Lately I’ve been making a concerted effort to get to the Lorne quiz every Wednesday that I can. There have been occasions in the past when it’s been tempting to withdraw from the team because it starts too late, or there’s something on at the weekend and I can’t do two social activities so close to one another, or my feet got wet earlier in the day and I haven’t gotten over it yet. But now that we’re in a heated race for bar vouchers with not only Quiznae Me but the Plant Doctor’s squad too, every point gained is vital. The only quiz I missed recently was to attend the trustees’ meeting at the Argyll Wellbeing Hub on the same night, and it turned out to be the first quiz that has made it into the pages of the regional newspaper the Press & Journal.
When I was first sent the link to the article, I wondered if we were witnessing the beginning of an interest in the outcome of the Lorne quiz that would stretch from Oban to Fort William, to Inverness and Aberdeen and beyond. However, upon opening the link, the story was reporting on an incident which occurred before the last quiz when the barmaid saved the life of a man who was choking on his dinner. It made a change from every other Wednesday this year when it has been the Unlikely Bawbags who were the ones choking at the quiz.
It was a story of selfless quick-thinking and fast-action, one which highlighted all of the best qualities of the young woman involved. Yet I couldn’t get past some of the detail in the article. It was mesmerising to read it disclosed that the victim was shorter than the barmaid, who is 5ft 7”, and that the food was easy to dislodge since it was chicken and haggis. Then there was the paragraph that simply stated: “The 23-year-old said the man – who has not been named – had initially tried to solve the problem himself by drinking a pint of Tennent’s.” This could have been any man in Scotland. It could just as easily have been me. There isn’t a problem I have encountered where my first thought hasn’t been “can this be solved by drinking Tennent’s Lager?”
I was unaware of the dramatic night at the quiz when I was taking my walk home after work the following evening. It was the last day of traditional Oban weather before the season finally splashed some colour across the town’s sodden canvas and people could stow away their winter jackets. For a while anyway. I had grown fond of my winter jacket and wasn’t sure I was ready to part from it yet. It wasn’t anything special, just something I’d picked up from Peacocks on a whim, but I had worn it in Stockholm and the cigarette smoke from Sarajevo still clings to the fabric. The pockets are fluffy and deeper than anything I’ve ever put my hands into – which come to think of it is probably partly why I struggle to acknowledge people who see me on the street. By the time they have passed, I’m still wrestling my hand from my pocket to wave. To any passer-by I imagine it looks like one of those videos that have been doing the rounds on Twitter recently where unusual items that large snakes have swallowed are prised from the reptile’s stomach.
At the parking machine opposite the War and Peace Museum, a man was performing his civic duty by purchasing a ticket for his vehicle as I approached. A gust of wind caught hold of the slip of paper and picked it up from the slot before the man could snatch it. What followed was a scene that until then I felt certain only occurred in TV sitcoms. The parking ticket was blown along the length of the pavement as the helpless driver went chasing after it. With every other stride the man tried to stop the ticket’s progress by stamping his foot over the top of it, but each time the wind just took it a little bit further from him. It must have taken him at least three attempts to trap the thing under his shoe.
When he reached down to pick the parking ticket up from the ground before turning back to walk towards his car, I didn’t know where to look. Immediately I turned my gaze to the pavement, as though there was suddenly something captivating about my shoes beyond their ability to take in rainwater. I couldn’t face making eye contact with the ticket chaser and preferred to act as if I had never seen the entire thing, as ridiculous as that was given our proximity to one another. When I thought about it later, I couldn’t say whether I looked away to stop him from feeling embarrassed or if it was for myself.
Later that night, the popular Information Oban Facebook page was abuzz with a different incident on the Esplanade. One poster reported that a paving slab had collapsed across the road from the Alexandra Hotel leaving an ominous gap in the pavement. An accompanying picture showed the pavement with a square hole where the slab used to be surrounded by a circle of rocks that had been placed to alert pedestrians of the danger, although it could just as easily have been a Pagan ritual. Curiosity had me looking forward to seeing the hole for myself when I was next down that way. After all, it isn’t every day that a slab just disappears into the earth. However, it was just my luck that the entire section of the pavement had been fenced off, forcing you to step out onto the road to walk around it. I couldn’t help but think it was a typical Oban reaction to a problem. You just block it off and leave it for another time.
For more than a week I’ve been walking up and down the Esplanade wondering if I’ll ever see the hole, each day registering another digit on the thermometer. Spring has brought the annual influx of visitors to the town, and the better weather of late has seen a change of mood about the place. It’s true that everything looks better with a bit of sunlight. I was leaving work for another of those evening walks this week when I was stopped outside the Day To-day Express. As I crossed the road to walk towards Station Square, I noticed a black car sitting outside the corner shop with the passenger side window rolled down. There was nothing I could do about it. I’d already made eye contact with the woman whose head was poking out of the open window. She was older, in her fifties I guessed, and her hair curled like a nest of noodles. I took my ear pods out and felt them vibrate in my hand. I’d been listening to the new Pearl Jam album.
“Can you tell us where the train station car park is?” The woman spoke with an American accent. My heart sank the way a paving stone falls into the sea. Of course I could tell her where the train station car park is – I was virtually looking at it from where I was standing. But I had no idea how to describe how her husband could drive there. “Can’t you just walk?” is what I felt like advising her. It’s the same any time a tourist stops me for directions in Oban, but it’s worse when they’re driving. I have never driven a car, save for a couple of terrifying lessons I took in my early twenties. A driver asking me for directions is no different to someone coming to me for marriage advice.
“Just go down this road you’re on and turn left into the taxi rank,” I eventually mustered, before realising that because of the direction the car was facing they would need to drive out into Argyll Square and around the roundabout before coming back to the station, and that was going to cause all sorts of different problems. They seemed satisfied enough with my effort and I put my ear pods back in, but I’m rarely comfortable after one of these encounters. For hours after I have given directions I find myself worrying about the fate of the tourists. Did they survive the roundabout? Did they catch their train? Where are they now?
I had just about put the American couple out of my thoughts by the time the weekend arrived. Nothing helps me refocus my mind like cooking an omelette on a Sunday morning. It’s the only day of the week when I have the time to go all out and make something better than a bowl of overnight oats. I would probably have stayed in bed for several hours more after being up late watching the NHL had it not been for me discovering a packet of bacon at the back of the freezer on Saturday. As far as breakfast goes, unexpected bacon is as joyous as reaching into the pocket of your spring jacket and finding a ten pound note.
When preparing an omelette it is easy to get lost in whisking the eggs until they’re at the cherished light and fluffy consistency, trying to get the heating right, and scraping the cooked egg in from the side of the pan. By the time I’ve made a crude attempt at folding the omelette I’m usually so frustrated by my inability to make it look like it does on the recipes that I’ve forgotten whatever it is I was thinking about. This time it was an anxious shopping trip to Lidl the day before that had me breaking the eggs. From the moment I walked through the automatic doors I recognised someone I was once involved with practically a lifetime ago. It was typical of my luck that I would have to see her before I was planning to go for a haircut.
My intention was to head straight for the in-store bakery section to pick up a maple pecan plait that had 15% off with a coupon on the Lidl Plus App, but I was worried that she might see me and presume that I’d let myself go. All I could do was abandon the notion of pastry and sneak off to the bread aisle instead. I was a mess. Every step I took was as though I was walking across a flimsy rope bridge, my palms had developed their own microclimate, and my heart thumped like a pair of ear pods. Even if I wanted to talk to this person I used to know it would have been nothing but gibberish.
I clutched a Post-it note shopping list consisting of items such as blueberries, broccoli, apples, and grapes, but she was lingering in the fresh produce aisle and I was too much of a coward to risk going near it. If I had a can of Tennent’s Lager I would have opened it there and then, but in the absence of alcohol I did the only thing I could. I developed a sudden fascination with the smorgasbord of items on sale in the ‘middle of Lidl’, studying each one intently. Who knows if £16.99 is a good price for a telescopic tree pruner or if I’d ever have a use for glow in the dark pebbles. For what could have been an eternity, I stood practising the look of a man who could have bought them all. It was the equivalent of raising a fence around a loose paving slab and taking the long route to avoid the problem, only in this instance I would have welcomed the ground opening up before me.
No sooner was the downpipe fully reattached to the front of our block of flats than another problem had arisen. It was a Tuesday night and I was in the kitchen reducing Lidl’s Marvellous Tomatoes for a pasta sauce. The halved fruits were sweating it out in the pan the same way I had been on my yoga mat a few minutes earlier as I finished a gruelling practice. My overgrown hair was sticking up in all different directions, and I was dressed in the fashion a man adopts when he knows he’s home for the night and won’t have to see another person.
I was dusting the bubbling mixture with mixed herbs with the indiscriminate shake of a person who is not following any particular recipe and whose rhythm is dictated by a banging song which has come on the Spotify playlist when there was a knock at the door. The knock was unfamiliar, not that there are ever enough of them for me to keep track of knuckle variance. Most recently I believe it was a takeaway delivery driver who had the wrong address, and before that, a police officer looking to speak to the occupant of the flat across from mine. This wasn’t long after the Press & Journal had reported about a police raid on the Lochavullin Bar up the street with a picture of our building, and for days I was worried about how this would look.
Briefly I considered ignoring the intrusion, but the volume of my music and the waft of onions would surely have given me up. I left my sauce simmering on a low heat and went to answer the door. It was my upstairs neighbour, who had come to tell me that he had noticed a couple of loose tiles on the roof of our block and he’s been seeking quotes to have them repaired. I was too busy wondering how anyone can spot some loose tiles on the roof of a three-storey building when I struggle to see people I know passing me on the street to ask any further questions, so he continued to tell me that it would likely cost each occupant a couple of hundred pounds to replace them. I didn’t feel that I was in any position to quibble over the cost of the job when the five other households in the block had seemingly approved. It was just going to have to be a case of if I want the tiles fixed, I should be spending a night or two fewer on them.
It’s little wonder that there has been some damage done to properties around town after the weather we’ve seen so far this year. Even the popular Dunollie Museum had to close for a couple of days as a result of the wind. On the west coast of Scotland, it’s a good thing that we have long since learned that you needn’t wait for the finer weather to arrive to mark the beginning of spring. Here we can tell that the season is underway when the first cruise liner appears in the bay and the walk from one end of George Street to the other suddenly takes a few minutes more. Once the benches that have sat empty along the Esplanade since October begin to see some action and the seafront is filled with the fragrant vapour trail of chippies you know that it is finally spring.
Storm Kathleen was causing some bother when we gathered for our latest open mic night at Let’s Make A Scene. A few regular attendees were stormbound, and with a few minutes until the event was scheduled to begin the theatre was almost half-empty. We were growing concerned until a surge of people almost as great as the waves crashing against the sea wall turned up, ensuring the place was as full as it always is. I usually like to arrive at the Corran Halls and prepare a topical joke to serve as an introduction to the written piece I am about to read from my notebook. More often than not it’s the part of my performance I am most nervous about since it is ad-lib and done without the crutch of the notebook. Anyone can take a seat and read aloud from a book, but the very thought of talking from the top of my head sometimes seems as bewildering as the idea of being able to see a couple of loose tiles from a distance; something other people can do, but it isn’t for me. Nevertheless, I ambled onto the stage and thanked everybody for braving the conditions to join us for the evening before launching into the improvised line I had been going over in my head all night.
“As it happens, being a single person in Oban is a lot like a windy day. Your hair is a mess, you are kept up through the night from the howling, and everything gets wet.” I didn’t truly understand what the punchline meant, but it sounded clever in my head and got some laughs when I said it. It’s always a good feeling when something you think is stupid raises a chuckle from other people. If only that could be repeated across all aspects of life.
The night was a fantastic success. It is always such a heartening thing to see the scope of the talent in Oban. At Let’s Make A Scene you’re as likely to hear a poem about the rain being on again as you are a beautiful song performed in Gaelic or a piece of rock music. On this occasion we had three new artists take to the stage, one of whom especially captured my attention. She was a young English woman who had honey-coloured hair and a voice that was just as sweet. It was her first time at Let’s Make A Scene, and despite not intending to perform, she came along with a piece of spoken word prose that she read from her phone. If nothing else it was reassuring to learn that phones can be used for purposes other than disappointing Tinder matches.
Our new performer’s set was based on her impression of Scotland’s west coast from her time cycling around the area, a trip that she enjoyed so much that she decided to move here. I was transfixed by the way that she described the landscape and how it affected her. I have spent my entire life in Oban and often wish that I could write about the place with more insight than to say that the seafront carries the smell of a Norries’ fish supper.
At the end of the night she approached me as she was leaving the theatre. She wanted to tell me that she found my reading funny, while in response I vomited a series of consonants and vowels. I immediately found her to be engaging and earnest, the sort of person who when you’re talking to them you don’t notice things like the time passing or remembering to inhale and exhale. There could have been a fire evacuation and it wouldn’t have mattered. Just a few minutes spent talking to this woman was enough to turn me into a lepidopterist.
She invited me to walk along to the Oban Inn with her group. This sort of thing never happens to me. I had to tell her that I was waiting on some friends who were finishing up clearing the room but that we intended to go to the Oban Inn. When we eventually arrived after what felt like an interminable passage of time, the bar was its usual Saturday night riot of bodies, broken glass, and rivers of beer. It was impossible to get close enough to talk to her again. This was much more like the type of thing that frequently happens to me.
It was tempting to think that I would likely never have the chance to talk to the eloquent English writer again, until a rare instance of me recognising someone as I was walking to work on Wednesday morning gave me that very opportunity. She was carrying a camping mat and a bike helmet but had no bicycle, but I made an effort not to dwell on that. It had just started to rain lightly as we had our stop-and-chat, like a scene from a romantic comedy. Only instead of saying something charming and insightful like Matthew McConaughey would, I attempted to pass comment on her statement that Thursday is her favourite day of the week by pointing out that nobody writes any songs about a Thursday. “Not like Friday and that song…” My mind cycled way ahead of my words and I couldn’t recall the hit song Friday I’m In Love by The Cure. I should have taken the song’s advice for a Wednesday.
Despite my lack of coherent thought, the bicycle-less cyclist was on her way to find a gluten-free bacon roll and asked if I would like to join her. I blurted out that I had already eaten, which while true was not the entire reason that I didn’t go with her. I was more concerned with fulfilling the nine part of my 9-5. I spent the rest of the day kicking myself. The bitter taste of regret was most profound when I reached into my backpack for my apple. Usually that’s the best part of my morning, but how could it be when I could have been eating a bacon roll instead? Never has a Royal Gala been so underwhelming as when I passed up the opportunity to spend a few minutes more with a pink lady.
One of the other sure signs that it is officially spring in Oban is when the Lorne pub quiz moves back into its traditional 9pm slot. For as long as I can remember, Quiznae Me have been the main nemesis of The Unlikely Bawbags; the Gozer the Gozerian to our Ghostbusters. For the last five weeks we have had a new contender to deal with in the form of the Plant Doctor and his alliance of Aulay’s pint dwellers. They just showed up one week, my brother and Geordie Dave amongst them, and came within a point of winning the thing. The following week they won it. It had taken them two attempts to do something we haven’t achieved since October. Their win coincided with the first night of the nine o’clock quizzes and some kind of issue with chilling the draft beers which meant the taps were out of order. When I arrived there were three of us who were stood at the bar with no idea what to do next. I imagined it was like having your hands placed in casts and being forced to figure out how to use a set of chopsticks. We had a lousy performance that night, finishing sixth out of nine teams, but while I was keen to put it down to the absence of a good pint, the truth is we’ve been struggling at the quiz for a while.
