The “bridge” is three rotten telegraph poles laid lengthways across the gorge. It’s barely wider than the eight-wheeled Argocat we’ll drive across it. I can see the stream gushing twenty feet below through the gaps in between.
“Replacing the bridge is one of my jobs for the winter,” Ewen says, grinning, exposing the missing tooth he knocked out while vaping. It doesn’t make him look any less like George Clooney’s offspring. Handsome fucker.
“But that’s what I said last winter.”
He puts the Argocat in gear.
I cross myself.
I’ve been thinking a lot about death lately. The Queen dying Sept. 8, the day before I left for a week of fishing on Jura, isn’t helping. To me, in that last photo at Balmoral Castle, she looked like any other frail, 96-year-old woman. Probably what finished her off was meeting the latest in the revolving door of what passes for a British Prime Minister these days.
When it came to Her Majesty, I was strictly agnostic: neither collector of royal trinkets, nor egg-throwing UK Republican. But from baking cupcakes at my primary school for her Silver Jubilee in ’77, to photographing celebrations at five retirement villages when she went Platinum in 2022, I’d had Queen Elizabeth as a constant, reassuring presence for my entire life. Plus, she showed more leadership during the pandemic than all of the government fuckwits put together. Now the country feels like American Thanksgiving without John Madden’s turducken.
f you recognize the name Jura, it’s either because of the whisky, which is made there, or as the place George Orwell escaped to so he could write and catch wild browns in the lochs high above the farmhouse where he stayed. (In Scotland and Ireland, lakes
