He stood there for a long time before going into the house. He leaned over the fence looking out towards the fields. He could imagine his father coming towards him, in long beard and wearing wellingtons, solid, purposeful, fixed. And hadn’t his father been an observer too, an observer of the seasons and the sea?
As he stood thinking he saw the cloud of midges again. They were rising and falling in the slight breeze. They formed a cloud but inside the cloud each insect was going on its own way or drifting with the breeze. Each alive and perhaps with its own weight, its own inheritance. Apparently free yet fixed, apparently spontaneous yet destined.
His eyes followed their frail yet beautiful movements. He smiled wryly as he felt them nipping him. He’d have to get into the house. He would have to find out when the bus left in the morning. That would be the first stage of the journey: after that he could find out about boats and trains and planes.
Murdo & the Mod
At the time of the Mod, Murdo tended to get into long arguments about Mod medallists. He would say, ‘In my opinion Moira Mcinally was the best medallist there ever was. Her timbre was excellent.’ Most people wouldn’t know what timbre was, and Murdo would repeat the word. On the other hand, he would say that though her timbre was excellent her deportment wasn’t as good as that of Norma McEwan who became a bus conductress on the Govan route.
Such arguments would go on into the early hours of the morning, and as many as eighty Mod medallists might be mentioned with special reference to their expression when they sang their songs, as well as their marks in Gaelic and music. Murdo would sometimes say, ‘97 out of 100 is not enough for a medallist since I myself used to get more than that in Geometry.’
‘However,’ he would add, ‘Mairi MacGillivary got 99 out of 100 for her timbre, though she only got 7 out of 100 for her Gaelic since in actual fact she was a learner and was born in Japan.
‘Her expression,’ he would add, ‘was enigmatic.’
At one Mod he offered protection for adjudicators. This was a service which consisted of whisking them off to an armoured taxi immediately they had given their adjudication. For he said, ‘Haven’t you realised the number of threats those adjudicators get? Not so often from the contestants themselves but from their close relatives, especially their mothers who have carefully trained these contestants for many years in expression, timbre, and the best method of wearing the kilt. No one has any idea of what is involved in producing a gold medallist. His Gaelic must be perfection itself as far as expression is concerned and must be taken from the best islands. Furthermore, he must stand in a particular way with his hand on his sporran, and his expression must be fundamentally alert, though not impudent, though for the dreamier songs he may close his eyes. Now a mother who has brought up such a contestant cannot but be angry when an adjudicator, who doesn’t even come from her island, presumes to make her son fifth equal in a contest which moreover only contains fifth equals. There have been death threats in the past. Some adjudicators have disguised themselves as members of the Free Church and carry Bibles and wear black hats and black ties, but this isn’t enough as everyone knows that the Free Church doesn’t like Mods, since they are not mentioned in the Bible. The Comunn Gaidhealach have even produced very thin adjudicators who, as it were, melt into the landscape when their adjudication is over, but even this has not prevented them from being assaulted. These mothers will stand in freezing rain outside adjudicators’ houses and shout insults at them and sometimes the more ambitious of them have fired mortar shells into the living-room.’
Thus Murdo’s ‘Adjudicators Rescue Service’, knows as ARS for short, was in great demand, and for an extra pound the adjudicator could make faces at frenzied mothers through the bullet-proof glass.
Another service that Murdo would provide was skin-coloured hearing aids which in practical terms were in fact invisible. These were for turning off after the seventh hearing of the same song, such as ‘Bheir Mi Ho’. If the hearing aids were visible it would look discourteous to turn them off. So Murdo would advertise for people who would make skin-coloured invisible hearing aids, and sometimes he would even apply for a grant for such people who had to be highly skilled and whose pay was high as they only worked during Mod times.
Another service he provided was special tartans for people from Russia and Japan and other distant countries. His tartan for the Oblomov clan was well thought of. It was a direct and daring perestroika white with a single dove carrying a Mod brochure in its mouth. Sometimes too it might carry a placard ‘Welcome to Mod 1992 in Dazzling and Riveting Kilmarnock, home of Gaelic and Engineering Sponsorship’. Indeed his sponsorship from Albania was the high point of his life, and he kept for a long time a transcript of the short interview he had with its president, who at that time was being besieged by 300,000 rebellious people demanding more soap and toilet paper.
Murdo indeed became very animated at the time of the Mod, as if he were emerging out of a long hibernation like the church at Easter. He ran a service well in advance of the Mod for booking Choirs into Bed and Breakfast locations, and he further advertised a service for making rooms soundproof so that pipers could practise their pibrochs,
