On Saturday, being spared and well, I shall do something I have not done in six years – drive south from Lewis, with a little help from Caledonian MacBrayne, to enjoy Christmas with my family.
These were in many respects grim years: a time of emergency, sadness and change, from my late father’s decline and death through the nightmare of Covid lockdown. Fraught shopping trips, sweaty face-coverings and the sapping, daily dread of bringing the pestilence back to the house.
The daunting matter, from May last year, of sorting out the estate and, far more pleasurably, supporting my mother.
Much of my time in consequence was spent in Edinburgh anyway. No more.
Mammy has now happily resettled herself in a beautiful Glasgow apartment and, for the first time since March 1980, we are once again back in Jordanhill, within ready walk of the Free Church manse where we spent the 70s.
There will no longer, then, be that turn east at Crianlarich for Callander, Stirling and the M9. My drive will be at least an hour shorter: it will begin in a quiet crofting township at the margins of Stornoway and – ferry permitting – end just after Anniesland Cross.
This Christmas run I have never undertaken lightly. Given the time of year, most of it will be at night: the sun will have set by the time I reach the Skye bridge. Driving in the dark is something you like less and less when you are getting on a bit.
And the route south, by the Great Glen and Lochaber, has two fraught stretches. From Shiel Bridge to Invergarry, and excepting the Cluanie Inn, it is so much mountainous desert, with a similar lonely run from Glencoe village to Bridge of Orchy.
The road across Rannoch Moor can be bleak in winter and a ‘lonely run’ for the solo traveller
Deer are a risk and there is always the worry of snow – though I have completed the run several times over the decades through serious blizzards, carefully handling my gears, watching my speed and with a shovel stowed in the boot among the Christmas gifts. These days, I have the added reassurance of a mobile phone.
The return trip, just before New Year, will be much easier. Most of it will be in daylight and there will be rather less a stampede of traffic.
But, either way, it is one of the great journeys in Scotland, by the mountains of North Harris, a brief ferry crossing, the misted peaks of Skye and the West Highlands and – still rather heartwarming – the trundle through Lochaber, where my life began all those years ago.
And I have never found it a demanding run – in contrast to the gruelling drive from the west of Ireland to Edinburgh, which I have done a great deal in the past decade.
I am also promised one matchless blessing: for the first time since 2012, I am excused cooking Christmas dinner. Not that it is difficult – even a turkey the size of a Fiat Cinquecento is really just a very big chicken.
But there is an awful weight of expectation and someone can usually be relied upon to cause trouble.
The trick is to stick stoutly to the basics: turkey, roast potatoes, stuffing and pigs in blankets, and two or three separately cooked veg; not to be afraid to ‘rest’ the bird, once out of the oven, for a couple of hours; and remember that you can get away with a great deal as long as you serve dinner on hot plates with abundant hot gravy.
Face down with your best death-stare anyone who demands such absurd additions as Yorkshire puddings or cauliflower cheese – one gathers that these, today, are fashionable – and do not tumble into the trap of humbly asking everyone how they might like things done.
Because, if you do, you will in short order no longer be cooking Christmas dinner – you will be a restaurant preparing eight different types of potato.
But there are other charms to the Great Run South, beyond the steady purr of tyres on tarmac.
People these days go gloriously overboard with their festive lights, and the displays in many Highland homes, at this time of year, are gorgeous.
By Lochaber, I will be able to tune in to Classic FM – another Christmas delight but unavailable in north-west Scotland – and the whole run is rich with memory.
It is exactly the same route, when I was a boy, we took home to Glasgow from Lewis holidays, save that there are no longer ferries at Kyleakin or Ballachulish. And my late father seldom had the patience to queue for the latter anyway – we just detoured around Loch Leven.
But he soothed us with tales and stories. The exploits of the Commandos, as we passed the memorial at Spean Bridge.
All the jobs and energy and construction brought to the area by the Corpach Pulp Mill, which opened as his local ministry began.
Our spines would tingle deliciously as he regaled us on the Massacre of Glen Coe and, by hallowed custom and once its twilit waters were in sight, he and my mother would sing The Bonnie, Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond.
They were both sweet singers and, looking back, they were then still pretty young.
Thus my brothers and I huddled together on the back seat, safe and secure, till that last right-hand turn off Great Western Road and down Lincoln Avenue towards our home.
After a month of Lewis – the peat-smoked air, the bleating of sheep and the whirr of snipe – it was always a little strange.
Unmowed grass long and dewy, the air noticeably warmer, and once more the screech of low-flying airliners (for our manse was in the flightpath to Glasgow Airport) and the periodic rattle of the adjacent ‘Blue Train’ as, finally, we nodded off in our little beds.
It has become fashionable to despise the 1970s. When Margaret Thatcher died, in 2013, David Cameron spoke of those years as if we had all been reduced to toiling in the fields gathering filth: a broken Britain where nothing worked.
But, while a difficult time for Britain’s politicians, these were actually very happy years for the mass of ordinary British people, and I recall them with great affection.
My father will no longer come by Loch Lomond, and ‘home’ this year is over a new threshold which I shall step across for the first time on Saturday evening.
Our home of 42 years in Edinburgh is gone beyond recall, a finality that has yet quite to sink in.
But, granted kindly weather, I look forward to many happy walks around old G13 haunts, from Victoria Park to Knightswood Library and my stately old school – and whipping up some Boxing Day feast, or tucked up in a corner with the Chronicles of Narnia.
And, after nine months in my Hebridean lair, one thing above all will pull me ineluctably towards Fort William and in the happiest anticipation. McDonald’s.
