[Again, this is being posted months after the trip–a good portion of it was written while still in Scotland, some upon our return, but Blogger somehow ate several hours of writing, so a lot of this is being reconstructed from memory. Also, procrastination (see earlier blog entry).]
Glasgow street in state of dilapidation
Now we've moved on to Glasgow, to our decidedly
more urban flat. At first, when we got here, we had a bit of culture
shock; this was not our beloved medieval, picturesque, refined Edinburgh. It is
squalid, weedy, trash-strewn, run-down, marred by graffiti and disrepair.
The River Clyde, grey and muddy, gives off a distinct odor of sewage in places. The city
is riddled with dirt-mounded construction sites and large cranes in
preparation for hosting next year's 20th Commonwealth Games.
But our very obliging landlord, Mr. Macdonald (yes, really, there are
people here named after that fast-food chain), took us on a wee tour of the
city when we arrived (Am I overdoing the word "wee"? Possibly, but I
think not. It's used whenever the slightest hint of smallness creeps into conversation), before depositing us at our
comfortable flat on the south side of Glasgow Green, a large swath of
park to the southwest of the center of town. Slowly, as the week has progressed, we have become more aware of the city's beauties.
Our
first move, however, was to hike a mile and a half to the local Tesco (a kind of British A&P or
Kroger or Piggly Wiggly–pick whichever American supermarket chain you find to be
most ubiquitous) to buy provisions for dinner and the following day. The
kids discovered nearly an entire aisle of biscuits (cookies to us
Yanks) and, when I told them sternly that
we could absolutely not get one package of every variety, agonized for nearly twenty minutes over what kinds to buy. The boys' favorite has
turned out to be Jaffa Cakes, a spongey cookie with marmalade inside and a
dark chocolate coating on top. My daughter, the sweets fanatic, likes the plain tea biscuits best (they are plain wafers with very little sugar), much to my surprise. Both types of biscuit go very well with Scottish tea. The
boys have rationed the Jaffa Cakes–no more than three a day per person, which means
a packet lasts two and a half days instead of one. Of such small
sacrifices is life compounded.
Immediately following the Tesco
excursion, the kids discovered a fantastic playground on the Green,
with 20-foot tall slides and amazing climbers, and proved that 15 is
still a kid–the boys played just as avidly as my 10-year-old daughter.
Also, watching my children scale those vertiginous heights with only a
thin layer of sand on top of packed earth below, I theorized that the
Scottish are a far less litigious society than the Americans.
The Barras
Kids at a candy stall in the Barras
Our first full day in Glasgow we wandered over to the Barras,
a sort of year-round weekend flea market that has been taking place
since the 1920s in open stalls and covered malls. "Barra" is the
Glaswegian dialect for "barrow," as goods were originally sold from
large wheelbarrows. There were piles of discarded electronics, used
clothing, designer handbag knock-offs, kilts, T-shirts, used DVDs and
CDs, food of all kinds, and used furniture. The children gravitated
toward a stall selling candy. My daughter had a great find–she
managed to fish a lovely sterling silver Celtic-knotwork ring out of a bowl of rings (it
looked like a serving of metallic spaghetti) and paid only £5 for it.
Later that day I resolved we should have tea at the Willow Tea Room, mentioned in the guidebook as a lovely representation of Glaswegian architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh's Art Nouveau style. Well, off we set on foot. I figured an afternoon tea would serve us in place of a late lunch. The Tearoom didn't look that far away on the map, but the streets of Glasgow do not meet at right angles, no matter what our charming landlord asserted: "It's the first European city constructed on a grid pattern, ye know." Also, to make things more interesting, the playful city planners leave off street signs at more confusing intersections. After walking for forty-five minutes, turning, turning again, retracing our steps, and staring at the map in frustration, the kids revolted. They sat down on a curb and refused to go another step. "We're hungry!" they moaned. "Our feet hurt! Let's just eat anywhere!" There was a McDonald's close by (no relation to our charming and inaccurate landlord), and I shuddered.