In an effort to arrest our slump, we brought out the heavy artillery for the most recent quiz and went six strong. It was the first time we’d managed a full quota of players in a long time, even managing to bring along a pharmacist who was once a regular member of The Unlikely Lads before she moved to Australia. A strong opening couple of rounds had us feeling good about our prospects, as if we had finally found the cure for our quiz ills. Things rapidly began to fall apart for us in the round on springtime, where each of the answers began with a letter from the word ‘springtime’ with each character being used only once. We scored a wounding 7 points in that one, although the silver-haired host awarded us 8. Being experienced quiz players we knew that it was only right to confess that our round had been wrongly marked, especially when the contest was so close, but it still smarted to give up that point. It’s not that we were wanting rose petals thrown at our feet for our honesty, but something more than polite applause from the rest of the bar would have made it worthwhile. A standing ovation, having our names chanted in unison, or some sympathy points when we’d crossed out a correct answer for a wrong one or inadvertently identified Paul Young as being Paul Simon.
As it was, our performance continued its downward turn in the next round where the questions were based on the four main points on a compass. I knew right away that the city of Charlotte is the state capital of North Carolina and said it with an authority that I don’t usually display. However, the more I kept repeating the options in my internal monologue I started to believe that the answer could be South Carolina. Sitting on either side of me, two cartoon devils on my shoulders, the nut tax man and the pharmacist were doing their best to convince me that South Carolina sounded right to them, too. Eventually I relented and changed our answer from North to South. It was yet another terrible decision I’d made that Wednesday. Although in the final standings we’d gotten the better of the Plant Doctor’s Aulay’s alliance and Quiznae Me, we still only managed to finish third. Despite winning the bonus bottle of wine for the second week running, we couldn’t help but feel disappointed that the real prize of quiz supremacy remained out of our reach.
Me and the pharmacist took to Aulay’s to pick at the scabs of another defeat. We arrived to find that we had almost the entire pub to choose where we would sit. If I had walked in with the Plant Doctor or alone, as is usually the case, you can be sure that the place would have been busy. But when I walk in with a beautiful woman there is almost nobody there to see it. It has always been this way. We took the stools at the end of the bar, where the pharmacist marvelled at the full-length panoramic painting of Oban Bay that stretches from one end of the wall to the other. She had never noticed it before. It often takes a few visits for folk to appreciate the artwork since usually you tend to spend your time in the bar with your back to it or you are too drunk to notice.
Last orders had just been called when we bought our drinks, so there wasn’t much time to enjoy them. We discussed the differences in the culture between Scotland and Australia: how there is so much more peer pressure in this country to be involved in a relationship; the attitudes to drinking; and the cost of drugs through the health service. Upon recognising who the barmaid was, the pharmacist reminisced over when she was 12-years-old and everyone would spend their time after school hanging around the cafe in Tesco. It wasn’t a story I could relate to since I was terrible at socialising at that age. The barmaid was working there at the time, presumably pouring coffee rather than pints, and the pharmacist recalled how it would be her modus operandi to ask the schoolkids if they were buying anything. Those who responded that they weren’t would be asked to leave, with the pharmacist usually being one who would have to leave her friends behind. There’s just no way that would be allowed to happen these days, we agreed.
With last orders long gone and the time approaching midnight, the bar staff were busy clearing up and naturally keen to finish their shifts for the night. The barmaid peered over the top of the gleaming taps and asked the pharmacist if she had finished her drink, “because it’s time to go home.” The timing was so exquisite that I couldn’t help but wonder if she had heard us talking. We gulped down the last mouthful of our drinks and went on our separate ways. By the time I reached home a few minutes later, it was already Thursday morning. The week wasn’t finished yet and I’d inadvertently declined the opportunity to hang out with an engaging woman – twice – lost the pub quiz again, and been told that I’d likely need to pay a couple of hundred pounds to replace some tiles on my roof. This seemed like a good day to watch the walls instead.
I think it would be fair to say that none of us particularly knew what to expect when my brother and the nut tax man accompanied me to Braehead Arena to watch the recent Challenge Cup semi-final first leg contest between Glasgow Clan and Guildford Flames. While the three of us have varying degrees of interest in ice hockey, with me becoming borderline obsessed with the NHL, the UK league is not televised anywhere, making it difficult for casual fans like us to follow. We knew that it wouldn’t be the same as the game we saw in Stockholm last year, at least not in terms of the standard of the play, but we were curious as to whether the British game would have the glitz and razzmatazz of the North American arena experience.
The game had sold out a few days beforehand, which made for a fantastic atmosphere inside the building. Our seats in Block N were so close to the rink that we could feel the chill from the ice on our cheeks. From the back of our section, a drum was being battered all night long, sometimes even in rhythm with whichever chant was being belted out at the time. Pop music played during the frequent stoppages in play, and in the second intermission Glasgow’s mascot Clangus – an enormous dancing Highland Cow – took to the ice and encouraged spectators to throw pre-purchased pucks into his pouch to win a prize. It was quite the spectacle. Best of all, a pint in the arena costs only £5, which is surely amongst the cheapest in the Glasgow area. Sure it was Coors, but still, you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth and you can’t refuse cheap beer for your mouth.
There is no doubt that a night watching the hockey at Braehead is as fun a way of spending between two & three hours as anything. That was even the case on this occasion when the game finished 0-0 after the regulation 60 minutes, with there being no overtime on account of the teams playing again at a later date in the second leg. I could scarcely believe that we’d seen a 0-0 draw. Ice hockey games are virtually never goalless. To confirm my suspicion, I sat on the bus back into the city, soaked from the walk we undertook in search of the bus stop, and asked Safari to Google “How many ice hockey games finish 0-0?” Although statistics are not complete, the search engine told me that since the introduction of the shootout in 2005, 0.25% of NHL games have finished 0-0. As of May 2017, there had been 189 0-0 draws dating back to 1924. In the 2023 NHL regular season – without considering the Stanley Cup playoffs – there were 1,312 games played.
To put it into perspective, had I stayed in Oban and done my usual routine of scrolling through the NHL fixtures on my Firestick after coming home from Aulay’s, I could have watched the following games on the Saturday in question:
Philadelphia Flyers 4-7 Colorado Avalanche
Vancouver Canucks 6-4 Toronto Maple Leafs
Boston Bruins 9-4 Montreal Canadiens
New Jersey Devils 2-6 Dallas Stars
San Jose Sharks 5-3 Anaheim Ducks
Not only is a goalless draw in hockey vanishingly rare, but more often than not both teams will score in a game, as opposed to neither of them scoring at all. If you are to place a bet on the over/under total goals in a standard NHL game, a bookmaker tends to offer 6.5 goals. For comparison, football is typically 2.5. In the last few months, I have been in attendance for 125 minutes of live ice hockey and witnessed two goals.
Despite the absence of the most valuable commodity in competitive sports, I felt the game was quite entertaining with plenty of action and some excellent netminding. At least that was the opinion of a couple of guys who I overheard talking about it at the urinal. By this stage in life, I have learned that it is usually for the best to believe anything that is said over a urinal. People speak with such authority when they are peeing. Not everybody in the arena shared that outlook, though. From my seat, I could see a woman sitting a couple of rows in front of me who was on her phone shopping on Amazon during the second period. Despite my curiosity, I couldn’t get a close enough look to see what she was buying. I guess a 0-0 tie isn’t for everyone.
In a stroke of fortune that wasn’t in keeping with my experiences travelling to watch ice hockey in Stockholm and Glasgow, my brother and I took the mid-morning train back to Oban from Glasgow, some hours before the entire rail network in Scotland was suspended due to the arrival of the first of two named storms that week. The second of those storms, Jocelyn, landed on Tuesday night and provoked dad to message our family group chat to warn that we “need to have bins and other loose items secure.” I don’t know why the simple piece of advice tickled me so much, but it didn’t seem so funny the following morning when the downpipe on my block of flats was damaged by the wind and was left dangling at a 45-degree angle away from the wall. As if we need to be drawing any more attention to ourselves on Combie Street.
By the time I was ready to go out to the first Lorne pub quiz of the year, one of my neighbours had reunited the two broken ends of the pipe using industrial-strength Duct Tape. It was an admirable piece of DIY, the sort of thing that convinces you that everything will work out alright after all. The Unlikely Bawbags were hoping to take that same sentiment into the quiz, which we hadn’t won since October when I split from the team to participate with my Aulay’s crew on my 40th birthday. Quiznae Me have since become the dominant force on the Lorne quiz landscape, with at least one of their members clearly possessing stronger general knowledge than their ability to play the plastic kazoo in a novelty Christmas board game. We didn’t know why exactly, but we did know that their reign of trivia terror had to be stopped.
Ultimately we finished third out of around a dozen teams, which is pretty good going, but it could have been better. The first quiz of a brand new year typically features many questions based on events that have taken place in the twelve months just past, but there are other morsels of information to get tucked into. One of the questions set out to test our spelling, asking competitors to spell the name of the US state of which Boston is the state capital. We knew that it was a case of separating the double letters from the single, but nobody on our team was entirely certain what went where. I was in charge of the pen for the round and had tentatively scrawled Massachusetts across the blank line, completely unaware of whether it was accurate or not without Grammarly there to tell me. We moved on with the rest of the round, but the more we looked back at Massachusetts the more we managed to convince ourselves that we had gotten our t’s and s’s confused. The nut tax man was especially taken with Massachussets, enough to break his cardinal rule of never changing an answer once it has been written on the page. Of course, we had made the wrong decision and should have stuck with our first answer. We were kicking ourselves, and it wasn’t the only time we had done it. It goes to show that sometimes you shouldn’t spend so much time worrying about having your t’s and s’s in the right places and instead follow your instincts.
It was my instincts that took me to Markie Dans a couple of nights later for their pop-punk theme night. I knew that the sandwich artist formerly known as Subway Girl was going to be there and I could hardly wait to see her in a purple dress that had been anticipated more than the third Ghostbusters movie. Her favourite song, Teenage Dirtbag by Wheatus, was playing as she walked in, as if it was meant to be, and without ordering a drink or even saying hello she pulled me away from my Jack Daniel’s and we danced to it. Things could hardly have been better. Later we threw some shapes to Limp Bizkit’s classic take on the Mission Impossible theme Take A Look Around. If my 18-year-old self could see me dance with a girl to this song he would be beside himself. So would my 38-year-old self if he could see me dance to this song with this girl.
The night was easily the best one I have had this year, even accounting for a 0-0 draw at the ice hockey and the US State of Massachusetts. For a moment I dared to believe that I might even go one better than the skaters and get one past the netminder. At closing time, as I was waiting outside for the sandwich artist formerly known as Subway Girl to gather her belongings, I struck up a conversation with a man who was smoking a cigarette. He was visiting Oban for the weekend from Glasow and at first seemed like a regular drunk, however it didn’t take long for him to mention that one of his favourite things to do is to “box someone’s jaw.” The way he said it made it sound like getting involved in a fight was as regular to him as reading a book, making a risotto, or completing a patchwork quilt. It’s just like any other hobby.
“Seriously, I’ll knock anyone’s cunt in,” he continued.
There was a poetry about the way he spoke, though I couldn’t help but feel unnerved by it. He was clearly agitating for a fight, and despite him not acting particularly aggressively towards me sometimes you get a feel for these things, like when you’re making a pot of soup and you sense when it’s time to remove it from the hob before it bubbles over. I bid him a good night and took myself away from the heat, but he soon caught up with us and walked along the Esplanade with our group. We had hardly reached the Gem Box when the bloke proposed kissing me. I didn’t have the chance to protest that I’d rather he box my jaw in than kiss me before he planted a smacker on my mouth, although really it was more beard on lips than anything intimate. By the time we were past the Oban Times building he was reporting to anyone who would listen that “I’m gonnae shag him.”
This came as news to me. He repeated the statement again and again, as if it was somehow going to sound better the third or fourth time. My internal monologue was debating the entire time whether I should be concerned or complimented by the outburst. On the one hand, nobody ever expresses romantic intentions towards me. But on the other, it would have been nice to have at least been wooed a little. I found myself irritated that he had waited until after the bar was closed and I was already drunk, when there wasn’t even the opportunity to buy me a drink and seduce me the old-fashioned way. More than anything, I was once again wondering how it is that a guy can make an effort to initiate sex with someone he met nigh upon ten minutes previously when I can harbour a crush for eight years and do nothing about it.
Things were complicated enough with me being in the unusual position of rejecting another’s advances before I walked into Aulay’s some 18 hours later to find matters had taken a turn. The bar was as busy as I had seen it in a long time, while there had to have been a ratio of around eight women to every two men. I was welcomed into the corner of the lounge by the jukebox where some of the elder statesmen of the bar had congregated. A friend of my dad’s invited me to join him, Doc and a third man who I didn’t recognise. His hair was as white as a rabbit’s tail and equally as wild. Strands of it stood up in every direction, the sort of hair you might find on a cartoon mad scientist. This guy was the loud talker of the group; the focal point and always the centre of discussion. In the beginning I felt privileged to be summoned into their company, but in time it dawned on me that I am now probably considered old as well. I didn’t stop to work out the numbers, though if I did there is a fair chance that at one point we were likely the four oldest people in the pub.
The complication arose when the cartoon mad scientist leaned across the bar and confessed that he had an apology to make to me. I was intrigued by what this could be all about considering that as far as I knew I had never met the man before.
“I always assumed that you were gay,” he confided solemnly. It was the quietest he spoke all night.
My life was turning into the season four episode of Seinfeld, ‘The Outing’, where every denial I made would have to be followed with the famous line from the show. For example: “What made you assume that I am gay? Not that there’s anything wrong with that…”
“I always used to see you drinking in here on a Friday after work and you’d be wearing those fancy suits.”
I wasn’t annoyed by it, but I was disappointed, I suppose, to discover that rather than being a well-dressed man for all this time, I have actually just been a fancy boy. Since when did a brightly coloured tie and a pair of socks that match say so much about a person’s lifestyle anyway?
At any other time I could have happily laughed off the misapprehension, but coming a night after the encounter on the Esplanade it gave me pause for thought. In those 24 hours, I’d had more men proposition me or announce a belief they’d held about my sexuality than I have had women show any kind of interest in me for as long as I can remember. It turns out that there is more chance of me having a man declare his attraction to me or seeing a 0-0 game of ice hockey than there is meeting a woman.
It was six days after I sent an email to the Press & Journal newspaper complaining about their use of a Google Maps image of Combie Street where my flat is clearly visible alongside a headline reporting “Drugs seized following police raid in Oban” that they removed the picture from the online article and replaced it with a shot of the actual pub involved. By then it felt as if it was too late, of course. Everyone would have already seen the story and concluded that there is a drug operation being run from the block of flats where I live. Word travels fast in this town.
All I could think was how the newspaper’s misrepresentation is going to make it even more difficult for me to meet a woman who would be willing to date me; while inviting someone back to my flat at the end of the night will become practically impossible. People will either be reluctant to go for a nightcap in a reputed drug den, or they will be sorely disappointed when all I have to offer my guests is Jameson and ginger ale.
The truth is that it could hardly be any more arduous to find a woman who wants to spend time with me, even without all of this Press & Journal business. This much was evident on a recent evening when I took a cursory swipe through the dating apps whilst waiting for a batch of plant-based chilli nuggets to heat in the air fryer. Nothing was doing on Tinder or Bumble, but Sally* – an Oban-based sailor – appeared on Hinge. Unlike other dating apps, Hinge gives users a series of prompts selected by the person and allows them the opportunity to leave a comment on one. While Tinder and Bumble rely on two people liking one another’s profile, on Hinge you can really let your personality shine with the right message.
Sally was another outdoors type whose profile was filled with sailboat pictures. We had nothing in common, but nobody living in Oban ever shows up on Hinge, and her page at least had the popular prompt where she lists “two truths and a lie” and it is up to prospective dates to decide which of her three statements is untrue.
