Edinburgh, in permanent pre-spring. Hard stoned and blue. The glasshouse, The Scott Monument in a whirl of snow, an alley in the University district. Only a model of the town, showing it in 17th century layout, looks warm, Mediterranean. Let’s go and live there in the tiny houses, rake the wee gardens, sun ourselves.
Nothing to do but wait and blow on our fingers.
Filed under Uncategorized
Today D and I made our way back to the National Museum of Scotland with the aim of walking through the exhibit on Dr David Livingstone, explorer, missionary and abolitionist. True to his reputation, he was a little hard to find. The exhibit was tucked away on the third floor of the new part of the museum. It was interesting, if a bit piecemeal.
Livingstone was born into a cotton mill worker family, and worked at the mill from the age of 10. An exceedingly bright boy, he was taught to read and write, then taught himself Latin. He saved up enough money to go to University in Glasgow, but to save a penny on the cart fare, had to make his way on foot up the river clyde from Blantyre every morning. Good training for his later rambles around Malawi and southern Africa. There was a video, filmed in Malawi, talking to residents there in the Malawian town of Blantyre – they seemed happy with his legacy there, of his pacts with local tribe leaders to end the East African-Indian Ocean slave trade.
But I am suspicious of heroes, particularly of strong men of the British Empire who, regardless of whether they were doing good themselves, went into ‘the dark continent’ with the aim of opening it up to Europe. There wasn’t a lot of analysis, and only one dissenting voice was lightly mentioned, that of John Kirk, the botanist who traveled on one of Livingstone’s expeditions. Livingstone was, it seemed, a hard leader. And then there was that famous meeting with Stanley, where the presumed Dr Livingstone refused to come back to Britain, and later died in a village in Malawi of a nasty combination of Malaria and Dysentery.
Well, whoever he was (D wants to read his journals now), we saw his little navy cap and his nice sketch of a fish from Lake Malawai.
I enjoy visiting the museum, which has free entry, and it’s a good thing too. Coming in the new year, after I’ve finished this second ms (May at the latest, I hope), I will be going there a lot. And to the grand Central Library on George IV bridge. Research for novel number 3. It is going to be about a strong, egotistic leader and her followers, and set in the wastes of Edinburgh. I’ll not reveal too much more before I have an outline in place. As you can see from the picture above, there’s a certain atmosphere to the city in winter – a soft harshness – which I want to learn and replicate for my postapocalyptic version. Anyway, that’s enough for now.
The other piece of news I have is that Smokelong Quarterly is coming out next week. In it will be my Edinburgh-based flash, ‘Boy Cyclops’, and an interview with me (first ever interview!), facilitated by the excellent writer Casey Hannan. (Casey’s book, Mother Ghost, is available on pre-order from Tiny Hardcore Press. His writing is really beautiful and weird and compelling, and I’ll be picking it up when I can). When Smokelong goes live I’ll link to it here, and you will have lots to read, should you wish.
Finally! Don’t forget to submit your photograph for my competition! The deadline is the 31st of this month.
Here’s a song for this post: Laura Marling’s ‘Old Stone’. I like to think the ‘you’ she is addressing is the city itself, and the volcanic rock much of it sits on.
A refrain of rock and clinging moss. The ground under these leaves I think where once the Nor loch stood. Outcasts – unwed mothers, ‘deviants’ and like criminals were occasionally thrown into the loch to drown, and their bones lie under the bones of the respectably buried. But this time let’s not linger. The city is not all steeped in such a mood.
Most early afternoons I walk back from work thinking of the way the wind and cold have stripped back the greenery and darkened, higgledy stones. Here the ivy persists on one side, forming a contrast that highlights the absence, the dying, elsewhere. Environment as editor, removing excess. Elsewhere, humans have more actively written themselves onto the canvases of near ruined space:
This is up behind the University of Edinburgh main campus. I can’t help but feel more could be done with these mews. Maybe because I’d like to live in one myself. Little cottage in the city.
I love the way the shadow covers the cobbles and washes against the side of the mechanics. I love the difference each cobble carries, the breakages, the inconsistancies which mark a lingering presence, something repaired and patched over time. The road was not the only thing I found repurposed but left fragmentary, left with its half-sentences intact. The grammar of this city might have changed over time, but the words don’t always alter.
Closer to home I came across a mysterious sign -
Clearly, in this area, there was no longer a bowling club (that’s the more frequently found outdoor lawn bowls, rather than the American indoor style).
Behind it, there is some kind of official looking building – perhaps Crown Lands or Parliamentary business. And yet, the doorway to this non-existent place remained:
Did I push the doorbell? Of course! It went in, and though I listened, I couldn’t hear the bell. No admittance to the club, this time.
