Image by Billy Alexander
This morning, I took my favourite Monday morning running route: a steady climb out of town, then a looping return along a back road that winds through a fertile agricultural valley.
In places, the road affords a dramatic view of distant mountains to the west, but mostly it contains me within lower, closer contours of the landscape. On one side is the Knock of Crieff, a linear piling of lumpy glacial remnants called “pudding-stone”. On the other is the beginning of the Grampian foothills, where verdant strips of farmed land bleach and brown as the slopes ascend into wilder peaty moorland.
Out here at 9am, I encounter little traffic: a local or two heading out for the morning; the odd trades van on a job and avoiding the through-town route; the postman on his rounds, burling along in well-practised avoidance of the road’s many potholes. Some days a tractor will bellow past, or a farm quadbike with a troupe of collies circus-perching on the back – but mostly it’s just me and the road, the hills, the sky, the quiet sheep.
Today, as I traced the last remote curve of the road before it returns to civilisation, I heard a soft burr behind me – and then, barely idling, a bright red Ferrari curled past. What was it doing out there on that narrow, rattily surfaced country road, its violent red outline cutting like a gash through the muted tones of wild Scotland?
If fate presented me with enough money to buy, fuel and maintain a Ferrari for the rest of my days, what would I buy with it? Out there, the question is easy to answer: a lifetime’s bare necessities; in other words, freedom.
It’s said that Ferraris should be red and Lamborghinis yellow. So you saw the real McCoy. Whoever was driving it, it wasn’t an impecunious poet.
…but an impecunious poet creates and leaves behind riches beyond measure that will be there in perpetuity. Even a Ferrari will end its life as a scrap bale ready for the arc furnace!
Hooray for your conclusion, Kona!
I’ve never been a mad keen petrol-head, although four wheels on a sleek streamlined body with a gurgling throaty exhaust and power to spare appeals sometimes. But, setting aside unnecessary FUGS (Fat Ugly Gas-guzzling Status symbols), what is it for, this temporal existence, if to make a stressful life slightly more bearable or to give a privileged but shallow life apparently more meaning.?
My recently self-imposed unemployment does, from time to time, give me a sneak view at the possibilities of being a ‘have-not’ – as we nearly were in the rip-roaring inflation and high interest rates of the early eighties – and, therefore, for those of us in the Western world who live without luxuries, a view of how jealous and hungry we can sometimes get for them. But, at my near retirement age, I am grateful to be able to get from A to B by whatever means, to eat, to be warm and dry and to write about it!
You could buy me a second-hand 911 and still have enough for weekly cheese/wine/kindle-fest
Sounds like a numinous encounter – if a Ferrari can be said to possess numen (and surely it can). Of course Keats was quite wrong about beauty and truth. There is nothing ethical about beauty, and never has been.