Trendy But Casual

New book, new flat

This is a banner week in the M & M household. Home after a busy month of travel to London, St Louis, New Orleans, Paris and Luxembourg, we managed to stay put for an entire seven days. Our new flat in Glasgow (rented, in case any of you imagine we've come into money) is finally looking habitable - furniture delivered, stacks of paper mostly hidden, books and CDs in categories/alphabetical order and on shelves. So I haven't unpacked my suitcase completely yet, and the stacks are hidden rather than sorted: oh well. It could be worse.

We love our new place. The first two pictures here are our living room; the last is my study, in which many of the stacks lurk. Most of them are notes for RANGATIRA. The blind in this room is closed against the sun, if you can believe that - it's south-facing, and incredibly bright. Glasgow: endlessly surprising.

 

 

 

The other happy news is that this was the publication week for DARK SOULS, my new YA novel. It's another mystery with a supernatural twist, this time set in York, England. The action takes place over one very snowy, misty week in December. I've written some more about the book at my web site.

 

Casual Colonialism

It’s been a long time since I lived in the UK. I left in December 1993, eight and a bit years after arriving in the misleadingly sunny September of 1985. 

In 1985 Thatcher was Prime Minister; by 1993 John Major had taken her place, and I arrived back in 2010 to the joy that is Cameron's Tory/Lib-Dem coalition. (I missed the Blair and Brown years altogether.) When I left, SURPRISE SURPRISE and NOEL’S HOUSE PARTY were still on TV. My fondest memory of SURPRISE SURPRISE is Cilla Black singing and marching her way through ‘In the Navy’ on board an actual ship. Sadly, this is not available on YouTube, though at least we can still see/hear the wonder that was the closing credits.

But I digress. Things change, things stay the same. One thing I had forgotten about: the casual colonialism. In the US, I got out of the habit of experiencing this. When Americans find out you’re from New Zealand, they are various things – delighted, curious, intrigued, envious. Sometimes they are confused, and think that you might have said Venezuela. But mostly they are positive. I heard the words ‘I love your accent’ at least once a week. (This was good, because nobody else anywhere – including anywhere in New Zealand – loves my accent.)

The casual colonialism isn’t as bad here in the UK as it used to be, but this is relative. It’s like saying service in Britain isn’t so bad these days either, or it hasn’t rained that much in Glasgow this week. An example: arriving in the mail recently, a copy of Scotland in Trust magazine. We get this as members of the National Trust. (The National Trust for Scotland, to be precise, because Scotland has to be separate and different. It has to contend with casual colonialism issues of its own.)

In the ‘From the Archive’ section there’s a black-and-white photograph of a kapa haka group standing in a walled garden. The headline reads: ‘Maori dance at Pittmedden 1978.’ Pitmedden Garden is a National Trust property in Aberdeenshire.

Don Currie, author of the short article, describes what we can see in the photo – the fountain, the yew trees, the audience, the ‘dancers’ who had just appeared at the Edinburgh Fringe festival. He makes specific mention of the two guitar players standing behind the group. These guys, both young, wear shirts, blazers, and what people used to call slacks. The ‘elaborate attire’ of the other performers, notes Currie, stands out against the formality of the garden, ‘and even the musicians’ jackets and wide-collared shirts.’ Clearly, he deduces, ‘Maori culture did not go untouched by Seventies fashion.’

Um, what? There's a glimmer here of patronising smugness that – to give the writer the benefit of the doubt – was probably unintentional. Why would anyone Maori living in New Zealand in 1978 – let alone gadding about the world – be ‘untouched’ by the fashion of the day? Without the startling evidence of this photograph, would we readers of Scotland in Trust assume that, back home in the Land of Exotica, Maori walk around wearing piupiu, busily untangling poi or lowering kete of food into hot pools?

Earlier this month I was reminded of how a colonial notion of distance – cultural and physical – persists here. Robert McCrum’s column on books in the Observer mentioned the attention-seeking remarks made by VS Naipaul about female writers (it's all 'feminine tosh', apparently'), and cited the reaction by New Zealand writer – and Booker Prize winner – Keri Hulme. Hulme lives, McCrum advises, ‘amid sheep and fisher folk’ on New Zealand’s South Island. In other words, in some fairy-tale land, a place of yokels and delightful simplicity. (Try asking someone on the West Coast to point you in the direction of some ‘fisher folk’ and see what they have to say.)

