Catch-up (with a Scottish Accent)

Ages ago I promised a write-up of Edinburgh, so even though it’s been almost a month since I heard a Scottish accent I’m going to go back and see what muck I can dredge up from the depths of my memory.

Julian and I arrived in a downpour and made our way through what struck me as rather dreary streets to our hostel. But when the weather cleared and we went out to explore, I found myself falling in love with the city. It’s packed with ornate old buildings and gothic spires, and I found myself fascinated by the intersecting lines of roofs, chimneys, gutters, and church spires.

Detail from Rembrandt’s self portrait (1659).

The next morning we went to the National Gallery. There was far more than I can do justice to here, so I’ll just focus on the two highlights for me. First was a self-portrait of the middle-aged Rembrandt. The play of light and shadow is striking, especially in the way he fades into the background of the painting. And something about those eyes evokes a beautiful melancholy. Absolutely incredible.

There was also a collection of intaglio prints by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, an 18th century Italian artist.  The prints were based on Roman architecture, but with a fantastical twist. Often depicted as vine-covered ruins, many of the buildings are far larger than any that really existed. The prints were extraordinary from an aesthetic point of view, but I also found them particularly appealing because of my experience intaglio printing. Several of the prints featured superb control of line quality, with a range from lines so faint you could barely see them to others that were bold and black. And the detail was simply extraordinary – every fern on every Corinthian column captured perfectly.

But the prints I found most appealing were much less precise. Perhaps it was the darker tone (both in execution and in subject matter) that appealed to me; perhaps it was the fact that most of these depicted the construction of massive stone buildings (dungeons?) – something that was certainly on my mind given the coming work at the château. But I think most of all it was the sketch-like quality of these prints. They felt more dynamic somehow, as if the detail of the other prints- however exquisite it may be – robs them of some of their life.

Our next stop was the Scottish National Museum, which was actually a bit of a disappointment. They have a very impressive collection of historical artifacts, but the layout of the museum is confusing and fails to guide the visitor through a coherent narrative. We spent a distressingly large portion of our visit simply trying to find the way to get from one floor to the next. Exhausted after navigating through a few thousand years of Scottish history, we discovered a whole new wing of the museum that we had been completely unaware of, but decided that eating a decent meal might be a better use of our time.

The next morning Julian and I hiked up to Arthur’s Seat, a bluff that offers a view of the city below. Unfortunately this includes the less quaint areas that are blocked from view when you’re  surrounded by the buildings of the old city. Oh well…

A short bus ride took us to Robin and Christine Davis, lovely family friends in Dunblane who hosted us for the night. We told them about the highlights of our trip, and they told us about the proper way to make tea. Apparently the first hot water that goes in the teapot should not be for the tea itself, but is only intended to warm up the pot. I’ve prided myself in usually taking the time to boil water in a kettle instead of in the microwave, but apparently I still fall short of perfection.

Properly educated, I had a cup of tea the next morning and then said my farewells to Robin, Christine, and Julian. And with that, I was on my way to France.

Smoke and Flames

October is almost here and the morning chill shows it. When I go out to pick raspberries for my breakfast bowl of muesli my breath puffs out in front of me in great clouds and I walk through grass glazed with a trace of frost. These are the kind of mornings that call for a fire.

I’ve been looking forward to this for a while. With the possible exception of hot cider, wood stoves are the best thing about cold weather. There’s the heat, of course, but you can get heat from a radiator. But no radiator can give you that wonderful smoky smell. (I plan to make a fortune selling campfire-scented laundry detergent.) And smelling that in a château? That’s tough to beat.

The château has lots of fireplaces but they are mostly off-limits due because many of the chimneys are either collapsed, filled with birds’ nests, or both. But in the basement is a wood furnace – secondhand, but new to the château. A few days ago we fired it up for the first time. But instead of going up the chimney, the smoke poured out the door of the furnace. Within minutes all but the lowest four feet or so of the room were filled with smoke. The fire would die down when we’d close the furnace door, but whenever we opened it again we were greeted by a jet of flame and a belch of smoke. The situation was merely inconvenient, not dangerous, so as we crawled around we could safely look up and marvel at how the stacks of wood suddenly vanished at the transition from clear air to murky haze.

My room isn’t always this beautiful. Only when it’s hard to breathe.

When I stepped outside again I saw that the smoke that escaped through the basement door was drifting up right past my room. My window was closed, but some still made its way in. When I went to my room to get dressed for work I found it filled with a haze illuminated by a brilliant sunbeam. The morning sun is always beautiful there, but never quite that nice. And as an added bonus, my clothes all smell like wood smoke now.

