Trendy But Casual

Christmas flora and fauna

As threatened yesterday, here's a seasonal update.

It's early winter in Glasgow: frost, snow, sunshine. George Square has switched on the Christmas lights, to the despair of the taxi driver who took me to the station this morning. ("Why do thousands of people turn up to watch? The lights are the same every year!") Then I said that I thought the Blitz-like firework display was an unnecessary addition to the switching-on ceremony, and that the money would be better spent clearing ice from the streets. Then the taxi driver told me that he didn't really believe in global warming, and we agreed to disagree.

On Saturday TMiddy and I threw our annual Christmas party. We've hosted these in New York, in Iowa City, in New Orleans, and in Glasgow. Next year: Sheffield? A few weeks ago I bought an amaryllis bulb, timed to bloom in all its extravagant red profusion just before our party. And so it did. But on the morning of the party, when we were out of the house buying ice and prosecco and other necessities, the amaryllis decided to kill itself.

Undeterred, we pressed on with the party. We'd made a ham, after all.

And other yummy food too, of the feeding-a-crowd variety:

We even turned on the log-fire DVD, though it makes everyone feel hot FOR NO REASON.

And afterwards we were left with the gnawed remnants of ham, a poinsettia given to us in lieu of the recently deceased amaryllis, a dozen sodden tea towels, and a lot of washing up.

The next day, the dryer transformed one of the tea towels into an origami bird, and TMiddy was almost persuaded to get out the iron for the second time in two days. But then we came to our senses, and lay around watching HOMELAND instead.

We're neck-deep in Christmas cards now - as ever, the ones we're sending rather than receiving. I asked my students this year if they'd consider sending a card to someone elderly - a grandparent or older relative, a neighbour, a family friend, a former teacher. Some of them seemed keen on the idea, or at least willing to humour me. If any of you out there would consider doing the same - sending a holiday card to someone elderly not usually on your list - it would be a good thing, I think.

TMiddy has turned on the electric blanket. Like the George Square Christmas decorations, it's the same every winter.

 

Glasgow, Summer

Or is it Paris, Summer? (That's where we spent much of last July. Whatever.) I'll post some pictures, and you try to work out which city, in all its summertime glory, is depicted below.

OK, I think the John Lewis sign might have given it away.

So we are having a bit of sun here in Scotland: this evening, for example, is beautiful. Out my study window I can see all the way to the wind farms encircling the city. (You see, it IS just like Paris.)

And TMiddy and I are still brimming with Jubilee spirit. We had some foreigners (German and English) over for dinner last Friday, and we used Jubilee-bunting paper napkins with the pre-dinner snacks. We even made a Jubilee pavlova.

Actually, it's a chocolate Jubilee pavlova, which means it's the same as a normal chocolate pavlova, except with a Union Jack of fruit. (This is TMiddy's work, and he was dissatisfied: apparently he needed "a larger canvas" to display the full extent of his artistry.)

Tomorrow we're off to London, scene of our Jubilee Flotilla torment. Hopefully the rain will have stopped by now.

 

The Scudder Road Circus goes to Edinburgh

Don't get excited: the Scudder Road Circus & Literary Journal isn't performing at the Edinburgh Festival this year. Transporting all the animals and printing presses on the train from Glasgow would be complicated, and Edinburgh is very crowded in August, with little room for us to unfold the Big Top. It's hard enough for TMiddy and me to wrangle ourselves, anyway, especially with the weather this changeable. But a visit to the Fringe Festival seemed like an essential office outing, so off we ventured yesterday morning to the Far East.

It's less than an hour on the train to Edinburgh, but over there it's a different world, really. The train station is crammed with tourists. The streets are lined with cashmere-and-kilt shops. The bagpipe buskers play 'Scotland the Brave', not 'We Will Rock You' as they do in Glasgow. "Now I feel like we're in Scotland," TM observes. He foolishly draws my attention to a commemmorative Princess Diana tartan, and then manhandles me down the street before I have time to distract myself with royalist tat. We don't have time for Scotland right now: we need to collect our booked tickets - for five shows - and find the first venue. As it takes us fifteen minutes just to find the right way out of Waverley Station, we're already running late. (I've slipped into present tense, I know. It makes the whole day seem more dramatic.)

