I am well aware, dear readers, that this last installment of the Scottish journey is past due. I understand that you are disappointed that it is tardy, however, I am properly livid. The colorful appellation is not simply referring to my adorable bill. I am as cross as two sticks. Let me go back to the onset of this issue.
It all began with only two days left on my contract with the lad and lass and one more brilliant installment of reporting. When the lass came to me and suggested that she was rather pleased with my keen insight and delightful prose and wondered if I might like to come to the states with them for a bit. Well, I must say, I have been intrigued by the colonies for quite some time having seen nearly every episode of “Friends” and “Seinfeld” while I was recovering from my unfortunate storm-caused damage. My culinary expectations were and remain low but the idea of living for a while in New York and, perhaps, getting some Babaca bread or a famous bagel might be worth the effort. It is a paid trip after all. So I said, “yes” to the proposal. Then the horrors ensued.
First some official with a badge and name tag took me and placed me in quarantine. Me! I have never set a feather wrong, have no common diseases, brush my beak every night and have read Dickens. Yet this person whose language I imagine might have been English, rudely and unceremoniously dumped me in a pseudo jail with animals of every kind for five days. Plus they had the gall to serve me raw seeds. Unconscionable cruelty.
Second, after being released by my employers who had to pay fees for this stay, I am whisked off not to Broadway but to “Isle of Palms” in some place called South Carolina. There was an ocean but not the friendly, familiar rocks and craigs of a normal coast but hectors of sand followed by more sand. And the heat. Oh my. Now, much to my surprise we did have some interesting food that I will get to next week or so. I am just there long enough to wilt when we speed off for hours and hours in a car toward a place I know not, TenIsea. Poorly named as far as I know as I see no ocean at all. Again, barely in place long enough for my pillow to mold to my beak and back in yet another car and off to North Carolina. I presume it is north of SC but would not know as there, again, no ocean in a place named after Sir Walter Raleigh. We are there for some festivities and apparently the annual stuffing of boxes in a car and then, poof, hours and hours again to back to Tenisea.
Third we ate food along side the highway more than once at one of the thousands of “fast food” options that litter the highway. In my brief experience they are sort of fast but barely food and, again, eating in the car. I shudder to think what I may have agreed to with the American visit.
My head is spinning. So, I will prevail on your patience to wait for the next bi-monthly installment of my oasis of a column where I will complete the Scotland journal.
A proper meal in Scotland - one I fear I may never see again.