“I’m a vicar’s daughter, I used to be cabin crew and I can play 6 musical instruments” the little box read. There wasn’t a lot to go on in terms of using the prompt to show Sally who I am, but a good answer here was most likely my best shot at impressing her. Adopting the traits of a detective seems necessary to have any chance of success in the world of online dating, so I channelled my inner Columbo to scrutinise each of the statements for holes, as if Sally were a criminal under suspicion of murdering my hopes of romance. Immediately it stood out that nobody would lie about being a vicar’s daughter. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Church of England has a rule against it.
Any good detective’s senses are pricked when a suspect offers more information than is essential, which is why I was drawn to the line on musical instruments. That anyone can play an instrument at all blows my mind, so to claim that you can play six was really stretching credibility. To my mind, it would be like someone who worked as cabin crew insisting that they can fly an aircraft. It was obvious to me that Sally was lying about her musical ability, but even a doofus like me knows that I can’t flirt with a woman by outright brandishing her a liar, so I sought to soften it a little by suggesting that she wasn’t being truthful about her musical accomplishments “because you can actually only play 5 instruments.”
Sally immediately matched with me and replied to my comment. “Have we matched before? As that answer is correct.”
Unlike Sally with her brazen lies, I thought that honesty was the best policy. “Mostly I responded with 5 because I don’t think that I could name 6 instruments.”
“Fair enough! Well done for getting it right.”
“I would have responded to your voice prompt, but initially I was hearing some Irish and Australian in your accent and I realised that didn’t make any sense.”
Silence. The timer on my air fryer pinged and in the time it had taken to cook a portion of plant-based chilli nuggets, I had made and lost a match on Hinge. I opened the door and found that there was green jalapeño goop splattered all over the wire rack. This is going to be a nightmare to clean, I thought to myself. Such is the reality of online dating.
With the inevitable exception of my romantic exploits, it would be hard to say that January 2024 has been anything but a good month so far. I have fully booked up my next trip to Bosnia in February and my friend Medina has even generously invited me to have dinner with her family when I visit her home town of Sanski Most. Nothing excites me more than knowing that I will be back in my favourite place in a matter of weeks, even if the weather is likely to be even more frigid than it has been in Oban. Here the temperature has barely scraped above zero in the last fortnight. Every morning has seen varying degrees of frost, ice, or snow on the pavements, meaning that I have had to adopt a different walking technique each day. Each step is a potential calamity. I don’t know how people do it. Remarkably the dread of falling on ice isn’t the worst thing about this weather. That would be the hat hair, which I imagine must give casual observers the impression that I have made no effort at all on my hair before leaving the flat, when in fact there has been a minimal attempt at styling it.
My daily yoga routine gave me a great deal of focus in the early weeks of the new year, while even after just a couple of days of stretching I was feeling an energy I hadn’t experienced in months. I was walking with a real spring in my step, not that anyone would have known it from my penguin-like shuffle down George Street. I was willing to do just about anything to maintain the positivity that was coursing through me. This extended to spending an extra forty pence on a tin of chopped tomatoes from Lidl just because the deluxe brand has a ring pull and the regular cheap tins no longer do. It seemed extravagant at the time, but it was worthwhile to avoid the frustration of trying to operate my terrible tin opener. I just couldn’t put myself through that this early in the year when things are going well and I’m brimming with positive energy. It’s the same reason why I bought the chopped tomatoes at all rather than go through with my original midweek meal plan of spaghetti carbonara. I can never stir in the eggs quickly enough.
As well as the renewal of some healthy habits, the new year usually tends to bring a fresh scent in the form of the traditional Christmas haul of Lynx gift sets. It’s always easy to turn one’s nose up at the Lynx gift set at the time, but once you’re into January it’s welcome to not have to spend money on yet more shower gel or deodorant for a while. Of the two boxes I received for Christmas the first one I broke open was the Lynx Gold, which promises 48-hour freshness and an oud wood and dark vanilla fragrance. It’s hard to deny that the stuff smells good, though the trouble with it is that it is far stronger than the bodyspray I am used to and it seems to make my nose run. Who knows why that is, an allergy of some sort I guess. That notwithstanding, free deodorant is not to be sniffed at, even if it is the cause of quite a lot of sniffling.
I was hopeful that walking into Aulay’s on a Friday night with my positive posture and a brand-new scent would prove to be irresistible like the official Lynx Gold website promises, but I think that other than us there were maybe only another two or three people in at any one time. At least apart from the brief 20 minutes when a large group of youths turned up. One of the boys had a lump under his eye the size of a plum, while another asked the new Australian barmaid if she could put his empty quarter bottle of Glen’s Vodka in the bin. She dispatched of the contraband with the same ease she had snuffed out some of our delicate attacking play when she joined our game of indoor football earlier in the week. Not only was she a formidable defender, but some of her footwork could open a can of chopped tomatoes. At one point as she dribbled past me I was left feeling the same way I do when I am walking on an icy pavement.
For most of the night, it looked as if the installation of a new television set above the corner of the bar in the lounge was going to be the height of our excitement. To be fair, a second screen in the lounge bar is something we have often dreamed about. The space has always been perfect for it, and it would put a stop to those occasions when someone wants to watch the rugby and we are unable to see the Partick Thistle game we have negligible interest in but would quite like to have on in the background.
My brother, the nut tax man and I were huddled beneath the new screen as if it was a vision of some great deity, which in a way it was. There was some mid-level Spanish or Italian football being shown on the TV – or it could have been Portuguese, we weren’t giving it much notice. Our discussion was around making plans to go to an upcoming Glasgow Clan ice hockey game when I noticed the numbers in the bar swell by one when a woman entered from the public side and took a stool at the opposite side of the bar, close to the original television. She was around my age, give or take a couple of years out of politeness, and wore a hairband on the top of her head that sat up and gave the appearance of tiny bunny ears. The woman attempted to engage Doc in conversation, but he wasn’t having any of it, perhaps due to being in the unfamiliar surroundings of the lounge. I could see her occasionally looking over at the three of us as if she was trying to catch our eye and enter herself into our discussion. We were so caught up in our vital planning meeting that we never allowed an opening for her to join us, and the woman eventually left the bar without any fanfare, presumably disgruntled that she couldn’t get the attention of any of the four men who were in there.
Lately, it has been the case that most of the people in my social circle have other things to be doing on the weekend rather than just hanging around Aulay’s until closing time, and so it was that they departed and I found myself alone in the lounge with one of the stalwarts who by this point I’ve become convinced only has the wherewithal to recognise his own name and drink order. It’s times like these where it’s almost tempting to wish that I actually did live in a drug den if only for the thrill of it. The night was hurtling towards indifference until the lone woman from earlier returned. I fancied my chances considering that it was either me or the old drunk dude, and I felt that I had the advantage by virtue of the fact that the woman and I were both wearing glasses. Everybody knows that spectacle wearers stick together. That wasn’t going to be enough to get me talking to her, though. I needed something more and kept looking over the woman’s shoulder to the original TV which was showing WWE wrestling. I was watching two oiled-up men trying to get to grips with one another as I grappled with the best way of striking up a conversation with this woman. I knew that I just had to get her talking to me and the Lynx Gold would do the rest.
Eventually I played it straight and asked how her night had been going. She told me that it had been fine and she was visiting Oban for a short holiday to see her dad who had taken ill in hospital. I considered my response to be the natural question anyone in my shoes would ask, but seemingly it struck a nerve and I had put my big feet in it.
“I’m sorry to hear about your dad,” I said. “How long are you in Oban for?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“Fair enough,” I whimpered, suitably chastised. I returned to considering the bubbles atop the head of my Tennent’s Lager, resigned to the fact that I was out of the reckoning and the coast was clear for the drunk regular in the corner.
A heavy silence hung over the bar, higher even than the brand-new television screen, until it was broken by the woman entering into a rant about how people from Oban are far too interested in what others are doing. I agreed that this is always the way in a small town, but pleaded my case that I was just making casual conversation. She claimed that she has found it far worse here than in Islay where she is from, and it was all I could do to resist the urge to tell her that I hadn’t been so nosey as to ask about where she lives. I was content knowing that I had the moral victory.
Over the next five minutes or so as the woman rolled a cigarette on the bar, I could hardly get a word in as she blurted out all sorts of information that I hadn’t asked for. She proceeded to tell me who her sister living in Oban is as well as the local business she manages, about another family member who is soon travelling to Israel, that she works for the NHS, and that she is tired of her taxes being spent on funding paedophiles at the BBC. It was like interacting with a walking, talking Twitter profile. I didn’t want to be too hard on the woman, especially after she had bought me a whiskey, but boy was she hard work. Ordinarily, the sound of last orders being called causes the heart to sink, faced with the comedown of tomorrow’s return to reality, but on this occasion, it was most welcome. I looked forward to going home and getting into bed alone, just me and my sniffling nose with the irresistible lingering fragrance of oud wood and dark vanilla.
Everyone has been talking about the 16-year-old darts sensation Luke Littler, who reached the final of the PDC World Darts Championship this week but ultimately lost. Even people who don’t usually engage in conversation about sports were raving about the youngster’s achievement. I felt compelled to tune into the live coverage of the final on Wednesday night but gave up with it around halfway through the match. Voluntary maths just isn’t something I can get behind, which is effectively what darts is. Any sport that requires me to take off my shoes and socks to keep score isn’t for me. Darts is something I could only ever watch in the pub, where the World Championship is a traditional feature over the festive period – but that isn’t saying much. The television in Aulay’s has always been like a flame to the hopeless moths that are my drunken eyes. It doesn’t matter what’s on, they are drawn to the light over and over again.
Luke Littler’s unexpected run to the final inspired folk to reminisce about what they were doing with their lives when they were aged 16. In my case, I recall that I was spending much of my time fantasising about dating females who were unattainable and completely out of my league, listening to morose music, and writing stupid puns to impress my friends. To most it was an exercise in highlighting how wasteful the time spent at that age was when compared to a young lad competing for a World Championship, but for me it only served to confirm my suspicion that my life at 40 isn’t any different to the way it was at 16.
As well as being the day of the big darts match, Wednesday was the first day back at work following the Christmas break, and to say it was a slog would be putting it mildly. I think I must have slept for little more than an hour the night before, and even then it was the hour before my alarm went off in the morning. I don’t know why I ever think it’s going to be any different when I’m getting into bed before midnight – and sober – for the first time in a fortnight. Returning to the office for the first time in 12 days has a familiar ‘back to school’ feeling about it when you are forced into immediately shrugging off all of the terrible habits accumulated over the festive period. There is an element of having to re-educate yourself when you’re returning to the real world after such an absence, as if you need to learn how to act like a civil human being all over again. A healthy sleep pattern needs to be re-established, there’s a requirement to go shopping for proper food, and you find that you no longer have the option of asking yourself “Can I get another day out of this shirt?”
Perhaps the worst thing about having to leave the flat for an extended period of time was that over the first couple of days of the new year I had noticed a pair of enormous spiders on the living room ceiling, one in each corner either side of the window. Across Monday and Tuesday I sat on the couch for hours studying the two spiders, thinking to myself how fascinating it is that they could stay in the same spot for so long without doing anything. Don’t they get bored? Before I went back to work it had been my duty to keep an eye on them and make sure that they weren’t getting up to mischief – not that there is anything I could have done about it if they were when my ceilings are so high that they might as well be in the sky. For all I knew the spiders were waiting for me to return to work before their collusion began. Until then the behaviour of the arachnids quietly resembled my own romantic endeavours. Awkward, incapable of making a move, and forever destined to be separated by the curtain pole.
Temperatures have dipped in the New Year
Unlike the spiders on my living room ceiling I couldn’t hang around all week, and I would eventually have to reintegrate myself into society. I wouldn’t say that I had made any New Year’s resolutions as such, mainly because I made a promise to myself years ago that I would never make a resolution in January, but I suggested that it would be of benefit to me if I could get back into a couple of habits that had fallen by the wayside by the end of 2023. I can’t even blame the Christmas break for it, I know that I’ve gotten lazy and let things slide. The first thing I was keen to do was to get back into a daily yoga routine. My current exercise regimen of playing indoor football on a Monday night and then spending the rest of the week complaining about how much my legs hurt isn’t doing it for me. I miss the mindfulness and energy that my regular yoga practice brings. Usually when I have that everything else follows. If I really think about it, I imagine that I probably stopped writing consistent journal entries around the same time I got slack with my yoga. I decided that as well as putting my feet on the mat, I wanted to get back into a routine of putting pen to paper at least once a day, even if all I had to write about was the movements of a spider on the ceiling. It would be recapturing my youth all over again.
My New Year’s writing habit got off to an unexpected start when the Press & Journal newspaper used a screenshot from Google Maps of Combie Street with my flat at the forefront on a story about drugs being seized following a police raid at the Lochavullin pub. When I first saw the article on my Facebook feed after having spent eight hours in Aulay’s watching the Celtic versus Rangers game, I was surprised to see a photograph of my home alongside a headline reporting “Drugs seized following police raid in Oban.” I found it funny that people might see it and think that I live in a drug den, the Walter White of Argyll, when the strongest substance in my place is the Stilton that’s been in the fridge since Christmas. Then I considered how absurd it was that a news outlet could use an image taken from Google Maps of a residential building on the opposite side of the street from the pub featured in their story about a police raid. The more I thought about it, fuelled by Tennent’s Lager, the more irritated I became, and I ultimately fired off a furious email to the publication demanding an immediate explanation.
The first I’d heard of the police raid on my street was when dad mentioned it over coffee in Roxy’s the morning after it had happened. How he knew about the incident when I didn’t, despite being out in the bars the night before, is anybody’s guess. Though perhaps it shouldn’t be so remarkable when I think back to the week before Christmas when we were all out in Wetherspoons for a family meal. The place was packed with revellers, work parties and the like. There was a constant hum of activity around us; glasses clinking, festive cheer, the buzz of drunken chatter. I don’t recall the context of the conversation it was used in, but from out of nowhere dad used the phrase: “I was stoned out of my head at a Searchers concert in the Corran Halls.” My brother, sister and I looked at one another as if to ask if we’d heard dad say what we thought he said. We were almost egging him on to repeat it, posing questions like what were you doing at the Corran Halls? and what was your state of mind? But he never did say it again. The unlikely statement was left as one of those colourful things you’re destined to hear once and never again, like when I overheard one barman say to another at Gellions Bar in Inverness “he was making a shitload of sushi.”
As it was, I could hardly bear to log into my email account for days in case I was forced to follow up on my complaint to the Press & Journal. The prospect of having to read back what I’d written filled me with a horror that was only surpassed when I came home from work to discover that there was only one spider remaining on the living room ceiling.
There isn’t anything quite like a breakfast from the London City Airport branch of Pret A Manger at 5.30 on a Monday morning to give one pause for reflection on life. I was wearily blowing the foam from the top of a mediocre cappuccino while looking out towards the runway stretching over the River Thames, the way characters in film and television do when they have a lot on their mind. It had been nigh upon twenty hours since I got out of bed, and my thoughts whirled between the National Hockey League [NHL], Swedish meatballs, a Kosovan Uber driver, and how they all took me to this particular time and place, sitting bleary-eyed over a soggy cheese and tomato croissant.