"Come on!" I encouraged. "It can't be more than three blocks from here!" I turned the map again and frowned. "Unless we're here, and then we're eleven blocks away. Or..." I turned the map again and blinked. "Never mind!" I chirped. "We're close!" The children glared at me mutinously. My son delivered the ultimatum: "We'll walk ten more minutes and that's all. Then we have to eat." "Fine, fine!" I hastily agreed. "Ten minutes, then food, no matter what."
Afternoon tea in the Willow Tea Room
After a few more false turns, I started to get desperate. As the minutes ticked away, I finally got up the courage to approach one of the natives. "Um, we're trying to find Sauchiehall Street...." (Trying frantically to figure out how to pronounce it, vacillating between "Soshy-hall Street" and "Sowchee-hall Street," I eventually settled on the latter) "Whaire. loove?" asked the perplexed Glaswegian. "Here!" I said, thrusting the guidebook into his hands and pointing at the word. "Ah!" His face lit up with comprehension, "So-key-hall Street! It's just over thaire!" He gestured, and the murderous looks on the kids' faces softened a little. In the end, it did take us a few more than ten minutes to get there, but we made it. And we had a wonderful afternoon tea there, each of us with our own little pot: Earl Grey for my daugher, Darjeeling for my son, Scottish Breakfast for my son's friend, and the shop's own Willow Tea Blend for me. My son and I ordered the full afternoon tea set, so ours came on a three-tiered platter with crustless sandwiches on the bottom, scones with clotted cream in the middle, and cake on top. Sitting on elegant ladder-back chairs that echoed the designs on the walls, sipping scalding tea and eating those scones dripping with strawberry preserves and clotted cream, we gazed around at the lovely light fixtures and decorations in the Glasgow Style. Bliss, Scottish-style! Also, the triumph of pigheaded determination over whining.
People's Palace
My favorite attraction in Glasgow turned out to the be the People's Palace, which was located on the Green, only ten minutes from our flat. In addition to the over-the-top fountain crowned by a statue of Queen Victoria outside, it featured room after room of recreations of moments in time in the working class and bourgeois history of Glasgow from the 18th century until about the 1970's. There was the Single End, a model of a single-room family apartment from the 1930's, where an entire family ate, slept, and lived. There was the Steamie, a public building where women would go to bathe and to wash clothes and gossip. And there was a World War II family bomb shelter, where the family would go during the air raids. I stood rapt in front of exhibits on contraception, the temperance movement, and dancehalls, only to look up at the end and find the children camped out on the staircase, moaning, "Can we go now?" The plaintive cry of the modern 21st-century child with the 140-character attention span.
View from ferry of unknown castle on banks of Loch Lomond
Two days before we were scheduled to fly home, we took a day trip to Loch Lomond, the largest loch in Scotland, but the day was chilly, overcast, and rainy. By the time we caught the ferry out to the island of Inchmurrin, which featured an inn and some Roman ruins, we barely had time for a soggy lunch of fish and chips before we had to get back on the ferry and return to the mainland. We never discovered the ruins, which even the tour guides assured us were "not mach ta see–bit disappointin', reeelly." Do Scottish tour guides even have to pass any sort of test on how to get tourists excited about local landmarks? Or maybe that's just as effusive as Scots get.
Children frolicking in secret garden
The children's moods were as dour as the weather when I suggested we take the footpath alongside the loch to see Balloch Castle, a manor house rebuilt in the early 19th century from the ruins of a 1238 castle. "Do we have to?" was the glum response to my chirpy suggestion. I quickly moved into Fierce Authoritarian Mode: "Yes, you do. Come on." We started off in a grudging, foot-dragging manner, but the mood transformed when, half-way to the castle, we found a walled garden. The kids frolicked (yes, they did, I assert defensively; they also gamboled and frisked. And rolled around on the grass) and then settled onto stone benches to read the books they had bought at Waterstones (sort of a British Barnes & Noble, but much, much better) the day before. It was exceedingly picturesque.
