COLIN CAMPBELL: Five years after Covid Highland tourism gloom, now we could be taxing them
Five years ago at this time we were in the early days of Covid. No one knew what lay ahead but everyone knew they'd never experienced anything like it before.
I was working a couple of times a week overnight in a riverside hotel before retirement. The order came through for hotels and similar establishments to close. The manager wanted to get the premises fully fitted with locks and was looking for someone to stay overnight in the hotel while the work was being completed.
So around midnight I found myself looking out over the riverside from the most expensive suite in the place. It was a strange, sombre and eerie feeling. A landmark building normally teeming with life was empty for the first time in its century-long history. And a dark Inverness city centre would remain silent and empty throughout the next day and probably far beyond. I have no fear of prowling ghosts in large deserted buildings but, luxury room or not, I didn't sleep well that night.
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That was the beginning of furlough for millions of people, but not for those doing the most difficult jobs of all in hospitals and care homes. But what a leisurely time it was. Money was shelled out like there was no tomorrow, or at least as if there would never be a day of reckoning for the nation. Payouts were supposed to be 80 per cent of normal wages, but many enjoyed a more generous stay-at-home income than that.
After a lifetime of work many of us would be quite glad, eventually, to get back to the job. But many others would develop a taste for idleness - funded by an income from the state - which is still widespread to this day.
Difficult, confusing and no doubt depressing as it was for some people, we undoubtedly had it easier than many people elsewhere. The comparison between having easy access to open space and countryside as we do, and being cooped up in a city tower block for months on end didn't bear thinking about. There has never been a better time to live in the Highlands.
And through it all Nicola Sturgeon was on her daily BBC soapbox, constantly scrapping some rules and introducing others. Some people never missed her. To give her credit she did sound authoritative and for the duration of Covid was a reasonably credible "leader of the nation". But it has since emerged that she was making it up as she went along, surrounded by equally hapless advisers, with a principal strategy being to foment division - even at such a dire time - with Westminster.
Unforgettable memories remain but one of the most enduring will be the one from any riverside window right through the summer of 2020. An area which is usually congenially crowded with tourists often had not a soul in sight. Travel restrictions and the menace of Covid kept every last one away. Ness Walk, a magnet for strolling visitors, was virtually deserted on midsummer evenings. Tourists add a zest to the city and really bring it alive when they flood in. Without them the place looked like a dreary summer ghost town.
But five years on from 2020, we now have complaints about the incoming surge of tourists which looks likely to lead to the imposition of a "tourist tax". This would add to the already high cost of their stay in Inverness and the wider Highlands. The money, it is said, would be invested in the infrastructure to cater for them. There may be some merit in it, but it is a penalty on visitors also.
During Covid there was no talk of penalties on tourists because there were none here. Many tourism businesses were worried about survival.
Those who now complain about an excess of tourists and who want a tax added to their already very high accommodation charges as we await another influx obviously have very short memories when it comes to the desolate and desperate days of Covid.
