On the isle

 

 

This is the isle of Arran seen from the town of Troon. Out of order, as D and I went first to the island and then the town. But I wanted to start with this image of hazy beauty, and from there draw nearer.

 

 

 

The Caledonian MacBrayne ferry left from the mainland at Ardrossan Harbour. A rough crossing; earlier ferries had been cancelled, and the one that took us arrived with some  drama. As it took the narrow pass between the harbour walls, it started to lurch to one side in the swells. A gasp went up from the Cal Mac waiting room as it looked for a moment as if the boat would tip too far and slap into the water.

 

Thankfully, the captain manage to right things, and our crossing was a lot calmer than we had expected. D bought a nip of whisky as a palliative,  though I am of the opinion that it would have made matters worse. The crossing lasted 55 minutes and landed at one of the largest villages on Arran, Brodick.

 

 

 

Again, this photo is out of sequence, but the weather was the same: sun and gusts and flecks of rain.

 

D and I took a walk before picking up the later bus to our youth hostel in the North of the island. On our wanderings, we were mobbed by hungry ducks and geese, which we fed from a 50p bag of oats and other duck-appropriate snacks at the side of a woody path.

 

Along the roadside grew a profusion of this plant – raspberries, we thought. But like none we had seen before:

 

 

 

 

 

They did not taste as pungent as their red cousins, nor as sweet. Still, they were good with the Arran cheddar, Creeler’s hot smoked salmon and smoked salmon pate we bought at from shops at Queens Court.

 

But now to our youth hostel in Lochranza – the picture I shared yesterday was taken at the loch shore.

 

 

 

The staff at the youth hostel were so friendly (though D tells me, hard to get hold of when he was secretly arranging things). The rooms basic but scrupulously clean, and the views, of the rhododendron-blanketed back garden, or the loch-facing kitchens, were as gorgeous as any hostel I’ve stayed in. I hesitate to recommend this place as I’d rather it remain quiet for the next time we make it there, but really – it was lovely. A half minute stroll away was this:

 

 

 

The river meeting Loch Ranza, loch of the seals. An estuarine environment where the peereep call of Oyster Catchers stitches the air above the gentle hish of the waters over pebbles. The smell of salt and rotting seaweed fills your head. I associate the smell of the sea with healthiness, though it’s based on nothing at all. It never fails to make me feel better.

 

Further along from the hostel, the preserved ruined castle of the Macsweens sits on a spit of land.

 

 

 

Here’s a very short video I took on my camera of the panorama, taken from the very edge of the castle lands:

 

 

 

We walked on to explore Lochranza, and found this swing set:

 

 

If these are not the swings with the best view in the world, then I would like to know which are.

 

 

 

The next morning we went back, because a thirtieth birthday should definitely include swinging on the best swings in the world.

 

 

What else is there to say of my birthday? Well, there was cake in the morning, and this present from my parents:

 

 

 

 

I’ve only just started playing with it, but I’m amazed with how well it works. This same camera was the one my father used to take (I think) the first picture of me, at a few hours old, in the hospital. Here’s one taken 30 years on from that day at the harbour in Lochranza:

 

 

 

 

We left the island for Troon, which as you saw in the first image in this post sits on the West coast looking out at the island. Our hotel was a step up from the hostel (though sadly not as good as it should have been for a 4 star place). The beach stretched on for miles under the mild high sun. But if I had my way, I’d be on Arran still, exploring the lanes and shoreside. We had such a fleeting visit we missed out on the standing stones and had no time  climb Goat Fell, whose shard-like edges and stories of murder add a menacing edge to the island’s profile. For another week, for another adventure, Arran will be waiting.

 

 

 

A taste of travel

 

 

I turned 30 on the 16th of June and this Saturday, D whisked us off to the isle of Arran in the Firth of Clyde, where neither of us had ever been. The picture above was taken on the 15th at Lochranza, or loch of the seals. A great breath in of salt dusk air – and midgies, but they seemed especially sluggish and easily out-maneuvered.

