High On A Hill Lived A Lonely Laird

IN direst January, the lovelorn laird from the west threw in the towel and fled south.

- Joe Gibbs

Prowling the streets of Ullapool with a salmon landing net and a bouquet of wilting chrysanthemums hadn’t landed our friend a lady to share the lonely bothy where he and his mum hang out. The average age of the three Tinder respondents in his Highland orbit is 83 and none is rich.

For a man still in his early forties, to shack up with any of them would have been reckless, so it was swipe left and head for London. He called me from there with an update. Thanks to a new dating app, affairs had got rather zingy. He had met a nice Tajik NHS bowel specialist from Uzbekistan.

His medic worked night shifts in emergency admissions, which absolved the laird from having a full-time day job if they were actually to see each other. The pillow talk was electrifying: an eye-watering encyclopaedia of the objects Londoners get stuck inside their nether regions. It must have provided a Tajik with a fundamental insight into contemporary Britain.

Life was a bowl of cherries until the laird got a Monday morning text dismissing him, without coffee. In retrospect, he thinks the very understated sense of urgency that he, like the average West Highlander, customarily displays may not have matched the more driven ambitions of a career surgeon. She was more clinical, was how he saw it.