According to McCrum, not only is Hulme buried deep in a Tolkienesque idyll, she ‘has been silent for decades.’ This news will surprise many New Zealanders. Is this the silent Keri Hulme who actively comments (sometimes under the moniker Islander) on literary blogs like the late, lamented Leaf Salon, and the lively forum managed by the indefatigable Bookman Beattie? Is this silent Keri Hulme the writer who was published in Landfall last year? The Keri Hulme who was the fiction advisor to the Montana Prize judges the year my first novel won a prize? The Keri Hulme who has edited a Huia Short Stories anthology, and this year is serving once again as a judge in their Pikihuia writing competition?

Hulme herself was unimpressed by the label ‘silent’ and told Bookman Beattie exactly what she thought here.

I suppose what McCrum is really saying is this: Here in London we haven’t heard anything from Keri Hulme for decades, so she MUST be silent. Whatever she’s up to in the distant colonies – ‘noises off,’ as it were – doesn’t count.

The patronising swipes don't stop there. Hulme, McCrum says, ‘told her New Zealand audience …’ – hang on, which audience? Is she the Queen of New Zealand, perhaps? Do we all assemble, amid the sheep and the fisher folk, at a weekly audience? Or perhaps she was speaking to a physical audience at some kind of festival event in New Zealand. No. Actually, she was commenting online on a blog post by Bookman Beattie. I guess McCrum doesn’t want to mention the source, or give a context for the discussion.

In her comment, Hulme calls Naipaul ‘a misogynist prick.’ This permits more smug colonialism from McCrum. ‘The language of literary criticism,’ he observes, ‘clearly has a different register in the Antipodes.’

This might be a more useful observation if Hulme had been engaging in literary criticism – say, writing a long essay on Naipaul for the New York Review of Books. But she was commenting online, responding to a blog post. Anyone reading various online Guardian/Observer articles will soon discover that the ‘language of literary criticism’ in online comments is pretty much the same all over the world. Here’s a selection from Guardian and Observer readers on the topic of Naipaul: he is a ‘total tool’, a ‘silly old fart’, a ‘mega-misogynist’, an ‘old git’, a ‘wife beating’ writer, an ‘oaf’, ‘a prize berk’, and a ‘sexist a**hole.’

A Guardian online article a few years ago posed the question: ‘is VS Naipaul simply the grumpiest, most conceited writer alive?’ In a print article about literary prizes in the Guardian earlier this month, writer and critic Bidisha alleged that a ‘man does a s**t in a potty and it is called a work of genius; a woman produces a work of genius and it's treated like a s**t in a potty.’ (You can read the whole feature here.) Gee, the language of literary criticism clearly has a different register in the UK, doesn’t it?

This is what I mean by casual colonialism: dismissive, smug, and a little patronising, with no sense that one’s own ignorance and/or parochialism might be informing an interpretation – of a picture, of remarks, of another culture, of another part of the world. It’s amazing to me that it still exists here.

This week, when I'm not puzzling over such absurdities, I'm thinking of two of my family members who are in strange places right now - strange to them, at any rate. My mother is in hospital in Auckland, and my niece has just arrived in Paris, where she'll be spending the next two months. I hope my mother will be able to come home soon. I hope my niece has the most wonderful, wonderful time.

Signs

I've just submitted the manuscript of my novel, RANGATIRA, so I can begin to creep back into real life. There's still a lot to accomplish this year. But today all I plan to accomplish is sending out a few invoices, and tidying desktops (computer and workroom). Perhaps some daytime TV? Let's go crazy.

Actually, I just remembered about ten things I really do need to do today, including preparing for an interview/article for the Listener, and beginning work on an outline for the sequel to RUINED. I might get dressed at some point as well. Tomorrow we move house, so there's not much time for languishing.

News: I now have a web site: www.paula-morris.com. Please visit it and consider signing up for my mailing list. I have quite a few news items to post, and from now on will use the web site for all my relentless self-promotion, leaving this blog free to explore universal verities, discuss nonsense, and share pictures of TMiddy frowning at his lunch.

