I thought that I’d do something a bit different this month: one longer piece rather than three short ones.  And it’s a travel piece – to kind of throw a virtual window open since physical travel is so restricted for the moment.  So what follows is an account of a journey I made to Orkney many years ago on a little Italian motorcycle that I had just rebuilt.  I sold the article in advance to the editor of a now-defunct motorcycle magazine by pointing out the historical Italian/Scottish connection and by making the chapel built by Italian prisoners of war on the island the destination.  The payment for this was a princely sum: £800.  That was enough to fund the journey and some over, so off I went.  I took slide film, a 35mm SLR and a circuitous route. 

Since I am reproducing it here for a readership that is largely non-petrolhead I will take the opportunity to point out some of the conventions of motorcycle journalism as it goes along.  The motorcycle travel piece tends to be an uneasy triptych of technical detail, daredevil riding and the occasional geographical reference. Mine, I like to think, tended to break this mould because to me a motorcycle was simply an exciting way of getting somewhere interesting. So the destination was central.

I’ll start off, nonetheless, with the convention of the machine establishing shot: this is a standard in which readers are invited to gaze upon the epic beauty of whichever particular machine has been chosen for the journey.  Ideally this is taken on the open road but for some reason that I cannot now remember I took this one on my drive.  The bike is a 1976 350cc Italian Moto Morini .  I had spent the previous year neglecting all domestic duties in order to rebuild it from the ground up.  I did some sea trials and deemed it to be of merchantable quality and fit for purpose i.e. reliable and fun.  The account below is exactly as I wrote it twenty-odd years ago and as it was published.  I threw away my own slides a while ago so the pictures are scans from the printed article. Title and subtitles are courtesy the magazine subeditor. The picture captions are my own and written for this blogpost.

 THE ITALIAN CONNECTION

Aaaah, la dolce vita!  I am sitting back in the late afternoon sunshine outside the kind of café that only the Italians do properly.  As I sip at my cappuccino and demolish a gelato I consider the Art Deco lines of my Morini’s crankcase at the pavement’s edge.  Around me the locals chat in their incomprehensible dialect.  Over the road is the harbour, boats cheek by jowl along the jetty, and in the distance blue hills rise in a warm haze.

Where do you think?  Naples, maybe?  Or a little coastal village in Tuscany?

Guess again.  This is Troon.  That’s Troon, west of Glasgow.  The blue hills in the distance are on the island of Arran.  This café is one of hundreds dotted about Scotland and still run by the descendants of Italians who migrated here in the 19th century.

What better way to spend a few spare days than to take another Italian classic – the Moto Morini 350 – and investigate this connection?  And it doesn’t end at cafés because further north – much further north – there’s another enduring monument to Italian culture.  It’s a little chapel on a barren strip of land looking  out over the silent waters of Scapa Flow…..

Café Society

The Morini is a 1976 Strada which I bought as a wreck and rebuilt over a couple of years.  This is its first long run and I’ve spent the first day whizzing up through Northallerton, Richmond, Penrith and finally over the border by Dumfries.  Many years ago I stayed a night in Dumfries.  In a pub that evening I asked the barmaid what sort of a town it was.  It used to be very quiet, she told me, “until they opened a branch of Marks and Spencer.”

I end this 300-mile day with a wonderfully sunny 60-mile ride up the Galloway coast, spending the night in Troon, where I search for the legendary Togs Café. It’s not hard to find and it does not disappoint.  The frontage is classic coffee bar and a sign announces that it was established in 1901 and is “under the personal supervision of Wilma Togneri”.  The window display is a monument to confectionery pleasure, featuring jar upon jar of sweets with names like Soor Plums, Rhubarb Rock, Liquorice Satins, Floral Gums and Midget Gems.

Next morning I saddle up under threatening skies and the first drops of rain fall as I set off for Cavani’s West End café in Saltcoats.  Its frontage is less impressive than Togs but the window sweets are even more imaginatively named: Polly Pastilles, Mixed Oddfellows, Clove Rock, Rich Butter Perfections and, my favourite, Mixed Boilings.  By now the rain is heavy.  The Morini takes this in its stride and I am rather pleased in retrospect that I rewired the whole thing with the north European climate in mind.  A total rewire may sound impressive but in fact the Morini’s electrics are not all that complicated.

In Largs, Nardini’s is perhaps the best-known of all Italian cafés in south-west Scotland. 

But why is there such a  proliferation of Italian caffs in this far north-west tip of Europe where the climate is generally less than Latin?

The great Italian migration started around 1860, most of the immigrants being itinerant statue sellers from the regions of Lucca and Frosinone, escaping desperate poverty in their homeland.  They found a greater demand for ice cream and cafés here than for statues and diversified to suit.  By 1905 there were 336 ice cream shops in Glasgow alone.

