Abroad among people ii: Scotland

In between chapters of  Irving's Tales of the Alhambra...not a long book, but nice to read each short piece and leave a few days to let it dry, so to speak, as it is that 19th century romantic style thick enough to need a bit of air), I have been re-reading Alain de Botton's The Art of Travel, a copy of which was first found, as I have already noted, on the shelf in the apartment in Lady Lawson street, Edinburgh.  I have my own copy now, and like the Tales, it is best opened every few days, though for different reasons...deBotton's style, compacted and highly referential, needs some air, too.

Anyway, it put me in mind of a lady we met for lunch on our second or third day in Scotland's capitol city, in a pub on the busiest corner of the High Street, Deacon Brodies Tavern, chocked (though not yet choked, though I could see it easily might be) with tourists and a few recognized locals, and organized by bar maids with strong voices, kind intentions, and efficient hands.  We found a small table one over from the corner window, and in less time than it took to choose and order from up at the elaborate bar, out came marvelous smoked haddock fish cakes, curried, and a salad of seeds, fruit and lettuce I really liked.  In deference to my friend Denise, who had made it her serious business to try local ales and to compare Guinesses wherever we took pub meals, I tried the house Guiness there, though gave it to her to finish--I am not, nor really ever have been, fond of beer, though certainly it did not spoil my palate for the meal.  I'd probably go back to Edinburgh just for that lunch again...and a few others.

At some point, we moved over to the window seats, when they were vacated, to make room for a woman from Maryland, who was visiting her daughter and son-in-law on business there...the couple each hop from office to office internationally, though affiliated with different concerns.  We chatted awhile about travels and home; her husband, she said, doesn't like traveling, so she goes it alone or tags along on her children's ventures, wandering while they worked.  She seemed to like the mix of her own company during the day, and the children to talk over her discoveries in the evening.  I could see why.

Her husband's dislike of being away from home, however, brought to mind what I had been reading the night before in an early de Botton chapter, where so much is said of people's yearning to travel elsewhere, so that they might escape the ordinary realities of their lives.  When they get wherever they think is ideal, however, they are often disappointed, for what they find, taking themselves with them wherever they go, is simply more ordinary reality.

That is, if (I must nudge de Botton a little here), that's the way you choose to see it, a cowl over your senses.  Anyway, there she was, and there we were, and after our separate repasts, off we went to our different wanderings...Denise to her tour of underground Edinburgh and I to St. Giles, which I spent hours in, just reading the walls...but I think I've already told you about that.

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Here is what I most admired about Edinburgh, and what, in consequence, I came to find strange in juxtaposition to it.  Saturday morning found us heading for the Parliament and the Palace, two more opposite constructions of the Scottish people I cannot imagine.

It was market day in the Grassmarket, so while we waited for the bus up to the High Street, we visited a few of the interesting booths there, including one with several kinds of tapenade and curry paste we tasted and liked.  The fellow who had made them was someone I would have liked to spend a few more minutes talking to, for he had all sorts of ideas about combinations of hummus, tapenade, mediterranean and mushroom and garlic and herb, but the bus was coming, so off we went.  We had a ride all around the town til it lighted at Parliament at the bottom of the Royal Mile, so named for its span between the castle above and the Queen's Scottish residence house below.  I'd seen the Parliament building before, but only from the outside; this time we were due for a tour.  

Fortunately, we stepped off a block or so before we had to, and crossing the street, I spotted a chalk sign on the pavement...the way to the Scottish Poetry Library and headed toward it, with barely an apology to poor Denise.  I'd been thinking about that place for days, remembering when Will first introduced it to Jake and me and I fell in love with it.

A lovely quiet light-filled place of reference and borrowing, it holds Scottish works of poets, essayists, critics and historians one can read there in comfortable chairs, or work at tables.

And bring the children to its children's corner...all the right scale and coziness for young ones.  Fortunately, since I wasn't a citizen and couldn't borrow, there was a small but well-stocked bookstore where I bought two books of Scottish poetry, though I had to leave behind Eavan Boland's memoir...I made a note to acquire it when back in Chapel Hill.  Just being in so easy and word-rich a space was heady almost--I could have spent half a day in it, reading and writing.  Alas. Our day was written for.

But then it was lunch hour, so we stepped across the street to Clarinda's, a tea room I'd made note of on our roundabout tour of the city the day before.  Touristy, yes, its walls decorated with crockery and teapots of every sort and a sweets table so loaded with Scottish pastries of legendary size, one could hardly countenance the real lunch to come.  But that was good, too...the soups, lentil and tomato, mushroom, carrot, which I had, and the tea strong and just right to battle the wind outside.

The Parliament, down the hill a bit, grows slowly as you, walking toward it, try to take in its size, shape, symbols and sensibilities.  For me it was the inspiration of the journey, equal to the Scottish Poetry Library in its light, accessible space, so astutely designed with every consideration to reflect an accessible government.

That quality shone from every detail, including the cut-outs on the walls of the legislative chamber, forms which, the guard explained to us, are the citizens of Scotland, looking over their shoulders at those who legislate for them. That its sole purpose is the regard of the Scottish people.  That word regard bears a huge responsibility, actually...not only the consideration of its citizenry but the requirement to look after it and the reminder, engraved on the walls of its chamber, who it is they legislate for, not to or at.  Even on a day when there are no onlookers in the visitors gallery, always open, there they are.  Politicians everywhere are what they are, no getting around it, but to be reminded in their very chambers of their real charges...it seems to me that that's what "for the people and by the people" means.

