The biggest lie of all

I WAS in Scotland last week, sailing around Loch Lomond. After months of preparation I managed to break a mast and reverse over a case of wine before even getting on the water. More haste, less plonk.

SCOTLAND was doing what it does best, presenting visitors with all four seasons, sometimes in a single hour. But the evenings were usually still and warm, and light until 10pm. We sat out on the verandah overlooking the loch, sipping what erudite people call “the twilight wine of Scotland,” and common folk call “electric soup” and the rest of us call whisky, watching the bats performing impossible aerobatics as they chased their supper against a blood-red setting sun. If you believe in reincarnation, try to come back as a bat. You get to fly everywhere and you can settle old scores by biting lots of midges.

OUR holiday cottage had an open fire. One of our party, a well-educated and widely travelled American, picked up a lump of the fuel in wonder. “Is this coal?” he asked. In his 40 years he had never even seen, let alone handled, a piece of coal.

MY holiday reading (or to be honest, re-reading) was Great Britain's Great War, Jeremy Paxman's excellent account of the First World War. It is a fine selection of anecdotes and statistics, delivered in the main with respect and understanding. Yet there are times when you can see Paxo raising one sardonic eyebrow. He refers to the “s*** wallahs” whose job it was to remove buckets of excrement from the Western Front trenches. He adds: “ Since none of them appears to have written his memoirs it is hard to be sure how effectively the system worked.” You cannot escape the mental image of a former s*** wallah hawking his war diaries around the publishers and facing rejection after rejection. For a start, what would the title be? All Quiet on the Cistern Front? Oh, What a Lovely Wee?

RETURNING from the bliss of Loch Lomond to the white-hot, pre-election world of bloggery journalism is a rude shock. It's a bit like returning from seven days' leave to re-join a mighty military campaign. Much happened? It seems L/Cpl Corbyn has sold the officers' mess silver for a shilling, Colonel May has gone native and become a bloody Bolshevik and Lieutenant Boris has gone strangely silent; missing, presumed blond.

WHAT stays with me, after the 350-mile drive from Highlands to Midlands, is the sheer scale and vast activity of the UK. From the Trident-fuelled rebuilding of the submarine base at Faslane and the £1 million mansions on Loch Long, via the heaving energy of Manchester and the perpetual rush-hour congestion of the M6 at Birmingham, even at weekends, this is one vast, bustling and incredibly busy nation with 32 million people working their socks off. How often were we told, by sneering politicians and cynical teachers, that Britain was merely a middle-ranking nation whose only future was as a member of a federation run from Brussels? Of all the untruths in the EU saga, that oft-repeated whopper was the biggest lie of all. We are huge.

OUR changing language. A friend is taking up jogging. It begins with something called a running workshop.