Following a Christmas break that neither you nor I knew about ahead of time (I’d been planning on sending something over the holidays, but espresso martinis got in the way. Ey-yo what am I like?), we return to our trip from Kinlochleven to Stirling last Summer.
When I left you, we had just dipped some wraps into a pot of peanut butter for breakfast, fearing another pyrotechnical problem with the Trangia…
Hiking past the uni into town (more of a walk than a hike really, given that it was all along the pavement), we stopped at HBW for some coffee. HBW is a formerly vegan restaurant which now serves meat, but all the pastries and most of the dishes were vegan so we commented that they may as well go vegan because it felt like they wanted to be.
It turns out that they used to be vegan and made the decision to change due to rising costs. It is a massive shame that the cost of energy and rent means that a place like this has to compromise on its original vision. Chains proliferate everywhere because they operate at a massive economy of scale and can get by more easily with razor-thin margins at each individual venue.
All of the kids in our village are desperate for a Greggs because places like Greggs are all they know (despite the fact there isn’t an actual Greggs anywhere near us). What they really want is a cafe of any kind, where they can go and get some hot food rather than riding the bus along the full loop because there is nothing else for them to do in the Winter.
With time to kill, we did the rounds of the local charity shops and I bought a book about the end of work, which I was interested in as a soon-to-be-unemployed person. There is a big argument in the Group Chat about oil and gas and net zero - specifically whether there is a necessity to increase gas production to improve energy security - which succeeded in creating no consensus and plenty of annoyance, as discussions like this often do.
Had tofu souvlaki and bad falafel at Cafe Aina, a Greek restaurant. The tofu was excellent and the falafel very poor. Why would you make such bad falafel when you are a supposedly good Greek restaurant? The answer to that would be that falafel is not a Greek food, not even remotely Greek (whoops), so they have to be partially let off on this occasion. If they’d been an Egyptian restaurant, however…
With still more time to kill, I tried to find some trousers because I was scared my shorts would be too cold for the gig. Found some chinos I liked, and tried on some tartan trousers which looked snazzy but were very tight. Tight and not stretchy, which is a horrible combo - why is anyone making trousers with that combination of properties? They’re like an Egyptian restaurant that makes terrible falafel.
Stirling is approximately 70% charity shops. Due to the same price levers which afflicted HBW, the reduced rates afforded to charity shops mean that they are often the only kind of shop which can reliably survive. People aren’t willing to take risks with other kinds of independent businesses because of the inherent insecurity, another thing robbed of us by greed.
Wetherspoons was rammed as always. If other places were close to as cheap as this then more people would go to other places, and more people would be able to go out more often. If there was a Universal Basic Income then people wouldn’t be so compelled to go to the cheapest places and more people would feel confident enough to open independent pubs and bars. If if if…
Went back for the chinos but that shop had closed so no luck. Cold legs for me.
Hiked (again, probably a walk, but this one involved a hill) up to the hostel we had booked. Originally, it had seemed full, because of the festival, but a room had become available and I had eagerly booked it up when I was in the Wetherspoons in FW last week. I don’t think I spotted the irony of me going to a Wetherspoons when I wrote this a few months ago, but there it is. I too am not immune from the allure of the cheap pint. Especially when I have no income.
Anyway, it turns out there was a reason a room had suddenly become available.
It was booked for the 29th of July.
This was June.
Shit.
The gig starts in less than an hour.
AirBnb.
Hotels.com.
Booking.com.
Nothing, nothing, nothing.
Everywhere in the city centre is booked.
No choice but to go back to the campsite.
The bus is super full so we squeeze on with our bags and run back to check in again at the campsite.
‘I had a wee chuckle to myself when I saw that name’, says the lady who’d checked us in yesterday, ‘I could have sworn I saw you leaving this morning.’
Tent back up, shower, there’s a bus back in less than an hour. We’ll miss the opening act but make it for the second.
Setting up camp in record time, we race back to the bus stop with half a baguette, a pot of hummus, and two beers in my back pocket.
5 minutes go by, 10, 15. This bus isn’t coming, is it? The next one is in an hour.
As a long-time defender of public transport and the need to accept imperfection and delay in life on occasion, I can’t let this get to me too much and we head back to the campsite for some phone charge while we wait for the next one.
I had waved enthusiastically at the counter lady when we first ran for the bus. Hopefully she didn’t see us slinking back in for a third time…
Looks like we’ll make it in time for Act 3 which is Self-Esteem — our main reason for going to this show, so the bus better come!
There’s a big crowd waiting now. Where were these people when the bus didn’t come? Casuals.