It was sometime during the winter of 2022 that I found myself arriving home from the pub on a Friday or Saturday night to watch whatever NHL games I could find on television. It didn’t matter to me who was playing, I was mesmerised by the speed, intensity, and skill of the sport, and it gave me a great excuse to stay up drinking beer until 3am – a healthier use of my time, I think, than crawling into bed and asking Alexa to play the entire Ryan Adams catalogue while I recount the nights’ romantic defeats. In the beginning, watching the NHL was just something I did to pass the time between Saturday night and Sunday afternoon. I never understood many of the rules such as icing and offside, or what it meant for a skater to dish out a “hit” and why it was so celebrated, but it was fun as hell to watch. Over time I learned a little more about what I was watching. I started listening to hockey podcasts, there were certain teams or players I started looking out for, and by the time the playoffs came around in April, I was subscribing to TuneIn Radio so I could listen to the games as I drifted off to sleep. If we’re to accept that there’s little chance of me hearing someone whisper sweet nothings across my pillow any time soon, then listening to a Canadian commentator describe a fight between two burly goons must be the next best thing.
My newly nurtured love of the NHL peaked with the announcement that the 2023/24 season would see the league’s Global Series return to Europe for four fixtures in November. In the previous two tours the games were hosted in Prague, which gave me hope that I would have the opportunity to visit an affordable, beer-loving city to see a live ice hockey contest played before midnight. That’s not to say that I was disappointed when the league announced that they would be travelling to Stockholm, but the exchange rate of British pound to Swedish krona was throwing up numbers I had barely conceived of. When I mentioned to my drinking companions that I was thinking of attending an NHL game in Sweden, my brother and the nut tax man were immediately interested in making a weekend of it. The spectator sport aspect of the trip wasn’t as important to them both as it was to me though, they just fancied visiting a new place. That Stockholm is only a 39-minute train journey from Uppsala, where the algaeman had moved in January, only added a dollop of lingonberries to our mashed potatoes, as we imagined how nice it would be to bring a taste of Aulay’s to our friend in Sweden.
My brother and I stayed in Glasgow the night before our flight from Edinburgh, where we had arranged to meet the nut tax man before boarding. The pair of us thought we would grab a coffee before heading round to get on the bus to the airport, though a police cordon at the intersection with Bath Street halted our leisurely stroll up Buchanan Street. We couldn’t see exactly what the commotion was, but there appeared to be orange paint on the wall of the Sainsbury’s supermarket while a woman was sitting on the ground outside, presumably glued to the pavement, though I’ve never seen what that looks like to know for certain. The entire area was blocked off to the public and there were no fewer than four police vans on the scene to deal with the incident. We were forced into a detour along West Nile Street, but we were eager-footed enough to nab a window table in Cafe Nero – which was situated on the other side of the cordon, where we were able to watch the drama unfold. Not that there was as much drama as one might expect for there being four police vans. From our seats, we could see a male police officer who was stationed on the opposite end of the cordon from us, inside the non-action zone. His role appeared to be to offer directions to those pedestrians who were attempting to walk down Buchanan Street; a steady stream of them, one after another. He looked thoroughly fed up, and his predicament was one I thought about all the way to Edinburgh Airport. All I could think of was this young man who had put himself through years of painstaking training at the police academy, only to see it finally start to pay off as he is promised by his sergeant that he will soon be asked to deal with more serious crimes. It’s Thursday morning and the call goes out for four units to attend a major incident on Buchanan Street – the station is abuzz; finally the big one they have been waiting for. Everyone assembles and rushes to the scene. The squad arrives to find that a supermarket with expected pretax profits of £700million has orange paint on its exterior wall and a woman is sitting on the pavement a few yards away. The area is cordoned off and the young police officer spends the next few hours of his day telling people how they can get to Queen Street Station. I had only seen his experience through a window for the better part of half an hour, but it felt as though I had been living it for years.
Our timing with the nut tax man could hardly have worked out any better, giving the three of us plenty of time for a libation in the airport bar before taking off for Stockholm. Ordinarily the airport pint is celebrated because everything from that moment forward is going to be cheaper. Nothing can be more expensive than an airport drink. In our case we were savouring the last cheap beer we were going to buy for four days, knowing how fiscally strenuous Sweden threatened to be.
When we made it to our departure gate we found ourselves at the back of a very long line. Our collective demeanour likely matched that of a police officer-cum-traffic warden, and it wasn’t helped when the fire alarm began to sound throughout the terminal building. I mean, really, I can’t think of anything more inconvenient. We were standing our ground in the hope that we could steal a march to the front of the line once the panic started to set in, but nobody ahead of us was budging, as if it was an everyday occurrence to hear a fire alarm in an airport. Though this was no ordinary fire alarm – it was literally an automated recording announcing: “Warning. The fire alarm has been activated. Please make your way to the designated exit” in a voice so calm it could have put an entire nursery class to sleep. It was only when a little old woman in a uniform appeared and started bawling at people to leave the terminal that folk started to take notice of the imminent danger. Still, passengers were lingering in the corridors, suspicious of the legitimacy of the emergency. There’s no fire without smoke, after all. We agreed that it would be in our best interests to hedge our bets when it comes to personal safety versus advancing to the front of a queue and wait in the corridor, at least until we could see how the situation developed. Sure enough, the soothing automated voice was soon telling us that the entire thing was a false alarm and everybody should return to their gates. We strode up the ramp with the confidence of a man who has just been served at last orders, a faint whiff of burnt bread in our nostrils, and arrived right at the front of the line for the flight to Stockholm. The trip was off to a flying start.
Almost everyone on our flight seemed to be wearing hockey apparel of some kind, while the line at passport control was shaping up to be a scene from a TV sketch show. From our position, we could hear the border officers ask each passenger why they were visiting Sweden, and each person responded that they had come to see the ice hockey. I was waiting for the punchline, which I imagined would be some wee guy at the back announcing that he was here for the meatballs. In truth, the popular Swedish dish was high on our list of priorities, too. We commuted into the city centre and checked into our single rooms in the Skanstulls Hostel, where we spent ten minutes before heading out in search of the indie foodies’ favourite spot Meatballs For The People. The place was bustling considering it was a Thursday night, though we were able to get a table immediately. It was busy, but there was definitely a chance of meatballs.
Over a glass of the local Wisby Lager, we perused the menu of twelve different meatball varieties and each came to the same decision that we would order the classic dish with six reindeer meatballs. All I could think through the meal was how I would never again be able to attend a Winter Festival reindeer parade and look the creatures in the eye. Christmas would never be the same again, but I could hardly care – the meatballs were delicious. When the waiter came around to ask if we would like to see the dessert menu, the nut tax man revealed his radical idea to revolutionise the dining experience: he proposed ordering a small plate of meatballs without any of the side stuff that comes with a main dish. I don’t have a sweet tooth, but this was a version of dessert that I could get on board with. We ordered some veal, moose, and bear to split between us. I can’t deny that there was something thrilling about the prospect of eating bear. I think it was the knowledge that while I would never go out and kill an animal to eat it, I could at least stand a chance in a fight with a chicken or a cow. A bear would defeat me easily, though. In life you have to take opportunities when they are presented to you, and this seemed like the only time I would ever hold an advantage over a bear.
Everywhere we went in Stockholm over the weekend there were people sporting hockey attire. Toronto Maple Leafs and Detroit Red Wings were by far the most popular teams, but there were shirts of all colours seen. On our walking tour on Friday morning there was a family who had flown all the way from Minnesota to see their team play, while at the NHL Fan Zone where they were displaying the Stanley Cup, a couple from Ottawa responded to our comment about coming to view the cup because we would never get the chance to see it in Scotland by telling us that they were doing the same. I loved being amongst the hockey banter. In Centralstation they even had an enormous Toronto Maple Leafs jersey hanging from the rafters to promote the television movie Börje about the legendary Swedish ice hockey player Börje Salming. Before I arrived in the city I hadn’t been ready to commit to a team. I was happy watching the games and enjoying the sport without the tension that comes with attaching your affection to one team or another. In a way, my attitude toward the NHL was similar to my experience on dating apps such as Tinder or Bumble: I was simply seeing what’s out there without having anything serious in mind. I never had any expectation of making a match. But the hockey jerseys looked very warm, especially in the -4 temperatures, and I wanted to feel like I was part of the action.
When tickets originally went on sale for the NHL Global Series, the one game of the four that I really wanted to see was Toronto versus Detroit. They are two of the Original Six NHL franchises and are generally amongst the more attractive teams in the league. Tickets for that game on Friday night sold out immediately, however, and the next best option was the Saturday afternoon encounter between the Ottawa Senators and Minnesota Wild. Neither was a team that I would ordinarily go out of my way to watch when I come home from the pub, but I was happy to be able to attend an NHL game of any sort. I decided before we travelled to Stockholm that I would support Ottawa for the benefit of the contest, purely because they’re an east coast team and it’s slightly easier to see their games at a reasonable hour – but it was with the intention of it being a coffee date without it leading to anything serious. Somewhere in Sweden that changed, though. I decided that I wanted to buy a shirt and was ready to commit myself to the Senators. Excited at having finally found a mate, I went to the merchandise tent at the fan zone to pick out my jersey. They had replica shirts on display for each of the teams who were playing in Stockholm over the weekend, except for the black Ottawa uniform I was seeking. I asked the bloke behind the table if they had any in stock, and he told me how they had been sent a supply of shirts that had an old logo on them which they couldn’t sell due to trademark laws. From what I had learned about my adopted team through podcasts, it was the most Ottawa Senators thing possible.
At the Avicii Arena on game day, I was finally able to get my hands on the Sens jersey I’d been wanting for all of a day. I proudly slipped it over the top of my jumper, giving me the vital fourth layer I needed to combat the bracing Stockholm climate. The three of us climbed an interminable series of stairs to reach our vantage point in the cheap seats. We were seated right on centre ice which, despite the comparative paucity of the cost of our tickets, gave us a fantastic view of the entire game. Every thump of body into glass echoed around the building as clearly as the pop music that played during each stop in play. Usually I have difficulty following or even finding the puck when I’m watching on TV, but in the arena it stood out like orange paint on a Sainsbury’s. The whole experience was thrilling, even if the match itself wasn’t the most exciting. In the other NHL games played in Stockholm over the weekend, fans in attendance saw a 5-4 overtime win, a 4-3 overtime victory, and a 3-2 scoreline in the Toronto vs Detroit match I’d wanted to see. Ottawa and Minnesota, however, served up a 1-1 stalemate all the way through the regulation 60 minutes and the additional 5 minutes of overtime, which is pretty hard to do in ice hockey. It meant that we were treated to the rare spectacle of a decisive shootout to settle the score. As a new fan of the Ottawa Senators, I was chewing my nails almost as much as the arena hot dog I had earlier in the evening. To my relief, my beloved Sens won the shootout and I wasn’t left looking foolish for spending thousands of Swedish Krona on a hockey shirt. We left the globe-shaped arena in an upbeat mood, and I wondered if it would be like this all the time following the Senators.
Three nights felt like a reasonable time to spend in Stockholm. We enjoyed some of the sights, marvelled in the colourful architecture, took in the carnival atmosphere of the NHL Global Series around town, and ate many portions of meatballs over the weekend. My brother continued his Scandinavian odyssey with an early Sunday morning train journey to Oslo and then onwards to Copenhagen, while the nut tax man and I booked an evening flight back to Edinburgh. I woke up feeling hellish with what was at best a heavy cold or at worst a bad case of the dreaded 2020 travel bug. I wasn’t in the mood to do anything with my remaining few hours in the city and spent it aimlessly wandering around the National Museum before I inadvertently but happily ended up on a pro-Palestine march. I met the nut tax man beneath the enormous Maple Leafs jersey in Centralstation with plenty of time to spare before we needed to be at the airport. The next departure on the Arlanda Express wasn’t due for another 20 minutes, so we grabbed a coffee and a sandwich from a nearby cart and reflected on our time in Sweden. After 10 minutes an announcement came up that boarding the train was underway, enticing a surge of people towards the platform. We snorted at the needless rush of it all with there still being so much time until it left, and in our typical Oban way we sat and nursed our coffees until the last possible moment. When we finally gathered our bags and headed for the platform, we could see that the train was packed. Folk were rushing for the last remaining spaces, while on the platform the harassed conductor – as harassed as a Swede can be, anyway – was insisting that nobody else should board the train. We ignored him and pushed our way in before the doors shut behind us. It was a close call, but we should have recognised the ominous signs.
The panic on the platform was quickly forgotten when we breezed through the efficient airport. Everything was so effortless, even the security process, where the scanners had the new technology which meant that nothing had to be removed from our luggage. We hoped that we would be able to find one last taste of Swedish meatballs before our flight, but had to settle for a burger and beer instead. Meantime, my nose was streaming more quickly than a puck glides across the ice, and the only enthusiasm I could muster was to talk about how much I was looking forward to getting into my bed in the Travelodge hotel I had booked in Glasgow. We finished our meals and eased through passport control on our way to the gate, keen not to give ourselves the drama we had with the train. The line progressed slowly towards the aircraft, with the nut tax man getting through before me. I handed over my passport and mobile phone with the boarding pass to the Norwegian Airlines attendant, while thinking to myself that his colleague who had hair the colour of candyfloss and tattoos visible on her legs could be the most beautiful woman I had seen in Stockholm. Nothing was happening for seconds. Eventually the woman took my phone and passport and stepped out from behind the desk. My heart was pounding – I had no idea what she was about to say to me. It could have been anything.
“The name on your boarding pass doesn’t match your passport.”
I had no idea what that meant, but I was beginning to realise that it couldn’t be good. “We can’t let you board the flight.” Suddenly I could hardly muster a sniffle. I could only think that I must have let Google autofill my abbreviated name when I was making the booking. My devastation was only compounded when the beautiful woman asked me if I would like to keep the printed copy of the boarding pass they had produced. “It isn’t going to be much good to me, is it?”
I slumped back to the seating area and collapsed onto the harsh plastic, my mood as bleak as my health. Everything around me was taking place in a blur of uncertainty and confusion. I felt like all I wanted to do was cry, but I think that all of the fluid in my body had already exited through my nose. After taking a moment to compose myself, I began the process of thinking about how I was going to get home. A direct flight to Scotland wasn’t going to be possible for several days, so I was forced to fork out for a trip to London instead. From there I would be able to catch a flight to Glasgow that would take me in at a time that would allow me to take the train to Oban I was always intending on getting, only the entire episode would cost me more than several hockey jerseys.
After the ordeal of attempting to explain to a passport control officer why I was being stamped out of Sweden having already left and re-entered the country within an hour, I got my flight to London Heathrow at around the same time as I should have been landing in Edinburgh. It was close to midnight when I arrived at Heathrow, with my flight to Glasgow not scheduled until 7am and departing from an airport on the other side of the city. All I could think to do was to loiter around the deserted terminal until public transport reopened in the morning, like the perplexed character in the 2004 Tom Hanks movie. Only unlike Viktor, I had neither the energy nor the ingenuity to come up with a more comfortable plan than sitting on the punishing seat all through the night.
There were maybe half a dozen or so others like me who were dotted around the place, while every so often a robotic floor cleaner would amble by in the background. It was a miserable night which was only made bearable by the fact that I could indulge my obsession with the NHL by watching a live game on my laptop. This wasn’t what I had in mind when I first started coming home from the pub to watch ice hockey on a Saturday night. There will probably come a time when I can pull on my Ottawa Senators shirt and fondly look back on a trip to Stockholm to see my team play, but it was never going to be over breakfast at Pret A Manger in London City Airport.
I recently came across a couple of inspirational quotes on the subject of turning 40. The first of these was in the days leading up to my 40th birthday when I was still seeking a measure of reassurance over the approaching milestone. I took to Microsoft Edge and visited google.co.uk where I searched specifically for “famous quotes about turning 40” since as a society we put much more currency in the experiences of famous people than anybody else. There weren’t as many comments attributed to celebrities as I hoped there might be, although one of the founding fathers of the United States, Benjamin Franklin, apparently did once say: “At twenty years of age, the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; at forty, the judgment.” It was heartening to think that even if I was leaving my decade of wit, I might now at least have a better judgment of when – or when not – to use it.