Picking up the tickets at the Fringe Festival Office is also complicated, because much of the Royal Mile is thronged with desperate people brandishing flyers, trying to drum up audiences for their shows. This is necessary, because there are too many shows. Evidence:

Many of these show-hawkers are in costume and/or aged 18. If they're not shoving flyers at you or shouting FREE SHOW! or TWO-FOR-ONE! or FOUR STARS!, they're dancing around on makeshift stages, waiting to dance around on makeshift stages, attempting to out-bill-sticker everyone else, or handing out paper masks (that may or may not be ironic) to a dubious TMiddy.

We pick up our tickets (tip: book online in advance, so you don't have to stand in the endless queue) and try to make sense of the venue map. It's hard to do this when you're being accosted by people wanting to know if you would like to see a great/free/four-star show that day, or if you would like to buy a copy of the Scotsman and get a free I Heart Edinburgh bag.

We only have four different locations to deal with today for the five shows, so it's not as bad as it could be. The tightest change-over time is 15 minutes. I've picked our shows based on various strict criteria. Anything we see today must be: a) recommended by my friend Deborah Keyser, who comes here every year for ten days, seeing six shows a day, so she can book acts for theatres and arts centres in Wales; OR b) randomly selected because it sounds sort of interesting.

 

Ever since I spent an evening at the Osmond Family Theater in Branson, Missouri (in 1998, while travelling to every place Laura Ingalls Wilder ever lived), I have appreciated the power and time-saving efficiency of the medley. So the first show of the day is a medley, of sorts - Mervyn Stutter's Pick of the Fringe. This show runs every day for ninety minutes, and seven or eight acts get a chance to do a few songs/dances/jokes and promote their own gig. Every day the show is different. As we're not British, we haven't heard of Mervyn Stutter, but apparently he is the Comedy Voice of the Baby Boom Generation. He wears a pink suit with a yellow trim. ('Sounds awful,' as my mother would say.) This get-up reminds me of a black pencil skirt festooned with pink, turquoise and yellow polka dots, owned and loved by me c 1980/81. I wore it (with a black leotard) to see Cheap Trick at the Auckland Town Hall.

(I can't say any of this to TMiddy, because he grows enraged at the fashion/musical taste of my formative years. In 1981 while I was skulking around West Auckland trying to look New Wave, he was living in New York, allegedly dancing with Bianca Jagger at Studio 54, dropping by Elaine's for cocktails with Woody Allen, and listening to Beethoven and the Clash.)

Mervyn Stutter, who been doing this show for 20 years, hands out 'I Saw Merv in 92' to anyone claiming to have been there back in the day. He tells us that he and his team of researchers have seen loads of shows and carefully selected acts "so you don't pay tenners for turkeys." He also tells us that today is the first time ever, in 20 years, that he's sold out this venue. (We're in Beyond in the Pleasance Courtyard, which I think seats around 400 people.) Courtesy of Mervyn, we see some numbers from the musical APPLY WITHIN ("the first time I've ever heard the word 'fart' in a musical!" snorts Merv); comedian Mark Olver selling his show OLVER: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER, which promises, he says, "actual violence"; an amazing and sinister dance excerpt from PINOCCHIO: A FANTASY OF PLEASURES by Company XIV from New York; the first seven minutes of the play SOLD - seven minutes which run through the entire history of slavery; some amiable nonsense from the FITZROVIA RADIO HOUR; comedian Steve Hall with tales of man-hair from his show VERY STILL LIFE; and a crowd-pleasing, wide-smiling a capella group from South Africa, SOWETO ENTSHA.

On the way out of the theatre, all the performers are waiting, in a reception line from which there is no escape, to smile in sweaty exhaustion and hand us flyers. (This is especially impressive in the case of the APPLY WITHIN cast: they left Mervyn's stage to perform their entire show at another venue, racing back just in time for the flyer-shove.)