 

Come back here tomorrow for strange berries, ruins, and of course stories and pictures of those deep and changeable Atlantic/Firth waters.

Sojourn

 

 

D and I are staying with our friend A in Hamilton while we wait to take up the lease in our new flat in Edinburgh. On Sunday we took an 8-mile walk around the loch above, in Strathclyde Country park. It’s an artificial loch, and somewhere beneath it is the rubble of a village and coal mine (I believe the same colliery that sank Hamilton Palace, displacing the dukes and duchesses forever more).

 

 

 

 

Under blue skies, Lanarkshire is in a different country entirely. What was this odd building? Something belonging to the council, mysteriously cordoned off to all but the birds.

 

 

 

 

Another feature of the loch’s artificiality, this overflow weir, feeding into the narrow river Clyde just across the road. The rhythmic surge made it quite hypnotic, while the pedalos added accents of rubber-duck yellow as their riders chased the birds.

 

 

 

 

The forested rim of the loch provided a break from the rare scorching heat ‘Taps aff’ weather, as people have started to call it. That’s weather that results in men taking their t-shirts off. Generally anything above 16C will lead to this in Scotland. Many women – white women, at any rate – by contrast turn orange overnight, either through tan beds or sunshine from the bottle. In the picture above you can see the opposite phenomenon – the forest floor turning fluffy-white with seed puffs scattered from some tree I don’t know the name of.

 

 

 

We also had a relaxing moment with some of these tadpoles – which always remind me of my childhood on Skye. In summer we would go and scoop up frogspawn to put in our repurposed paddling pool. Then peer over them, watching them grow from day to day.

 

 

I’m happily posting these pictures, though they give a slightly distorted impression of what our stay will be like. I have work through in Edinburgh, and a long commute of about an hour and a half (as opposed to my usual 25 minutes on foot). Most of the time we all be too tired to head out on adventures like this one. Though at the end of the week, something special -  I turn 30 on the 16th of June. And D is in charge of events. I suspect a small adventure might occur then.

 

For the rest of the week I shall be digging into books on the long train journey. My friend P gave me a gorgeous hardback of Life After Life by Kate Atkinson in return for my battered ARC copy of the heart-wrenching The Light and the Dark by Mikhail Shishkin. I have been flying through it, as I do with Atkinson’s fiction – I think I’ve devoured just about every one of her novels, aside  from the detective stories (crime fiction and I are not on speaking terms, generally). I hope to have a review for you of this absorbing slab of fiction in a few days time.

 

Until then – reading, working, living in A’s flat, and little writing at all until the move once again into a room of one’s own.

 

The cool air between the pines

 

D, A and I went walking this weekend in the woods of Chatelherot, close to where A lives. These were the old hunting grounds of the Lords (and perhaps ladies?) of Hamilton – the woods were kept and cultivated as an environment for deer and foxes.

 

Pictures of the forest, calming on a Monday. Take a deep breath, imagine the creaking of the branches. The flittering sounds in the leaves and red flash of robins. The streaming sunlight turning to washed-out white as the clouds are blown overhead. Here to the right is oak and beech:

 

 

 

Some of the oaks have been dated to the 1460s, when the parklands were planted, though the mounds around these wood monsters were shaped by iron age hands. Modern hands had tied a yellow ribbon round the branch of the tree below. And a millennial has been included for scale:

 

 

Sometime around the Second World War, Norwegian pines were planted – the giveaway is how all the trees in certain parts of the forest are around sixty to seventy years old and planted in straight lines:

 

 

 

We walked the eight kilometer trail which rises and falls, crosses the Green bridge over the river Avon, and climbs up to the rim of the valley, before returning to Chatelherot itself – a grand frontage which overlooks Hamilton, and which despite appearances, was never more than kennels for the hounds and a dining room and chambers for the hunting party.