Filed under Uncategorized
Do you have a quote you can bring to mind, or have found recently – I won’t ask for a favourite – but something that you find incredibly precise or beautiful in its attention to language? Or where the ideas stir you and seem the best articulation of something you’d perhaps never thought to think?
I want to quote here from Heroines. Specifically, towards the close of the book, where she utters part rallying cry, part acknowledgement to the community of writers online, part kick, part song to being thin skinned and writing despite lack of recognition.
I want just to say, I felt it all.
“I’m tired of trying to hurl my girl-body against the great unfeeling fortress of academia and old-guard literary publishing”
and
“In a way this subculture of literary blogs, fluid, amorphous, non-hierarchical, functions as a community of solidarity, privately and publically – fighting against feelings of illegitimacy and invisibility, of feeling like ghosts in the physical world”
and
“We cannot wait around to be discovered. If you can’t write masterpieces, why write? the doctors said to Zelda [Fitzgerald].”
I would quote it all. I can’t. But I think of light, when I put this down.
How the internet is light broken up and reformed, broadcast in pixels, in beams. How the internet is a trembling net of light across the world. Marvel. How words on the internet and in books are tiny darknesses printed on white. Of the smallness of words that have traveled a long way, visible, invisible, here and now, gone, shared. And I am thankful for how much good writing there is still left to transmit and cheer, from one place to another.
Filed under Edinburgh
Onwards, to Camden!
I’d tired myself out walking, so thought I’d give a rest to my legs and take the way of the future – the underground!
Camden at lunchtime was colourful and bustled with hungry young people. The markets on Inverness St stuffed with hundreds of tee shirts printed with the ubiquitous ‘Keep calm do X’ slogans, Camden High Street lined with knock off headphones and heart shaped sunglasses.
Unfortunately, I was going the wrong way – I had taken the wrong spoke of the roads that cross the canal. An easy thing to do, my friend G later told me. Camden is tricky if you don’t know the lay of the streets.
But if I hadn’t got lost, I wouldn’t have seen how lovely it was in the sunshine.
Eventually I turned around, and worked out where I was to meet my agent. After a coffee underneath an overhead tube line (possibly a bad idea, shaking me every few minutes) and another read of NW, this time actually in an NW postal code area, I headed to the pub for our meeting.
And what news did I hear there? Well, the future for Kilea is uncertain. Drea is still supporting it, and had some suggestions. I am so grateful to her for her dedication and hard work with my quiet literary novel. It slinks like seagull above the clouds, keeering. Cross your fingers that one day it will find the right place to roost.
However! Progress with the second novel, Dear Friends and Gentle Hearts is underway, with two extracts of it out or forthcoming in online literary journals, and submissions planned later, when more work has been done on it. That shall be the effort of the next few months – editing the novel, deepening it, firming it up. The best sort of hard work, and with Drea’s support (and that of D, my first reader), I hope to produce something that will be watertight and compelling, that will, crucially, find its way into the wider world.
I feel touched too to have readers, here, who are following my progress. It’s been a long year of hoping and struggling along, and nothing is ever certain. Some days are spent burrowing down into the work, others in combing my emails for news, for some breakthrough. Your comments are like fairy lights, warming in the dark.
I know other writers are right now, at various stages in their careers, chipping away at the same coalface. Pushing their skills forward, trying to be ambitious in their writing, though their life circumstances are not always the most favourable for fostering imaginary worlds or the careful construction of sentences. For art, for storytelling.
Solidarity has helped me along. Excellent role models are everywhere. You know who you are, and that you have my admiration, my love for your words and your painstaking skill with them, and your honesty and necessary lies that illuminate the truth.
And to the rest of my day in London? Spent in meeting friends – fellow writers, storytellers too: C, G and J, in that order. A trip to the Barbican building with C, to stare out at the fountains in the lowering dark, discussing C’s adventures past and present. Out for Vietnamese food in Shoreditch with G, who is fighting the man and planning her novel, which I’ve had the privilege of reading in early draft – when things happen there, I shall direct you to her site, with her permission. A drink of juice in a pub with J, to whom strange and unbelievable things happen as a matter of course.
And then to the tube station, and then to Euston, and the sleeper. My tiny berth with only me in it (the other passenger lost somewhere in the big city), and me falling into an exhausted semi-sleep, dreaming my way North again.
Walking home from work the other day across North Bridge I saw the sun gleaming on the roof of Waverley train station, and the castle on the hill silhouetted against that sky, and the spire of the Scott Monument to the right. Walter Scott, who I’ve never read, wrote the Waverley novels after which the station is named. Shall I read them, ever, I ask myself. So many more books. Such a profusion.