Outside in the lobby, there were standing wooden posters with videos of real citizens, life-size, moving and talking as if they stood in body among us, explaining their views and takes on the way political life impacts their daily lives:  reasoning voting rights for 16 year olds and proper land use and the experience of growing up in care...even the Scottish form of signing for the deaf.

There were words on walls everywhere...words one couldn't neglect, words from every age, it seemed like, admonishments and instructions, reminders and recollections.  Wry Scottish humor was not excluded.

We left after our tour and crossed the street from the Parliament to Holyrood Palace, so quick and sudden a shift from the open to the closed, the light to the dark, apparent to appearance, shared to restricted.

Except for the haunting Abbey, and the dining room, a lovely light-filled chamber, hospitable to les invitees--in form, my ideal of a dining room--the quite beautiful stone palace in its setting against the green crags and Arthur's seat held little attraction for me, and I admit that though I spent a long time in the dining room, I raced through the rest, not bothering with Mary's bedroom so ill-fated.  At a display of herbal inventions in the salon, a kind guard showed me a short cut to the outside, where I stayed in the reflective mood of the old ruin more peaceably.

This is not my photograph...none are allowed inside the palace;
only the ruins and edifice outside are permitted to photograph.

The Parliament, built on tradition but open to what is and what is to come...I wonder that no one sees how differently the Queen's residence represents her (arguably reluctant) subjects.  Coming out of the palace, the sun now just at the tips of the crags, hitting the gold turrets, I admired at least the outline of the place for its beauty against that sky, but looked back at the Parliament for the real clue to the Scottish people.

Oh, gosh.  There is so much more to write about Scotland and its people...Stirling, Dunblane, Glasgow.  Then Cardiff, Wales.  I don't know when I will get that done.

Meanwhile, here are our photos from the Royal Botanical Garden, also in Edinburgh.

It's a lovely place, too.  I'd love to tell you about the Portrait Gallery, which, after a wandery walk, we  finally found a bus for (the first and only snippy driver in our visit to the country; though we are standing smack under the sign for the bus stop, he almost skims past us, then snaps at us, "You have to have your hand out to stop me!" humphing righteously as we find our seats) then walked to after the RBG, but my head is a blur, after all this, so I'm back to copying my journal:

Inside, I surprise myself by admiring the sculpted heads and murals most.  I am usually a painting and artifact admirer.  But the portraits--as in the Queen's palace yesterday--such elaboration of attitude and manor/manner.  Still, there are many bright spots.  Scottish inventors are plentiful and women join the ranks as masters from three centuries ago in mathematics, writing and literature, heads of state and national boards--an interesting history unfolds beneath the beaked noses and ruffed collars.  There is also an exhibit called Look Forward, from two contemporary artists collaborating in portraiture:  Audrey Grant, who works in charcoal on a portrait of a photographer, Norman McBeath, which she erases and begins over each day, taking years to finish a sketch, though in fact there have been hundreds of sketches before it (each erased)

Each characterizes itself by the day, the sitter's aspect, the time, the artists' energies...and that is her point in doing so.  Not a single portrait of one at one moment, but one that builds its history one at a time, through what might be called invisible overlays, and brings forth something she hopes will emerge as she absorbs the history her hands have accumulated.  When her sitter and subject, McBeath, begins to photograph each sketch before its erasure to record each version, he is going back to linear time to frame his work, so there is both unconventional and conventional recording going on.
  

Norman McBeat's portrait of Audrey's hands

But he does something more...much more fascinating to me is the competing perspective on what constitutes the capture of time in art, the perspectives to show us versions of  time which, like the Parliament and the Holyrood, allow us to stare into permanence and impermanence at once and do not dismiss either as being of lesser worth.  I see how change can eat into time, hollowing it in spots, enlivening it in others.  So many ways of looking at these works swirl in my head at the time...I catch a thread, trying to follow it, when another wings through and I am trying to bring it down to seed level, bringing each down to seed level as fast as I can.

I know this work is going to follow me home, and here I am, overlaying my first thoughts with these faraway latest ones.

It's Sunday, the last day of our stay in Edinburgh, and by then I feel like a table leg myself, dry and cracked, so I offer to splurge on a taxi ride to dinner, which we had planned to have in a pub down Advocate Close, at the Devil's Advocate (perfectly named for the moment and my head).  When we are left off back on the High Street, we find the close descends straight down in sets of stairs that eventually lead to Prince Street below.  The DA, a dark, cozy, half-buried place, is only halfway (like the grand old Duke of York), and though it's gloaming, it's also too early, we are told by the barman, for dinner...we haven't minded the fact that the fall-back time change has occurred.  But he assures  they do have a salmon board, among others, to offer with a drink.  We settle into a booth and order wine (me) and ale (D)...hers so dark and chocolatey it could be near-cocoa.  Given such libation, we wind down, the board comes, laden with three kinds of salmon, a chive-cream spread, pickled beets, cornichon, country bread, oatcakes, piccallilli with white fish, and something else...what was it?...of course, sliced apples.  

Our snack becomes supper after all.  I wonder, as I'm exclaiming over the butter salmon and beets and whatever else I can pile on an oatcake, why I don't make such fare at home, even given the fact that salmon of this calibre isn't likely to be got anywhere in my neighborhood.  We linger even after the plates and board are cleared, the staff being indulgent in this regard, so that the walk home, even up those stairs holding on to the sills of the now-lit apartments that line the close, and down the Victoria hill and up again from the Grassmarket seems easy, even welcome in our mellow state.