Speyside Way - Day 4 of 6 - part 2

Continued from Speyside Way - Day 4 of 6 - part 1

Okay. You are not going to believe this. I’m sitting here eating my dinner in this pub and a man walks in and orders a dram of whisky and mentions that it is his birthday. And I notice a swirl of sexual energy when he is in the room. Which is odd for me to notice, because I am not very attuned (actually I am very un-attuned) to sexual energy in this particular stage if my life). But after he has left and returned a few times I figure what are pubs for, pubs are for stories, so I ask about his birthday and what leads him to be celebrating it in this particular place. It turns out he is on a special tour his younger brother created for the two of them and two other close friends to celebrate the younger brother’s “big” 70th birthday. And the younger brother has planned especially that they would be staying at the lodge of which this pub is a part on the older brother’s birthday because this lodge is their former home. This is the house that their family lived in during the 60s and 70s and 80s - they moved here when the brothers were 9 and 11. And, this room here, now a pub, was their parents’ bedroom. 

Now…is that psychoanalytic, or what? No wonder even sex-deaf River felt a swirl of sexuality in this parental bedroom turned pub. Do you suppose those same whisky-guzzling pranksters who designed yesterday’s trail and today’s weather also set this up for me? I wonder what I will make of this in my paper on walking the whisky trail as a psychoanalytic pilgrimage? Obviously the parental bedroom in classic psychoanalytic theory is the original site of dangerous desires and murderous impulses and the repression required to tame them. Isn’t the pub like the psychoanalytic office in that it is a gathering place where we relax those repressions and make contact with repressed energies of desire and rage? And isn’t it like the psychoanalytic office in that it is a place where we create and share stories, and where primal urges are re-enkindled? I think it is essential to what little remains of Speyside Way - my whisky trail - that I get myself to go to pubs and listen to stories. 

Another story from this pub. The man who owns the lodge tells me his wife is the sister of the woman who runs Bridge View (the B&B where I am staying). Both families have a small child and the cousins are very close. The third sister lives in Fochabers (where I go tomorrow) but the man who owns Craigellachie Lodge does not think I will meet her. 

Speaking of siblings, the day I finish this walk is the first days of the Speyside whisky festival and also the birthday of my younger siblings Judy and Scott (born two years apart in the same day. So of course I thought of them during the first mile of my walk when I passed a distillery and saw this sign. 

I also saw an interesting metal bridge (which I had seen and walked across last night without even noticing)   

And the bridge gave me another opportunity to look at the landscape framed (this time by metal work) as with the eye in the sky sculpture on the mountain or the view through the arch of a train bridge. 

So here’s a few more frames I enjoyed on today’s walk. 

I’m trying to keep these posts to four or five photos because I’ve been having trouble uploading them, so …

I originally wrote to be continued in part 3. Then I realized this is enough for now. It’s getting late and we will be up early tomorrow morning to Fochabers where we will certainly visit a pub! Thank you for sharing this walk and these stories and your wonderful responses.  Do you think we might have as much fun in our pub as those trickster-pranksters do in theirs, what with plotting their trail twists and weather disruptions and psychoanalytic surprises?