On Holiday in Scotland – Edinburgh

[This should have been posted a long time ago, but I've been fretting and worrying at it, so we've now been back from Scotland two full months and more, and not much progress has occurred. So much for my resolve to start posting punctually once a week....]

My romance with Scotland goes back to age 11. Ever since I read Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped in 5th grade, I have wanted to go to Scotland. That Alan Breck! With his annoying attitude of superiority, his bravado, his braggadocio, his fierce pride in being a Highlander, his reckless courage in the face of danger, his deep loyalty to his young friend David Balfour that overcomes even their difference in politics (he's a Jacobite, who supports the claims of the House of Stewart to the throne of Scotland, while David's a Whig who's loyal to King George). I could imagine no one more exciting as a companion for an adventure. And the landscape! All those crags, and promontories, and heaths, and bogs, and barren islands! That landscape was as much a character in the book as all the eccentric figures who put in an appearance. Finally, the Scots dialect! Who couldn't love: "'David,' [Alan] cried, 'David, are ye daft? I cannae draw upon ye, David. It's fair murder.'" Och, it's fair poetry!

Later, I read Sir Walter Scott, and saw Local Hero, and, much later, learned how to do Scottish Country Dancing in New York City. While learning the intricacies of the pas-de-basque or the petronella figure, I would listen to all those Scottish dialects coming out of those Scottish expatriate mouths, and yearn for the Motherland, even though it wasn't my motherland.

So I and the kids and my son's friend are now on holiday in Scotland. It's a dream come true for  me, a long cherished desire. For the first week, we rented a cottage in the Lothians, near the village of West Linton; now we're finishing up in a flat in Glasgow, on the edge of Glasgow Green. Neither of these is the Highlands, but they will certainly do. The cottage was on the property of a larger house, called Slipperfield Cottage, owned by the warm and congenial Kilpatricks, and had its own private woods and loch (I haven't yet figured out how large a body of water has to be to be considered a loch, but this one is the size of a middling pond), and is surrounded by farmland on all sides.

Rock wall near West Linton

Scottish cattle near Slipperfield Cottage

Now, I grew up in the Midwest, so I know farmland. But this farmland is to the farmland of my childhood what Stir- ling Castle is to an East Central Illinois split-level brick ranch house. It is wild. It is craggy and steep. It is framed by heather, and thistle, and wind-blasted trees. There are tumbledown rock walls, and rusted barbed wire, and shaggy cattle placidly chewing the cud. Grey clouds pile up at the top of a hillside, then come boiling down the side, bringing torrential downpours of rain that just as suddenly stop. Sheep fan out on intensely green, impossibly steep hillsides. Craggy men, to match the craggy landscape, stride by in thigh-high olive green wellies, taking their wee dog for a walk (and if you think the word "wee" is cutesy, you haven't heard it coming out of the mouth of red-faced, square-jawed, yellow-toothed Scottish farmer with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth).

Since we arrived during the last week of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival,  and I hadn't planned ahead, there were no rental cars available with automatic transmission. In the U.K., it's sort of a mark of ineptitude if you can't drive a standard transmission, so I had to explain over and over, at each subsequent rental counter, with mounting embarrassment, that, as a pathetic American driver, I actually needed a car with automatic transmission. Finally, I found one, but the rental price was nearly one and a half times the rental for my cottage. I gave up, and we decided to throw ourselves on the mercy of public transportation. As it was, this was perfect: we got a tranquil hour-long bus ride into Edinburgh and back each day, with the magnificent scenery unfolding around us, and I was spared the white knuckle experience of driving on steep, impossibly narrow roads at impossibly high speeds, on the left-hand side of the road. All for less than £20 a day.

Singers advertising a musical

My daughter and street magician

The Fringe Festival was so much fun: the streets packed with crowds of people from all over, street performers and musicians on every corner. Street vendors were hawking their wares, caricature artists were drawing people's likenesses, barkers were handing out flyers for shows later that night. The catalog of shows was nearly an inch thick. We tried to figure out how to get tickets at the half-price booth, but the process was so difficult, and you had to know exactly what you wanted to see, so we eventually gave up and picked up a booklet advertising free shows. We eventually managed to find a couple of free comedy shows that were rated PG (by far the most common rating was 18+, as the raunch and profanity factors were high in these shows). My son and his friend were a little dubious: if the shows were free, how could they be good? And if they were PG, how could they not be other than childish?

