Rest and be thankful

Roads, like ambition, can creep as well as soar. As he reached the top of the Rest, by the long low road, the runner noticed the higher road was blocked with traffic lights, lorries, caravans....... and sheep. Little stubborn, filthy sheep who insisted on hanging about in the verges of that miserable highway, content it seemed to eke out a living among the oil soiled grasses, and the petrol fumes, rather than head downhill where the air was clear and the grass safe.
How curious it was, then, that both roads led to exactly the same place anyway.
And in that place, our friend stopped to rest. He was still heading west, just like the heavy horse told him, but  there was no sign, yet, of the particular kind of circus he had hoped for.

Glasgow

 

On the far bank of the river, a shipyard pretended to be a carnival. The runner stopped and, with the sun in his eyes, he listened to the hammer and the hum. In the dark  fire-work scented pavillions, air craft carriers were being built. Some  people still found work and worried about finding work tomorrow.
"... And there will be no hooliganism," he thought he heard some one say, " there will be no vandalism, there will be no bevvying"
The runner turned around to look for the source of the voice but there was no-one. 
"Who said that?"
But there was no-one there to answer.
A rat ran across the paved walkway and slipped into the water.
A cloud moved in front of the sun and the runner knew it was time get going if he wanted to hit the open road before night fall.

Keep going west

"Is this the circus? Are you a circus horse?"
The heavy horse on the M8 looked down at the little man. He longed to go with him, to gallop around the ring with a ballerina on his back. But, not everyone is free to follow their dreams.
"Keep going", he said " keep going west."

Frankie goes to Holyrood

At the end of the royal mile, the runner stopped to check his map.  Behind him, the streets teamed with actors and street performers but the address scribbled in his own handwriting said  'holyrood' and here it was - a strange deconstructed smorgasbord of granite blocks, shaped metal and dreams -standing at the centre of one of the most important decisions in the history of Scotland -  whether to stay in the UK, or leave it and become a new, separate and independent state. 

This was no circus and the colour and energy and madness of the surrounding  city seemed suspended a few yards before it.

"What do people want from this place if not circus tricks and spectacle", he asked. 

In the public circulation area, Edwin Morgan, the great scottish poet, explained .

"What do the people want of the place? They want it to be filled with thinking persons as open and adventurous as its architecture.

A nest of fearties is what they do not want.

A symposium of procrastinators is what they do not want. A phalanx of forelock-tuggers is what they do not want. And perhaps above all the droopy mantra of ‘it wizny me’ is what they do not want."

"I see" said the runner "so not a juggler or a sword swallower?"

"No"

Outside, a fire-eater walked passed, flame extinguished for now. He stopped, "you are running away to the circus?"

"Yes"

"So am I"

"Do you know where it is?"

"No - we are all trying to find the road that leads there -  all the performers and street acts you see around here. i don't know where it is but i think it is in the west -  we have a week  to get there - if we do not find it we will perform here on these damp city streets. Good  luck, my friend,  in your search."

The runner nodded.

"Good luck"

So, that is where he must go!

The runner re-appeared at the end of July. The Olympic year had passed and his body had changed. His legs felt thicker. The village lay quiet in the morning sun. A man was walking his collie dog and a woman was tending her vegetable patch. The loch beyond the village was peaceful too. A yacht with white sails silently tacked down towards Goat Island..
He smiled, and then something caught his eye. Some light, or at least a flicker of some light, out there beyond the peninsula. The runner paused to wonder and, for the first time, he felt a strange new yearning deep within himself.
He tried to translate this new feeling - a sort of dull pain that twisted into a thrill now and then lay heavy in his scarecrow torso. If he had more experience, he might have known exactly what that feeling was but there, that morning, he felt sure that it was a desire to run away  - to join the circus, or the carnival or to star in a musical.
Perhaps what he had heard was true - that there was a great circus in Edinburgh located in the Holyrood area of the capital. So, that is where he must go!