What We Did On Our Holidays: 2012

 Where were you when Elvis died? Were you even born? 16th August 1977: I was staying in a caravan for a week in the North Rhins of Galloway, with my brother, my mum, who was recuperating from an operation, and our three dogs. The caravan was situated near the ruins of 19th-century dairy buildings on the grounds of Cairnsbrock Cottages. We stayed for a week while my dad stayed at home to tend to his racing pigeons. 

There was no tv; the only media we had was the transistor radio: Angelo, the Brotherhood of Man's Mexican-suicide- pact version of Dancing Queen was Number One. There were a number of early electronic instrumentals like Magic Fly by Space; and Carly Simon's Nobody Does it Better was on heavy rotation- coincidentally, composer Marvin Hamlisch just died this week. Anyway, you can see all that on Top of the Pops on BBC 4 or iPlayer. With no newspapers or shops for miles, the radio was how we found out about the death of Elvis. Largely, he was known to me from his lightweight movies.

Among the books in the caravan, I read The Lost Worlds of 2001, not realising at first that it was really about the making of the movie ( which I wouldn't see for another three or four years anyway).
  
 My other memory is of stopping in Stranraer and getting the second Conan Treasury; reading it as the rain fell at the Dunragit level crossing.

I'll be reviewing this Treasury on Materioptikon later in the year.

I couldn't find the 1977 photo in my Glasgow flat of me and my brother in flares and hoodies (!) on the clifftop.Since 35 years had almost elapsed, I had decided earlier this summer to go back. Because I had revisited Dumfries and Galloway in the school holidays for the last two summers and I was in Glasgow anyway, I booked two nights in Portpatrick ( where I had visited before but never stayed) in order to have a base.

 
 The train for Stranraer left Glasgow on Monday about 11.40 and I reached my digs about 3pm: 

In the late afternoon, I climbed the steep steps to see the tower house of Dunskey Castle.

  This 16th century ruin is perched vertiginously on the cliff, like something out of Du Maurier. Churchill and Eisenhower used to have meetings in this area, so it's steeped in history.

On Tuesday morning,  I got a bus from Portpatrick to Stranraer, then caught one to Leswalt, which is a 10-minute journey. I then walked the 4- or -so miles to Mains of Cairnbrock farm in just over an hour. It's a 15 per cent gradient out of the village, however,which made for a steep climb. There was a little drizzle but otherwise, the sun shone. I was a bit worried because I couldn't get an Emergency signal on either of my phones but it was the end of the track that really hindered me. 

The gate was clearly not meant to be crossed. The original metal gate was rusty and broken, and draped with barbed wire. It was also blocked by two upright, wooden pallets. In addition, there was an electrified cattle fence on either side which, I recalled from childhood, could give a firm jolt. Nevertheless, I managed to scramble over, toppling a bit of the drystane dyke. I glanced anxiously back at a distant tractor,certain the rattle of stones could be heard for miles and anticipating a furious dairy farmer.

There was no more track either, just a boggy and thickly overgrown- and frankly, hazardous- headland, overlooking the North Channel. Gingerly, I made my way down to the rocky beach, where the burn enters the sea. Some of the vegetation was at head-height in places and the shore was littered with plastic washed in by the tide. Good thing I wasn't dive-bombed by seabirds. 

 One of my abiding recollections of this remote spot was the iron memorial on one of the cliff faces. John Biggar's climbing blog calls this area the "U-Boat Pen" ( http://www.johnbiggar.com/galloway-climbing-index/portobello-stranraer-rock-climbing.asp) It also shows, rather misleadingly, how the gate looked some years ago.
 It just goes to show how the memory cheats: I had pictured this plaque mounted much higher on the buttress.

 The inscription is hard to decipher, since it has cracked in half over time and the fallen piece is overgrown. It reads (approximately) "James Drynan died here 20th (?) July 1891 (?)  As I recall the story, James fell to his death trying to retrieve his cap when the wind snatched it. It's quite melancholy that the memorial has fallen victim to weathering. A trawler ran aground in the fog there in 1907 but no one was killed.

Aside from two Irish ferries and a sailing boat, I saw no other human beings or activity for an hour an a quarter. I read a bit of ERB's Swords of Mars then climbed the hill back to the gate, which again was very tricky to negotiate. After walking back to Leswalt and on returning to Portpatrick, I started reading When the Green Star Calls by Lin Carter.

How can you not love a book that reads: "It was a eerie duel...amid the leafy darkness- man against monster bee"? Carter was a flamboyant and prolific paperback writer and well-respected editor, who seems to have led an impecunious, hand-to-mouth life. His main skill is in capturing the voice of the writers he was most enthusiastic about. I enjoy his pastiches of ERB  more than Burroughs himself, whose Edwardian prose I find dry and unstimulating. Carter might have been a hack but there's a sumptuous quality to his description and a verve to his clichéd derring-do plots:

"There is a wizard who dwells on a dead world about Antares, in a dome of imperishable glass built above a mighty chasm wherein scarlet horrors slither hungrily."

The hero is a crippled Earthman whose astral form, Deadman-like, reanimates the body of a dying boy. Karn is a prisoner of an ascetic scientist in a dead, pre-human city ,who is trying to wrest the secret of immortality from its last, winged inhabitant. There's an escape from fungoid monsters, a guild of assassins and, of course, a princess to rescue. More fun than Swords of Mars, anyway.

I wish I had stayed in the port longer, despite the influx of tourists, because the weather took a turn for the better. However, I have a wedding in Elgin to attend but there's always next year. Having revisited childhood haunts over the last two years, it's probably time to make some new memories.

One last nod to 1977: Big Finish's The Oseidon Adventure (Ho ho) is the last instalment of the first Fourth Doctor season. Again, Louise Jameson's Leela is the best thing in a shallow alien invasion story (with several android doubles for Geoffrey Beevers' sibilant Master.) There are a couple of mildly amusing topical gags about "Lucky" Lucan and Shergar but it's trivial stuff.

Coming soon: Summer on Earth-2 (Slight Return)
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