During my absence from this blog, I've collected a few interesting pictures. Two are actual signs, and one is a possible sign that the E.nd of Da.ys is upon us. (I have to mess up those words: don't want to attract the wrong sort of attention here.)

The first was taken a while back in Lambert Airport in St Louis. Some people see the Vir.gin Ma.ry in a pancake; some see the face of Kate Middleton in a jellybean. TM and I see a meerkat in a muffin. But what does it mean?

 

The next two are photographs of signs taken in the streets of Glasgow. We like Glasgow a lot, and now you can see why.

 

Speaking of Kate Middleton, I just reviewed a "book" about her romance with Prince William: it'll appear in next week's Listener, so please keep an eye out for it. (If you don't live in New Zealand, it'll be up on the web site at some point.) Also, I have begun my Royal Wedding tea towel collection, despite the sabotaging efforts of TM: he neglected to order the one I wanted from the British Museum, and now it's sold out. We had to make an emergency trip to John Lewis to sift through the rubble of their Royal Wedding section. Everyone's supposed to be a republican socialist in Scotland, but someone must be buying that wedding tat.

I'll be tweeting the Royal Wedding (@CamillaPOW), with insider info on the Abbey and ALL the receptions/dinners. Sometimes it's not so bad being a Duchess.

A Scudder Road Circus Christmas

I've had a really crummy week, so yesterday T.Middy and I decided that the Scudder Road Circus needed its first-ever Christmas lunch - "in the manner," TM observed, "of the British." So we went to the Bothy, a very cozy place off Byres Road, and (joined later by numerous office groups, all dressed to the nines) stuffed our faces with roast turkey and hot puddings.

Afterwards we slid as best we could along icy, hilly streets to go to an exhibition at the Hunterian of Whistler's drawings and paintings of the Thames - very useful for the novel I'm writing at the moment, as a lot were of Limehouse and the docks in the 1860s. (The Hunterian has a major Whistler collection.) It was also very distracting, as exhibitions always are. Now I want to start reading all I can on Whistler's lawsuit against John Ruskin, especially as it implicates my old friend Edward Burne-Jones.

We didn't have a Christmas tree this year, as we'll be away, and all our decorations are in our Tardis-like storage unit. We've made the best of it, I guess. These are taken in our kitchen, the easiest room to keep warm.

My story, "Red Christmas," will be broadcast on Radio New Zealand National this Tuesday (December 21) at 10.45 AM. Red Christmas is an Icelandic idea: it means a Christmas without snow. We have one of those in Auckland every year.

In a week's time we'll be in St Louis, where it will almost certainly be a white Christmas. But by early January we'll be in New Zealand, where we're hoping for summer, summer, summer.

 

Chancellor Watch I

In every Friday's Guardian I turn to the page-long column written by Alexander Chancellor. It's the most ridiculous thing I get to read all week. I keep meaning to write summaries of it for this blog, because it is full of tremendous wisdom and insight - for example, that the best pizza chain in Britain is Pizza Express, or that most British people ("just as I would have suspected") don't like cooking, proven by a recently published top-five of shopping list items that included bacon, milk and cereal. (The "overall picture is pretty clear," he announces, forgetting that bacon needs cooking, and that even Jamie Oliver's kids probably get through vats of milk and cereal every week.)

He is confused when the (Catholic) Chilean miners thank God for their release; confused about who to vote for in the General Election (he hopes to meet someone at the polling station that day who might persuade him one way or the other); confused last April when every paper ran a hoax story for April Fool's Day ("I still don't know how much was true and how much false in today's Guardian"). He finds it "hard to warm" to the London 2012 Olympics mascots, hard to understand why over-70s aren't called up for jury duty, and hard to fathom why the Milibrand brothers hug in public ("In Mafia families, brothers carry on like that only when one of them is about to murder the other.").Wise words.

My favourite recent column was about the royal engagement. For a long time AC "dreaded the prospect" of a marriage between Prince William and Kate Middleton, and feared "it would mean the end of the monarchy." But now he thinks differently. Her voice is "pleasant ... neither too posh nor too affectedly proletarian." So it "now seems quite obvious that royal princes should only look for brides among the middle class."