 

 

 

The sunlight was high and the sky was blue and dashed with white cloud. It is almost Spring, it says – the 18th century buildings, the green short grass, the families out walking, the children rolling down hill, shrieking happily. Or if no Spring comes this year, it is promising something else. A good Summer, perhaps. A chance at a pause. Saying, wait. Look. Breathe in and out.

 

A good walk in a dark and light place. The smell of pines and a sheep farm. The steady, strangeness of ancient trees. A long field rolling out towards the townships.

 

Love Letter 6 – ‘Edinburgh, Scotland’

‘Edinburgh, Scotland’ appeared in ‘I <3 _____: Everywhere is the New New York’. Here it is in full, with pictures from previous posts:

 

To begin with, every city is about the people, of course. But in Edinburgh, the city is more about the interplay of stone, weather and light. The people have coursed through this space in its various forms for at least twelve centuries, but the stone and the weather and the angle of the sun outlast them all.

 

It’s easy to say we don’t have four seasons here, that we lack definites. Summer is cardigan weather most days. Winter, umbrella. Spring is much the same, and Autumn. But we do have two distinct seasons: the season of light and the season of dark.

 

In Winter, we wake to dark at eight, to bluish haze and the egg-yellow glow from the windows across the shared back green of our tenement.

In Summer, morning is at four, striking against the cliffs of Salisbury Crags. Stark outlines, warm tones against a keening pale blue, like a 1930s hand-drawn postcard version of itself. Dusk at eleven.

In Winter the dark comes knocking at four om, and some days it feels never light at all.

This is how we know our year, by the way the light or dark shapes our buildings, our volcanic rock.

 

From the summit of Calton Hill; Arthur’s seat, Salisbury crags (the long diagonal cliffs) and at their feet the Scottish Parliament (among other structures)

 

There’s something mournful about the city. I remember reading the writer AL Kennedy calling it a sad place, saying that she couldn’t live here through all that restrained sadness. I understand, yet here I am.

 

 

It’s cold and the sky lips the hill of Arthur’s Seat. The commuters walk down the blue and red North Bridge from the high-leaning higgledy of the Old Town over to eighteenth century New Town. The Crags and the Seat overlook them, leaning back in their mist. The commuters keep their hands in their pockets, their scarves neatly tucked at their throats.

 

Below, the train station, jimmied Victorian, glass encased, wonders if there will be another jumper from the bridge, remembers the days of steam and of ‘North Britain’. The grey shipwreck of the Scottish Parliament, off by the cliffs, whispers, wheesht. Shhh. Says, now really. We’ve more to show than those days.

 

It’s sometimes easy to get lost in the layers of the cake. How do we live here? It’s true that in Edinburgh, people are polite and reserved. That they won’t fight you so much as shake their head at you, judging. They are conservative in ways that defy the modern notions – socially progressive, politically too, they will purse their lips at someone speaking loudly in a cafe, wryly say, “oh that lot, there they go again.” The goth and punk kids stalk their limits of territory on Cockburn Street and Hunter Square. The arts fall within certain limitations, though artists are always there, pushing quietly back.

 

Festival time, in August, is the carnivalesque, the moment of sanctioned release. Here come the Irish, English, North Americans to tell us jokes and paint themselves silver. Here are the writers with books coming out, and issues to shuffle and spark. Then, when the month goes, most of them go too, and the grey stone re-solidifies, and the sounds muffle til the New Year. Hogmanay. A Viking longboat is dragged down North Bridge on a river of burning torches, then set alight by the unfinished pillars on Calton Hill. The dark is there, pressing tightly round us. History, of another part of the country altogether, really, pressing too. Dark at 3:40, that last first day of the year.

 

 

Beyond the feast days, it is a quiet city. Sometimes the breweries tang the air, bagpipes play on the street corners in the centre. Sometimes it’s a fraction of a scent or a reedy song you hear. Passing as you are under a wide dark bridge, up a cobbled narrow wynd, you become liminal, neither in one year or another. Adrift between the walls. The cities is entirely itself. It has grown and fossilised and now all that can change it is the weather, the light. Forces greater than human endeavour.