GeekMom in front of Balloch Castle
Nearly an hour later, we proceeded on toward the castle. We never found the ruins of the original castle, which I later read consist only of a grassy mound. Finally, we reached a large meadow studded with boulders in that picturesque Scottish way (I can just picture the Scottish Tourist Board inspectors walking about with clipboards, calling out to each other, "We cuid do with another wee boulder heere, Fergus."), and the disappointingly boxy, austere castle was in sight. My son, who had been looking green for the past half hour or so, suddenly flopped down onto the ground, moaning in agony from stomach pains, caused, no doubt, by the very greasy fish and chips we had had for lunch. We waited under the uncertain sky (kept threatening rain that never came) for him to recover, then walked up to the castle for a closer inspection. It was closed, and dismal up close, where evidence of modernization lay all around: exit signs, tourist pamphlets, vending machines. There was, however, a convenient public toilet, so my son recovered and we headed back to town.
Teens in playground
The day concluded with all three children playing in the local playground, another marvel of Scottish whimsy and total disregard for children's life and limb. then dinner at a pub, where we savored our last real Scottish meal, shepherd's pie for me, followed by sticky toffee pudding. The latter is a sweet, gooey slab of heaven studded with dates and drowning in caramel sauce, which looks like something that has been coughed up by a cow with an unsettled stomach. Never has something that looks so unappetizing tasted so good. And here is where I will end my travelogue of Scotland, with the memory of that warm, achingly sweet confection lingering in my mouth. I feel two weeks was not enough time to see even the tiniest portion of Scotland, but there is the dream that we will go back some day, to traverse the Highlands, to set foot on the Isle of Skye, and to explore the northern reaches of Loch Lomond. "O ye'll tak' the high road and Ah'll tak' the low/ And Ah'll be in Scotlan' afore ye...."
I know I said I'd write a post on this theme a while back, but I kept putting it off. [See what I did there? Ha, that's called humor!]
Seriously, though: "Hi, my name is GeekMom and I am a procrastinator." If there isn't a Twelve Step Program for this, there ought to be. Although I can appeal to a Higher Power all I like, my affliction doesn't seem to improve. Only fear seems to work: fear of public humiliation, fear of not meeting a deadline, fear of the stern look of disapproval on an authority figure's face. I have to create my own deadline for these blog entries and be my own stern authority figure in order to get them out in a timely fashion.
If there's a way of putting something off, I will, especially if it involves the writing down of coherent thought, or the filling out of forms. Thank God for accountants, or I would be under investigation by the IRS for never filing my taxes. But there are many other things one can put off nearly endlessly: trimming the hedge, washing the kitchen floor, taking the pets to the vet, getting the car inspected, sending thank-you letters, doing the laundry, writing a blog entry on procrastination.... Paradoxically, these can all be used as procrastination devices in turn for an even more onerous task, such as organizing one's office files. I find I never have a cleaner kitchen than when I'm preparing to do some filing.
Toad's To-Do List
I wasn't always a procrastinator. As a young child, I constantly drew up schedules for myself and followed them rigorously. I would cross out each item as it was accomplished, as Toad did in Arnold Lobel's story "The List" that appears in his book, Frog and Toad Together. In elementary school, I always did my assignments as soon as possible. My mother was suspicious that I never seemed to have homework, because I would do it during lunch and recess and leave it in my desk at school (Yeah, I was a serious nerd, even at age 7).
Once I got to junior high, smaller assignments would be done while having my milk and cookies after school at the kitchen table, larger assignments would be done a week in advance. I would wait until the deadline to hand them in, though, so I wouldn't provoke the jealous ire (or ridicule) of my classmates. By then I was getting an inkling that being a nerd was not going to be a social advantage.
By high school, however, I was starting to slip. I'd do the last of
my trig homework at midnight, or finish copying a paper over at
breakfast (back when papers were written in cursive in pen--only our
term papers required a typewriter (What's a typewriter, you ask? Oh
Lord, you're making me feel old!)). I'd find myself folding my laundry or sharpening all my pencils or making myself increasingly elaborate snacks as the night wore on, while successfully avoiding any actual work.
