayr is 'The people who walked in darkness'. If you've ever seen the musical score (not the musical: there isn't one yet, as far as I know) of Handel's Messiah, you'll know there is a title: 'The people who walked in darkness: Air'. To the sixteen-year-old me singing for the first time in the Leicester Philharmonic Choir (somewhere in my interesting history between breeding guinea-pigs and discovering boys with motorbikes) I didn't know that an 'Air' was a musical form, and wondered why the people who walked in darkness might need air, particularly.

Anyway, I didn't really want to go to Ayr: the campsite was smack in the middle of town, which I expected to be quite run-down, and it was pouring with rain, but my route required it. As it turned out, it was a perfectly tolerable site set in a park, nothing exciting, and all the usual facilities. As soon as I got there I was cautioned by one keen camper for driving the wrong way round the camp one-way system (you have to say that the Caravan Club are nothing if not systematic: I was actually trying to get my water intake the right way round so that the hose would reach the drinking water tap, rather than being bent on subversion).

Fighting the urge to be out of there as soon as dawn broke, unbreakfasted, with bits and pieces trailing behind the van as I made my escape, I thought no, I will give Ayr a chance, and breathe it in a bit, as it were. So I left the van and walked into town, over an unpromising flyover and via a petrol station (and also, incidentally, via a call to South Ayrshire council and the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency about someone who appeared to be discharging paint into a stream that fed directly into the river - this is my new role as Global Busybody with too much time on their hands. SEPA did in fact send someone to look at it. I bumped into him on the way back, and he gave me a long discourse about iron deposits from coalmining, which he explained were orange. Because this effluent was white, l didn't get the impression he expected to be able to do anything about it - despite the fact I'd even taken photographs).

Anyway. Back to the walk into town. I followed some women who I hoped weren't walking home to a housing estate, and eventually found the middle of town, and lo, it was quite nice, with a lot of Victorian buildings. It even had an H and M. But I was looking for breakfast, so I disappeared down an alleyway where I found a cafe with seats outside, a 'roll and sausage' kind of place where men covered in plaster dust were buying cups of tea. Because of the dog and the smoking, I sat outside and had a perfectly nice coffee and scrambled egg roll, and a man from the cafe with pastry all over his hands took a break from making strawberry tarts and came out and asked if the dog wanted 'a dish of water'. Not a bowl - I remember this - and he very generously brought a large bowl (for mixing pastry? Don't ask) and Bonnie had a nice drink. This picture isn't of the cafe by the way - but I couldn't resist the evidence that the people of Ayr have a sense of humour.


I also got talking to a chap - I'm very talkative nowadays, because you never know what is going to turn up - who turned out to be a newspaper editor for the local paper, who had in a previous life been editor of the Stornoway Gazette, in the days when it had the livestock auctions advertised on the front page. He revealed that his first battle had been to get them to bring it out on a set day each week: normally, they tried for a specific day, but if something got in the way such as harvesting or fishing or cutting peat, then it wouldn't happen. Anyway, the man gave me his card and the name of the current editor of the Stornoway Gazette in case it might be a useful contact when I'm up in Lewis (key fact: Stornoway is the capital of Lewis). So there you go: it's always worth talking to people. Although when they ask me what I do for a living it always sounds completely ridiculous - like I've spent my entire life writing the back of the phone bill. I wish I had a one-liner, or even a job description, that sounded vaguely comprehensible. I know what I'm doing, but I can't seem to tell anyone else in a way that doesn't make them either glaze over or tell me at great length about a bad experience they once had with British Gas. At the moment, I'm claiming to people that I tell multinationals how to spell, which is generally agreed to be a Good Thing. If they're interested, they then ask 'So how do you get a job like that?' Walk in and ask for one, is my advice.

Anyway, while we were talking a woman came out of the craft shop next door (the kind that sells bits for making cards, and paint and glitter, and runs workshops on everything from working with beads to stained glasssmaking) pushing a life-size fibreglass cow on wheels. It was going to stand on the pavement and attract custom for the shop. Apparently (I know, because I asked her) she does it every morning. It was a surreal moment, one perhaps worthy of Craggy Island. And to think that I might not have come.


On the strength of the cow, I went into the craft shop and found a fake stained-glass sticker with entwined thistles on it to stick in the back window of my van, and shell-shaped stamp and some nice green ink in an inkpad to brighten up my handwritten letters (yes, I am writing letters: it's somewhere to put all these extra words that don't make it onto the blog. If you can believe it - there are always more words).

I also found in Ayr the right size and the right colour of Hedgehog Gore-Tex trainers so that I now have some light shoes to wear to walk in that keep my feet dry, and also a very nice black fleece and some lightweight trousers. The shoe-shopping confused Bonnie: she was allowed in the shop, no problem there, but one of the things you do when buying walking shoes is walk around in them a lot very fast - even up and down a little fake hill, if they have one - to see if your toes bang against the fronts. So all the time I was sprinting round and round the racks of waterproofs, she was trotting after me. I don't know who was the more embarrassed by the end of it: her or me.

While I was making my purchases, someone came in to ask the man in the shop if Danny or someone still worked there (no, he's working up at Avis, but he still pops in now and again, in case you're wondering). I could hardly understand a word, and when he'd gone I asked the shop man if that was a local accent. No, he said, I couldn't understand half of what he said either. So it's not just me then.

I did manage to get underway, after all my dawdling in and out of camping shops, at about 5 to 12, when the Caravan Club cut-off time is 12. I realised just as I'd gone through the camp barrier that I didn't have my shopping - I'd left it on the pitch next to the van and driven off without it, such was my haste to get away. When I ran back for it, an enterprising crow had already broken into the bag and was investigating the contents. Luckily, it hadn't done any damage - it had only just penetrated the shoe-box. It was probably bitterly disappointed not to find a discarded roll and sausage, at the very least.