8.30 in Balamory

I’ve come to the conclusion that I am punctuality deficient. It seems to be physically impossible for me to arrive on time. I give myself an extra hour to leave the house, I set deadlines for tasks but nothing, NOTHING, I do seems to help in the slightest except for careful and meticulous planning. My punctuality graph reaches an all time low when I leave for holidays. Hours are spent packing bags, loading up the car, writing mental lists of items I will forget, which I should really write down and then finally I shut the door around sundown, start the engine and suddenly remember that, as predicted, I forgot every item on the list I never wrote.

This summer, I decided enough was enough. I was planning a trip to the Isle of Mull in Scotland, a journey which involved an 8am ferry from Larne in Northern Ireland. To prevent tardiness, I rolled out a two stage plan. 

Stage one involved inviting my friend and budding filmmaker Lionel to join me. I felt Scotland would be a perfect match for Lionel’s photographic eye and, crucially, the only feeling worse than being late is the feeling of being late for a friend. Sure enough, collecting Lionel ensured that I was only running 15 minutes late and so we swiftly moved to stage two.

Stage two involved driving up to Larne in Northern Ireland the evening before our ferry and pitching a tent 400 metres from the ferry terminal. Having cut the dangers of a morning commute, there seemed to be no excuse left to miss our 7.30am checkin and yet, still, we found ourselves groggily stuffing tent fabric and pegs into the car at 7.28am. 

I zoomed the car down the road with the speed and aggression of an Audi driver on the M1. In my eagerness to arrive, I mistook the customs officers' signal to stop as a signal to continue towards the ferry, which never sits well with anyone in charge of securing the nation. This prompted them to carry out an inspection. They peered in the car window at the balloon of stuffed tent canvas and seemed happy with my mumbled explanations of why there was a tube of toothpaste stuffed in my pocket. I got a second strike however, when they asked me to open the car bonnet. I hadn’t the faintest clue where the button for the bonnet was as I hadn’t needed it since my driving test. Understanding how your car works is a trend which I believe died with the old millennium. I desperately hit every button and dial at my disposal, causing Radio Larne to erupt over the speakers at the same time as a fountain of windscreen washer fluid shot out into the asthenosphere. At last I found the right lever deep in the underbelly of the passenger seat and, satisfied that it was indeed a car bonnet, I was allowed to continue on to the ferry. 

It was a five hour drive to our next ferry to Mull, which sailed from the port of Oban. Lionel used this time to begin a week long series of film analysis lectures which filled many a dinner, drive or late night ramble far more effectively than than any audio book could. We stopped for lunch in Glasgow and it was there, as we got distracted by the city sights, that punctuality raised its ugly head once more. We were standing calmly at the top of Glasgow’s Necropolis, taking in the views of the city when I suddenly realised that we had exactly 2 ½ hours to complete a 2 ½ hour drive before the ferry to Mull closed in exactly 2 ½ hours. We legged it back through the city, jaywalking enough traffic lights to send the city centre into a spiral of anarchy. 

Now, I’m late for a lot of things and it's a horrible feeling, staring at those rude figures on the Sat nav that read “Arrive 4:06pm”. It's really quite stressful and can’t be good for your health if you do it all the time. But this was another level. It was only 2 o’clock and I already knew that at 4 o’clock I would be late. I was literally seeing into the future, and it was far bleaker than Marty McFly’s vision of 2015. You simply cannot hold that stress for that amount of time and I found myself in full blown conversations with the city traffic, criticising slow drivers and gesticulating at red lights. 

Glasgow’s motorways eventually disintegrated into country lanes which wound their way along the shores of Loch Lomond, a Scottish response to the Lake District. It was at this point that we found ourselves behind a large, slow bus that was impossible to overtake on the narrow, lakeside roads. The Sat Nav worked its way up the digits as our anxiety began to approach a boiling point. 

We began to debate the ferry company’s stance on deadlines. The ferry didn’t leave until four-thirty so was the four o’clock check in a formality? Or would we be denied entry? We decided the best answer to these questions was to phone the ferry company. A lilting, automated Scottish accent filled the car, calmly informing us of a high volume of calls. This was then reconfirmed every 40 seconds for the next half hour, interjected with the usual music dribble that fills an automatic phone line. With each repetition the voice seemed to grow louder and Oban seemed to grow further away. The atmosphere in the car grew more and more tense, like an overheated forest where one careless barbecue, one small match was all it would take to start a wildfire. Suddenly silence filled the car and we realised the automatic Scottish accent had given up and ended the call, confirming our fears that robots were truly getting smarter by the day. 

At last, I pulled up at Oban ten minutes late, my teeth chattering with stress and my hands clamped so tightly to the steering wheel that the fabric had dissolved into a kind of mush. A man at check-in gave us a stern look and informed us we had missed check-in. I launched into a long story about wide buses and narrow roads. 