Nardini’s turns out to be in a different league from those I’ve seen so far.  It opened in 1935 and on its first day served 4000 customers.  In its heyday it was the largest café-restaurant in Great Britain – it even had the first soda fountain in the country.  Then it fell on hard times as the popularity of places like Largs succumbed to the lure of the package holiday.  It went into receivership briefly but is now back in apparently thriving business.

I park the Morini under Nardini’s awning.  Inside, it’s something of a cross between Art Moderne and Palm Court.  Customers sit in gilded cane chairs at glass-topped tables; inlaid screens and cabinets are scattered around the room.  The shop sells patisserie and chocolate specialities made on the premises.  You can even buy bridal mannequins.

There is a mouthwatering menu and even though it is not yet midday I know that I have to do my journalistic duty.  I sit myself down, place helmet carefully on spare chair and peel off my dripping waterproofs.  The staff do not even blink – always the sign of a classy establishment – and I order the waffles special with vanilla and chocolate ice cream, the two hardest flavours to get right in my view.  They are delicious when they come, especially the chocolate which nicely balances bitter with sweet.  But - oh the waffles - they are cold and heavy!  Surely the whole point is that they should be light and piping hot so that the ice cream melts over them?  Well,the cappuccino makes up for this and 30 minutes later, restored, I venture out into a rain whose terminal velocity on my helmet almost buckles my knees.

Don’t take the tablets

I consider taking the hideously expensive ferry over to the Isle of Cumbrae to investigate what I have seen billed as the ‘infamous’ Ritz café in Millport but my will is weak in this weather.  It’s twelve quid for the ten-minute ride there and back. “Is it worth it?” I ask the guy on ticket sales.  He looks over his shoulder at the weather.  “Ye must be joking” he says.  So I set off through the sluicing cloudburst of a day to sweep round Wemyss Bay then over the Erskine Bridge and on to the Highlands.  Rain gets a bad press but I am enjoying myself.  It isn’t cold and my waterproofs are well up to the job. 

I shoot up the side of Loch Lomond and it is in the Crianlarich Station Tea Room that I come face-to-face with the infamous Tablet.  For those who don’t know it, this quintessentially Scottish confection is a formidable slab of boiled butter, sugar and condensed milk.  One treats it with the utmost respect.  A journalist once ate two portions by mistake and claimed to have had a near-death experience as a result.  I examine it warily from a distance then order a large mug of tea in preparation for my assault on Rannoch Moor.

And it’s a good job that I do.  Many years ago I walked over Rannoch Moor and agreed with the the old saying that “on a bad day, it tends to promote the view that hell need not be hot”.  Today is a bad day.  Heavy rain, scudding cloud and racing wind are a fitting backdrop for the sheer black rock face and endless expanses of bog and heath; and there’s a ghostly yellow sheen too across this Dantean vision.  I speed through it all, the wind pushing me towards the roadside ditch and rain dashing itself against my visor in sudden squalls.  If a pterodactyl had soared across this primeval scene I wouldn’t have so much as blinked.

The little Morini romps through it.  The Metzelers (tyres – Ed.) are surefooted and the engine drums away faultlessly beneath me.  In any case, the roads up here are Morini-friendly, though very much at the mercy of topography: that it to say, they are good and bendy with firm surfaces but you have to share them with everyone else.  The one I am on now was built by General Wade for the British army clearing the Highlands.  Since it’s virtually the only way through loch and mountain it has to share its route with the railway and a long-distance footpath.  So you are there with the vans and the coaches and the cars and the caravans and the locomotives and the walkers.  It’s only further north and west that much of this drops away and you can have most of the awesome roads to yourself.

Black water

For a few pounds I spend the night in a hostel in Fort  Augustus and then bowl on up the east side of Loch Ness bright and early the next morning.  And bright it is.  The sun is out and fluffy white clouds are drifting across a blue sky.  But, my word, that loch is still very, very black. 

The traffic gets thinner and thinner on the road up to Ullapool.  It’s a fine run down into town, lined with rhododendrons and giving great views of the sweeping bay.  Beyond the town it’s mostly single track roads.  They rise and fall past little black lochans as shafts of sunlight thrust their way onto the peat and the moss.  At Kylesku I pass a memorial to WW2 midget submarine crews of XII Submarine Flotilla who trained in the three lochs which meet here.  I peer into the dark waters below the memorial and can foresee only blind terror if I were obliged to dive deep into them in a diver’s suit astride some sort of giant torpedo.  There are 30-odd  names on the memorial.

