Accordion lessons and a good seaweed ale

As we’re driving through the Scottish countryside, I ask Charles if he’s married. “Aye,” he says, “to a remarkable woman.” They live in a little village called Balquhidder (from the Gaelic “Baile-chuil-tir” which means “the distant farm”) a place so remote, he says, that no one can ever find it. “Which is fine with me.”

There’s not much to do in Balquhidder, Charles says, “So we need to entertain ourselves.” He’s in a singing group but his wife can’t carry a tune, he says. So she decided, at the age of 43, to take up the accordion, mostly because if you’re going to learn an instrument in Balquhidder it has to be the accordion since “all we’ve got is the one accordion teacher.”

Fair enough.

The only problem, Charles says, is that the other two students taking accordion lessons with his wife were both under 12. Still, she’d not be dissuaded. After a year or so of accordion lessons, the town had a ceilidh in which Charles was going to sing and his wife was going to play the accordion. Obviously, he said, he was more nervous for her than for himself.

And how’d she do? I asked.

Charles got a big lovely grin on his face. “It was brilliant,” he said.

Later we stopped at the Crannog seafood restaurant in Fort William for lunch, sitting loch-side next to the town pier, relaxing in the sun. I was tempted to get the cullen skink, just to see how it matched up to Topi’s, but decided I didn’t want to smudge my memories one way or the other, so instead I had the house hot and cold smoked salmon and rainbow trout in lemon butter along with a Kelpie Seaweed Ale.

Seaweed ale? It sounds more exotic than it is. The Scots have made beer from local malted barley grown in fields fertilized with seaweed harvested on the Argyll coast for over two hundred years. They say the seaweed (called bladder rack) gives the beer a particular “aroma of the sea” but I didn’t get that. The Kelpie (which is the Gaelic term for the mythical creatures who live in the lochs of Scotland, the most famous being the Loch Ness Monster of course) was dark brown and a little chocolaty with maybe a sniff of smoke in the creamy head. But I didn’t get any seaweed.

Still, it was good enough to order a second. I sipped it out on the deck, wondering how long it might take me to learn how to play the accordion.