Giving Scotland a Try

We tried so hard to keep hope alive. Finances only permitted visits about every six weeks and then only a weekend or a long weekend. To begin with I flew to Frankfurt and that was about a five hour drive up to Schwerte. It was exhausting for Claudia to collect me and drop me off. She had -and still has - the use of her Mother's car - (it has had about 40000kms put on it since she took it over - another little thing she has taken for granted and that her parents have been very good about.) Claudia visited me twice. It was plain that she did not like Scotland and there were a number of reasons for that. Firstly, she struggled to understand people because the accents were unlike any spoken English she had encountered before. Her first visit was at a bad time of the year and the place does not look good out of season in the Central Belt ( - That grimy urban sprawl that stretches from Kilmarnock through to Edinburgh, South of the Highlands). It is not pretty and we did not have the money to get around much. Everyone was friendly and very welcoming to her, but she was not going to allow herself to settle in.

Perhaps Germans still feel - even just subconsciously- as if they are still being judged on their having initiated the two world wars when they are in Britain. Perhaps you notice dirt and grime and ugliness easier in another country than your own because it jars when you are away and you are conditioned to it at home. Perhaps because Scotland does not exude a feel of vibrancy and dynamism and there is little that is brand new and exciting (- we didn't go to see the new parliament building). Perhaps because the whole 'Chav' look is on wider display than elsewhere. I suppose there were many factors, but at the end of the day, Claudia did not want to come to Scotland.

I stopped building work after a year, with my debts largely cleared when it became clear that things were not working for well Claudia over in Germany. I got an office job at a double-glazing company. The company was the biggest in the West of Scotland and I was the Customer Service Dog's-body. I had an office, a desk and a phone. I had three teams that I had to dispatch for the warranty work that was reported by clients. Now I don't for one minute believe the company was bad at what they did, but they did so much of it and they had for so long. This combined with the industry-standard ten-year warranty meant that I could field up to a hundred calls in a day, book on 40 new jobs while I was lucky if the teams cleared 24 calls in a day. I would have to order replacement frames and glass, check the validity of warranty claims, dig out drawings from old client files, try and source old parts all around the country and then try and call 24 people in a geographically sensible proximity for the teams to visit the next day. Oh, and I had to do the post. I calculated that after twelve hours, my pay rate - being fixed salary- was dropping to below £3 per hour and then I would drop everything and go home. I just knew that I would arrive to find that I had missed something the next morning, but that seemed to be part of the package. I hated the job, but looked at it as a start if we were now going to change our plans and make Scotland a base. I took the time to get a flat that I thought might attract Claudia out. We had considered the possibility of her studying occupational therapy and I had run around doing the homework on that. It was on the Required Skills list for emigration to Australia, it was a sensible step from the degree in pedagogy that Claudia had and it would have been relatively simple to arrange. With this in mind, I rented a flat in Kilmarnock. It was a ground floor, one bedroom unit in a red sandstone building a short walk from the (dreadful) town centre and bus-station.

Claudia came out for her second visit six months later and we had an enjoyable week together, I had the flat but we only spent two nights there, the rest of the time we were up North. We drove to Oban and on up to Skye for a few nights before coming back via Inverness. It was wonderful and the weather treated us well. We met friendly people, ate great food, stayed in hospitable and clean B&Bs and for the first time in a year, felt a bit of the happiness and magic that had once been the normal and everyday feeling in our lives together. I had a 1992 Volvo 440 1.8l that I had picked up for £150 with a year's MOT and three month's tax. "Rusty" was still mechanically perfect and never misbehaved. ( I am starting to mull over the fact that my last two cars have been kinder to me than my last two women. They were cheap and reliable although smelly and not too good-looking - older models that had been ridden hard, but cared for. I should perhaps transfer these criteria to my singles advert!)

The verdict on Scotland was still negative to Claudia, but I felt that I could possibly bring her around to considering it more seriously. Then a perfectly common occurence in the field of air travel was to cause Claudia untold hurt....