To Cove Park, an artist-run centre on the rural west coast. We reach it by train and by ferry.
We’re the ferry’s only passengers and the boatmen have to extend the ramp just for us. We’re a minute late and the boatmen have already begun to unmoor. This makes them us hate us a bit, presumably because they’re now no longer able to take off their trousers for the return journey (or whatever it is they like to do when they have an empty).
It’s temping to keep saying things like “yo-ho-me-hearties” to annoy them even more but I manage to restrain myself. I think I’d have ended up being quietly plopped over the side and into the Firth, my final thought being oh look, a plastic fork.
At Cove Park, we rendezvous with Alan who shows us the grass-roofed pods and shipping container residencies, and then off we go for a day of the sillies around the peninsula.
We drop into Helensburgh, visit Ross at his house (where we eat soup with an original Soup Dragon), and drive past Faslane where Alan forbids me from bouncing pennies off The Bomb.
Finally, we head to Hill House to marvel at “the box,” the impressive cage now surrounding the house to help thwart its ongoing fall to rising damp. The official website has a quote from the President of the NT who says the house is “dissolving like an aspirin in a glass of water.” You’ve got to give him points for, well, not poetry exactly, but at least for not putting on the middle-manager claptrap voice when he stepped up to the mic that day.
In said box, we walk up and along some catwalks around the outside of the house. I don’t quite make it to the highest point, which would have afforded me a view over the rooftop, because when I make the mistake of looking down through the steel-mesh gantry, my stomach uncharacteristically tries to escape my body.
Still, I now have a good idea of what a Mackintosh Masterpiece looks like when it’s spinning, which is a nice thing to strike from my bucket list.
Home again only to lose another raisin.