A brief encounter with a ladybird. Ben Lawers...

One thoroughly wet & windy day, 7^th February 1981, to be precise, two of us (Malcolm and I) were out all day on the Ben Lawers Range.

Ian missed the trip as he was in breeding mode. However, to us, the day was not regarded as a washout. Far from it, as we had successfully bagged three new Munros.

These Munros were numbers 46-48 for me. They were Meall Corranaich 1069ft, Bhain Ghlas 1103ft and Ben Lawers 1214ft.

We had started at 11am and finished by around 3pm. There was some difficulty in the retreat from Ben Lawers as we were facing the weather which was pretty atrocious, with high winds from the S.W. blinding us with driving hail and sleet.

It had been persistently wet most of the day. Despite the weather we had marginally beat Naismith, (Inventor of Naismiths Rule- a formula used by hillwalkers and navigators to estimate the time required for a mountain or hill walk). Yeehar!

We had not met a soul.

We thought our day was over, but a little episode remained.

We had started our day at the old Visitor Centre which had an actual, small, building, with tourist information in. When we arrived back, and despite wearing waterproofs all day (no Gortex then!), we were absolutely soaked to the skin.

We found the huge car park absolutely deserted apart from one car....our own. In those days it was quite common to find ourselves alone on our excursions into the hills.

We badly needed to get out of our wet clothing and get into dry kit. So we moved our car closer to the Visitor Centre building. Naturally, being winter, it was closed, but it did have a small canopy which gave a little protection from the elements.

We started to get changed, and were soon stripping down to basics, and beyond!!

As we were doing so a solitary coach pulled on to the car park.

It slowly circled round. The coach driver obviously weighed up what was happening and deliberately drove his coach until it was only about 10ft away from us.

It appeared that he had a coach load of elderly ladies. They had presumably been touring round all day in the pouring rain, with no scenic views whatsoever, and the Driver thought that they needed their day livening up.

Here in front of him was a scene from the 'Full Monty' which he obviously thought might do the trick!!

He guessed right, because the coach windows were being vigorously wiped, and faces were pressing against the windows, and one side of the coach was definitely becoming heavier than the other.

We continued to change as quickly as we could and I was doing quite well until I hit a problem. Having already discarded my soaking trousers and undies, and had a quick towelling down, I was at the stage of climbing into dry gear.

Unfortunately I was having some trouble with my dry undies. They were very tight and my wet skin didn't help matters. With a great effort I got one leg in, but the other could find no room. Why was it so difficult??

It was then that I spotted something on the label of the Undies. It was the small emblem of a Ladybird. At that time, Ladybird was one of the logos of Woolworth's children's clothing range, so this explained my predicament.  I was trying to get into a pair of children's underpants!

When packing I had taken a pair of my 8 year old son's underpants, and there was no way I had any chance of pulling them on.

Unfortunately at this stage I was unable to remove my second foot from its attempts to get into the other leg hole... which caused me to lose balance completely. So the laughing coach party gained a 'cheeky' view that they hadn't anticipated!

I hastily abandoned the undies and went straight for my normal, dry, Rohan, trousers, feeling very unprofessional for a qualified chartered accountant!

The coach driver thankfully took this as a cue that it was probably time to move on and to leave us in peace before any other developments arose.

It's funny to think that this little episode was probably the talking point over their evening meal after a wet and potentially otherwise viewless day for the coach passengers.

Despite the achievements of our day it was certainly a major talking point over ours!!

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