Further north the road spins down a long glen which finally opens out in the Kyle of Durness.  This is midsummer and the light evenings are otherworldly.  The sun goes down in a spectacular display, bathing the surrounding hills in an ethereal glow.  It’s gone 10pm but everything that can reflect this dying light does: the grass shines, the sheep shine, cars, windows, walls, seagulls, road signs – they all flash like hundreds of tiny flares until the sun disappears and the world returns to its normal three dimensions.

The sun is back next morning and we have an easy gallop to the Orkney ferry terminal.  Over the water, at Stromness, every hotel and B and B seems to be full.   The only single room I can find is at the best hotel in town, so I bite the bullet and resign myself to a couple of days of luxury.

Stromness really is the most extraordinarily atmospheric town.  Settled by Vikings and built around a beautiful natural harbour, it’s a real sea-soaked old salty dog of a place, from its horned helmet down to its trawlerman’s boots.

Traffic is not heavy here.  Glancing through the local paper, as I always do on my travels, I notice that a local man, up before the magistrates for jumping a red light came up with a  novel argument.  Traffic lights, he insisted, are  “ a precautionary measure” and of advisory status only.  The beaks weren’t impressed, and down he went.

I stroll up the main street of the town – more of a meandering alley really “uncoiling like a sailor’s rope” as the local writer, George Mackay Brown, put it – listening to the local accent which is a beautiful mixture of Scandinavian and Scottish.  At Point Of Ness, looking out over Hoy Sound, I lie on the pebbles in the late afternoon sunshine and watch the seals frolic, honking and barking and splashing.

That evening I undergo an experience bordering on the spiritual in the unlikely surroundings of The Ferry Inn.  On the way up, purely in the interests of cultural research, I have been sampling a range of malt whiskys.  They are all good, but this evening I put the local Highland Park – the softest dulcet little thing – up with a piece of smoked haddock.  Then I am  no longer in the world of ordinary mortals.  It is truly the greatest combination in the world.  To celebrate this exciting discovery I have several more glasses and just about avoid being carried out on my shield.

Chapel Works

My final destination, the chapel at Lamb Holm, is an ornate creation that is clearly not at all local in conception.  It is a true Italian connection.   In the 1940s Orkney was home to several hundred Italian prisoners of war, captured mainly in North Africa.  They were shipped to Orkney to work on the Churchill Barriers, a massive series of causeways which seal the eastern approach to Scapa Flow.  It’s not clear who had the idea of building the chapel but it was largely realised through the drive and talent of one of the prisoners – Domenico Chiochetti.  With simple materials and scrap the Italians transformed two Nissen Huts into the beautiful chapel which stands there today.

Relations between the Italians and the Orcadians seem to have been very good and when the prisoners left, the islanders promised to look after the chapel.  It became something of a place of pilgrimage for visitors though the weather inevitably took its toll.  Chiochetti was eventually traced to Moena, a village in the Dolomites, and he returned in 1960 to restore it.  It was rededicated before he left and he wrote an open letter to the Orcadians: “The chapel is yours for you to love and preserve.  I take with me to Italy the remembrance of your  kindness…..  Goodbye, dear friends of Orkney.”

When I arrive the place is crowded with two coachloads of tourists but I wait until they disappear and I have the place more or less to myself.  It’s beautifully maintained and,  like most things on Orkney, very atmospheric.

Last lick

The following day I get the early ferry back, the cheap one from St Margaret’s Hope to Gills Bay.  I have some misgivings when the SS Rustbucket hoves into view but what it lacks in apparent seaworthiness it makes up for in very fine fried egg rolls. I am back on mainland Scotland in an hour.

Early morning sunshine has given way to heavy rain for the long haul back down the A9.  On a whim, I turn left at Inverness and head for Lossiemouth through the deluge.  Standing under the awning at Rizza’s Ices, I enjoy a good vanilla watching a spectacular display of thunder and lightning as raindrops bounce off the Morini’s tank.  I’m tempted to try a gelatofest in Musselburgh or to ride back through Edinburgh where Valvona and Crolla’s delicatessen and restaurant can induce financial ruin. But enough is enough and I kick the little motorcycle back into life and hurtle southwards towards a horizon so dark it seems to prefigure the end of the world.”

I visited Orkney two or three times by motorcycle and had a good nose around but this is the only article I ever wrote about the place. This story didn’t end there though. When I got back from the trip I sent the article and the slides (untouched by any digital process in those days!) down to the editor. The article duly appeared in the next issue of the magazine.I then had to go away for a few weeks. When I got back I found that my bank account had not been credited with the agreed £800. I rang the editor. He was terribly sorry, he said, to tell me that the magazine had just gone bankrupt and there was a long line of creditors…..

(If you are at all interested in the story of the Italian prisoners on Orkney there is a great film directed by Michael Radford: Another Time, Another Place starring Phyllis Logan.)