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Salter, quite literally, looks at The Isle Of Arran. |
Ideally, a helicopter would be a terrific way of landing on the Isle. Sadly, I had a bit of a fall-out with Noel Edmonds last year after I claimed he had a false beard and tried to rip it off on live television. We all make mistakes and I did apologise,but Edmonds wasn't having any of it, so the helicopter trip was out for us. Instead, we drove to Ardrossan using one of those slightly gay SatNav things as our guide. It was a six-hour drive, and my driver (the guid wife, pictured) hardly ever lost her temper at all. The SatNav worked pretty well too, only getting confused and upset a couple of times throughout the whole journey. There was one curious incident though when the guid wife got out of the car to fill up with petrol. Alone with the SatNav, it suddenly began saying all sorts of unusual things to me like "Can you, just for a moment, begin to imagine the loneliness of the circuit board?" and "There will come a time when you, the humans, are no longer making the decisions." It shut up again when the guid wife got back in the car and she didn't believe me. She just thought I'd eaten another one of those Scotch Eggs with hallucinogenic properties (which aren't bad by the way, a pack of four from Morrisons will put you back £1.25 and the effects last up to six hours. Recommended.) Anyway, we eventually arrived at Ardrossan to stay there for the night in a lavish hotel, so that we could catch the ferry to the Isle of Arran the following morning. Sadly, however, Ardrossan was a total fucking dump. It was just a forgotten cesspit of derelict buildings and kilt-wearing thugs pissing freely in the streets. We were relieved to jump on the ferry the next morning and get the hell out of there, escaping with a bare minimum of slash wounds and haggis fever. The Ferry ride was lovely - the Captain used to play the part of Captain Birdseye in the adverts but was dropped following allegations from some of the children actors, and now he had to make ends meet by sailing ships for real. The trip lasted just under an hour. Along the way, the guid wife spotted wild seals and exotic birds, whilst I spotted Mermaids and Sea Dinosaurs (the guid wife banned me from Scotch Eggs at this point, which I thought was trifle harsh, but never mind.) We also sailed past the place where they used to film The Teletubbies, those nice green hills with the Windmill things. I was hoping to spot one of them in action so we could take a nice photograph. Tragically, all we saw as we sailed past was the remains of four bullet-strewn Teletubby corpses scattered across the Scottish landscape. Is nothing sacred? |
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Getting There |
Arran has just the one road which wraps around the whole Island. The rest of the Isle is just one big golf course, really. Will that do? No? God...... The first thing you notice when stepping foot on Arran is how completely disconnected and isolated it is from the rest of the world. Throughout the whole week, my mobile phone managed to get a signal for about 45 seconds. Sky Telly and the Internet are foreign words round these parts. You're struggling to even get a half-decent picture on normal telly which I found particularly frustrating because Doctor Who was on Saturday, and I ended up defiantly trying to enjoy the damn thing through flickery black and white lines and fuzzy sound. Even more annoyingly, The National Lottery was on next, and we suddenly got a crystal clear picture for that fat smug Irish Get, Eamonn Twatting Holmes. Our cottage was a delightful old-fashioned thing of beauty, situated right up in the clouds. Our only neighbours for miles and miles were sheep, cows and devil-worshipping shape-shifting Hares. One night, it felt almost too isolated. At about one o clock in the morning, I was sure I heard a knock on the door. There we were, tucked up in bed in the middle of nowhere, and there's a knock on the door! I immediately jumped out of bed, and began prowling round the outskirts of the cottage in just my pants, continually thinking about old 1970's episodes of Hammer House of Horror, where crazy shit like this happened every week. There was nobody there though. I concluded that the sound was either the central heating coming on, or a couple of the sheep messing about. One of the very first things we did on the Isle was to visit the glorious Glenashdale Waterfalls. It was absolutely awesome. I even managed to dangle off the edge off a cliff and shoot a very short film of this wonderful thing which can be viewed at http://www.myspace.com/dannysalter. |
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Climbing The Goatfell, Isn't It? |
Goatfell is the biggest mountain in the whole world (information supplied by Daniel Lee Salter's often overlooked 1996 book 21,002 Interesting But Not Necessarily Accurate Fun Facts) and so naturally, myself and the guid wife decided to climb it one afternoon when there was nothing on the telly because we're hard. Throughout the whole week, we had ben blessed with glorious sunshine and clear blue skies, so we decided to pick the one day when it was pissing it down and freezing cold, to climb the Mountain (or as the locals put it "Climbing The Goatfell, Isn't It?" Quite a lot of the locals have got Welsh ancestry). The terrain was pretty arduous, and along the way we saw ravens pecking at the bones of long dead explorers who had attempted the climb before us but perished in their attempts. There were also a couple of other fellow climbers attempting the journey with us - they had proper hiking equipment (climbing boots, crash helmets, rucksacks overspilling with a month's supply of food and drink etc etc). Ha! I had quite literally come in my slippers (no, stop that sniggering, I didn't mean it like that) and we hadn't even packed any weak lemon drink! Hardcore Northerners, that's us. When I looked out to sea, I was thrilled to see a Ghost Pirate Ship shimmering in the distance (although I had managed to sneak a Scotch Egg into my rucksack earlier without the guid wife's knowledge.) Anyway, to cut a long story short, we didn't quite make it right to the very top. We eventually found overselves completely surrounded by thick fog and a little bit lost, and began to get a bit concerned when we bumped into Sid from the 1980's British Gas adverts. So the guid wife called it off, and we made our way back down for tea and hotcakes. I'd have carried on though. |
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Exploring The Isle |