They’re making me self-conscious about my tin of Innis and Gunn, and this self-consciousness ramps up when some of them start talking to me. It’s the same couple who clambered over us to get off the bus earlier — it turns out they’re from just outside Aberdeen, and they randomly start talking about vegan food (perhaps because I have a baguette sticking out of my back pocket?)
The wife loves vegan food, though she’s at pains to emphasise that she’s not particularly vegan. She just thinks that chicken is very bland, and prefers the taste of vegan food.
She starts raving about a vegan restaurant in the centre of Aberdeen, but can’t remember the name of it. Eventually, it comes to her — Food Story — and I wish we still had our big bags on us because our camping multi-tools are from Food Story!
The walk from the bus stop to the festival is through the gardens of Stirling Castle, which requires another hike (this part was definitely a hike) up a steep hill, but it’s full of rabbits, so that’s okay. Everywhere you look is a rabbit, and when you lose track of that one another pops up to take its place. Rabbits like stars in the sky over Crianlarich, which is a simile you’ll have to read another essay to understand.
I take a wrong turn, but we would have missed the end of Noname’s set anyway because the path from the festival entrance to the stages is incredibly long. There is a woman guarding the entrance whose job is that of a human signpost, even though there is a non-human signpost right next to her. She’s still there when the gig is over—taking her signposting role very seriously.
The grounds are quite big, with a great view of the castle, but there aren’t that many people here. Maybe there were more people here for Busted last night. It’s a bit disappointing, but means we can get a decent spot with no trouble.
A can of Amstell is £6.50, but we’ve just saved £57 by switching from the hostel to the campsite. We could have saved another £11 on buses if I’d realised earlier that I’d booked the wrong date.
Self Esteem kills it. I saw her at Truck festival last year and this was not as good as that set — perhaps because the crowd was a bit smaller and lower energy than expected — but her songs are so great and the choreography so compelling that it would be hard for her to put on a bad show. The highlight was her new song Big Man, about men who think they’re Big, which pops off live.
Young Fathers had been hoping for a bigger crowd too, I think. They give it 95% still, but you feel like there could have been something extra if the place had been sold out, or if they were playing to an energetic crowd at a bigger festival. Which is not to say that they were bad, because they were fantastic too. You could just feel that something special was there, hidden behind the empty space all around us.
The empty space was good in one way at least — it meant that I could dance to my heart’s content. I am a tall man, with long limbs which tend to flail out in all directions when I am cutting loose, so having a bit of room means I am less liable to whack someone in the face.
I like it when it gets dark because that’s when you really know you’re at an outdoor gig. It gets dark pretty late in the Scottish summertime, though not as late as we would have liked the other day when we were hunting for a campsite in inky blackness, so it threatens to stay light, but the light fades as they ramp up the music. By the time they’re finished, we are properly blanketed.
Something about the darkness makes it feel like we’re in it all together, and it retrospectively adds this feeling to all the sets which have come before, because they were all part of the build-up to this moment of obscured musical unity.
One organism, moving in rhythm and melody. Man, I’ve missed this.
When was the last time I properly danced?
We walk back to the campsite via McDonald’s (a surprisingly good McPlant — they’ve fixed the problem of construction which used to plague them, i.e. they used to fall apart, the tomato sliding out of the bun with every bite — and a terrible portion of chips. What have they done to the chips? They used to be amazing.
In America, they used to be cooked in beef fat, which supposedly made them very different, but in Britain that was never the case so far as I’m aware, so they must have changed something else because every time I’ve had them in the past five years they’ve been cardboard-esque.)
At the bus stop in the morning is a man from New Zealand, who has come over to contest the running races on the Highland Games circuit. He’s done this before, in 2013, and he used to live in Aberdeen in the 90s. I don’t know much about the Highland Games, and didn’t realise you could just enter events willy-nilly. I wonder if you can enter the caber toss, or if there is some kind of licence needed to hoik giant logs around.
At Glencoe, we have a drink while waiting for the bus to KLL. A drunk woman starts speaking to us, and tries to come up with things for us to do since we don’t have jobs. She thinks we should do something to do with cryogenics since L is a water engineer. Water is very important, she reckons, and there’s a lot of it around here, so we should be fine. She wants to buy us a drink but we have to catch the last bus to KLL or we’ll be stranded at the top of the valley.
Except the bus doesn’t come. Again. And again, I try to invoke mindfulness.
Two Italian girls are also waiting for it and I assure them it will come, but it doesn’t.
A man wanders over and tells us there’s been an accident down the road so the bus won’t be able to make it through. We try and hitchhike, but no one is stopping, so we are incredibly thankful when a replacement bus indicates down towards us and takes us down the hill.
Even better, because it isn’t a regular local bus it doesn’t have anything to take payments, so we’ve saved £5.40. Add that to the tally — we’ll soon have enough for a cryogenics lab.