2023-04-28 20:04:38
JYes, the king, one often sees him here, he likes to walk through the forest, collect mushrooms and give friendly greetings – that’s what the devoted subjects tell in the Scottish Highlands, around the royal estate of Balmoral Castle and the little town of Braemar. Pretty much everyone here has met the king, and before that it was the queen who was so human in the Highlands that people only hint at these anecdotes, but never quite reveal them. Blurring, it seems, is the principle of this area.
We were only there a week ago, and already Braemar was intoxicated with coronation anticipation. The newspapers reported the coronation mark, spinach quiche with beans, which everyone in the kingdom should please cook on May 6th. And unlike the local subjects, some foreign Braemar regulars spilled their Charles farces. One of them goes like this: Six months ago, shortly after the death of the queen, one day during a rainy walk in the forest, a lonely man suddenly appeared between the trees with a half-filled basket of mushrooms: His Majesty the King! He greeted and disappeared again. It was like that and no different.
A King of Strolls and “Scottish Porridge”
Moment. This story seemed somehow familiar to us. Wasn’t that something similar in the newspaper? Didn’t a colleague experience the same thing? Exactly – she too had seen Charles in the rainy forest near Braemar, she was sitting in a Landrover and saw the walking king with a mushroom basket at the roadside. Could it be?
The next day we had “Traditional Scottish Porridge” for breakfast, “with a nip of whisky”, as the menu said. “Lovely,” said the Scottish waitress. Only: The “nip” was a double single malt that was supposed to be mixed with the porridge. It was eight-thirty in the morning and the warmth of the porridge made the whiskey sniffle and the tears spring to our eyes, driving us into a royal state of rapture. The news still got through the blurred world: The king is here! He stayed in Balmoral for a few days.
Royal Deeside is the name of the area around Balmoral Castle and the village of Braemar in the Scottish Highlands.
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Bild: Picture Alliance
We later hiked through the Highlands with a so-called Whiskey Ambassador, and just as some clarity returned to consciousness, we spotted a lonely man in the distance. is it him Could it be? The ambassador remained calm. Yes, he could very well be. The man came closer, closer, very close – it wasn’t him. But the sheer possibility of a meeting (and a whiskey tasting) put us in a certain, shall we say, delusional readiness. On the way to the Royal Lochnagar Distillery we saw a police car and were sure: It must be around here somewhere! Another whiskey tasting at the distillery confirmed this belief.
And indeed! On the way back to the hotel, the driver and the ambassador sitting next to him in the Landrover later told us, the king came towards us in the car. We sat in the back, in the single malt blur, and didn’t see anything. Was it really him? “Really, we looked him straight in the eye.”
The principle seemed familiar to me. There is a hill near Innsbruck next to the autobahn, on which an artificial ibex is enthroned. Dramaturgically perfected, bus drivers on the return journey tell their après-ski-damaged tourists at the very last moment to look to the right – and everyone is happy to have seen a real ibex.
#King #Scottish #Highlands