This Friday's was a corker. Most of the columns are three unrelated items, and this was no exception. The first item was about the London Olympics, a recurring obsession. The second was about Dame Eileen Atkins, who has criticised young actors for retaining their regional accents. (AC agrees: it "seems sensible that the default position for an actor should be what used to be known as a BBC accent."). The third is about the aspirin and the cigarette which are, he declares, "very close to perfection in the performance of their respective roles." The best part is section one, I think, when AC expresses his outrage that "the first language of the London Olympics is to be French, taking precedence over English in all the Olympic announcements." What a shock! AC is at a loss to explain it. "I read in the papers that French is 'the first tongue of the IOC,'," he tells us. Apparently he has never watched an Olympic Games EVER. I guess he just never noticed that when announcements were made at the Sydney Olympics, or the Atlanta Olympics, or the Los Angeles Olympics, that they were made first in French. "I suppose it is possible that not every member of the IOC speaks English," he concludes irrelevantly, as though they all vote each time on the language of announcements for that particular Olympics.

You can read the columns each week on the Guardian site, along with the insane comments from people who've stumbled in from the Daily Mail by mistake, but I'll try to update here as well. It's all gold.

 

Of Christmas markets, snow, and disappointments

Tonight the M8 between Edinburgh and Glasgow is still an icy, snow-ridden mess, and the Minister for Transport here in Scotland is saying sorry. Nobody in government here, local or national, believed the BBC Weather on Sunday when they said that snow was on its way to the Central Belt (or, as I prefer to think of it, the cummerbund) of Scotland. Instead the government did what we used to do, until we realized the imprecision of its forecasts: they consulted the Met Office. When I looked at the Met Office forecast online before our trip to Edinburgh on Sunday, the only bad weather predicted for Monday was fog and cold.

As discussed in previous posts, we went to Edinburgh for an overnight stay on Sunday so I could see the Christmas market. Here is the dramatic arc of my relationship with Christmas markets in Britain. (It's a one-act play with too many scenes and settings, so possibly difficult to stage.)

Scene I: In the Guardian, I spot an ad for trips to European Christmas markets. All these markets look snowy, picturesque, authentic. I wonder: which shall we visit? Shall we explore the one with tunnels, or the one in the medieval square, or the one surrounded by snow-capped mountains? Shall we go to the city that has a different market in every neighborhood? Shall we visit the one with real ponies on the carousel or the one where the stalls themselves are handcrafted from pine cones and fir boughs and all the stallholders wear lederhosen? I rip the ad out of the paper and stick it on the fridge.

Scene II: I look up flights from Glasgow to relevantly Germanic airports, and start to worry about how much all the flying and driving and hotels and gallons of gluhwein will cost. (This is not a very dynamic scene, I know. It's like the one in THE GHOSTWRITER where Ewan McGregor works out the top-secret international conspiracy by typing a few key words into Google.)

Scene III: Up in Stirling, I ask my colleagues which Christmas market they'd recommend. "Oh, there's a good one in Lincoln," they say. "And there's one in Edinburgh, you know." But what about Germany? "You don't need to go to Germany," they assure me. Not when Frankfurt (or is it Cologne?) comes to Birmingham (or is it Leeds?)

Scene IV: I rip the Guardian ad for European markets off the fridge and throw it away. We will not waste money this year flying to Germany for Christmas markets, I tell T. Middy, even though Germany invented Christmas, and is still quite good at the lead-up, even though it celebrates it on the wrong day and with shoes instead of stockings. My sophisticated internet search skills have uncovered the St Nicholas Fayre, an annual weekend-long extravaganza of Christmas markets in York. And in Edinburgh, according to my local sources, there's both a German and a Highland market. Who needs the Continent? Not us. TM is relieved that I'm taking the sensible course, for once, despite the opportunity Germany offers, i.e. to drive again "on the right side of the road" and to make jokes about only following orders.

Scene V: I book a car for the trip down to York, and a hotel in Edinburgh. I don't stop to think about things like "will it be snowing for days on end?" because we are in Britain, not the Continent. At the last minute, I pitch the New Zealand Herald with a story on British Christmas markets, but I've left it too late. None of this trip will be tax-deductible, but that's OK. It's much cheaper than going to Germany, and sure to be JUST AS GOOD.

Scene VI: One of my colleagues, who lives in Edinburgh, tells me that the Christmas market there is lame beyond belief. "Nothing like the ones in Germany," he says. I experience doubt. But it's too late. Everything is booked. We can't opt for Europe instead.