Equally as inspiring, the second quote came in the form of a statement on the front of a card produced by the Holy Mackerel greeting card company which was presented to me by one of the maiden mothers of our latest pub quiz adversaries, Quiznae Me, and an accidental Tinder match. Although there was nothing to say that the wisdom was strictly limited to the occasion of a 40th birthday, it was a card given to a man who was celebrating turning 40. The enormous green text read: “HAPPY BIRTHDAY YOU GIN-RADDLED OLD SOAK.” I guess it has been determined that my forties will either be a time of good judgment or gin, and all that remains is to see which it is.
As October approached, I had for some reason convinced myself that the final days of my thirties were going to be a light procession, similar to the Charities Day parade we used to see during the summer in Oban when I was growing up, only with more corduroy and tweed. In reality, even on the cusp of one of life’s significant milestones, I was still having to contend with the challenges that come with being a single occupant. The night before bin collection day, for example, I performed my usual role of taking our block’s three blue recycling bins from the garden out to the pavement for emptying. There has always been something of a laissez-faire approach to filling the bins, at least as far as I’ve been aware. I tend to drop my recycling into whichever one other people have been using, which I have always assumed is what everybody else in the block does since the bins are not numbered or marked in any identifying way. I approached the first receptacle, finding it to be around three-quarters full, and wheeled it through the close to the front of the building. The next bin was the same – plastic and paper barely halfway up the length of the thing. I lifted the lid on the final bin expecting that it would be empty and I would be spared the trouble of dragging all three of the things out into the pavement. But then, like some kind of rubbish fruit machine, the third bin lid dropped with me having seen that there were maybe six inches of material lying on the bottom. I’m not ordinarily an advocate for capital punishment, but in that moment I would have happily witnessed the responsible party maybe not lose a hand, but certainly have a fingernail badly bruised.
It wasn’t only my bin collection woes which were being recycled in early October. By the end of the first week, four of the five bulbs in my living room chandelier had expired. The fifth lightbulb has continued to valiantly light part of the room for several weeks while I muster the enthusiasm to take the stepladder out. Lightbulbs have been a nemesis of mine since I moved into my flat, especially when the ceilings in the place are so high. How can it be that four bulbs die within a day or so of one another while the other in the set burns moderately brightly for weeks after? Six years of research has thus far only told me that dimmer bulbs are not necessarily the smartest lighting option.
On the final day of my thirties I was forced into defrosting my freezer, a monumentally mundane household task that was only made into a mountain by the realisation that I have never considered what other people use to dislodge blocks of ice from their freezer. A look in my kitchen drawer was only a crude version of a hit 1995 single by Alanis Morissette when there were half a dozen spoons when all I needed was a pick. The most suitable tool I could find for the job was a cake slice I had inherited from the previous owner of the flat. It was a chunky silver thing that sent flakes of frost flying across the kitchen when I chipped away at the ice that had built up on the top shelf – as if I was battling the elements on a gruelling Arctic expedition. It’s these things that nobody ever writes about on a 40th birthday card.
For months I agonised over hosting a birthday party for myself since, being someone who is so awkwardly shy that the only reason there isn’t a picture of me next to the dictionary definition of introvert is that I couldn’t face having my photograph taken, I felt uncomfortable with the notion of an event that would be all about me. Besides, a party for a person’s 40th birthday isn’t anything like, say, the fifth birthday party that your mum organised, when classmates are forced to come along because their parents like your parents and because there is cake. I worried that if I was to put on my own party the night would trundle by with only my brother and me standing at the bar with our niece, which would be just like any other Saturday night in Aulay’s, only in this instance there would be a girl who actually laughs at the things we say. Yet, despite those anxieties, I pressed on and invited everyone I know to Soroba House the Saturday after my birthday.
There turned out to be far more interest in the event beyond only my immediate family, and I proceeded with planning ways of making the night appealing to everyone. As with any celebration, there is always an important person or two who can’t make it. On this occasion, it was the Doctor of Words who was using the school holidays to take a trip to Ireland. To compensate for missing the party, she offered to take me out for dinner and pints in Markie Dans the weekend before the big day. We made a night of it by inviting the formerly raven-haired quiztress and a bird-watching accountant to join us. In a way, the evening was a kind of initiation into my forties by three of the finest fortysomethings I know. They have shown me that people in their forties are every bit as attractive, witty, conscientious, and fun-loving as anybody else. That the Doctor of Words ordered a round of Tequila for the table less than an hour after we arrived surely only confirms Benjamin Franklin’s theory.
During the evening, sometime after we had eaten a portion of salt and chilli chips that was as big as any of our heads, we were joined by a couple of trainee doctors who had recently moved to Argyll from the south of England to further their development. These young women had smiles that were so sparkling one could be forgiven for believing that they were student dental nurses. They were fun and easygoing and didn’t seem at all perturbed by sitting at a table with a pageant of fortysomethings. Of course, much like every woman on the dating apps seems to be, I quickly discovered that they were both really into outdoor activities. One of the doctors told me about her plans to go white water rafting the following afternoon. Knowing that Saturday was forecast to see Old Testament levels of rainfall throughout Scotland, I queried whether going rafting on the rainiest day of the year was such a great idea. With clinical precision, the trainee doctor responded that “I’m going to get wet anyway,” and it was all I could do to nod my head and hope that the beats from Steve-O’s decks would swallow me up. I didn’t have a clue what to say; whether to be funny or flirty or simply outright admit that I don’t know what the point of white water rafting is. It was in that moment that I came to realise that at 39 years and 360 days of age, I no longer know how to talk to women who are in their twenties. However, there was a part of me that wondered when I ever could.
Sure enough, the rain on Saturday morning was unlike anything any of us had seen. It was coming down more steadily than the new short-term let licence notices have been going up on property doors around town. By the time I walked around the corner to Lidl, the road was effectively a stream and cars were like jet skis coughing up waves in their wake. At least a quarter of the supermarket car park was flooded, and this was 10.30am – hours before high tide was due to arrive.
With my head still swimming in Tequila, I met the rest of my family at the Bridge Cafe. There was a sort of end of days feel about the place: it was practically deserted; Halloween decorations dangling from the ceiling, twisting menacingly in the breeze whilst Britney Spears played from a radio in the kitchen. Over coffee, we revisited my night in Markies and discussed plans for my party the following weekend. It would be my birthday in midweek, and I mentioned how I would like a repeat of the meal a few of us enjoyed in Bar Rio a year earlier. My sister made a quip questioning whether I thought of myself as the Queen by holding three separate events celebrating my birthday. As someone who holds fairly strong Republican beliefs, the zinger was a stinger. But the truth is that if I could have gotten away with it, I would likely have spent the entire month partying.
By the time we had quaffed our coffee and ventured back outside, almost the entirety of Lochavullin Road was flooded. The water had travelled all the way down to the bridge and was troubling the lane outside the cafe. We stepped down off the pavement to find that the flow was at least ankle-deep in its shallowest parts. Dad was keen to get to Tesco on the other side of the road, but he was trepidacious to walk through the water. My brother and I insisted that he could get whatever he needed in Lidl, or at least take the long route around to Tesco if necessary, but he wouldn’t listen. He began to shuffle across the bridge, almost in the manner of someone who is learning to walk for the first time, which I suppose in a way we all were. I never thought that I would see the sight of my dad wading through water that was at least shin-high by the time he reached the middle of the road, just to get to Tesco. There was something admirable about it; in that I couldn’t help but wish that I had the kind of desire for something, anything, as my dad had to buy some milk and bread. Still, the depth of the water was getting silly before he could reach his destination, and as soon as he realised that my sister wasn’t going to risk walking across to retrieve her car, he relented and came back to the bridge. It truly seems that nobody can resist the authority of a Les Mills instructor.
The Great Flood of 12pm-10pm 7 October 2023 will live long in the memory of everybody in Oban who survived it. I can remember standing in the bus shelter at the station with dad waiting for the Soroba bus to arrive as the rain continued to fall without any sign of it ever stopping. With no sign of the bus at least 30 minutes after its scheduled time, rumours began to spread that it had become stuck at the Corran Halls and wasn’t able to drive up the hill to Dunollie due to flooding. It was easy to see an armageddon scenario knowing the consternation it causes when people can’t get out of Dunollie. The relief we felt when it eventually arrived was similar to the euphoria when a barstool facing the television in Aulay’s opens up and there’s a game on that you want to watch. As the day developed, a deluge of photographs appeared on social media, businesses in some of the worst affected areas were forced to close as water levels rose, while landslides on the roads to the north and south of the town meant that Oban was cut off from the rest of civilisation in the physical sense rather than the figurative way many people usually like to believe.
By the time the day of the 40th anniversary of my birth came around the following Wednesday, the flood was just another one of those things that happen at the weekend and are quickly forgotten about, a phenomenon that becomes easier with age it seems. It was to my surprise that I awoke in the morning to discover that not only had my body not completely broken down the way I had occasionally feared it might, but rather it felt like it did any other morning – only somewhat sprightly. A residual rush of energy from my indoor football game on Monday accompanied a spring in my step. I had scored the finest goal of my fleeting career in the hall at Atlantis, and although there were only nine other people there who witnessed it, it was still nine more than are present any other time I’m scoring.
A group of us arranged to go for dinner at Bar Rio in a sort of recreation of my 39th birthday, only this time we arrived with a no-fern pact – nobody wanted to finish up with soil on their hands from my inability to care for houseplants. The eight of us managed to unconsciously organise ourselves into a seating plan that was identical to a year earlier, with (much more than just…) the Plant Doctor’s girlfriend taking up the spot vacated by The Algaeman. After our initial drinks order was taken by a bloke, we were even joined by the same waitress who had previously served us. Nobody had seen her since she disappeared midway through that last meal following my handcuff remark, so there was some relief to know that she hadn’t skipped town. The waitress had a knowing smile as she approached our table. It was easy to see that she recognised us, though there was an unspoken agreement that no-one from our group would attempt to engage in any banter with her lest we ended up going hungry, and she seemed quite comfortable with the unspoken element of the agreement. I was only a matter of hours into my forties and already the better judgment was coming through.
Having filled our pie holes with pizza, and without this time offending any waiting staff, we ventured forth to the Lorne pub quiz in search of trivia triumph. It wasn’t without some guilt that I temporarily separated from my usual team, the Unlikely Bawbags, but this was a rare occasion. It isn’t often that I get to team up with my brother and the Plant Doctor at a quiz without one of them falling asleep before the music round, and never with Dirty Finger, who we hoped would show the same acumen for general knowledge as he does for picking cheesy chart hits at the jukebox.
The main purpose of our one-night-only alliance, however, was to take our rivals Quiznae Me down a peg or two. Their rise to prominence in the quiz makes me think of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in the original Ghostbusters film: a cute and fluffy little character who couldn’t possibly cause any harm to anybody until it suddenly grows to a monstrous size and threatens to crush the entire city before the heroic Ghostbusters cross their streams and melt it down to a puddle of goo. They had been getting their excuses in early ahead of the quiz, claiming that half of their team was away on holiday and they were going to be down to only two members. I didn’t believe a word of it. The whole thing sounded like the days when my niece was younger and I would hide whatever toy she was playing with that day behind my back. She would protest and I’d insist that I didn’t have the missing toy. Eventually, once her guard was down, I’d sit the toy atop my head waiting for my niece to notice it, her eyes would widen, and Quiznae Me would win the quiz.
Perhaps the only obstacle I could see to our alliance going all the way and winning the quiz was our inability to agree on a team name. I quite liked the idea of Traveling Quizburys, but there were a variety of alternatives put forward in our group chat. Steak Pie: Revisited is always a popular reminder of the disastrous entry the Plant Doctor and I made into the Settle Inn’s quiz in Stirling; Don’t Cross The Streams was our Ghostbusters-themed suggestion, though it is precisely what we were going to have to do to defeat Quiznae Me; A Caricature of a single quiz team and Are stars just pinpricks in the curtain of night (spoken like Sean Connery) were also options. We hadn’t decided on a name when the silver-haired host came around to ask and we were forced into a panicked 40-Year-Old Virgin.
Things didn’t get any better from there when we were presented with the opening picture round, which was ten photographs of famous places of worship. When the general knowledge round contained the weekly Celtic-themed question, the Rangers-supporting Dirty Finger began to question whether he had been reeled into some kind of Papal conspiracy. Despite this, our alliance made a strong start to the quiz. Indeed, we performed well throughout the entire night. Yet, to our frustration, there was always one team ahead of us from beginning to end. A team that had no qualms about denying a 40-year-old man a victory at the pub quiz on his birthday. It wasn’t Quiznae Me – we crushed them – but, rather, the Unlikely Bawbags. The very team I had left to join my one-night-only alliance. It seems that the first lesson of my forties is to never underestimate your bawbags.
I couldn’t let my birthday pass without stopping in to have a drink in Aulay’s, the one place that almost feels as natural as the womb. Being a Wednesday night it was quiet and we had the run of the lounge bar to dissect our quiz defeat and pump the jukebox full of pound coins. It wasn’t long before a pint of Tennent’s was passed through from the public bar accompanied by hushed words from the bar staff. “Doc says happy birthday.” I couldn’t recall ever being bought a pint by Doc before. It feels it would be something a person would remember, like an Old Testament-style flood. More important than that, though, was the question of whether receiving a pint from Doc is an act of congratulations or commiserations.
When I was next in Aulay’s in the hours before the party I had decided to throw for myself, my mind was almost utterly consumed by a comment made to me in the same place the night before. I was talking to the former barmaid who once believed that my name is Rupert when she told me she planned to come to my party dressed as Lara Croft. It didn’t seem to phase her when I pleaded that I would likely hardly see five minutes of the night if she turned up in the guise of the Tomb Raider. There were all manner of things going on around me – Aulay’s had a bottle of Lagavulin behind the bar for the first time in years; the scientist from Swansea University who has strong opinions on shoelaces had travelled down from Skye with his wife; the nut tax man was being sent on a wheeze around town to source balloon weights after the ones I had bought from eBay proved to be defective – yet all I could think about was that damned Lara Croft.
With whisky in our bellies, we sauntered across the road to the taxi rank to catch a ride up to my dad’s on our way to Soroba House. Cars were at a premium, but in a rare stroke of luck, there was one pulling in just as we arrived. I sat in the front passenger’s seat for the journey, which was considerably more dry than the same route was a week earlier. A strong breeze ruffled the branches of the trees in Argyll Square, enticing the driver into invoking page one of the small talk handbook. “It’s been so windy today,” she observed. I hadn’t noticed, but the new wisdom that comes with being 40 years old suggested that confessing as much wouldn’t assist in continuing the conversation, so I went with one of my most-used self-depreciating jokes.
“Aye, I spent ages doing my hair this morning and it was all for nothing.” I could feel the driver’s eyes twist from the road to my head, and a faint chuckle followed. “But you don’t have any hair,” she jabbed. I hammed up the feigned indignation, blaming the approaching winter nights for her poor vision and threatening to withhold our fare as she collapsed into hysterics. I reckon it was at some point on that brief journey that I remembered that I was always more into Super Mario Kart anyway.
Despite having organised the thing, nothing could have prepared me for the emotions of walking into my own party, while others seemed unprepared for the harrowing sight of the ‘Green and Glowing Ghostbusters’ cocktail I had ordered for arrival, with the Irish Cream slowly curdling on the surface of the drink. People had put in such a remarkable effort to make the night memorable, especially my sister and partner who must have inflated more than a hundred balloons, and Oban’s leading purveyor of Irish dance who did so much to help put the ‘jig’ in Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It. As many as 16 would-be DJs added more than 12 hours worth of music to a collaborative Spotify playlist for the event, while Dirty Finger went to the extent of having his friend create an enormous creamy fruit cake centred on a daft throwaway comment I’d made during one of our lockdown beer clubs on Zoom about a particular tipple having the taste of “Babe Ruth smashing berries into your mouth.”
