This Place, Where I Live?

I live outside of a small town about 24 miles from the coast, in the north-east of Scotland. Where the grass is painted green in the summer, drowned in the autumn and buried in the winter. The days are long in half of the year and the days seem to do whatever they want towards the end of the annual cycle. All in all where I live is pretty normal; children go to school during the day then hang out with their friends, the local clichés doing whatever they want to friend, foe or town. The weather is as unpredictable as the people, their emotions, daily lives and routines throwing everyone in their surrounding area off of their game.

The town just down the road the town sits upon a hill, its outskirts surrounded by a variety of farms, green lichen filled forests, old crack packed roads, shiny Distilleries where the local economy seems to be driven and a small train station that many of the locals use on the weekend. There are small shops, cafes and restaurants within the town. A beautiful new creation of this town which has recently been added is a flower shop with a variety of gorgeous and thoughtfully collected varieties of flowers and other small trinkets that were highly sought after on Valentine’s Day, which is not long past. A café that sits snugly on the high street on the left is being renovated, its interior now spacious and the area full of light; the exterior windows are large the wooden frames hugging the walls, the glass panes letting in the maximum amount of natural light.

The small train station on the outskirts of the town houses a small business that has recently been sold and is now under new management. Many locals frequented the establishment where the food is cooked in a rail car that was converted into a kitchen and served in an adjoining rail car which had quaint wooden tables and chairs (the rail cars are on a track that runs alongside the main one, but it remains stationary and is fixed in position). These locals (including myself) wait in anticipation for when we can once again have a lunch down at the railway in the distinctive country style premise of the café and are excited to see what the new management will keep or change from the food to the décor, but not much can be drawn on as of yet as this is still ongoing.

One of these Distilleries gives this town a place on the map; being the ‘Whisky Capital of the World’, or so it claims on the sign.

 This Distillery is constantly being done up, seeming to not only hold ties in the drinks industry but helping the building and construction industry as well; utilising their abilities to improve upon their image and their constant need for more warehouses and stills. Just now this Distillery has finished a small touch up on the roof of the still house, which caused many employees of theirs to take different routes to their usual place of work. Not long before this endeavour was almost completed, they began another project to build a new still house, a canteen for their employees and a possibility of more warehouses. Though, this seems to have gone wide of the mark for them as, the road, (a key road that bypassed the town) has been closed for a few months over the recently predicted finish date. Perhaps some problems have occurred during the excavation of the ground to lay the foundations and pipelines as none are currently in and completed. A crane was stationary as the day wore on, a lone worker appearing to be the only one there. And so, the road will be closed for at least another month as there is no possibility of the road being reopened with the lack of land mass to support it; an almost vertical drop cordoned off by tall metal removable fences, which leave only enough of the road for pedestrians to traverse.

Many come on holiday from all over the world to visit the Distilleries here; travelling from America to China, all the way across the planet. The whisky trail stretches all along the local area from the Distilleries of this town to Distilleries and barrel companies all along the vicinity of the A941. Patches of this road run smooth; recently re-laid with tarmac between the towns. Though the second town along the A941 from the ‘Whisky Capital of the World’ runs almost parallel to the river that gives the area and the local high school its name. This town also houses a very popular Distillery, along with the remnants of the old railway that would have connected the Distilleries along the whisky trail, supplying them with materials, grain and other outsourced ingredients and necessities.

This small town has an array of beautiful scenery; the river, that 7 out of 10 ten times out of the year rises from its banks to try to breach the borders of its domain, a walkway that connects the town with many others leading them through an almost enclosed walkway where the trees entangle themselves above you, the pale green leaves letting small sparkles of sunlight flicker through with the breeze. 

This town, like the last houses some quaint little cafes and shops. From a French restaurant that makes the most amazing cakes and treats to an old style sweets shop that serves a brilliant fudge created by the owners. Just before the turn of the year, this town was consumed by traffic piling back, car after car waiting for lights to change. This may not have happened to the extent that it did, if not for delays and mistakes made. It appeared that as soon as they had finished the project they were already on their way to ripping up the road again to correct their mistakes. This endeavour went on for months disrupting travel and the local businesses, causing many of them to lose out on the potential revenue they would have gained if the traffic lights hadn’t been there or even if the road had been finished correctly and on time.

Although some come for the Distilleries, other come for the local wildlife; the Wild Cats, Grouse, Pheasants and all other types of birds and animals; the landscape views and the fresh air appeal to many different types of people. There is also another categorisation of people who come to re-connect with family, friends; who come to just visit their relatives and take advantage of the local events going on when they arrive.

It’s been quiet, not many jobs going around with hundreds of people applying from the surrounding area.

And me, I’m currently unemployed with no career prospects. If life has taught me anything its that basically everything you learn in high school is almost useless, they don’t teach you how to budget any sort of wage, they don’t teach you about Tax or about VAT, they don’t teach you how to react in an emergency, for example, emergency first aid. The grades I achieved and the time I put into high school, I can’t help but wonder if I should have left and gone to work, college or even into a modern day apprenticeship.

In this area there only a few types of work, work for one of the small businesses, work as a factory operative, manage to acquire a placement within an office of one of the local businesses, go further afield or go out of your way to learn several different languages to then be rejected from being a tour guide at one of the local distilleries.

A little further away from my nearby town with a distance of about 23 miles, is a seaside town; its size about three times larger with a military base, where regular drills and training exercises are carried out, which sits on the far side of the town. This town, home to over 6000 people, is considered a beautiful piece of the Scottish landscape. The beaches worn down more in the past few years than in the years before I was born, roughly twenty years prior. The once large sand dunes, ghosts in comparison to their past selves. Many teens find that the docks (although are frequently told off for) are great places to ride their stunt bikes and hang out in general, whether sunbathing on the roof of the time-worn wall to throwing themselves off of it on their bikes into the stone ground or into the waves as the tide pulls the water in and out of the docks.