Around Scotland with a Suit Part 1 - Trains, Weddings and Curried Chips

I don't usually spend much time travelling around the UK. I tend to spend even less time backpacking with a suit. But last week I found myself doing both during a whirlwind tour around the north of England and Scotland. It turned out to be a good introduction to small communities, friendly people, beautiful scenery, weird individuals, and strange local ways of doing things. I usually try to travel light, but since we had an itinerary that included a wedding, a city night out, long periods of travel, hiking, sea canoeing and potential beach time, I ended up lugging around more stuff than I took with me when I went off to live in Canada for a year.

Our first stop was the small town of Alnmouth in Northumberland where we were heading for the wedding. Almouth is a pretty coastal community which looks out into the sandy beaches of the River Aln estuary. There's not much there except guest houses, restaurants and gift shops. Booking ourselves a guest house there turned out to be a bit of a mission and involved an elderly woman named Janice, a lack of email or a website, and sending a deposit by cheque (I had to search around to see if I even HAD a cheque book any more). We got a taxi from the station and found out that although people weren't altogether familiar with the name of the guest house, everybody for miles around seemed to know 'Janice's place'. Despite all the previous correspondence however, she still wasn't sure who we were and got our names wrong.

After getting ourselves ready, failing to find any places that sold takeaway food, and being charged £2 to use the only cashpoint in town, we headed for the wedding in the nearby town of Alnwick. Having organised a pretty complicated itinerary, and having been up since 4.30am that morning for our 6am train up from London that morning, I hadn't really given the actual wedding details much thought and forgot to bring my paperwork with me. I was pretty sure it was St Paul's church though, and headed to the pretty church. We got out of the cab and were horrified to find that the ceremony had already started early and everyone was already inside. We peered through the window at the back of the church and tried to identify some of the congregation before realising that we didn't really know anyone else at the wedding. We were just about to disrupt the service by walking in when we found a spare order of service and realised that we were at the wrong church and the wrong wedding. Fortunately (and somewhat predictably) the cab driver had got chatting to someone he knew in the car park, so we hopped back in and frantically tried to figure out what church it could be, and eventually settled on St Michael's. We were relieved to see the bride in her tartan-themed wedding dress along with her bridesmaids only a few minutes' walk away from the front entrance and breathed a sigh of relief that we'd be able to sneak into the church in time without being noticed. However, for reasons known only to himself the cab driver then did a u-turn, pulled up right next to the bride and dropped us off there instead. We said a quick apologetic hello and legged it into the church before they did. The wedding itself was fairly unusual since the groom was French, and in our haste to sit down we ended up on the side of the church for his friends and family, surrounded by French people who read everything in French during the bilingual service. I've never had to mime French during a wedding service before though, so this was a first.

So having watched them get hitched (technically for the second time since they'd previously had a quick ceremony in New Zealand where they both lived) we headed to the wedding meal and evening festivities. Like the service, the wedding speeches were delivered in both English and French. It turns out that French after-dinner jokes translated into broken English aren't that funny, but I have massive respect for any of the French guys who have it ago. After the meal we had a ceilidh (pronounced kay-lee) which is some kind of Scottish country dancing thing which filled me with dread having not done anything like that since being made to take part in country dancing at primary school. With a similar lack of optional participation I found myself involved in a strange Scottish mix of line dancing and the hokey cokey. Fortunately half the guests were French and were similarly bemused so nobody stood out as looking too clueless. Quite why English people near the border of Scotland have so many Scottish influences confuses me as I'm pretty sure Scottish people just over the other side of the border don't make the same attempt to be English. But it was a fantastic night!
The next morning we said goodbye to Janice (who tried to charge me £40 extra having lost/forgotten the cheque I'd sent), and set off on a train due north. The East Coast train follows along the top of the cliffs that surround the coastline, and make for some pretty impressive scenery outside your window. We crossed the border, whisked through Edinburgh, and eventually arrived into Glasgow where we were spending the day. I'd never been to Glasgow before and was half-expecting it to be full of factories and Rab C Nesbitt lookalikes in white vests holding cans of Tennants. I was pleasantly surprised. We stayed with a friend in the West End which is a particularly nice bit of the city with cool shops, cafes and bars. We spent the afternoon in the lovely Kelvingrove Park near to the University of Glasgow, followed up with the impressive Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. Later that evening we headed to Ashton Lane which is a cool little lane filled with funky pubs, bars, restaurants and a tiny little independent cinema. Finishing off the night I decided to get involved in a bit of Scottish culture so I got myself some chips with curry sauce. To be honest I wasn't expecting much except some kind of blobby curry sauce out of a squeezy tub. The kind of thing McDonalds do. But yet again I was pleasantly surprised as the bloke mixed a bunch of curry spices from a collection of tins, mixed it all up in a separate pan, and served it up on top of my very nice chips. Tasty is probably an understatement. So there you go. Glasgow - City of Pleasant Surprises. I'll hopefully get the chance to go back some time and do it in a bit more depth.

We caught the early train out of the city the following morning and headed further north to a place called Oban where the ferries left for the Western Isles. This took us into proper Scottish scenery with beautiful lochs and mountains as we passed through the territory of Argyll. We met a friend there, mooched around a bit, marvelled at the fake life-sized coliseum that overlooks the town, checked out the tourist shops, and stocked up at Tesco. It's not the most interesting of towns, but it does the job. Eventually our ferry showed up, we got on and headed into the sunset (with my suit) towards the Isle of Barra.