Then there was the grand reveal of the project the no longer raven-haired quiztress had been secretly working on for weeks. A ray of inspiration had come to her during one of our quiz defeats in September that it would be fun to prepare a Piñata for the party, though she refused to indulge me with the theme of the piece. I couldn’t even begin to hazard a guess as to what kind of Piñata someone would bring to a 40th birthday party, and so concerned myself more with whether we could get miniature bottles of whisky inside the thing – although that was quickly ruled out on the grounds of safety. I couldn’t believe it when I arrived at Soroba House and saw the creation swinging from the ceiling in the middle of the room: a Piñata of my own head, complete with glasses and a colourful tie. The features were unabashedly accurate, from the size of the forehead to the haunted hairline. From this angle, I could see why the taxi driver was so amused.
In addition to the generosity of time and effort, I was touched by the number of people who came to the party bearing gifts. I had received an Andy Warhol picture depicting the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, a snappy tie and socks combo that nearly matched, a gorgeous green and gold silk pocket square, a personally engraved notebook, and enough Jack Daniel’s and Jameson to last me until my 50th birthday. It was almost too much, and then it did become overwhelming when the Plant Doctor made his presentation. From the outside it looked like any other gift-wrapped offering, even if it was difficult to believe that he could wrap so neatly. Inside, however, it was anything but an ordinary gift. I was stunned to find a collection of six books bringing to life all of the blog stories I had published online between 2018 and 2023. Across 1, 114 pages, the books weaved together every fabric of our friendship, with contributions in each volume from those closest to me and others who have featured in my writing through the years. I have long dreamed of seeing my words in print but tempered that ambition with my own self-doubt about who really wants to read of interactions where women are being asked if it’s a good idea to go rafting in the rain.
It would be easy to think from the likeness of the Piñata that my head could hardly get any bigger, but holding this impressive tome in my hands challenged that notion. At least, it was that way until I witnessed the vigour that my niece showed in battering the Piñata. There was a relentless cacophony of plastic on paper mache, yet my big bald forehead wouldn’t budge. Eventually the bat slipped out of my niece’s hand, landing at the feet of the VAT man. He reached down to pick it up and found himself overcome with the temptation that just about anybody else would. A gunshot-like sound reverberated around the place and the room was filled with silence as bags of Haribo fell from the gaping wound in my head. As my paper likeness crumpled to the floor, the VAT man’s face was a picture of remorse – at least for a handful of seconds, until the sweets were gleefully gathered up and the burst Piñata was placed over my head. Think Frank Sidebottom, but reeking of Joop! and Jameson. When you consider that split-second decision to pick up the dropped bat and all that followed, maybe Benjamin Franklin didn’t have it all figured out after all.
In recent years I’ve made it a habit at the end of the summer to place an order on the World of Books website. Similar to a squirrel gathering nuts to see it through the winter, I spend an evening browsing the 4-for-3 offer on the second-hand book retailer’s catalogue. My end-of-summer 2023 haul was placed on 25 July. The package arrived sometime in early August, and I was pretty excited to get torn into it. While it feels nice to hold a brand-new book, one that has never belonged to anybody else, there is something appealing about the pre-owned sort. You never know what you’re going to find written inside the cover or in the margins, and they always have a pleasing fragrance. Or maybe that is just something I have been telling myself since 2018 when a woman in Markie Dans said to me that “You smell like old books.”
I was chuffed with my delivery from World of Books, although I quickly realised that not everything was as it should have been. There were four books, that much was correct, but only three of them were items I had ordered. Amongst them was a rogue little number that had 373 pages, each the colour of a porcelain cup after a teabag has been left inside for too long. It was a book that not only had I not ordered, but I had never even heard of before: The Good Earth – “a classic novel of pre-revolutionary China by the Nobel Prize-winning author” Pearl S. Buck. Despite having never read anything of even post-revolutionary China, let alone pre-revolutionary, I was intrigued. While I was disappointed not to have received Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, at a retail cost of £3.60 it hardly seemed worth the administrative hassle of composing an email and packaging the book back up to return it, so I decided to keep The Good Earth. I guess it’s true what they say about things in life passing by your eye quickly – though I can never remember exactly how that phrase goes.
August in Scotland often does this thing of being more like autumn masquerading in summer clothes. This year it has been that way since I got home from Sarajevo in mid-June to discover that I had already missed Oban’s two-week heatwave while I was away. There were a handful of days where summer threatened to break free from autumn’s clutch, such as on the consecutive weekends in July when I did two-fifths of a Hugh Grant film and attended two weddings and no funerals. But otherwise, it has been a brief parody of a season when I could have placed my World of Books order at any time in the last three months.
Indeed, nothing seems to have been the same since I returned from Bosnia. It’s almost as if my flight passed through some alternative timeline and I arrived back in Oban with no sense of where I am or even who I am, similar to the way I imagine people might feel when they get off the bus at the Dunbeg turning circle. I couldn’t put it down to the usual post-trip blues anybody feels when they get back from a place they enjoy, although part of me was undeniably pining for cevapi, rakija, and Sarajevo. My motivation was off on an extended holiday, while the baggage I was carrying felt way over the usual allowance. I found myself inventing all sorts of excuses to get out of my daily yoga routine; things like not having time because the bins needed taking out, feeling too tired from my 9-5 desk job, or feeling an urgent need to reorganise my book cupboard. It’s much too easy to get out of a good habit by making a habit out of bad excuses.
My yoga ritual isn’t the only area of my life that has stalled in the months since my trip. It has been a struggle to muster much interest in many of the things I usually love doing, such as writing about my hapless exploits with the opposite sex, going to the weekly Lorne pub quiz, playing five-a-side football, or performing at our regular open mic night. There have been times when even going to Aulay’s seemed like a chore, although it turns out that is one thing I can always manage. But somehow it is different, too. It is as if somebody had hit a switch and suddenly everyone I know is a responsible grown-up who is either married, in a relationship, or drinking 0% lager. Though when the price of a pint of Tennent’s is as much as £4.10 it is hard to blame anyone for seeking an alternative. Even the Plant Doctor has committed to a period of sobriety, which strikes me as being akin to a bird that chooses to walk rather than fly. Chances are if you walk into Aulay’s on any given night now, the Plant Doctor will be nursing a 0% Menabrea and Doc will be sitting on a stool in the lounge bar. Going for a pint nowadays is like getting off the bus at Dunbeg turning circle.
There’s a gap between the side of my bed and the wall where I have to reach in to turn off my bedside lamp after I’ve read a chapter of the Chinese book I didn’t order. For a split second while my hand blindly fumbles for the switch, I never know what I’m going to find in there. It occurred to me that the uncertainty involved in the act of reaching for the switch is exactly what I’ve been experiencing since the summer ended, when I’ve been lying in the comfort of being in my thirties whilst reaching unaware into the dust and cobwebs of becoming forty. When is the summer of one’s life, I wonder, and how do you know when it has passed you by?
The reality of growing older has never been something that has bothered me, aside from in 2016 when I turned 33. For several months leading up to my thirty-third birthday – in that gap between my bed and the light switch that is July to October – I felt panicked by the prospect of being the same age as Jesus was when he died. It’s all very well knowing now that there is nobody who is going to judge you by such a ridiculous standard, but back then I had no idea how to handle the pressure associated with outliving our Lord and Saviour. When I thought about the 73 books in the Bible recognised by the Catholic Church, it seemed a lot of material for a man who only lived for thirty-three years. Sure, I was writing a blog at the time documenting my days out at the football as a Celtic season ticket holder, but it didn’t have anything like the same audience, and it was mostly complaining about the difficulty of getting a decent steak pie at half-time rather than any great achievement I had made.
At the depth of my fretting, I began to compile a list in my notebook of some of the things other people had achieved while aged 33 as a sort of spur to inspire me that it needn’t necessarily mark the end of my usefulness. My list included items such as the Vaudeville performer Walter Nilsson riding across the United States on an 8 ½ foot unicycle; Paul Raposo beginning his study of watchmaking; Robert Hensel setting a world record for the longest non-stop wheelie in a wheelchair – covering a distance of 6.178 miles despite being born with spina bifida. The entries went on and on.
Things worked out alright once I realised that being 33 wasn’t all that bad and that very few people these days care about what Jesus did anyway, while later into my thirties I came to appreciate that the personal relationships you build are much more important than any list of achievements you can put to paper. I’ve been trying to tell myself that every time I hear it said that “life begins at forty” and the temptation is then to question what the fuck I’ve been doing with all of these nights standing at the bar in Aulay’s if not living my life. Was life really still to begin when the podcasting phycologist warned me that the face cream I’d been buying from Lidl was most likely terrible for my skin? Or every night when I walked in wearing a suit and Geordie Dave would holler after me, “Oi, Penfold!”
The fact that I am getting older is inescapable, however. Despite my brain trying to fool me into believing that I am still 29, my body has long since started to behave as if I am already 40. If I am not playing football like my trainers are filled with cement then I am straining a muscle in my back just by lying on my living room floor during one of the yoga practices I can be bothered doing. Towards the end of summer, around the time I received my copy of The Good Earth, I was invited to join the board of trustees and become the secretary of the local mental health charity Argyll Wellbeing Hub. I was thrilled to accept, even when it just feels like something only a person in their forties would be asked to do. Things have reached the stage where I’ve now accepted that I need to expand the age range of the women I’m seeking to meet on dating apps into the late-forties.
Somehow it doesn’t seem to matter how wide I set the age range on Bumble or Tinder, it does not affect my chances of success. For all I can see, there are approximately a dozen women between the two apps who are living in the Oban area, and none of them appear to have an interest in dating me. Everyone else is from places where nobody actually lives, such as Bridge of Orchy or Kinlochleven. From the number of women who show up as being in these far-flung villages, you’d be forgiven for believing that the Highlands is a bustling metropolis. What is going on up there that there exists such a thriving population of single women?
For as frustrating as that is, it’s not even the location of the Bumble and Tinder users that is most perplexing to me. The thing that gets me is that virtually every one of these women has the same interests. They like to go hiking, or freshwater swimming, or climbing, or foraging, while their “ideal Sunday” is a country walk followed by a roast dinner. Reading profile after profile of this it is hard to stop yourself from imagining that somewhere like Ben Cruachan or Glencoe is choked full of outdoor enthusiast single women as far as the eye can see, while in the surrounding villages, there are nothing but lonely men who cannot understand why they can’t get a date. These days more than ever I find myself asking where are all the women who want to waste a few hours in Aulay’s before going home and falling asleep while watching Ghostbusters for the 500th time?
Despite all of this, I did manage to make a match on Bumble in August. The woman was 41 and seemed to be visiting the Isle of Mull from either Germany or France, it wasn’t immediately obvious, though I later sussed that she was in fact German. The nature of Bumble requires that, once two people have been paired together, the woman makes the first move. Having read my profile, the German asked in the first instance if I would send her a link to my blog so that she could learn what type of guys are hanging around in Scotland. Although I felt as though I would make the least impressive spokesperson possible for the men in my country, I felt obliged to comply. After all, this was a woman whose first thought wasn’t how many metres she could climb, but how many words per minute she could read, and most importantly, she actually sent me a message.
Without hesitation, I gave her the link to my blog. Her response read: “And you are the only single person in Oban? That must be really hard. Maybe you should move to the continent where more and more people believe romantic relations to be utterly overrated, a postmodern substitute for church. But of course, church also isn’t an option.” I’ve heard of playing hard to get, but this seemed ridiculous.
Despite the initial difficulties, I exchanged messages with the German for a couple of days while she travelled around the Inner Hebridean islands. During one of her stopovers, she was complaining about how the only pub on the island closes at five o’clock in the afternoon and as a result, she was being forced to make conversation with the elderly man whose home she was lodging in. If nothing else, I felt sure that the situation would benefit me by encouraging the German to seek refuge in a blossoming online holiday romance. Things were really looking up when she asked me for recommendations on what she could do in Oban the following day. I suggested that she should go to either McCaig’s Tower or Dunollie Castle, visit the Distillery, or eat some seafood. Since it wasn’t clear from her messages whether she was staying overnight or just passing through, I added that it would depend on how much time she has and that there are plenty of good pubs and cafes in town.
I was excited about the possibilities that Thursday had in store for me. My head was filled with scenarios where the German would come off the ferry and our messages led to us going for a drink. It was all I could do to think about the places we would go: Aulay’s wouldn’t do for a first date, it would have to be somewhere a bit more classy, such as a Mediterranean meal at the Olive Garden or some cocktails in the Perle. I could just see the faces of the people at the office when I went in and bragged about the Bumble date I was going to go on after work. Things didn’t work out that way, however. The bus timetable to Callandar turned out to be my undoing and the German was only ever in Oban for a handful of hours during the afternoon. Our interaction was over by the end of the week. As someone whose Bumble bio relies heavily on the art of wordplay, it was somewhat ironic that my chances of a date should be scuppered by Callandar.
When the latest Let’s Make A Scene open mic night came around at the end of August, I was so caught up in the cobwebs of existing in the space between 39 and 40 that I didn’t feel like reading from my notebook as I normally would. There have been so many talented people who have performed at the Corran Halls in our last few events that I figured I could get away with not participating on this occasion. However, just in case I had an unlikely burst of enthusiasm, I did bring along the book which I read from the night I supported the comedian Gary Little a year ago. It was nice to go along and enjoy the rest of the poets and musicians without the stomach-turning nerves that usually accompany these things. My comfort wasn’t to be permanent, though, after a couple of people insisted that I perform. There’s nothing that will motivate a person more than having their ego stroked. As well as that, it was the first time that my dad had come to a Let’s Make A Scene in four years, when his review of my set was that “it was good, but he went on a bit long.”
Getting up to read in front of an audience was the best thing I have done since the summer ended. My performance went better than I could have expected, and I even got a laugh out of the joke I’ve been trying for years about whether it would be acceptable to ask for assistance in finding the self-help book section in Waterstones. Afterwards, I was complimented by a woman who I can remember all of the lads in my year in high school having a crush on, while I ended up talking to another woman who had some nice things to say. She was keen to tell me that “I don’t normally enjoy cringe comedy, but some of your bits were funny.” It was the sort of thing I wished I could put on my Tinder bio: Not likely to go hill walking with you, but I will make you cringe. She continued that “There were times when it felt as if I was being stabbed in the side…not by a knife…maybe something like a needle.” For the first time in a while, my hand reached for the switch by my bedside table without fumbling. The light went out, summer was over, but I knew that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
Drinking cheap beer until after one in the morning doesn’t seem like the best preparation for a 7-hour, 5km hike, but then I’ve never been one who can be described as being the outdoors type. While I am comfortable practising yoga in my living room every morning or playing a game of indoor football once a week, I have a habit of doing everything I can to avoid most forms of outdoor activity. It’s not that I dislike nature, just that my natural place is not to be amongst it. At the best of times, the closest thing I get to a serious outdoor pursuit is when I’m trying to get from Aulay’s to Markie Dans before the curfew.
For people who derive greater pleasure than I do from frolicking in the fresh air, Sarajevo is a city that has a great deal to offer. Its four giant Olympic Mountains make it an increasingly popular destination for winter sports enthusiasts and those who enjoy hiking, while adrenaline junkies are known to get their fix from rafting on the nearby River Nerveta. None of those has ever appealed to me, and it was easy to see why after a serene stroll around the city in relatively mild temperatures on my first afternoon.
