The two older teenagers and their mother flew back from the land of her parents’ birth, and late on a warm humid night I met them at the airport, and heard stories of Scotland on the way home. Being mid-winter in the northern hemisphere it had been cold and it had snowed and it was out of tourist season; therefore it had been a good time to travel.
The following night we had dinner in a small Vietnamese restaurant and I heard the extended adventures illustrated occasionally by pictures on a phone. Thanks to its immediacy the cell phone has ingeniously obviated that once-common social occasion, the slide night. Overseas travellers once took rolls of film and had them developed as ‘slides’ - transparencies - to be projected against a large bare wall. This function (as well as for projections of Super 8 films) was catered for by architects who penned the cathedral-ceilinged or low-slung modern houses of the cosmopolitan 1950s. The slide night, a cultural shipwreck ironically washed up on some deserted island that no-one visits, has now regained the nostalgic ring of the echoing front-door chimes of those modernist homes. Swivelling Danish leather chairs, visions of treetops through the upper out-of-square windows, endless glasses of hock, selections of cheese and bâtard … and a Peugeot 403 in the gravelled half-moon driveway.
Meanwhile, back in the present there had been no need for the planning of a slide night. Photographs had already been viewed and commented upon - along the way - via WhatsApp. Notable had been a moss-covered memorial cross, luridly green in pale sunshine (not a distant relative; just a beautiful image) in a church graveyard in a small village called Luss; a picture of a flaming home-boiled plum pudding in front of its proudly smiling maker on Christmas night in a cousin’s house in Edinburgh; and a picture of a gargoyle, worn by centuries but still recognisable as a medievally frightening face, on some ancient castle or other amidst the hills and valleys of the northern winter.
It occurred to me that the dread of the slide night had been not so much the boredom of looking at the fluorescent Kodachrome colours of a tourists’ June - or jejune - conquests; but that the images were old, past tense, finished. A slide night was an inquest. Postcards are another thing altogether. They arrive without notice, and the irresistibility of flipping from the image of beach, mountain or monument on the front to a reverse of scribbled writing proves some point about immediacy. For you are reading words as if they had just been written. The tense can even swing from past to present to future - ‘felt sad thinking about you not with me’; ‘just ordering your favourite muffin to cheer me up’; ‘must go to post this soon before the snow starts again’ - and places the reader directly in a suspended existence in which he is a fellow traveller. A postcard flutters down unannounced into your letterbox like a transcontinental bird lighting on a branch outside your window.
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The waitress, who happened to be the owner as well as the mother of the two small children drawing with broken crayons at the table nearest the kitchen, brought pho, one bowl with brisket, one with tendon, one with tripe and something else. The tendon was mine; probably the tastiest near-meat experience in the world, but some react to it like others do to tripe. They don’t know what they’re missing. Or maybe they do. We squeezed lemon and Thomas spooned chili oil onto his. In that central tray they place on the tables in Asian restaurants, along with the chopsticks and the western cutlery and the paper napkins, or sometimes just a box of tissues, there were three types of chili (oil, sauce and minced) and a jar containing pickled garlic cloves. No salt and pepper; it’s not needed. I put a couple of pickled garlic cloves into mine as well, and we hid our bowls with bean shoots and basil and then entered the resulting forests with tentative chopsticks.
Outside, the cool January evening sun was engoldening behind some western cloud and the Greek church. The mall was desultory with the impalpably intersecting tracks of the everywhere food delivery cyclists who ride, upright like the Parisian girl in the Godard film, through savage inner city traffic, and only a few are killed. To think they left the Indian class system only to run into another, servilely taking food to an overclass of moneyed bureaucrats.
We were looking at pictures on a phone. One showed a blurred mist over a low hill, shot from a train window, a train to somewhere in the north. A suggestion of sea was in the far distance. The blur was not bad photography; it was rain.
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The morning was gray, wild, and melancholy; the wind moderated before sunrise, and then went about, and blew in puffs from the shore; the sea began to go down, but the rain still fell without mercy. Over all the wilderness of links there was not a creature to be seen.
- R. L. Stevenson, The Pavilion on the Links.
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