Scene VII: We drive down to York, traveling into the worst early winter weather in decades. When we arrive at my friend's house, she warns me that the St Nicholas Fayre is lame beyond belief. "It's all kitsch," she says, making an I-just-ate-something-sour face. We race off into town anyway. She's right. There isn't even any mulled wine. We have to drink hot cider instead. TM takes one sip and makes an I-just-ate-something-sour face. Even I cannot find anything to buy, and my tolerance for tat is almost super-human. The next day we go around every impromptu market in an historic building (King's Manor, Barley Hall, Guildhall, etc) where all the stall-holders are dressed in Medieval gowns and (in King's Manor) we manage to buy glasses of mulled wine. I'm so low-ebb by now that I actually sit willingly to listen to a duo playing a lute and a harp. ("People must have been really stinky in the Middle Ages," observes TM, looking at the lutenist's greasy mullet.) But wine and madrigals can't make me forget my Christmas-market disappointment. I have to go to Little Bettys twice to dull the blow.

Scene VIII: A week later, we catch the train to Edinburgh, traveling into the worst early winter weather in decades. (The Lincoln Christmas Market is canceled completely this year because of the snow.) We leave our bag at the hotel and rush off to see the German market and the Highland market. There are (allegedly) German stalls and German stallholders at the German market, but they seem a bit second division. TM buys something German that is like a large MallowPuff, a favored biscuit from my New Zealand childhood. I don't buy anything. The queue for mulled wine is too long. In the Highland market, I learn that chips with curry sauce are a traditional Highland food.

Scene IX: (Can you even have nine scenes in a one-act play?) Back at the hotel, I loll disconsolate on the bed watching COME DINE WITH ME (omnibus edition) on television, and tell TM that next year, whatever the cost, we're going to Germany.

So this was the Christmas market and the ice rink and the fair in Edinburgh on Sunday:

After traipsing through this lot, we decided to climb the Scott Monument (the Gothic thing in the background). I haven't done this for years. Apparently I have a short memory, because I'd forgotten how many stairs there are, how incredibly narrow and winding they are, and how the whole experience induces vertigo. Only hobbits have small-enough feet to deal with the tiny steps, and cloaks woolly enough to withstand the icy blasts of wind. The last time I climbed the SM, it was summer. This weekend, each landing/outside viewing platform was encrusted with lumpy duvets of slick ice. The only way the building could be navigated was by clinging by our gloved fingertips to rocky outcroppings and snowy railings. Even the griffons were dribbling icicles.

 

Views were good, of course.

But what's a view when there's mulled wine for sale at the Assembly Rooms, even if those of us with vertigo managed to knock over the cup and spill wine across the tablecloth? We decided not to rush back to Glasgow the next day, but to tour Holyrood Palace, something we'd missed out on the first time we visited Edinburgh back in October.

In the morning, this was the view from our hotel window:

It was snowing when we woke up, and it snowed on and off all day. This is outside the hotel, where cars weren't able to get in or out of the street. The truck, trying to do a laundry pick-up, had been stuck there for some time. The guys in the truck had laid towels on either side of the back wheels, but nothing was working.

The receptionist tried to call us a taxi to the station, where we planned to leave our bag, but pointed out a taxi on the other side of the square that was stuck there. So we walked to the station, which was all very picturesque.

This last picture was taken out the window of the National Gallery cafe, to which we retreated en route for a cooked breakfast and orgy of postcard-buying. There were also a few pictures we wanted to see, but the rooms housing them were closed for two hours. One of the paintings in question we tried to see in November as well, but the room was temporarily closed then too. So we headed out once again to take our bag to Left Luggage. No one was out on the ice rink. No one was riding the ferris wheel. Why not take the shortcut through Princes Street Gardens? This was my idea. Nobody else appeared to be walking along the path. I wonder why not?

Could it be because there was a chain blocking this path at the far end? And also a steep icy bank to negotiate in order to get out - one down which we would soon be comically sliding backwards? TM just wanted to get rid of our bag. "Then we can walk around," he said. "I'd like to rub your face in the snow." Nice.

