Snow
On New Year, through the lands of Walter Scott and John Buchan
It did not snow where we live, not one tiny bit, so we drove north in search of the fluffy stuff. We saw it the next morning. It spread from our host’s doorstep in Midlem and we walked around the village listening to it crunch underfoot.
Afterwards, we drove six miles along a road that wound its way around gentle white-carpeted hills dotted with flocks of hardy lowland sheep. We were headed for Melrose, the birthplace of Sevens Rugby. Neither of us were rugby fans, but we dutifully took in the Greenyards pitch which saw the origin of the first seven-a-side in 1883 under the influence of a local butcher named Ned Haig, then escaped across the wet High Street into the warmth of the Greenhouse Cafe by the eerily beautiful ruins of the St Mary’s Abbey.
It did not snow that night. The next morning we found our way to Tweedbank and parked on the last stretch of leftover snow at the far end of a free car park and ran on to the platform without pausing to buy tickets. We rode a two-carriage train through Galashiels, Newtongrange and Eskbank all the way to Waverley and rode it all the way back. We dined in Tweedbank. We ate steak and salmon and pavlova at a restaurant by a lake full of swans, attended by a pretty Polish waitress who had followed her boyfriend to the country.
On the last day of the year, we walked around the 100-acre estate of Sir Walter Scott. We posed for bad selfies and worse cinemagraphs in front of his magnificent but foreboding house, then retired to the cafe in the visitor’s centre to read Ivanhoe and ruminate about the ‘Author of Waverley’ who gave the world ‘blood is thicker than water’, ‘caught red-handed’ and ‘tongue-in-cheek’.
With the deceptively swift River Tweed by our side, we drove to Peebles to pay homage to James Buchan. We walked the streets wondering about the inspiration for his Richard Hannay, the original James Bond. Wistfully, we looked at the patches of white that still decorated distant hilltops.
In the evening, under a near-full moon, we drove through a desolate landscape of one-street villages in search of a restaurant that would take walk-ins for the last dinner of a dying year. We found one in Selkirk, an ‘Indian’ run by Bangladeshis, and had bad lamb, decent chicken, and good lentils.
At midnight, in a strange village hall, we joined hands with newfound friends and sang Auld Lang Syne and stomped the New Year in under a snowless sky.
