Drew Cochrane on weddings, fire alarms and air ambulances

The vocalist had already resigned himself to entertaining the dugs and the dozens of weans running about the dance floor and bar area. 

No, it wasn't Butlins or a downmarket holiday camp. It was actually a high class hotel for which we had paid the proverbial arm and a leg in order to attend a big wedding.

Then the din of the fire alarm took over as we supped our late night glasses of vino.  The siren-like alarm persisted before a young lady, at the disco desk, announced something inaudible.

Staff told us we had to leave hurriedly as we gulped down our drinks. I told the disco announcer that we couldn't hear a word she said on her sound system, to which she replied: "Aye, that's always the problem."

The evacuation was the end of our entertainment at the Drimsynie House Hotel and Leisure Complex which sits alongside the quaint, picturesque village of Lochgoilhead in Argyll.

Drimsynie House Hotel, near Lochgoilhead. (Image: Google Street View)

At least we had a bottle of wine in the room when we eventually got in...to calm our nerves of course.

It was a precursor (appropriate word) to the next 12 hours as the alarm had us jumping out of bed in the early hours. As I groggily staggered around the room, thinking I was in my house in Largs, it thankfully went off for a bit.  In the morning, as we lay in bed having a cuppa (tea, not wine), the sound, like a low flying jet, saw us evacuated from the hotel. Again.

This was to be repeated a few hours later as we were in the midst of donning our glad rags for the wedding. This time the alarm was accompanied by banging on our door before being ushered outside the premises in a state of undress. 

"I think someone was vaping in the spa," I heard someone say. Must have been a persistent vaper.

If we thought Drimsynie was in the back of beyond, albeit a beautiful back of beyond, at the end of five miles of a one-track winding road, worse was to follow. We were heading for the wedding at the even more remote Carrick Castle, with a bus scheduled to take the guests there.

However, there was a crash on the one wee devilish road, involving an air ambulance flying to the scene. The bus couldn't get through. My good lady, who was doing the driving, had to take some of the guests in our car up another five-mile one track road to be in time for the (delayed) outdoors ceremony.

Carrick Castle sits in a stunning setting on the banks of Loch Goil. (Image: Jodie Mitchell Hyslop)

But the wedding of Kirsty and Paul was worth it to the backdrop of the magnificent mountains and forests, as a classical quartet played the theme tune of Braveheart and other Scottish airs. The drink was flowing freer than Loch Goil itself. Italian beer and wine was partaken....to calm our nerves once again, of course.

To be honest, we had to be anaesthetised before a bus did get through at midnight to take the merry guests along the single lane, in the pitch black, back to Drymsinie, where we found that no-one had bothered cleaning our room.

Apparently, you had to put a notice on the handle saying you were 'Oot and Aboot' if you wanted serviced! The hotel never bothered to tell us.

I once performed at a Burns supper at Lochgoilhead and was confronted by a huge juggernaut which caused me - Mister Magoo - to reverse, avoiding the deep ditches.  That's an invitation I'll decline in the future.

Thought for the week: Was Guy Fawkes the only one to enter Westminster with honourable intentions?

I WRITE this column in pain (what do you mean, you're reading it in pain?) as a result of an injury at that gentle, geriatric sport of walking football.

I have been limping around for weeks as a result of a knee injury which is being 'investigated'. I even invested in one of those knee protectors favoured by my fellow athlete and tennis star Djokovic.

A Largs doctor gave me a yellow sheet to authorise an X-ray at Inverclyde Royal Hospital, so on my way back from the wedding I called in on Sunday clutching my chit. 

Three staff were on duty at the X-ray counter in a deserted hospital, but it was a 'no' from them. 

"We don't take doctors' sheets at the weekend," I was told. "It's only for emergencies."

(Image: George Munro)

To compound my chagrin a hospital volunteer told me that the place was "dead" at weekends and the three staff were probably on double time pay to sit there and tell me I couldn't get treatment. 

Is this perhaps one of the reasons that there are long waiting lists in the NHS?

Three days later I attended the walking football session, intending to referee, but we were one old fogey short and I decided to go in goals. My knee collapsed from under me. Ice-packs and sprays were applied.

As I used to shout in my boyhood: "Mammy, Daddy, it's so sore..."