Bag stowed, train timetable checked, we clambered and slid and stomped our way up into the Old Town and then down the Royal Mile to Holyrood Palace. "The Royal Mile will certainly be cleared," I promised. (Wrong). "It will only take us 15 minutes to walk there." (Wrong.) "The palace is open today, because I checked the web site this morning." (Wrong. It had just closed because they "couldn't keep the paths clear.") So this is what we got to see of Holyrood.

 

The only people out were idiotic tourists like us, making the long trek from the closed palace to the closed castle, with nothing to entertain us but a few stuck cars and the modified statue of Robert Fergusson:

That's me in the background, wondering if the church was open. (It was not.) On the way back up, we passed an old man wearing slipper-like shoes, sliding home clutching a plastic bag of provisions.

PM: I hate seeing old people struggle in the snow.

TM: He's the same age I am.

We scuttled back to the station and managed to get one of the last seats on the train. People stood in the aisles all the way back to Glasgow, where the snow earlier in the day had been heavy. Now it's just cold, cold, cold. I was supposed to go up to Stirling today but couldn't, because the trains are a mess. Instead we bundled up and ventured out to the post office to spend a hundred pounds sending packages and buying stamps for overseas Christmas cards. We came home and wrote/addressed cards until TM declared he had "lost the will to live." Next year we won't send a single card, I think. We'll use the money to go to Germany, where trains run, even in the snow, where the Christmas markets are A-list, and where they drive on the right side of the road.

 

A change in the weather

Here are three pictures of the view up to Edinburgh Castle, taken by me or TM. The first was taken on November 13, when we were there for the rugby. The second was taken just three weeks later, this Sunday (December 5). The third was taken on Monday, December 6, shortly before we fled back to Glasgow.

 

Big snow

It's been snowing for days now in Britain - more than a week, in fact, and nobody knows what to do. People write to newspapers complaining because there is no grit on the street, or buses on the roads, or bread in the shops. Smug Europeans also write in, saying that in Finland and/or Switzerland everyone carries snow tires in their pockets and the schools never close. But we live in Scotland, not Europe, so schools have been closed, you board a train at your own risk ("We cannot guarantee travel beyond Perth"), the pavements are treacherous glaciers, and restaurants haven't had deliveries for days. This is the worst early winter weather in forty years. Tonight in Glasgow, the temperature is minus 8 C. (So glad we're living in a flat with no central heating.) The Clyde river froze over this morning. People were trapped in their cars on the M8 and other motorways around the city for five hours. Almost no buses are running in Glasgow right now, and very few were running in Edinburgh for most of today.

I'd like to say that T. Middy and I are made of stern stuff and therefore go about our business in spite of the ongoing blizzards. But really we are just stupid, because we DO try to undertake all planned activities, even if the weather is against us. TM grew up in St Louis, home of much big weather, so thinks he knows what he's doing. I grew up in Auckland, a place never visited by snow, so I'm still childishly excited by it - in a "Look, fox prints! Why is it so cold and wet?" way.

So off we drove down to York last Friday, on a road closed two days later because of bad weather. That night, walking back to our friends' house along the river (after suffering a scalded arm at Loch Fyne restaurant, when a hurrying waiter spilled tea on me: thanks for the concerned follow-up calls, Loch Fyne - in your own time!), it started snowing. York looked beautiful the next day, which helped to soften the blow of its sub-par Christmas market, and the endless queue for Bettys.

But then it was time to clean off the car and drive north in the snow and fog to Northumbria, to visit my cousins. This area was the worst-hit place in the UK. (Snow covered the sand dunes on the beach at South Shields, and we went for a nice skid around a roundabout in Cleadon village.) Last Sunday we caught the Metro into Newcastle for a football match at St James Park, where the ground had been scraped clean of snow that morning.

(Of course we bought the gear, though we removed it that night in South Shields, in case one of my Sunderland-supporting cousins spotted us on Ocean Road.) This was what it looked like in Newcastle just after the match ended, when I insisted on wandering the Christmas market on Eldon Square:

Undeterred by weather, we planned to visit Alnwick and/or Bamburgh castles the next day. But these were closed, as were numerous roads leading to them, so we had to content ourselves with venturing to Durham, pretty but perilous in the snow:

While we were roaming the eerily quiet Cathedral, it started snowing again, and the cafe where we were about to have lunch instantly closed. So we slithered down the icy cobbles back to the car and headed north to Otterburn, high in the Cheviot Hills. The roads up there in the Borders were barely cleared, and we passed a snow-heaped car upside down in the ditch, never a cheering sight. When we arrived at the hotel, the Otterburn Tower, they seemed suprised that we hadn't cancelled, like all the other guests. Not us! We like being the only people in the hotel, and the only people in the restaurant, unable to get reception on the TV and wondering if the roads will be passable the next day.