I’ve recently thought to add Ford Madox Ford to the list, after the wonderful (if mumbly) production of Parade’s End. If you haven’t watched it or had the chance to yet, I recommend you seek it out. Not something I’d ever really go for – a landowning Tory statistician trying to live honourably by his philandering wife, despite falling in love with a much more wholesome suffragette and facing the dismantling horrors of World War One. But it’s one of those rare examples of lush BBC drama brought convincingly to life with excellent actors. Little scene-chewing here, just subtle hand movements and flashing eyes and rich draping fabrics coupled with oddly stagey set pieces. Tom Stoppard wrote the script and apparently this is something of an achievement, given the source material’s anti-narrative, Modernist style. Which makes me want to read it all the more. That and FMF encouraged Jean Rhys (after or before their affair, I’m not sure). How does the one feed into and complicate the other?
So that’s the week, the last few weeks. Watching this drama of restraint and farce and dizzying luxury. Waiting and working and reading. And being disappointed and carrying my bags and planning. And being anxious about the future of my first book and my current manuscript. Taking long breaths out, stretching my arms in front of me and behind. Creeping inch by inch across the pages and hours. Do I make progress, or do I just hope I do?Time progresses, regardless. The sun burnishes the panels of glass and blackens the old stone buildings, the clouds in the sky arrange themselves like silks and wool. And it is beautiful, and I despite it all, have time to notice.
Back to the gloaming, which has been so elusive this summer, and up Salisbury Crags.
Up to join the other dusk-time photographers there, trying to capture the city as the city – a whole spread out, something which can be made to fit on a postcard or print.
I suppose this last picture counts towards the challenge of the title. Just that the figures are all unseen, crawling their way through the streets, lurking down closes or muttering something in every pub, some dull and wonderful dialogue with their day.
Filed under Edinburgh
We walk the dusk, the gloaming, cuffing The Meadows, watching the sliver/slipper of the moon evading all attempts to capture it on film. We walk past the gable-ended houses, the closes, the fringes of the university.
We note the places where the light gathers like dust in the overshadowed courtyards.
We see the old hairdressers that has been there since I can remember, Violet in the violet hour. Kitsch becoming something else, more elusive. An old photo of yourself as a child, with relatives now dead, a time you can’t remember.
We walk past modernity, symbol of the New Scots settling in. The lighted windows, the rushing cars.
Above are the gardens you cannot get in to, looking out on the field (below) that belongs to everyone.
We cut a path into the new development on the park, the looming offices, mostly empty. All lights on here, ready for some bright future pre-recession Edinburgh seemed to hold.
And there is space for the dark too. And it all soon passes, and we walk back to our flat, and into our own box of warmth and light, however parceled and temporary.
I normally post pictures of the older parts of Edinburgh – since where I live, in the Old Town, is dominated by cobbled streets and the damp dark undersides of bridges…but that’s only one side of the story. Modern buildings (mid 2oth century and older) stand often shoulder to shoulder with the historic city and the ancient volcanic landscape.
Council housing near Holyrood Park - Salisbury Crags in the background.
The other side of the street, and an old VW camper van
Graffiti in Potterow, near Edinburgh University
From the Poetry Library towards another view of the Crags
Very blue hotel, tucked into a street close by the Parliament
More council housing - right next to the Palace of Holyrood House (have a search for that if you like for comparison)
Flats just off the Royal Mile, facing a very nice courtyard
Some of these places I’d never seen in all my time in this city. It’s a place that requires wandering, diversion, tangential walks to more fully discover. I must keep trying, rambling the periphery, taking a measure of things.
Instant(/Instance of) Nostalgia
Harking back to this post from November, I am trying to hold an elusive love for this city, which is so beautiful, and sometimes so difficult for me to love.
Facing down the Royal Mile from the Castle Esplanade
To love any city, you must forgive its clutter of people, its indolence, its indifference, sternness, distance.
A walk through The Meadows
Victoria Terrace
Victoria St, taken from Victoria Terrace, in bright and near-balmy air
There will always be history; streets stacked upon streets. The writing of others. There will always been this fine balancing act between peace and chaos, between the unsaid and the unsayable.
Greyfriar's Kirkyard, looking towards Candlemaker Row
To love this city, Edinburgh, I have to move past my past, the written and unwritten signs, palimpsests, to make old markers new.
Ramsay Gardens, on the Esplanade
Over the cityscape to the Pentland Hills
Resignify. Remake. Write over. Learn to see. Gather. Write my own story between the stone and the sky.
