Travel journal

It's 8:20am, and I'm sitting in a tiny waiting room at Balloch station, just north of Glasgow. It was a little hard to spot the station because it only has a single line running into it, and it doesn't run out again. There's 4 seats in the waiting room, and they're all positioned to stare directly at the man behind the ticket desk. I did not plan to be here today.

I was supposed to be going up to Harris today. An early coach from Glasgow up to Uig, which is a 7 hour trip - I think I saw that it's the longest named bus route in the country? It's a long way, anyway. Then the ferry over to Tarbert, to join my dad & stepmum for the week. Despite living in Scotland for 4 years for university, I never made it out to the islands - barely made it out to the highlands. So this was (is?) a chance to rectify that.

I was more nervous about today's travel than I have been about any travel for a while. I think it's that it involved travelling in places badly served by public transport, with public transport. I'm used to travelling to cities, places where if your plans go wrong you can just spend some money and fix things. I'm used to arriving in an airport in a foreign country and going – huh, guess I better figure out how to get to wherever I'm staying from here! I quite like that, absorbing context clues and puzzling out a foreign system. Like a big videogame you're stuck inside. But this felt... well, I guess I just had less confidence that if I fucked up I wouldn't end up stranded in the countryside with a wheely suitcase and nowhere to stay for the night. Higher stakes makes it less of a game.

Anyway! The stressing paid off, because it meant I did enough preparation for things to go wrong in a gentle way. In the event, it turns out that today is the day that Storm Floris hit, with the peak of the winds hitting at approximately the time the ferry was scheduled to depart. But I'd subscribed to the text alerts for the ferry and got notice through yesterday that it might get cancelled. And then, this morning, as the coach wound its way up past Loch Lomond, I got a text through: yep, definitely cancelled.

So I got off at the next stop and... now I'm making my way back to Glasgow & my Dad's flat there. Half an hour's wait for a bus, then a train back to Glasgow, then the little underground service back. Definitely could have been worse!

And then I need to decide whether to try again tomorrow. I'll be coming back Friday anyway - I have a workshop to give at the Glasgow Indie Games Fest on Saturday. Or alternatively I could relax and maybe see some more fringe shows, see if I can meet with some folks I thought I'd miss on this trip... I reckon I ought to have a nap first.

I'm travelling for most of August, complicated travel with a bunch of moving parts. This is also one reason I'm more anxious than usual, all the logistics feel knotted together into a bigger tangle than usual. My health has been pretty good recently, but over the course of the train up to Glasgow I went from feeling fine to feeling wretched - maybe I'm going to blame the leaning Pendelino trains they have on the west coast for setting off a stomach that was a little unsettled already. So since arriving I've had to prioritise lying down and making some serious progress through Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone. Not that this is a real hardship, it's a banger of a book - just some fantastic funny character work through the various narrators over the course of the book. Although some of the twists are... not the most plausible. I admit I don't have direct experience, but I'm pretty sure that's not how O____ works!

But I did make it out yesterday - a jaunt over to Edinburgh to catch up with my friend Alice and catch some shows with her. We saw two shows - the first was a funny gentle show about The Diggers and historical reenactment and a Brighton council estate near some chalk hills. I say gentle but it had me in tears - the kind most easily produced by demonstrations of care. Maybe I mean charming. Then we wandered on to Dovecot Studios, where we saw:

• an exhibition about IKEA fabric patterns. Nice to see all the sketches (I love seeing design sketches) and think about patterns and design – but I think it was a bit too corporate to justify paying money to see. Maybe if you're a real IKEA head.

• some nice jewellery. For sale, and for surprisingly cheap!

• some paintings & prints & tapestries by Victoria Crowe. Some beautiful stuff - there's a big tapestry, not on show there, that was done in undyed wool, the shades just coming from the variation in breeds. And nice to see the printmaking, the attention to the natural world, light, etc.
• and my favourite, although I have no picture of it - a nice view into the working tapestry studio, where you could see a giant tapestry seemingly completed, but not removed from the loom, and a woman working away at a smaller tapestry. God what an endeavour a tapestry is.

We went back to Alice's flat, where her cat Hilda was very brave and stayed under the coffee table while I sat there drinking my tea. I would look down sometimes and see her round eyes staring up at me, the rest of her body just a silhouette where the pattern of the carpet was obscured by darkness. What a creature.

And then we went out to see a clown show! Furiozo, who puts on the clown olympics (on again on the 18th!) which Alice is obsessed with, and I am by proxy. The show is some great classic clowning - but he plays a Eastern European hard man, raving, threatening violence, driving his beamer, etc. Very Anora. But also he is very clown the whole time. It's a good dynamic. We sat at the front, so I was brought up on stage - he proceeded to cut a literally comically large line of "coke", then snort it with a vacuum cleaner. Then it was my turn:

What a fantastic show, if you are about and into clowning then I very much recommend it. I'm also gonna keep an eye out and see if he does any clown workshops back in London.

Anyway – in the process of writing this I have arrived back at the flat, so I will sign off again – maybe some more rest would do me good, or maybe I'll be bored and at a loose end once I finish the last few pages of The Moonstone. Maybe it hinges on whether I'm likely to get some good views if I see through that same bus journey tomorrow. We'll see!