In the late 1980s my parents and I spent a year in Glasgow, Scotland. In December we spent a few days at a hotel on the Scottish island of Islay. There's a big golf course there, but since this was out of season we got a discount. We ate lamb chops with mint sauce for the first time, and Mother like it so much that we'd often have it with lamb stew in later years.
I remember that on the day we left the news was dominated by the explosion of the Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland. (Six months before a US ship had carelessly shot down an Iranian airliner, and if you can believe that's a coincidence you can believe anything...) We drove past Lockerbie a few times and they'd put up a wooden fence between the highway and the crater, but it had narrow slits and when you passed by at 60 MPH you could look "through" the fence.
I was annoyed that day because the liberal newspaper The Guardian had published an editorial casually asserting that the Reagan presidency had been "benign." They also referred to how popular he'd been, as if popularity justified itself! (Such obtuse conformism has a desperate feel...) What's a little digression among friends.
The unusual thing? We were driving around the island and at one point the road was blocked by a herd of cattle. Father was ready to turn around, but I got out of the car and managed to shoo them away. One of the cows, Mother recalled, had a particularly illucid look. This was the time when Britain had a problem with "mad cow disease," where cattle got this disease that made holes in their brain, and they were afraid that it would spread to people who ate diseased beef...
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