This is our rental car outside the hotel the next day, and a view from the car window as we drove south towards Hexham:

By the time we got to Hexham, the weather was deteriorating. What to do? Stop at the big Waitrose to buy lots of food, of course, and then drive back to Glasgow via Carlisle before the road turned into a giant chocolate slushy. The first pic is the carpark in Hexham; the second is the view on the drive back.

Back in Scotland, the snow kept coming. Trying to get up to Stirling was ridiculous. Trains were delayed or cancelled, and everyone in Glasgow Queen Street station stood around looking cold and cross, crowding through the ticket barriers so they could sprint onto a train as soon as one pulled in.

The view from the train on the way up to Stirling on Thursday was beautiful.

Even our neighborhood in Glasgow looked quite picturesque, though trying to carry shopping back from Byres Road along steep grit-free streets is no fun.

 

Because I am obsessed with Christmas markets, and may never recover from the psychological blow of the rubbish one in York last week, I'd booked a Sunday-night special at a hotel in Edinburgh this weekend. Even though we'd had people over for dinner the night before (departure time: c 3 AM, in the manner of all British dinner guests), and more snow was predicted for Sunday night, we set off on the train early on Sunday afternoon. What followed was a tale of two cities. I will write a separate post about it, because this post is already too long.

By the way, I'm aware that I'm now writing in a mixture of UK and US spelling. Just wait until I start speaking in Scots.

Granite City (Note: not the one in Illinois)

We're just back from Aberdeen, where we went (for two days) because we can get cheap train tickets throughout Scotland this month. Aberdeen is the Granite City, and granite has an austere beauty, though T. Middy felt the city's architecture was "sort of like concrete" and "a bit too matchy-matchy". Between the granite and the November gloom, most of our photos look as though they're in black-and-white, with a spot of hand-colouring.

The following represent some of our rambles on Saturday around the City Centre - Union Terrace; Golden Square (not golden at all); Union Street (ready for the Christmas light switch-on); cobbled Castlegate with the old Mercat Cross and requisite anti-British sentiment; the lane we ducked down to visit the excellent Peacock Visual Arts Centre; and parts of Old Aberdeen - the fifteenth-century King's College, and St Machar's Cathedral. A wedding was going on in the cathedral when we arrived - hence the flowers up on the altar. Almost all the men at the wedding were wearing kilts.

 

We also walked down to the busy working harbour. Aberdeen is a huge oil industry base, servicing more than a hundred rigs perched in the North Sea. And we went to see the great Lewis Chessmen exhibition at the City Art Gallery. The chess pieces originated (probably) in twelfth-century Norway, carved from walrus tusks and whale teeth. It was particularly interesting to learn so much about the Kingdom of the Isles, which included Lewis, because its Norse kings ruled from the Isle of Man, possibly T. Middy's ancestral home. ("So now I'm a Viking," he announced, secretly pleased.)

One thing also not pictured: we caught a bus from the city centre up to Old Aberdeen. En route, a woman sitting behind us walked up the aisle to talk to the bus driver, and then returned to her seat. "He's not going the right way," she told us. She was right: we were on the wrong road. The bus then seemed to be taking a right, but no - it was actually making a U-turn. This was quite a feat in a double-decker bus, and it involved the bus a) mounting the pavement and b) narrowly missing hitting the traffic lights. I don't think I've ever been in a bus that performed a U-turn before. It drove back to a major roundabout and, this time, took the correct road.

It was chilly up there, unsurprisingly: the latitude of Aberdeen is north of Moscow. Snow was expected, a taxi driver told us, though this piece of information seems to be a requisite piece of taxi-driver banter all over Scotland. We first heard that line in Glasgow in early October. Snow is always expected, and we could see it on not-so-distant mountains when we caught the train home on Sunday.

