Driving the hilly, boulder-spiked Isle of Lewis and Harris proved a tonic to my inherent wariness of humanity. Just over the Lewis-Harris border, where the landscape suddenly softens, as if nature conceded to geopolitics-we detour at the small village of Balallan and stop at the Loch Erisort Inn, a small bed & breakfast with an attached pub.
The pub is empty, save for a tall, grey-haired gentleman and a friendly border collie. Jacqui and I sidle up to a pair of barstools. Much of the rose-coloured walls are adorned with cricket and rugby mementos. A small dining area is warmed by a glowing peat stove. With its quiet, cosy ambience, this is already a prime candidate for my favourite pub anywhere.
Jacqui, as gregarious as I am reticent, engages in conversation with our host. We soon learn that Bernie is a Yorkshireman, who, along with his wife, Geraldine, expatriated six years ago for this outpost twenty-four miles out to sea. By Bernie's reckoning, he owns the only pub in a twenty-mile radius. That's some monopoly.
Although Jacqui and I are the only patrons at the moment, he assures us that the place is jumping on weekends. Behind Bernie, the television is broadcasting rugby and cricket scores. As Jacqui and Bernie chat about the latest happenings in the world of cricket, talk segues into the international rivalry between cricket and baseball that often flares between me and my South African girlfriend. I know something of cricket, but not enough to follow details, and my concentration remains on my Guinness as I pet Zak the border collie.
Learning my relative ignorance of baseball's cousin, the affable Bernie comes out from behind the bar, takes a cricket bat from the wall, and hands it to me. Directing me to the edge of the abbreviated wall separating bar from tables, which is now serving as an impromptu wicket, he grabs a cricket ball and stands about ten feet away. Bernie's first toss, with his disorienting pinwheel motion, gets by me, but I gently hit the next two along the floor to the back wall. They surely would have gone for fours had the pub been spacious enough.
Then Bernie grabs a half-deflated rugby ball and invites me to the parking lot for a catch. Underhanding the ball from the hip using both hands is completely foreign from how I throw an American football and takes some getting used to. Not only is it great fun, but in a vacation intended to avoid as many people as possible, our brief stop at the Loch Erisort Inn stands as my favourite memory of a week in Scotland. Thank you, Bernie.

RANDY S ROBBINS
4605 Aberdeen Drive
Mount Laurel, NJ 08054
USA