 

 

You could go into a kirkyard to see the gravestones, think: did you all feel the same? How little and how great a space you had to slip yourself within? The green, black stones are silent, it’s one-thirty and there is no sun. A great inevitability. But you’re already here, within the weather, breathing clouds. A narrow space in your own body. A line in the book of history, though your name itself might not be reported.

 

Right now. Here. Edinburgh. A yolk-yellow light beams from your own window, charming a rain-harried passer-by.

 

Departure

 

I am off to the wedding of my friends A and M, down in the English Peak District. Things will be quiet, but I hope to take advantage of the (presumably) lovely scenery and take a lot of photos – snow is predicted. Which I would be excited about, but it’s March, and March snow is always a little wearying.

 

Happy International Women’s Day and World Book Night (for yesterday). I shall be merging the two holidays by reading a book by a woman on the long train journey down – The Secret History by Donna Tartt.  So if the landscapes going by the train are gloomy and misted like the picture of the Meadows above, I shall have something to keep my mind off of it.

 

Wishing you a good weekend, and that if you are in the frozen Northern Hemisphere, that you stay as toasty as you please.

 

St Andrews

 

It was D’s birthday yesterday, and we went up to St Andrews to celebrate. The picture above shows the old cathedral, built in the 12th century and destroyed in the Scottish reformation in 1560. The University of St Andrews, where I studied for my undergraduate degree, was officially founded in 1410. So the place itself holds a great deal of history. But for D and I the more important history is the one we have a share in. This was the town where we met (ten years ago this coming October), and where D proposed.

 

The West Port, part of the remaining town walls

 

We spent all day wandering around, enjoying ourselves. We met A, and after lunch decided to go down to the Botanical Gardens. What follows are pictures from there. Not much commentary to add – it was just a lovely day, and a chance to breathe and be outside after a week of being mildly ill and working over an essay and edits.

 

St Andrew, patron saint of Scotland

 

Squash-like cactus

 

 

Space invader cactus

 

 

Redwood tree – actually quite a slim wee specimen

 

Pastries in Taste, a tiny cafe on North Street. I used to work here – the coffee is the best in the town.

 

 

The entrance to St Salvator’s Quad, where a student foam fight is held every year in balmy October

 

 

One last picture from our travels. Fields bathed in the lights from Leuchar’s train station, a few miles outside of St Andrews.

 

 

 

More of London, snow

Le Grande Foyles

 

Some fragments – a journey is never really complete when retold.

 

But here they are, gathered a bit.

 

A trip to London wouldn’t be complete without a visit to one of its fine bookshops, and Foyles was the perfect place for a wander on a gnawing cold day. I picked up Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet, her essays/pieces on love in Classical and other literatures, but didn’t buy it then. I’m blessed at the moment with an abundance of books to read. Some old – The Twelve Chairs, which I mentioned a while back, The Polyglots by William Gerhardie, kindly sent by Melville House Publishing when I was stricken with a chest cold – and some new -Errantry by Elizabeth Hand is burning in my TBR pile.

 

The dim unheated grandeur of Westminster Hall

 

On our third day, D and I went to the UK Parliament, and were lucky enough to be admitted to watch Question Time, that day on the subject of Education. We saw Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education (in the Tory/Lib Dem coalition government), snidely and blandly shoot down questions from the opposition and obsequiously respond to the ‘aren’t we great?’ questions from his own side. Education is a devolved issue – meaning that the Scottish Parliament is responsible for how the system is run here, so it was quite hard to care too much about school district issues South of the border.

