On the Eastern Airways flight from Bristol to Aberdeen I spotted a shiny £2 coin lying in the aisle. The businessman in the seat opposite saw me lean down and retrieve it. ‘Toss you for it — heads,’ he said. It came down tails. I trousered the coin and returned triumphantly to the complimentary copy of the current Spectator I’d found in the seat pocket.
At Aberdeen airport I said to the taxi driver, ‘Rothes, please.’ I pronounced it to rhyme with clothes and I assumed the town was just around the corner. ‘Ya mean Roth-ess?’ he rasped. It was about 60 miles away. It was the longest and perhaps the most scenic taxi ride I’ve ever taken. As we passed between stark, smoothly curvaceous hills, the taxi driver reminisced about a particular brothel in Durban, South Africa, that he’d once lived next door to and patronised daily. He enjoyed going there so much, he said, he’d found it rather addictive. Did I know what he meant? I could well imagine, I said. At Rothes House, I was introduced to the four other members of our party over a memorable slice of quiche, and then we drove out into the Mannoch hills for an afternoon of competitive sports.
First on the programme was clay-pigeon shooting. I’d never fired a gun in my life and I assumed that this would put me at a disadvantage. But to my and everyone else’s surprise I couldn’t miss. I was a natural. Admittedly, I was calmly and expertly led through every step of the process of loading, aiming and firing by Jamie, a gamekeeper. And instead of going across, the clays rose straight ahead into the sky, then drifted very slowly, it seemed to me, and at a perfectly convenient height, neatly framed in the landscape by tawny hills sloping in from either side.
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