Preparations for my holiday had been clouded with uncertainty due to the weather in the infant days of June. On the weekend before I left Oban to begin my journey, Medina told me that conditions in Sarajevo had been changing almost hourly but were mostly rainy. This was in contrast to the thermometer-challenging heat I experienced on my first visit a year before, as well as to the situation at home, where Scotland was on the cusp of a heatwave. Instead of packing protection against the sun’s rays, I found myself shopping for a waterproof cagoule I could fold away into my backpack.
Once I had checked in at Hostel Franz Ferdinand, I joined a free walking tour with the Neno & Friends agency. We explored some of the sites between Susan Sontag Square and the canned beef monument, which stands in recognition of the international community and specifically its donation of canned foods during the 1425-day siege. The sun had emerged from behind a blanket of clouds by the time the walk started. I was forced to jump into an apoteka to pick up some sunscreen, leading to a lesson in how Factor 20 won’t prevent a person’s nose from being burnt if you apply it to every other part of your face except for the nose.
Even allowing for the occasional misstep of failing to protect my nose or arriving into a bar that is in the middle of playing a YouTube playlist titled “Acid Jazz”, I felt as though I was really starting to find my feet in Sarajevo. There isn’t much I enjoyed more than the heady experience of walking through Baščaršija as clouds of smoke wheeze from the grill houses and circle around Gazi Husrev-beg’s Mosque while the enchanting call to prayer summons worshippers; or walking by the Miljacka River and watching the architecture change from street to street, building by building, as if I’d been sucked into one of those timelapse videos that are always coming up on YouTube. One moment you can be walking down a wide street which is filled with Socialist-era high-rise buildings, all of them grey and lacking individual character, usually with betting shops or hair salons on the ground floor; then you turn the corner and are immediately transported into Ottoman excellence on narrow cobblestone streets; or the vibrancy of the Austro-Hungarian era. Along Zelenih beretki, there is dance music thumping from the bars and young revellers spilling onto the pavement, while around the corner on Ferhadija people are sipping frappuccino and spooning gelato amidst a gentle hum. Every turn brings something new, yet at the same time so unflinchingly different.
Having seemingly mastered walking on flat surfaces whilst developing a fulsome appreciation of Sarajevo’s endless charms from the ground, I found myself with a hankering for something more. Like the way a small child learns how to crawl and before you know it he is attempting to figure out how to get to the biscuit tin, I was keen to find my way into the steep hills which surround this city. They reach back as far as the eye can see: thick with evergreen trees interspersed with red-tiled roofs and chalk-white gravestones. You can’t help but be drawn to Sarajevo’s hills. I had tried wandering up one of them on my previous trip and got lost as I searched for the Olympic Museum amongst the labyrinth of narrow winding roads whilst cars whizzed by like a Scalextric track gone wrong. If there were such a thing as a medal for giving up on the first attempt, I wouldn’t even have reached the podium to collect my gold.
Finding information on the internet about travelling around Bosnia and Herzegovina is no easier than navigating Sarajevo’s hills. It’s what makes people like Hidajeta and Medina at Meet Bosnia so invaluable. On one deep dive into Google’s search results, I found a young boutique tour organisation by the name of .Cheyf. Derived from the Bosnian word ‘ćejf’ for that indescribable moment of quiet, simple pleasure – be it a cup of coffee, a cold beer on a warm day, watching the ripples on a calm, blue lake, or hearing a song you had forgotten about play on the radio – .Cheyf exists to provide visitors to Bosnia and Herzegovina with a cultured and personal experience; one that focuses on the many beautiful things the country has to offer beyond its infamous recent history.
I was especially intrigued by their ‘Mahala Urban Hike’. The website promised an easy walk through the old Jewish and Ottoman mahalas [neighbourhoods] on the hills around the city, past gardens where goats graze and chickens cluck, into the forest and up to some spectacular viewpoints over the entire city, before venturing back down for a traditional Bosnian lunch with an optional rakija. It was when my mouse hovered over the mention of rakija that I immediately went to the ‘contact us’ link. While it was all well and good drinking homemade rakija in the garden with my Bosnian Serb hosts in Mostar a year earlier, I wanted to find a flavour that wasn’t going to leave me feeling as though I would never have full use of my tonsils again. The Mahala Urban Hike seemed like a golden opportunity to not only explore Sarajevo’s hills but to dive head-first into its most intoxicating gift to the world.
The morning of the Mahala Urban Hike started out like any of my other mornings in Sarajevo. I broke bread over broken Bosnian in the Pekara Merkale and drank Bosanska kafa [traditional Bosnian coffee] at Slatko ćoše before I went to the meeting place where the hike would begin. Through my email exchange with Kathrin from .Cheyf, it was determined that I would meet her and her partner Nermin [Numo] by the silver statue of Pope John Paul II in front of Sacred Heart Cathedral. I arrived around six minutes early to find the pedestrian area outside the church surprisingly quiet. The site is one of Sarajevo’s most popular landmarks, the sort of point of interest that is normally impossible to walk past without having to slalom through crowds of people, but at 9:34 there was scarcely a soul to be seen. I was thrilled to have the rare opportunity to capture a photograph of the cathedral and the statue without stray heads and limbs entering the frame.
With the picture proudly stored on my phone’s camera reel, I squatted by the left foot of Pope John Paul II – the side where he is holding the long Papal ferula – and waited for my guides to arrive. Suddenly the square began to busy. No fewer than a dozen Asian tourists appeared, each of them taking it in turn to snap their photograph of Sacred Heart Cathedral. I was reluctant to move from the spot lest I missed my hosts, thus I resigned myself to the fact that I was going to appear in all of their photographs; me in my olive green t-shirt and khaki shorts; my bare legs and arms resembling milk bottles. Their family and friends would examine the pictures with a bemused look upon their return home. “Are you sure you were in Southern Europe?”
Numo and Kathrin showed up at the meeting place exactly when they said they would. From the first moment, it was clear that they were as warm as the previous afternoon’s sun that had left my nose red. They were open, energetic, and brimming with enthusiasm for their country – or adopted country in Kathrin’s case. The socially awkward, almost aloof part of me – that entire 90% of my personality – had been worrying for days about the prospect of spending a full day hiking with a man I had never met before. I could think of nothing but how uncomfortable I would make it, but in the end, my concern was misplaced. Besides, I had a new worry to deal with when it transpired that Numo has the appearance of somebody out of an action movie. Maybe not the main star, but definitely someone who has a decent supporting role. I was going to look ridiculous walking next to him with his tanned skin and competent outdoor persona. The only saving grace was that the group of Asian tourists had moved on to the next thing.
Having dispensed with the introductions, we ventured forth on our urban hike. From our position on the street next to Sacred Heart Cathedral in Sarajevo city centre, Numo pointed towards the hill in the distance and asked if I could see the electricity pylon at its summit.
“Just about,” I said, straining against the glare of the sun, the 1 am beers, and general poor eyesight.
“That’s where we’re going to be walking to.” My heart sank. What, all the way up there? I thought to myself. I wondered if it was too late to pull out. Maybe we could sit at one of the lovely al fresco cafes on Ferhadija Street with some gelato, looking up towards the hill and we could talk about how we imagine it would be to walk that distance. That wasn’t an option, in reality. I had already told anyone who would listen about the outdoor adventure I was going to go on – including the 63-year-old divorced gentleman in the hostel who was going on a mission of his own to visit the Bosnian Pyramids in Visoko. We had vowed to exchange stories of our experiences over a beer back at Franz Ferdinand, and it didn’t seem that going for gelato would cut it.
The three of us made our way across the street to begin our ascent, first passing a school where we could hear the full-throated excitement of children looking forward to the last week of term, and then the Olympic Museum I had failed to find a year earlier. Kathrin told one of her favourite stories surrounding Sarajevo hosting the Winter Olympic Games in 1984. The popular American actor Kirk Douglas was in town for the event, and like anybody else who comes to Sarajevo, he visited a Ćevabdžinica to try Bosnia’s most famous dish, cevapi. Sensing an opportunity to make some extra coin from the star of Ace in the Hole and The Fury, the owner of the Ćevabdžinica charged the English-speaking Douglas way more than the regular price for his ten pieces of kebab meat. Some locals later caught wind of the scheme and became upset that the businessman had been taking advantage of visitors to the city. People started to boycott the establishment once word began to spread, and before long nobody was eating there. The Ćevabdžinica was soon closed and its owner forced out of business, all because they ripped off a tourist. Being a good host is very important to Bosnian people, and in Sarajevo, they particularly value fairness and being welcoming to all.
If there’s one thing I learned about hills on this urban hike it’s that once you start walking up one, they don’t suddenly become any less steep. Nevertheless, we continued on our route through the little residential streets which stretch across the hillside. Houses are packed tightly together like squares of Shredded Wheat. You see a multicultural history unfolding before your eyes at every turn, from houses built by the Jewish people who fled the Spanish Inquisition, to the unfinished homes of Bosnian refugees, and the identikit designs of Tito-era blocks where you can literally see which door the government was encouraging homeowners to buy in a particular year. Coming from a small town like Oban where it is reckoned that everybody knows each other’s business, that seemed like nothing compared to this. It was easy to see how the mahalas [neighbourhoods] could be like Oban under a magnifying glass: you couldn’t stagger home late from the pub or an illicit meeting without the entire street seeing it; conversations travel from one home to another like ripples through a pond; and stray cats know how to milk the situation to get something from everyone.
Our first pit stop was at a pekara at the end of one of those small village-like streets for some freshly-baked somun, which is the flatbread that is served with cevapi. The bakery is a supplier for some of the Ćevabdžinicas in the old town, and I could tell by the aroma in the air from yards away that it was going to be good. Numo and Kathrin came prepared with some butter and kajmak [clotted cream cheese], which was a far more compelling use for a backpack than the three notebooks, two pens, and cagoule that lay in mine. The bread was as warm as a sofa cushion, and just as fluffy. The butter didn’t stand a chance, while the kajmak wasn’t faring much better. It was such a small, simple piece of joy; the three of us stood by the side of a road, using a brick wall for a table as we slapped lumps of butter and cheese onto torn chunks of somun. Not before long a stray cat appeared. I got the impression that if you stand at any spot in Sarajevo for more than ten minutes you will encounter a stray cat. Recognising that the kajmak wouldn’t last the heat of the day, Kathrin peeled back the lid and set the plastic tub down for the furry forager to do with it as it wished. I’ve heard of the cat who got the cream, but this was the cat who got the cream cheese, and it couldn’t have been happier.
Kathrin left the walk to return to the office and tend to administrative duties, leaving Numo and me to fend for ourselves without the buffer for my social anxiety. The walk turned into what was my more conventional impression of a hike when the tarmac became grass and we found ourselves deep in the forest. Having grown used to seeing Sarajevo from the ground up to the soundtrack of cars whizzing by and impatient drivers honking their horns, it was almost surreal looking out over the city as a butterfly flapped across my eye line and goats bleated in the background. From our vantage point, we were gazing towards the symbolic telecommunication tower The Hum Tower, with the Olympic Stadium sitting in the foreground.
These days the stadium is leased to one of the city’s two football teams, FK Sarajevo, and it was familiar to me as a venue where Celtic have played twice in UEFA Champions League qualifying matches in recent years. I was already aware from my exchanges with Medina that if there’s one football club in Sarajevo a person is going to take an interest in it ought to be FK Željezničar, but I was always happy to just take her word for it without ever questioning why. It turned out that Numo is also a keen Željo supporter, and he explained in a little more depth the differences between Sarajevo’s two football clubs; about how FK Sarajevo had been formed following a controversial merger between two local teams, and the differing treatment of the clubs following the outbreak of war in 1992, when Željezničar’s Stadion Grbavica was positioned on the front lines and partially destroyed.
Numo offered to take a selection of tasteful photographs as I wistfully surveyed the scene before me. Ordinarily I cringe at the prospect of having my picture taken. Still, unlike at Sacred Heart Cathedral when I was unwittingly in the frame for a group of Asian tourists, it somehow didn’t seem as bad when I could turn my head away from the camera. Besides, I felt as though it would look good on my Tinder profile; an opportunity to show would-be dates that there is more to me than drinking beer in Aulay’s and wearing corduroy.
The hike continued past a series of trenches which had been dug into the side of the hill. It’s the first time I have knowingly seen a trench, and I don’t think it’s something you can prepare yourself for. We stopped to refill our water bottles at the all too many Muslim cemeteries you find on the hills, which I learned are always situated at a crossroads. Because of their location, the view from within some of the cemeteries is breathtaking, and despite the passing traffic, they are always places that are filled with peace, where you feel as though you are alone with your thoughts, even if at the same time you technically are not really alone at all.
All through our walk together, Numo was looking forward to our lunch break at the hilltop restaurant. He spoke about how he enjoys the reward of a cold beer after the endeavour of a hike, but the people in his tour groups seldom want to join him for a drink, as if it is considered cheating to have alcohol at the end of a physical activity. This is why he was feeling optimistic when he saw that a Scottish person was due to join him on the urban hike. Some nationalities are known for their endeavour, their creativity, their romanticism, or their passion. What kind of ambassador for my country would I be if I turned down the opportunity to join a stranger for a beer at one-thirty on a Wednesday afternoon?
We ordered a couple of traditional Bosnian dishes to try along with our Sarajevsko and the real reason for clambering to the top of a hill – the rakija. While I was thrilled that I had put my doubts to the side and done something I typically wouldn’t usually do by exploring the outdoors with a guide, what I truly craved was a guide for exploring the inside of a shot glass. Numo suggested that we start with a quince-flavoured rakija, which I welcomed purely for being able to find out what quince actually is – an aromatic, peculiar-looking hard fruit similar to a pear. If we accept the adage that “pink makes the boys wink”, then it can also be said that quince makes the boys wince, though after the first sip, it is generally quite pleasing.
One optional rakija gradually became two then three as social anxiety dissipated in direct correlation with the increased inebriation. However, if a strong Balkan spirit helps ease one ill, it does nothing for the struggle one might be having with the local language. Numo was telling me about the exceptional purity of the water in Sarajevo, which is why we were able to enjoy so much of the stuff straight from the tap at the cemeteries we passed. He mentioned that the water is so clean that people often rest their onions in it to help the cooking process. I told him that I found that surprising since I couldn’t taste any onion in the water. He looked at me the way a cat might look at a tub of cream cheese that is empty.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you said that Bosnian people put onions in the water to make it clean, yet the water doesn’t taste of onion.”
Although the onion exchange perhaps suggested enough alcohol had been taken, we agreed that we would go to a rakija bar once we had walked back down the hill into Baščaršija. I had ventured into a voyage of discovery, after all, and I had to sample as many different varieties as I could. Despite the idea being floated that we might have to take a taxi or even roll down the hill to complete the urban hike, we continued confident and sure-footed, doubtless assisted by that fresh, clean water. We continued our exploration of rakija at Višegrad, where Numo found that he was needing to use the toilet quite soon after his previous visit.
“That’s what happens when you break the seal,” I told him.
He found the phrase, which I imagine is typically Scottish, to be amusing, and repeated it whenever either of us had to use the bathroom. In the end, I can’t say for sure whether it was drinking rakija with a warm companion or the relief that comes from breaking the seal, but I was left in no doubt that I had found ćejf in Sarajevo.