The other shows we see are TOM BELL BEGINS at the Tron; CHRISTMAS FOR TWO: FRIENDS WITH YOU at the Caves; NEW ART CLUB: QUIET ACT OF DESTRUCTION at the Bosco Theater @ Assembly George Square; and MATT GREEN: TOO MUCH INFORMATION back at Pleasance.

Matt Green is funny, and gets a good reception from the audience (a full-house, albeit a small venue). He is probably the most slick and conventional of the comedians we see. Christmas for Two is a double-act, Sarah Campbell and Amy Hoggart, and there isn't a whole lot of atmosphere at their show - not really their fault. Sketch comedy in the afternoon, in front of an audience of 20 or so ... No wonder the performers are clapping themselves at the end of each sketch, just to give us all the idea. The sketches are well-acted, I think, but not funny enough, and not as weird as advertised.

More rollicking fun is to be had at New Art Club's show at the Bosco Theatre. This is a Deborah Keyser recommendation, and an excellent one. There's shouting, dancing, a tug of war. Even TMiddy joins in the spirit of audience participation. It's easy when audience participation = a massive bread-throwing fight,us making animal noises (mainly owls and stags), and someone made to dress up as a wizard/badger. There's also a re-enactment of one of my favourite Morecombe and Wise sketches. We've already booked tickets for TM to go again later in the month when his brother visits from the US.

All comedy's an acquired taste, of course. Two people march out of New Art Club after ten minutes, looking grim-faced with disapproval. As we're leaving at the end, I overhear two sulky youths with Arctic Monkey haircuts.

Monkey 1: So, did you like it?

Monkey 2: No, not really.

They exchange pained looks. Maybe we Scudder Road Circus-ites enjoy the show because the Bosco Theater makes us nostalgic for a big-top tent of our own.

Nobody walks out of Tom Bell's show, but some of the c. 15 people there look very unhappy. I glance over a few times at a stony-faced older couple, for whom the act apparently is torture. On the way out, another couple apologises to the man they brought along. 'So sorry!' they groan, as though we've all just endured a nightmare.

I, however, spend much of the show crying with laughter. Tom Bell is hilarious. He looks like the weird nephew of Keats and Rick from The Young Ones. Although before the show, while arranging the chairs, he tells us "this is a friendly show," there's an anxious edge to it, the feeling that it might all implode and have to be abandoned at any minute. His humour is very, very silly, which is the highest possible accolade from the Scudder Road Circus. Highlights: kitten falling asleep on bookcase; Kegworth; other fish in the sea; cat with ruff; deodorant. (The story that involves the cat with the ruff is over-elaborate and stupid, but very funny.)

The show is a bit of a mess: there's a lot stuffed into an hour, including a couple of sort-of songs, and it isn't clear if the Neptune wardrobe malfunction is planned or not. (Tom's laptop running out of power is clearly not planned, but much funnier.) But weird, silly, edgy, surreal messiness is exactly what we're hoping to see at the Fringe. The show is at 3:40 PM every day at bar downstairs at the Tron - entrance on Blair Street. Don't get confused as we did and wander around upstairs, clutching your tickets and looking pathetic.

Tom Bell's show is also highly educational. I am now a convert to the delights of LOVE IT! magazine. Today I handed over 68 pence at W.H. Smith on Sauchiehall Street, and brought my own copy home. At the moment, when not out and about on important Scudder Road Circus business, I am working on the sequel to RUINED (referred to by TMiddy as either EVEN MORE RUINED or RUINED 2: RETURN TO NEW ORLEANS. It is called neither of those things.) But occasionally I need a break from artistic endeavour. Evidence:

And yes, that is a coyote on top of the record player.

Meanwhile, I'm sad to say, London is burning. Spending a day at the Edinburgh Festival, or escaping into the dreamworld of LOVE IT, it's easy to forget about the bad things happening down there and in other English cities. When we got back from Edinburgh last night, and caught a taxi home, the streets of Glasgow seemed eerily quiet compared with the violence going on elsewhere. I hope all our friends in London are safe from harm. We live in strange times.

 

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.