The Night of the Midge
It was the first long walking day after my injury, slowly getting going again. Darren had gone ahead to find a suitable place to park the van for our overnight. Andy and I finally arrived at the spot at about 8:30, exhausted after 12 hours on the road. We just wanted to eat and collapse in our bunks.
On arrival we could see that Darren was a bit agitated, the whole van was totally closed up and he was sitting in the driver’s seat just staring ahead out of the window. We cheerfully said hi and climbed in slowly taking off our gear.
There was a stern order barked from the front seat to do with the closing of the door or some thing to that effect, followed by a long explanation of some sort of Alien or extra terrestrial invasion and how Steven Hawkins mentioned if they invaded the only way we would drive them away was by just continuously bugging the hell out of them. What was happening to us at the moment?
I looked at Andy in total amazement, what the hell was Darren going on about. Andy finally said “D Man, what’s up with this invasion?”, then Darren replied: “look outside”.
We then looked out of the window and saw what he was going on about; there was a massive cloud of miniature flying insects wafting to and fro like clouds of smoke enveloping the van. Scottish Midges everywhere and they somehow were getting into the van and we had this internal cloud of our own was growing fast on the inside and starting to bite us. Darren had had it, we have got to move he said, he got into the driver’s seat fired old Schmidt up and yelled back, guys hold on and we lurched forward. Andy was standing in the galley hanging onto pats pans and the rest while I was sitting at the table trying to save the rest as we putted around the corner and down the road, our cloud of Aliens in tow. Down the road we went, we turned, Andy doing a pirouette in the back as we again swung around and headed back to where we had just come from, our belongings clanging around us as D man made the second run from the storm of midges, finally coming to a grinding halt on the verge of the road a few hundred meters from the original point.
Five minutes later the swarm was back, there was noting we could do, Darren sat there with this look of utter defeat on his face as the insects enveloped the windscreen and slowly wormed there way into the van. It was going to be a night of hell and Darren told us in no uncertain terms that he was never returning tho this part of Scotland.