Coming soon – part three: Bijambare, birtija, and big mushrooms
My intention was to return to Sarajevo with more than the four phrases of the Bosnian language that had been enough to help me through my first visit in 2022. Sure, it was great being able to respond to the offer of a beer with the quip that “I don’t know the word for no”, but I couldn’t help from feeling that I would have enjoyed the experience even more if I could have interacted with the locals in their native tongue to a greater extent than my extremely limited vocabulary allowed. However, as it turns out, learning Bosnian is a lot trickier than I had given it credit for. There are hardly any resources available for self-education: no dependable books that I could find in the UK; and while the popular language app Duolingo offers users the opportunity to learn High Valyrian from the Game of Thrones series or the chance to communicate in Klingon like the characters in Star Trek, there is no option to take an online course in Bosnian.
The best means I could find for teaching myself Bosnian was an alternative app by the name of Ling. As far as I could tell, Ling does most of the same things that Duolingo does, so I signed up and immediately imagined myself in the midst of fluent conversations with people in the bars and coffee shops of Sarajevo. Even though I had only downloaded the app in January, it seemed a reasonable goal to me. I think I was off work sick with my second dose of Covid-19 when I decided to begin my language journey. The first lesson was fairly straightforward, introducing me to a couple of the phrases I was already familiar with. It was based on the sort of interaction you might encounter upon walking into a pekara for some morning bread:
“Hello.”
“Hello.”
“How are you?”
“I’m fine.”
“And you?”
“I am good, thank you.”
“Goodbye!”
I breezed through it, with the app’s mascot – a little monkey wearing a black and orange hat – awarding me full marks for my efforts in the end-of-lesson test. It was easy to see how people can become hooked on such a tangible sense of achievement. I was eager to crack on to the next series of grammatical games and to further enhance my growing grasp of the Bosnian language. What followed was a lesson on various gender descriptions. The app repeated phrases such as: “He is a boy.” “She is a girl.” Can Ling make it any more obvious? It went on: “The boy is reading a Chinese book.” This was when I started to question whether the app could really help me integrate into day-to-day Bosnian culture. No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t see myself walking into Gastro Pub Vučko and announcing the sort of things that the app seemed determined to teach me. It was galling enough sitting in my flat in front of a rapidly decaying fern reciting things like “he is a boy” without bringing myself to do it in the company of people. In the end, I decided that I would be as well going back to Sarajevo with the pocketful of phrases I already knew, and I said see you later, Ling.
On the face of it, the fact that the budget Hungarian airline WizzAir wasn’t operating its Luton to Sarajevo route this summer should have been an issue for me, but flying with Lufthansa from Edinburgh via Frankfurt pretty much assured me that my flights would at least depart. The first leg was relatively plain sailing – or, at least, flying – and I had around four hours in a German airport to kill before I would finally be back in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Considering that an airport the size of Frankfurt’s is as large as the island of Lismore which sits off the coast of Oban, one might think that it should be quite easy to find a way to while away the time on a connecting flight. But I found it nearly as challenging as I did understanding why Ling would want me to identify the language of the book that a nearby boy happens to be reading. After you’ve had a hot dog and a beer in a German airport what else is there to do? I was reluctant to spend any more cash than I had to since part of the reason people travel to places like Sarajevo is the attraction of lower prices than we are used to paying in Western Europe. Another beer in the airport would easily be two in a bar in Sarajevo, maybe three depending on the spot, and no fewer than four 500ml cans of Sarajevsko from a supermarket. Even for someone who is as notoriously bad with figures as I often am, those numbers are impossible to ignore.
After striding the length of the enormous B gate more times than I could count, it eventually came time to get in line to board my flight. Almost inevitably, following an indeterminate spell ghosting the halls of the gate, I saw a woman in B33 who was flying to Sarajevo and whom I couldn’t take my eyes off. She was dressed entirely in black with chestnut hair which tumbled around her shoulders like carefree children rolling down a hill. We happened to be near one another all the way from the departure gate, onto the small bus that carried us to the plane, and as we boarded the aircraft. She was half a dozen or so people in front of me, and when she took her seat I could tell that she was maybe in the first twelve rows occupying a middle seat. My boarding pass indicated that I was in seat 9C. As I tiptoed further up the plane, my hopes were raised almost as high as my heart rate. It was clear that I would be sitting in the aisle seat next to her. As well as being beside her, I was beside myself. Then I remembered how I had spent much of my connection time in the duty-free area testing a variety of aftershaves I could never afford and must have been giving off the whiff of an overcompensating playboy.
Even still, I couldn’t stop thinking of how I could strike up a conversation with my row buddy. There was a possibility that she might not speak English, of course, and I would be left ruing my dismissive attitude towards learning the lines that could have been useful in situations exactly like this one, such as “she is a girl”, but that didn’t stop me from trying to dream up seductive scenarios. Once I noticed that she was wearing corduroy trousers just like I was, I became fixated on them. Hers were black whilst mine were navy blue, but what I really wanted to mention was how the cuts on hers were much deeper than the cuts on my cords.
“You know, this situation we find ourselves in is just like the one Cat Stevens described,” I might have opened with after referencing our mutual taste in corduroy trousers. “The first cut is the deepest.” However, I feared that the sartorial stranger might not have taken it as the compliment I thought it was. Instead, we sat and listened to our devices all the way from Frankfurt to the dark and dank sky of Sarajevo, where we landed a little after ten-thirty on a Monday night.
The first thing that strikes you when you arrive into the tiny terminal building at Sarajevo Airport is the thick stench of cigarette smoke. Discarded butts have been trodden into the floor of the passport control hall, which is so small that it resembles a school canteen. I felt as though I was back in St Columba’s Primary School in 1992 with my dinner tray in hand, queuing to receive my helping of fish and chips. It is easy to imagine that the airport hasn’t been upgraded too much since the collapse of the former Yugoslavia. I hadn’t realised until I looked the stern Bosnian border officer in the eye and received a simple nod to my greeting of dobro veče how much I had missed the place.
Sometimes a knowing nod is all that is needed to make you feel at home, similar to when the driver from the Meet Bosnia agency met me beyond the baggage collection point. I nodded towards him when I spotted the sign he was holding that had my name printed across its centre in bold type, and he responded “ATM” with a brisk point of his index finger when I told him that I would like to withdraw some Bosnian Marks to pay him with before we left for the car. It was the only words we spoke during the entire journey into the city centre, but they were the only words we needed. These are the things that apps like Ling can’t teach you, it seems.
Since my arrival in the city was too late to make the check-in at Hostel Franz Ferdinand, I spent the night at the Hotel City View Deluxe, which as the name suggests boasts a fantastic view across the city of Sarajevo from both its rooms and its rooftop cafe. However, nothing on its Booking.com page mentioned the deluxe size of the moth which awaited me when I went to pull the curtains closed before getting into bed. The beast was easily the size of a matchbox, and as soon as I turned the light off I could feel it flapping about the room, ready to strike. Every now and then I would hear it colliding with the window, like a drunk staggering home at the end of the night. Being someone who is not used to sharing sleeping arrangements in general, it ought to have been a tad disconcerting, but I merely employed some of the things I have learned through watching David Attenborough documentaries over the years and told myself that the moth was in all likelihood more worried about me than I was of it. With that in mind, I had a fairly peaceful sleep, though I can’t speak for the moth. It was nowhere to be seen come morning.
With a sense of inevitability that was almost as weighty as a moth on a bedroom curtain, it didn’t take long into my first morning back in Sarajevo before I was thinking how nice it would be to have the ability to communicate more fluently with the locals. After taking in the view from the rain-splattered cafe terrace, where I could see the minarets and cathedral spires shimmer in the fragile sunlight that was breaking across the city, I dropped my bags off at Hostel Franz Ferdinand before checking in later in the day. The young woman at reception looked up from behind the desk and asked me which name the reservation was under. I guess a year is a long time and thousands of travellers will have been through the place; it’s not like she’s going to remember them all, let alone the shy, single Scotsman.
I told her my name and could see the spark of recognition in her eyes. “JJ!” Her smile was as wide as any I can recall seeing in response to something I have said. It was like looking at the ‘after’ picture in an advertisement for a medical procedure; the type of smile that tells you you are home.
“I didn’t recognise you. You look different.”
There are certain statements that are virtually impossible to respond to, and “you look different” is right up there with “the boy is reading a Chinese book.” I was grasping for all of the things that could have reasonably changed in the year since I was last in the hostel. It seemed unlikely that she could know about my barber moving to Dundee, and that’s the most significant thing that has happened to me recently. Have I gained weight? Could I have lost it? I couldn’t help but wonder if I was already a victim of a communication breakdown; that in the receptionist’s second language she had gotten mixed up and said something she didn’t mean to say. If only Ling’s lessons had covered this sort of small talk in its syllabus.
It occurred to me as I was walking around the city during the afternoon when the temperature was noticeably cooler than it had been on my last visit that this might be contributing to my apparent different appearance. Specifically, the sun wasn’t so hot that I was having to baste my skin with Factor 50 sunscreen, while I wasn’t wearing the brown flat cap to cover my head that seemingly sets the British tourists apart. Without the flat cap on my head, the extent of my receding hairline must have been more obvious than it had ever been, and it is this that I came to believe must have made me look different. However, when I asked her about the remark later in the week it turns out that my decision to shave the stubble from my face on Tuesday morning had altered my appearance beyond recognition. If nothing else, it taught me that if I ever wanted to commit a massive criminal act, such as organise a bank heist or become a drug lord in the vein of Breaking Bad’s Walter White, all I would need to do to evade detection from the authorities is to shave every few days.
I couldn’t wait to tell Medina at Meet Bosnia about my first morning back in Sarajevo. She is the person I have kept in contact with the most following my previous trip, and as much as cevapi, rakija, baklava, or the beautiful sound of the call to prayer, Meet Bosnia represents Sarajevo in my mind. The city can have a rough exterior for many obvious reasons, but they are its soft and often glamorous interior. I took so many of their tours in 2022 that I have practically completed their schedule. In an effort to bring some Scottish culture to their office in exchange for all of the wonderful aspects of Bosnia and Herzegovina the agency has introduced me to, I brought with me a selection of shortbread and tablet for them to sample. Nothing screams Scotland like type 1 diabetes, after all.
Almost as sugar-coated as a thick chunk of shortbread is the way that Medina and Hidajeta would greet me each time I walked into their office. Their eyes would meet me from behind their computer screens, and in uncanny unison, they would call out: “Hello JJ.” Without fail it made my heart sing. There were times when I was wandering around the city and I’d feel tempted to visit Meet Bosnia with any old question just so I could hear that joyous chorus. Is it better to fill my water bottle from Sebilj or at Gazi Husrev-beg mosque? What time is the next train to Mostar? Why is Vječna Vatra [Eternal Flame] called the Eternal Flame? But like tablet, it is probably best not to over-indulge in these things.
What I didn’t realise until close to the end of my trip is that the reason Medina and Hidajeta’s pronunciation of my name – as well as everybody else’s pronunciation – is so emphatic is because the sound from the letter ‘J’ doesn’t exist in the Bosnian alphabet the same way that it does in English. It has an entirely different letter, one which looks like someone has written a ‘D’ by mistake and put a score through it. Instead, the Bosnian ‘J’ is spoken like an English ‘Y’, as in year, yo-yo, or yogurt. There is no letter ‘Y’ in the Bosnian alphabet. Yogurt becomes jogurt, and JJ looks nothing like it is spoken. Though depending on the day of the week and the use of a razor, seemingly JJ looks nothing like himself either.
These are probably things that I would have known before travelling if I had made it past the second part of Ling’s introduction to the Bosnian language. As it was, my pronunciation of some words and phrases often led to looks of bemusement or fits of hilarity. On the day that I visited the museum of the first President of the newly independent Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Alija Izetbegović, Hidajeta asked me several times to say his name. It brought us to a conversation about language and some of the other differences between our respective countries, particularly in the things we eat. A portion of fish and chips would look quite different in Oban from one asked for in Sarajevo, for example. Even with just the small things, I always left Meet Bosnia feeling as though I was integrated just a little more into the country.
It was important to me that I could communicate using at least some Bosnian phrases. Every day I attempted to order my food and drink in the local language, and most of the time it turned out alright. The point where things would start to fall apart was if the other person said something – anything – in response. I feel like my typical reaction was to flash the look of a bemused Bambi and whine, “Engleski molim.” Occasionally I might pick up on a word and be able to nod my head convincingly enough to fumble through the rest of the order; the nod being the international language of the person who doesn’t understand what’s going on but is happy to go along with whatever is being said. This technique doesn’t always work, however. On the rare occasion that I was met with a menu that didn’t offer an English translation, such as was the case in Gastro Pub Vučko, I had to figure it out for myself.
When I was last in Vučko I was on friendly terms with two of the bar staff who spoke English, but I didn’t recognise anybody this time around, so I was left to navigate the menu on my own. Since pizza seems like something you can hardly go far wrong with, I immediately thumbed to that part of the booklet. There were many words I didn’t understand, but Sicilian stood out to me. I imagined a pizza loaded with various Italian cured meats, cheese, and herbs; the sort that Tony Soprano might stuff his face with. That is surely what the words beneath the bold, black text were depicting. So I ordered it, salivating as I watched Novak Djokovic smash his way to another Grand Slam title. The pizza arrived after some time, with little about it matching the image that had been produced in my mind. It was heavy with olives the size of Bosnian moths, long stips of rocket leaves, and half-moon cherry tomatoes. There was not a hint of sausage to be seen. It was simultaneously the most disappointing and the most delicious pizza I have ever eaten: the bittersweet taste of being unable to speak the language encapsulated on a fluffy, doughy base.
Back in the communal area of Hostel Franz Ferdinand, everybody is equal and you can strike up a conversation with anyone who passes through. I spoke to different people who were from places as far apart as Australia, India, France, and an Argentinian woman who asked for my recommendation for the best place to eat cevapi. At the end of my first night, I returned to the hostel with a couple of the ridiculously cheap cans of Sarajevsko Lager and became engaged in a discussion with the older gentleman who was sitting watching television. I was minding my own business, writing about my day in my notebook, when this guy bellowed across the kitchen. “We are drinking the same beer. You like it?” I could scarcely believe that’s all it took to get talking to a stranger, a mutual like for a material object. Maybe I could have spoken to the woman on the flight about our corduroy trousers after all.
The guy was a large, booming character. His voice was so loud that the young man who was using one of the public computers outside in the hallway had to get up and close the door so he could concentrate. I enjoyed his enthusiasm, though. As so often seems to be the way in these situations for me, people aren’t shy in telling me every detail about their life. Without any prompting, I learned that the gentleman is 63-years-old, is divorced, has two children who have graduated from university and are forging very successful careers, and that he works for a cable TV company in Stockholm. He told me that he moved to Sweden from the Bosnian city of Banja Luka thirty years ago, to which I asked why. The question was the verbal equivalent of stepping on a garden rake and the handle bouncing up to hit you in the face. The words had left my mouth before I had the chance to put my hands up to block the incoming blow. I couldn’t believe I’d said it. Any fool knows why people were leaving Bosnia in 1993. Fortunately for me, the gentleman either didn’t hear my question or was ignoring it out of politeness.
We carried on talking into the night, though much of the time was spent with me listening as he went on frequent rants about Serbs and some of the Western leaders who it is felt didn’t do enough to help Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s, particularly President Mitterand of France and the UK’s Prime Minister, John Major. When he wasn’t bemoaning politics, the older gentleman told me that his favourite football team is Tottenham Hotspur. I bemoaned that they had just appointed the Celtic manager Ange Postecoglou as their new coach, which prompted him to mention the Swedish former Celtic player Daniel Majstorović. Of all the things that I was looking forward to about my return trip to Sarajevo, I could never have imagined that I would be sitting in my hostel at 1am talking about Daniel Majstorović. But then, if anyone had told me that I would be embarking on something called an urban hike or going on a Tinder date, I would have laughed it off as sounding as ridiculous as learning how to say the phrase, “the boy is reading a Chinese book” in Bosnian.
Diaries of a single man 