Try, try and try again said the spider. But the spider isn’t always right.

The time-honoured story of Robert the Bruce is especially popular in Scotland, where there is considerable taste for any tale in which the plucky Scots ultimately kick the stuffing out of the dastardly English. Sadly, in most of the historical confrontations, the outcome was the opposite. But Robert was one Scottish leader who did eventually pull off the trick.

Robert the Bruce, who led the Scots to victory over the English
But he cheated: he was helped by a spider

On his way to what my Scottish friends assure me was a highly desirable achievement, he encountered some terrible reverses. According to legend, at the low point of his life, he was in a cave which a spider kept attempting to span with her web. Each time she failed, she started again. Robert watched this struggle with great interest and, instead of reaching the obvious conclusion that, since one side of the cave was pretty much as miserable, wet and dank as the other, it was a colossal waste of time, he drew from this spectacle the courage he needed to persevere in his own struggle to win the Scottish crown.

So he tried, tried and tried again, until he won triumphant success.

Great story. And a moral from which we can all learn, no doubt.

Except that there is, in my garden at the moment, a spider from the Bruce school of strivers. She has chosen the garden’s narrowest point, between the house wall and the fence, to weave herself a web. This means that each time I follow the poodle Luci into the garden, after she has done her business (a great illustration of the truth that certain kinds of business often leave the rest of us with a mess to clear up), the first thing that happens is that I walk straight into a web. Which is annoying for me, because the stuff gets in my hair. But it must be annoying for her, because there’s little left of the web afterwards.

In fact, on one occasion, I emerged with the spider herself sitting on my shoulder and giving me what I could only feel was a deeply reproachful look. I tried to reason with her, explaining that unlike many fellow members of my species, I have nothing against spiders – indeed, I value the work they do on flies – and would far rather not destroy her web.

However, she has failed to take my advice to set up her web somewhere less heavily trafficked. So every morning, the experience is repeated. With little pleasure for either of us.

It seems that she truly believes that, if at first you don’t succeed, you should try, try and try again.

So you can fail once more.

That’s an aspect the Bruce legend somehow fails to capture. I’d like to suggest that sometimes it might not be such a bad idea to decide that, if at first you don’t succeed, you might try something else. Or at least, in the case of our spider, somewhere else.

On the other hand, I’d have been delighted if the English rugby team had applied a policy of try, try and try again, in the current world cup. It proved beyond them. 

Alas.

Arran and the appeal of legends

We had a great trip to the Isle of Arran last week. Off South West Scotland and on the way to Ireland, it has open sea to the south and two branches of what is in effect inland sea on either side, bounded by Kintyre to the West and the coast of Ayrshire to the East. An enclosed sea has a special air of its own which is strangely attractive.

Of course, Arran’s in Scotland so visitors have to play roulette when it comes to the weather. From the ferry port, my wife Danielle announced that it was clearly raining on the island. ‘Nonsense,’ I replied, ‘what we can see is just haze.’ I maintain that to this day though I have to confess that once we reached the island, the haze just got thicker and thicker and we got wetter and wetter.

The next day was fine, however, or at any rate dry. We set out for a pleasant ramble to the King’s Cave. This is a place rich in legend. It’s said that Robert the Bruce, when his long fight to be King of Scotland was pretty much at its lowest ebb, took refuge there for a while, waiting for the beacon to be lit in Ayrshire to herald the reopening of his next campaign. It was here, they say (whoever ‘they’ are), that he watched a spider struggling up a thread, only to fall back down repeatedly and start again each time. From that sight, he drew the heartening lesson ‘if at first you don’t succeed, try, try and try again.’

This is one of those enchanting tales to come down to us from history. We have so many, even in Britain alone. Poor King Harold, quintessentially English, killed by an arrow to the eye by those dastardly Normans at Hastings. The dashing Francis Drake, as the Spanish Armada emerged into the Channel and came bearing down towards the very spot where he was enjoying a bowls competition on Plymouth Hoe, refusing to stop and declaring ‘we have time to finish the game and beat the Spaniards too.’

These stories all have so much in common. They’re uplifting, heart-warming and taught to every school child in the hope of making history a little more palatable. They are also all based on absolutely no evidence that anything like the events they describe ever actually happened. Did Robert I (yes, he did eventually succeed in becoming King) really have that inspiring meditation on spiders? No one knows. He certainly didn’t sit in that cave and wait for a beacon on the Ayrshire coast: it doesn’t face Ayrshire but Kintyre.

But who cares? It’s no part of the essential characteristic of legend that it has to be literally true. It just has to be appealing – ‘se non è vero, è ben trovato’ as the Italians say, if it isn’t true, it’s well invented.

We were treading soil imbued with legend, we were breathing the stuff of legend. What more did we need?

Especially as it was such a beautiful place.

The view from the mouth of the King’s Cave on Arran. And that’s Kintyre in the background, not Ayrshire.