You No Eat Now You Go Now

It seems a long time since we had a meal out, and the hard tack is so old it is now mostly weevils, so we walked up the hill into the village at Buckie to find a traditional Scottish Chinese restaurant. We were not disappointed - our waiter must have been imported specially from Wong Kei in London because he was as abrupt and as rude as you could have hoped to find for delightful authenticity. Our chap rebuked us furiously for trying to order more drinks when he was came to remove our empty glasses because he only did one thing at a time, not as classy as the shrieked response to our request at Wong Kei to wait while our friends arrived "YOU NO EAT NOW YOU GO NOW!"

Buckie is an extraordinary town - in terms of architecture I think it is more interesting than Cheltenham or even Bath for sheer concentration of a single style of house. Most of them are elegant, double-fronted, substantial and stone-built with many stepped-gables and carved mullions. A result probably of the previous prosperity of the place, and fortunately most of them still exist, in the main untouched, although there is a plague of uPVC windows which spoils their faces.

At the top of the town it felt absurdly French, even under the grey rainy sky, but there were beautifully presented bakers, with delicate window decorations, many more elegant health and beauty shops than one would expect in a depressed fishing town and the lack of the big chains creates space for an exciting High Street and scope for local businesses to thrive.

I was touched and amused by the civic decorations half-way up the hill to the town. I imagine that at some point there was either some EU or lottery money made available for some kind of beautification and someone in the local council got one of their fishermen mates to do it. This is what happens if you leave a trawlerman to create an "installation" to decorate a public space...

In the background there is a pile of herring barrels, then an old anchor. On the right of the picture, nestled artfully on the gravel, there is a small hydraulic winch and the the foreground, as you can see, some punctured fenders. Note the dog-mess bin; located for convenience, not composition.

Buckie has other, more charming features, such as Finlay, one of the harbour-masters, whom we often interrupted during his making of creels to get the keys to the quayside bogs. Finlay always had a helpful word for us, at least we think he did, because for the first day we could not understand each other. Funny how we got to grips with the accent and the vocabulary. At one point I asked him where I could buy some fish and he said to go to the shop called "Eat Mair Fish", which I translated in my mind as "Eat More Fish", but no, that's what it's called. I wish we had bought one of Finlays pots to get some crabs.