“But you’ve missed check-in!” he cried.

The hurt and confusion in his voice was almost visible, as though our tardiness had cut right into his emotional fibre. I responded with more excuses, the passion in my voice matching his. After much bickering back and forth he waved his hand dismissively, calling an end to our domestic, his eyes inflamed with pent up rage.

“Go to Lane Five,” he spat. 

Lane Five turned out to be the lane passive aggressively left for “those who miss check in”; a sort of holding facility for latecomers with no guarantees of being able to use the tickets we’d already purchased. We found another staff member checking tickets who was much more relaxed about the fact we were in lane five. (I originally wrote here that he was eating a banana, which I felt showed just how relaxed he was, but I’ve since realised that it was actually ME who was stress-eating the banana at the time. It just goes to show what stress can do to memory.) He felt very confident that there would still be space on the ferry. A French couple pulled in behind us, also latecomers, and we filled them in on what we knew, namely that we were set to make the ferry and miss the ferry simultaneously. 

Thankfully the man I originally thought was eating the banana was correct and we were allowed onto the ferry. We chatted to our newly made French friends and took in our first shifting views of the mountains of Mull. 

Scotland is really one scenic overload and Mull is no different. It has the seascapes of Kerry, the Cliffs and Basalt of Antrim, the pine forests of Alaska, the lakes of Glendalough, the turqoise waters of the Carribean all packed into one island. But all these natural marvels are not in separate locations you have to drive to, they’re everywhere, a mosaic in 360 degree panorama.  By day three on Mull we were drunk from the sheer volume of scenery on offer, intoxicated by mountain upon mountain, waterfall upon waterfall until I knew there was no going back: I was forever going to be that guy, who’d talk about the isle of Mull at every scenic location on every future holiday, until Mull was no longer a geographical location but a fake friend I’d invented to compensate for the fact no one else would want to go on holidays with me anymore. 

We first based ourselves in a campsite close to Tobermory, the main town in Mull, which nestles itself between a hill and the sea. It is famous for being the setting of Balamory, a kids TV show prominent in both of our childhoods and we soon began to roam the town trying to find the houses used for filming at the time. This proved difficult as all the houses had been painted different colours since production stopped twenty years ago, but the more elusive they were, the more determined we became to find them, wandering in circles and constantly replaying Balamory’s opening credits on our phones.

This house hunting took longer than expected and by 8.30 that evening we had grown rather hungry. 98% of the places to eat on Mull sit on one street in Tobermory. The choice was overwhelming and we wandered from restaurant to restaurant. At one point we found our French friends from the ferry eating in a pub. Despite a friendly wave, we felt we didn’t know them well enough to sit at their table so chose instead to sit across the room staring at them. As if this wasn’t awkward enough, we discovered that the kitchen in this pub had closed at 8.30 and so, after 5 minutes of uncomfortable staring, got up and left as though the sight of our friends repulsed us.

It turned out that all the shops stopped serving food at 8.30 aside from a Chinese takeaway with a big paper sign on the window that shouted “CASH PLEASE”. 

We ordered fish and chips and the woman wrote our order on a piece of paper before leaving the order on the counter and relaying the order by word of mouth. We sat and waited, perusing a pile of maps of the island. 15 minutes later we heard a scream from the kitchen. 

“WHAT IS THIS?? THAT’S CURRY, NOT FISH. AND WHAT IS THAT EGG FRIED RICE DOING HERE??” 

Several similar observations were screamed, followed by a silence. The woman emerged from the kitchen and smiled at us. 

“Not sure what’s taking so long, must be the peas,” She tried to convince us, with all the success of an advertisement for soya milk in the Farmers’ Journal. She avoided eye contact and scarpered back into the kitchen with our order in her hand. 

Very confused, we discussed our options in hushed voices. The thought of fried rice after a day of driving sounded amazing, but rather than admitting the mistake in the order, they seemed to have decided to cook fish from scratch. Should we confront her and expose her lies? Should we buy a fishing rod? Or should we wait for these fish and chips and risk perishing from hunger? 

The food actually arrived suspiciously quickly, so fast that we wondered whether we’d imagined the screaming match ten minutes ago. We took our food to eat at the steps of the clock tower at the edge of the road to the pier, facing scenic wooded hills and the multicoloured houses of the harbour.

The sun sank, the tide ebbed and the evening scene eradicated all memory of the day’s dash across Scotland. The air and our minds, felt clearer, as though hurry had been abandoned on Lane Five of the ferry terminal. All that was left was that peculiar feeling on a holiday where there’s no purpose to being where you are, except for a simple desire to Be, temporarily freed of the guilts and anxieties of life. And so we sat and debated the various methods of converting egg fried rice to battered cod, basking in the peace and tranquillity of an island two ferries away from home.