Spey
A scruffy buzzard perches on the ‘welcome’ sign in the small Highland town of Grantown on Spey, its head angled down and sideways. Its one visible eye peers into my own, a bright pulse of contact as I drive by, and as a result of this I feel expected. I have made a reservation in the same hotel where our family holidayed each summer, although it is decades since I was last here. I have no idea what I will find, and am relieved to discover that the hotel is almost unchanged. The croquet lawn at the back has gone, and new houses fill its place; the gravel drive now forms an ordered car park. But there is still a glass case on the writing desk in the lobby where a – perhaps diminished - variety of hand tied fishing flies bristle, iridescent, over their hooks.