Chris Turner

Well, the boys were wrong. The two shows we picked at random were both excellent. One was a comic play by an ensemble cast from London performed in the basement of a Mexican restaurant (every possible open space is commandeered as a performance space during the Festival); the other was a set of three English stand-up comedians performing in a tiny room above a bar. We the audience were seated with our knees up against the backs of the people in front of us, the people in the front row nearly toe-to-toe with the comedians. The piece de resistance at the end was a freestyle rap performed by one of the comedians, Chris Turner, who incorporated five random words from the audience into his rap: in our case, Viking, handbag, harpist, jellybean, and utilitarianism. I can't figure out how he managed to think so fast on his feet, find all the rhymes, make sense, make clever jokes, and stay on the beat. In one portion, he used the word "slag" (offensive British slang term for a woman of easy virtue) to rhyme with handbag, all the while apologizing (in rhyme) for his use of the offensive word.

Kids touching the nose of Greyfriars Bobby

In addition to the Fringe, we took in many of the more touristy sights of Edinburgh, including Edinburgh Castle, the Botanical Gardens, Greyfriars Kirk (and the nearby Greyfriars Bobby Pub, with its bronze statue of Greyfriars Bobby outside, the wee faithful terrier that sat patiently on his dead master's grave for fourteen years until dying himself in 1872. That seems a suspiciously long life for a Skye Terrier, but what do I know? The statue is cute, its nose is rubbed shiny by all the tourists, and we had to queue up just to get a chance to take a picture, after a young couple from England, a large tour group of Japanese, and the extended family of some South Americans.

Distorted room at Camera Obscura

We also went into the Camera Obscura, a museum built in 1853 with a real camera obscura on the fifth floor, the pinhole apparatus being attached to the roof with a swivel, and reflecting its picture of the city onto a white wooden bowl in the middle of the room, which we all croweded around while our Swedish (yeah, it's a summer job) guide explained what we were seeing. Unfortunately, the day was overcast, so the picture was dim, but I still got a sense of what those mid-19th-century people must have felt seeing their city in miniature, flags waving, tiny tourists walking across even tinier cobblestones. Downstairs, there were rooms full of holograms, optical illusions, and mirrored mazes. There was a room that looked like a normal room from one central position, but, once you entered it, it was clear that it was terribly distorted. My son and I stood in two corners of the room (see above, and know that my son is taller than I am), and the effect to the onlooker was surreal–we look like we're built to different scales. But both the floor and ceiling are tilted, and those windows along the back wall are not square at all.

Then there was the bridge across the "Spinning Vortex" (spinning tubular walls with lights), which, though absolutely stationary, felt as if it were tilting drunkenly to the side. We staggered across the bridge, clinging to the railing, feeling as if we were in imminent danger of falling, though nothing was moving at all. If you closed your eyes, the sensation of falling vanished instantly. My daughter and son and his friend went across multiple times, laughing with glee; after a second time across, I felt faintly ill, and watched from the sidelines after that. Amazing how suggestible the human brain is.

Old Town Bookshop in Edinburgh

On our last full day in Edinburgh, I insisted that we visit a bookshop specializing in rare and antique books, with a special emphasis on Scottish authors and Scottish history. I found a whole shelf of leather-bound Scott novels printed on tissue-thin paper, and had a choice of a three- or a five-volume set of the collected poems of Robert Burns. I had no idea the man was so prolific. I settled on the three-volume set. While I love Burns, there is a limit to how much I Burns I can take in one sitting.

So now this blog entry has stretched ridiculously long and ridiculously late, so I am cutting it off here and making the Glasgow part of the trip a separate entry. In Burns's famous words, "The best-laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley." Cheers! (Scottish all-purpose word that seems to mean hello, thanks, and good-bye, depending on the situation)