I have spent the past few days attending and participating in some talks taking place at a priory on Loch Lomond.
The most curious among the many curious incidents over this time was the evening I returned late to the hotel after supper and was ushered by some folks out into the back of the hotel. They were sitting out in what durng summer would be the beer garden but was at this time a dark and freezing cold moonscape.
There were 4 of them and they were all astonishingly drunk on gin and tonic. In fact, there were nine glasses on the table. They told me I should have one, and that they couldn’t figure out how come they had acquired so much gin. Then another person burst out through the door carrying another tray frothing with fresh G&Ts!
This repeated itself a few times. One of them would go to the bathroom, forget how much alcohol there was on the table, make a drunken guess that this would be last orders, and order a fresh round.
Gin has a well known polarising aspect on people; they either laugh or cry. I am lucky in as much as it makes me laugh – even after red wine! So, in time, some people gathered around that cold table took to giggling, just as others became maudlin and confessional and began to drunkenly sob.
It seemed like everyone was out of time and place, talking too slow and having lost all direction and meaning. It reminded me like a cold version of the scene in Apocalypse Now Redux when the crew of the boat stumble into the French Colonial Plantation – effortlessly, affectingly surreal.