 

Later on, the big hitters appeared. PM David Cameron made a statement on the Algeria hostage situation, and Ed Milliband, opposition leader, said a few things too. I played ‘spot the politician I recognise’ which was a fairly short game, sadly. Little of any real heft was said, but when I read the newspapers later and found it interesting to see the various interpretations of the puff. Overall, I was very glad to have gone, but the pomp and ceremony does not feel like it belongs to me. The divisions between the nations are there, and though we have a lot in common, I will always hope for Scotland to go its own way. Come the 2014 referendum or later.

 

 

This, if you are unfamiliar with London, the famous Tower of-. We passed it every day before crossing Tower Bridge, but never went in. There was an element of resistance in this – in both our minds, growing up, the tower of London had been – well – a tower. Tall and menacing, with rooks circling the heights, dank cells lining the circular walls. I suppose the Shard filled that imaginative space. You can see it jutting in the background of the picture.

 

 

This is Regent’s Canal where it runs through Shoreditch. D and I went walking along it with London transplant, G. Later we would spend the day inside a cosy pub with her and C (who I’ve also talked about before), to hide from hours of snowfall. I took a fair number of pictures here, the unnatural beauty (I almost said natural, as if anything in London is natural) of the canal highlighted by the wooly skies and frosting of snow. But I’ll save those for another day.

 

The last image I’d like to leave you with is of the English countryside seen from the train North. At times we had white-out conditions, something I have not seen much of, and so still seems magical. A ghosting landscape, seen in passing and without name. That’s what I like about traveling, when you move so fast you cannot commit much to memory, just the flittery glimpses. The other side of that is when you stay so long in a place that every paving stone is mapped out – but that’s Edinburgh, for me. More pictures of that city when the cold and dark release their grip.

 

 

 

Back from the South

 

D and I have returned from a Christmas present trip to London. London snowbound and prettier for it, but harder to get around. In fact, one day we spent most of our time in a pub in Hoxton with friends, watching the snow blanket the streets. I’m still weary from our long train journey back up, and from walking on the icy streets, and seeing so much and so much. Lots of photos to share, so this will probably be a two parter. The first thing we did after dropping off our bag was to head to the familiar but wonderful British Museum to see all the lovely bought, looted, relics of Empires old and modern:

 

The Rosetta Stone

 

The Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon

 

Ancient Egyptian Ram God resting his head on a king

 

Beyond the Museum, D and I wandered the cold streets taking in the distinctive architecture:

 

The colourfully named The Hung, Drawn and Quartered Pub

 

 

A street south of the river, with the ghostly Shard Building above

 

 

The Shard at night

 

One of the running discussions of our trip was the Shard building itself, which we saw every morning and every evening as we walked back to our hotel. It’s probably been said elsewhere, but whoever designed that building was clearly going for ‘evil megacorp lair and/or inter-dimensional space portal’. It looms, it glows malevolently at the heavens.

 

But aside from awe-inspiring solitary buildings, the city as a whole impresses upon the viewer with its hard, dull edge. It’s a city worn into shape over hundreds and hundreds of years. Londinium. In the right light, it itself glows in its own gloom.

 

Northwards across the Thames, with the Tower of London to the right

 

More to follow, when I’ve recovered a little more.

 

A spot of warmth

 

D, A and I went to the Edinburgh Butterfly and Insect world (which has more than butterflies and insects to see). The hothouse atmosphere of the centre was in contrast to the low, churning gloomy skies outside. A bit of greenery and life on a dreich day. I hope you enjoy the pictures – they were shot on my camera phone, since my old digital camera has gone missing somewhere in my flat (hunted everywhere to no avail). Warning: beastie heavy.

 

 

 

 

 

All ready for Christmas

 

 

 

 

 

Me too, Saladfingers (the iguana’s name is excellent). He turned a bit livelier at feeding time -

 

 

Unseen here are the quails of various colours who run about underfoot peeping, the lazily drifting koi and cichlids who live in the ponds, and the leafcutter ants who follow ropes strung up overhead. It’s a small place, but very delightful. D took some video of the birds, so I might post that later, if it’s turned out well.