Then, with college and its concomitant lack of parental supervision and parentally supervised bedtimes came the dreaded All-Nighter, with its many cups of coffee and bleary, staring eyes, as I racked a brain that had mysteriously gone blank in my frantic quest for tree imagery in As You Like It or examples of the commodification of women in Thackeray's Vanity Fair. And finally appeared the fair and bewitching apparition of The Extension. Oh joy! To be given a day, two days, a week extra in order to complete a paper! Of course, you had to grovel before the Dean, but I learned to take groveling to a high art. I once callously used the premature and tragic death of someone I slightly knew from high school as an excuse for why I couldn't finish the paper in time, overcome as I was with grief at his passing. Even now I squirm with shame as I make my confession. Yes, I was shameless back then. And I still ended up staying all night to finish the paper, as I wrote nothing at all in the intervening week of grace.
So why do I procrastinate, if it makes my life so miserable? Why do any of us procrastinate? Well, as I'm a word geek, let's start with the origins of the word. It comes from Latin, the pro- meaning "forward," and crastinus meaning "of tomorrow" and its first known use was in 1548 by Edward Hall in a non-pejorative sense, to describe events leading to a wedding between two illustrious families being delayed by agreement. It wasn't until the mid-eighteenth century, according to Ferrari, Johnson, and McCown in their book, Procrastination and Task Avoidance: Theory, Research and Treatment, that procrastination began to take on its current, negative connotations. Schraw, Wadkins, and Olafson, in their paper, "Doing the things we do: A Grounded theory of academic procrastination" (Journal of Educational Psychology, Feb 2007, 12-25), have stated that, for the putting off of a task to be considered procrastination, it must meet these three criteria: it must be counterproductive, needless, and delaying. The "delaying" bit seems obvious; the other two not quite as much, but, after some thought, it becomes clear that these other two conditions must also hold true if a delay is clearly to be called procrastination. If you delay finishing a task because there is a fire in the building, you cannot be said to be procrastinating. If you delay finishing a task because you want to bake chocolate chip cookies first, it is procrastination. There is a sense that all the attempted definitions of procrastination ultimately point to a sort of psychological disorder.
In James Surowiecki's review in the New Yorker of the collection of essays entitled The Thief of Time: Philosophical Essays on Procrastination (ed. Andreou and White, Oxford: 2012), he says:
You may have thought, the last time you blew off work on a
presentation to watch “How I Met Your Mother,” that you were just
slacking. But from another angle you were actually engaging in a
practice that illuminates the fluidity of human identity and the
complicated relationship human beings have to time. Indeed, one essay,
by the economist George Ainslie, a central figure in the study of
procrastination, argues that dragging our heels is “as fundamental as
the shape of time and could well be called the basic impulse.”
Wow. The Fluidity of Human Identity. The Basic Impulse. I like that. So when I put off working on this blog entry, I am only experiencing the flow of my own identity, and am succumbing to that basic human impulse–to delay as long as possible. It's not a psychological disorder–it's human nature!
There are attempts at a Freudian definition of procrastination as the use of the pleasure principle to avert the stress and anxiety caused by the deadline for a difficult task, and there is the physiological definition of it as a struggle between the prefrontal cortex, which is in charge of executive brain function--things like planning, impulse control, and attention--and the limbic system, which governs things like emotion, behavior, and motivation. This whole argument, though perhaps not rigidly scientifically explained, is discussed quite charmingly by a young British vlogger called Charlie McDonnell in the video below:
"Stop Procrastinating" from charlieissocoollike on YouTube
Charlie also gives helpful advice on how to avoid the temptation to procrastinate. This particular vlog entry, I might add, is about his inability to get to work on his video log, just as the subject of my blog is how I've been procrastinating on my blog. My, it's all so meta!
For me, however, procrastination has become a way of life. I have actually been accused of thriving on it, which makes me crazy, because I hate the feelings of stress and desperation induced by prolonged procrastination. On the other hand, there is something about the rapidly diminishing minutes that drives an adrenaline push to that final effort, and there have been times when the pressure of the time crunch has led me to make certain leaps in thinking that might not have occurred to me had I been working in a more leisurely manner. So maybe my accusers aren't entirely wrong about this. Procrastination: it's not all bad.
