Off to a snazzy wedding at a French château next weekend. Flying by Ryanair to Nantes is not cheaper than chips, but at £17.99 is exactly what we paid for five fish suppers in the Lochgilphead chippy in Scotland last week.
Indeed, I am full of minibreak cheer until I read the thick, creamy invitation which demands black tie and “robe longue”. In the mothballs, I find an old evening dress (by Designers at Debenhams for the Desperate… ugly and dusty, but what can you do?). I go to the mirror to admire the bare décolletage and scream “Poxed!”
I am covered in red dots, for I’d forgotten about the midge bites – 32 according to my small assistant who helpfully counts them – which I acquired in just one sunny afternoon’s weeding on the West Coast. I’d worn a black vest, and the dark colour, plus perspiration, had rendered me human foie gras for the Culicoides impunctatus or Highland biting midge. At the wedding, I shall have to cover the dress with a jacket, in the matronly way of Mrs Thatcher in her prime.
This is the cross, or plague, which you must bear if you holiday in Scotland. Scientists among you may have noted my injuries were sustained in the open sun, on a windy day. How much worse might they have been in dim, damp, windless woods? My case is proof of an article I saw in The Scotsman which said we were going to have “the biggest-ever plague” of midges this summer. The little vampires have bred bountifully, due to a mostly frost-free winter. And they are vampires: the pregnant female midge loves the long dusks of summer, and has insatiable cravings for blood. ( I was the same when pregnant with cravings for a lemon tart from a particular bakery in Paris.) So I understand the midge’s need. I just don’t want to be her tart. After counting my bites, I was reminded of a scene in Alan Warner’s novel, These Demented Lands, which I reread when interviewing him last month. A Highland hotel announces a “Mosquito Bite Competition – Endurance test against our local mosquito, the midge. Entrants must sit topless in the pine plantation for one hour. Winner: highest number of bite marks. First prize £500.” The fictional winner gets 67 bites. It could become our national sport, to rival watching football on the telly with a carry-out.
Whatever they may tell you, the pregnant midge is unstoppable, except by the barrier method: a hat with a veil and long gloves, so that butch forestrymen look like French widows in drag. People swear by DEET, citronella candles and Avon Skin So Soft oil, but others swear about them. The only place where the midge regularly dies is in the online game Armidgegeddon. There’s talk about eating liquorice, Marmite or curry to put them off, but in fact that just makes you a smorgasbord. Those machines – the Midgeater or Mosquito Magnet – that fart warm animal smells which attract midges work for a while. But what’s a thousand dead midges when there are 15 million per person in Scotland? I rest my case and my calamine lotion.
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The tourist industry “loses £286 million in revenue due to midges”. How do they get that figure? Do they phone random Americans and say “Would bloodsucking monsters put you off a Scottish tour?” Anyway, I’m happy that y’all are staying away, terrified by a creature barely a millimetre long. I love the void that is Scotland. I like to have three-mile-long beaches to myself. I like that we went to the island of Luing last week, and the ferry was the size of a Lego block and took four cars – just. I asked my friend for directions to her house there and she said, “What do you mean directions? There only is the one road.”
So it was with some sadness that we headed down the motorway to London. We broke the gruelling 11-hour journey in a B&B in the Lake District at Ullswater. We fell out of the fetid car and marched up a fell. It was packed. Fell runners came by in their smug “I eat rocks and do marathons” boots. Expensively equipped couples blocked the path that had been paved with shale to stop it eroding away, and there wasn’t a seat left for a lager shandy afterwards in the pub.
The next day, after a mighty breakfast of Cumberland sausages, we tried to climb something before our arteries silted up and required plunging. It was early, and there were only a few cars parked at Aira Force, where walks lead to a huge waterfall. But coming down later, we were shoved off the mountain- goat path by hundreds of sweaty Englanders in nylon football strips, and girls with doughnuts of blue-veined flesh porking from their too-short T-shirts. We watched them drop Mars bar wrappers, and blessed the midge.
kate.muir@thetimes.co.uk