When we emerged from Kelvinbridge subway station that afternoon, Glasgow seemed incredibly colourful by comparison with Aberdeen - trees along the Kelvin still autumnal, the sandstones of the tenements a rusty gold. We dropped off our bags and walked back into the city to wander about with the c. two million people who throng Buchanan Street every Sunday. I was excited because yesterday was the turn-on-the-Christmas-lights day in Glasgow, but watching the dramatic turning-on in George Square was a forbidden pleasure. Ticket-holders only! The streets leading to the square were barricaded, in case any non-ticketed citizen tried sneaking in and seeing the Krankies for free. This is what it looked like, apparently. An outside ice rink will open in George Square soon, for the season.

The lights on Buchanan Street were on, at least. This photo was taken c 4:30 in the afternoon, so you can see that my claims of Glasgow looking colourful rather than gloomy are greatly exaggerated.

Snow really IS coming, according to the weather man on Radio Four just now - mainly in the east, which is exactly where we're headed on Friday. We'll be visiting friends and family, going to York for the Christmas market and Newcastle for football. It's TM's birthday this week. Our celebrations begin on Wednesday, when we go to see Alan Bennett's The Habit of Art. It may be dark in Scotland, but there's plenty to do.

 

Edinburgh. Rugby. We win.

This Saturday, November 13, T. Middy and I went to Edinburgh on the train to see the All Blacks SMASH Scotland at Murrayfield. (TM: "I'll support Scotland in every sport except rugby." I, however, still cannot forgive Scottish soccer for anti-NZ comments made by the Scotland manager during the 1982 World Cup, so both soccer and rugby are on my non-support list. On will-support list: curling.)

There was slight sport-related chaos in Glasgow on Saturday, involving fluorescent-vested police in the subway, queuing systems at Queen Street station, and a ban on alcohol sales on trains between Glasgow and Edinburgh that afternoon. Rangers were playing too that day, so the subways were crowded. Most of the Rangers supporters were wearing poppies.

It was a cold, clear day in Edinburgh. Already Christmas, according to Coca-Cola.

We strolled George Street and had a late lunch at an Italian restaurant, which used butter pats to express its divided sporting loyalties.

Along with everyone French-speaking in Edinburgh, we caught a bus to Murrayfield and then walked the last leg.

We had brilliant seats in the West Stand, surrounded by Scottish fans - many in kilts, some in Viking horns, one in a blue-and-white bodysuit (sensibly warm) and some in a popular ginger wig/tartan cap get-up that TM has threatened to buy. When I sang the NZ national anthem, I couldn't hear another voice joining in, though I could see a scattering of other NZ supporters nearby. Including this NZ supporter, who claims he couldn't join in because he only knows the first two lines.

The pre-show was a fantastic pipe band, displayed here swirling onto the pitch in out-of-focus artiness, then the anthems, then the haka (also slightly out of focus, because I was over-excited), partly drowned out by the whistles and jeers of Scottish fans. They weren't quite so vocal as the match progressed. I wonder why? Could it be because Scotland only scored once (a penalty) while the All Blacks converted seven tries?

At half-time, T. MIddy asked me about the "half-time show." He's used to America. Cheerleaders, mascots, a band; maybe even Ashlee Simpson. At Murrayfield, we had something much better - a sing-song to a souped-up, blasted-out version of"The Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond."

More than 50,000 fans were there at Murrayfield. I've never attended such a big international sporting event. The only other All Blacks test we've seen live was against France in Wellington, where the capacity is more like 35,000. I'd like to say this was the biggest sporting event of any kind I've attended, but unfortunately I've sat through an endless LSU game at Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge (capacity: 92,000) - the longest, hottest day of my life.

We got tickets for Murrayfield, by the way, at the urging of my father, who went there to see the All Blacks play Scotland in January, 1964. That game was a draw. Scotland has played New Zealand twenty-eight times over the past 105 years. The All Blacks have drawn twice (in 1964 and 1983) and won all the rest.

Highlights: watching the amazing Sonny Bill Williams. Catching up with my boyfriend Richie McCaw. Seeing Dan Carter in full-length. The last time I saw him, he was a life-size paper fold-out acquired, via a milk promotion, by my niece.

Some final rugby links, which many of you may have seen. The first is the All Blacks showing off in an ad for Sky and the second is a parody of that video by the Brumbies.

Kia kaha, Scotland. If you play England, I'll support you.