August 2015
I had just finished a week long run of performances at the Edinburgh fringe. Playing a tory called Ted in Jo Orton’s ‘The Erpingham Camp’ I had shaved my normal beard into a sizeable moustache and every time I caught myself in a reflection I realised the face I was greeting people with was not the face I normally expected to be mine.
Despite having been performing in the bustling capital at festival time, I probably spoke to more people walking up this hill! Being the tallest on the island, plenty of people had also answered the call to get to the top. It was quite nice to keep catching up with familiarising faces as different people paced themselves upwards. People shared food, water, advice about the weather, how to keep your energy and spirits up as the crossed paths. It was nice to see such direct empathy amongst complete strangers who each seemed to feel an open kinship with each other’s reasons for being there.
There’s a plaque dedicated to the good people who worked to make the path so clear and easy to ascend near to the summit. At the end of the script it says ‘blessed are the peace makers’. Two blokes stood with me reading through it. ‘Blessed are the cheese makers’ I said, quoting from ‘The Life of Brian’. The blokes looked at me and said ‘what?’. I said, ‘you know, like in the film…Life of Brian…Monty Python..’ ‘Oh… not seen it’ they replied. ‘Oh…’ I said…and skulked off…probably the last thing they’d have seen was the moustache disappearing awkwardly into the mist… i didn’t make a solid connection with everyone alas…
4 hours up, 3 hours down, mostly in cloud with very little visibility. The day I left Fort William the clouds shifted. Colours I had seen no hint of suddenly erupted from the hillsides. The train arrived at 06:30, I sat down and was taken away.
brian swaddling 