Day Nine: Silver Service, Australian Street Cred, and the Bench Problem

Dinner​ at Ballathie House Hotel is silver service. Gloves, proper presentation, the whole thing. Andy sat across from me smelling unmistakably of several days of Scottish hillside and received his Amuse Bouche with the expression of a man being reminded that the world contains experiences outside his current radius. I was raised with better manners and adapted accordingly. I won't say more than that. We were seated near three men who were, to put it diplomatically, not operating at indoor volume. The quote that perhaps best captures the energy, and there were several candidates, was this: "If you hadn't bought your boat you could have bought a whole stable of Ferraris."

Their politics required no further excavation. They were already out in the open, fully aired, available to the entire dining room.

One of the three was an older gentleman, father to at least one of the others. And when the subject of Eurovision came up at breakfast, one of the younger men declaring loudly that it was terrible, the father stayed very quiet. But he knew the details. All of them. The running order. The acts. The kind of knowledge that only comes from having watched it closely and with genuine investment.

He is, we concluded, a closet Eurovision fan. We respect this. We said nothing.

Early start. Forgot to start my watch until several kilometres in.

I don't want to talk about it.

We stopped at a cemetery for a rest, which sounds bleak but was actually very pleasant, as cemeteries on a sunny morning often are, ​and a man appeared. Australian. Very happy. He took one look at us and asked, in terms I won't sanitise because they were perfectly calibrated to the moment, what a couple of cunts were up to out here.

We told him about the walk. Oban to Arbroath. He was impressed. Said he would have offered a lift but wasn't going our way, which felt like exactly the right thing to say, the offer made, the inconvenience honestly acknowledged. We walked away feeling we had acquired some genuine Australian street cred. This matters more than it probably should and I don't care. I made an executive decision to take a mile detour into Burrelton for the shop. Soda. Ice cream. The small rewards that make the afternoon possible.

Andy was not happy about the extra miles.

He still hasn't let it go.

It was good ice cream. Near North Corstan we found a lovely stretch of path running past an old mill. The kind of place that stops you mid-stride and makes you look properly. Beautiful in a quiet, unannounced way, it wasn't trying to be impressive, it just was.

Kettins had a community garden with a bench and we sat down and solved, between us, one of the great overlooked problems of the modern world: there are not enough benches. Not enough bins. Not enough public toilets. These are not complicated things. They are not expensive things, relatively speaking. They make every journey, walking, cycling, just being a person outside, measurably better, and someone on a community council somewhere needs to take this up as a cause.

We are available to advise.

A Pictish carved stone later in the afternoon gave us a chance to stop and actually look at something ancient, which after several days of forward motion felt overdue. An older lady stopped too and we told her about the walk. She was impressed, making her the second person, after the child in Bankfoot, to be visibly impressed by what we're doing, and gave us some good tips on campsites ahead, which felt like a fair exchange.

Newtyle. Shop. Soda. Then the B954. The B954 is a road that was not designed with walkers in mind. Lots of cars. Minimal verges. The kind of road where you spend more time stepping aside than walking forward, which is demoralising in a way that's hard to fully articulate but very easy to feel in the legs.

We got off it as soon as we reasonably could.

Back roads. Trees. A secluded spot that felt earned. We're in for the night, properly sheltered, and tomorrow is still forward.

Gonzo out.

Andy's still annoyed about Burrelton. The ice cream was worth it. I will die on this hill, unlike Andy, who would like to avoid any unnecessary hills at this stage.