We’ve since figured out the problem with the furnace (not a bird’s nest), so in theory we won’t need to choose between visibility and warmth in the future. But I guess this means that I have to go back to mixing ashes with my Tide: Mountain Spring®.

Homework!

Work yesterday was not particularly enjoyable – mostly mixing cement outside in a cold rain. Being the generous soul that I am, I thought I should share the misery with my dear readers. So here’s a math problem:

Brendan and Stefan are installing a hydronic underfloor heating system. Warm water will be pumped through plastic tubes arranged like in the photo below.

Layout of plastic pipes.

Each loop of pipe is spaced 15 cm away from those on either side. If a room has a length of L meters and a width of W meters, how much tubing will they need? Express your answer in the form of an equation.

Oh yeah, and make sure you think about it in a bizarre system of numbers in which the seventies are the “sixty-teens”, the eighties are the “four-scores”, and the nineties are the “four-score teens”.

I’ll post the correct answer in the comments tomorrow.

Mending Wall

And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’

– Robert Frost, Mending Wall

At last, here’s the video I promised you of the work on rebuilding the retaining wall on the north side of the chateau. We were considerably luckier than Frost and his neighbor in that most of the stones we built with were fell into the “loaves” category. No magical spells for us, although there is some cement just in case.

So without further ado…

Château Chenânigans

Hannibal Lecter tries to decide whether Dupont or Dupond (Thomson and Thompson for those of us from the English-speaking world) would be tastier.

Last weekend my host brother Jean hosted a costume party at the chateau. The theme was “Movie Trilogies”, so I spent the evening in the company of Vito Corleone, “Doc” Brown,  Hannibal Lecter, Catwoman, two Jokers, two Obi-Wan Kenobis, Princess Leia, the Australian game warden from Jurassic Park, and many others. As you can see, people put a lot of effort into their costumes and the results were fantastic. I was particularly impressed with a group that came as the main characters of Tintin (technically not a trilogy, but too good to pass up).

Me in my Bilbo costume, with Martin Freeman in the inset. Or is it the other way around?

As for me, I dressed as Bilbo Baggins from the upcoming Hobbit trilogy, complete with a sword, hair on my feet, and something precious in my pocketses.

But the best part of the party was reuniting with an old friend. Isaac, who is a year younger than me, came to stay with my family in New Hampshire for two weeks in the spring of 2000. I saw him again in France in 2002 and he us in visited New Hampshire again in 2004, but since then we’ve had only occasional correspondences via email.

Isaac and me. He doesn’t always wear brown robes – he just promised a friend that he’d wear them for the train ride back to Toulouse.

Isaac is currently at engineering school in Toulouse but he came back home for the party. It’s been eight years since we’ve seen each other, but once I got over the shock of seeing a beard on somebody I’ve thought of as perpetually thirteen, we picked right up where we’d left off. (Fortunately his English is far better than my French.)

In other news, we’ve finished up work on the section of wall we were rebuilding. A video is on the way, albeit a bit late because John Williams cancelled on me in order to finish work on the soundtrack for Lincoln. Bummer. But stay tuned – it’s coming soon!

 

My First Week in France

I’ve just finished my first week at the chateau so I thought I’d post a quick update to let you know I haven’t yet been crushed my falling rocks or a collapsed ceiling. I’ll have much more detail in future posts, including a video at some point. But for now, here’s what you get:

I got in to France on Saturday evening and took the TGV to Dijon, where I was met by Marion and her son Dimitri, who’s my age. We drove to their place in Asnieres, a suburb of Dijon, where I was greeted by Marion’s husband Gonzague and their daughter Flavie. (Marion and Gonzague have three other children – Isaac, Graziella, and Jean – but they’re all living elsewhere.)

Sunday morning was pretty uneventful, mostly hanging around Asnieres and trying to remember not to slip into Spanish when I don’t know the word in French. I spent a large portion of the afternoon trying on women’s clothing. This weekend Jean is hosting a party at the chateau, and guests are meant to dress as characters from famous movie trilogies. I decided to go as Bilbo Baggins from the upcoming Hobbit films, so on Sunday Flavie took me took me to a thrift store to find costume parts. “Thrift complex” might be a better term. Housed in several stone barracks from the Napoleanic wars, the store featured piles of electronics, tools, building supplies, antique furniture, and random knickknacks such as an old wooden cider press and a coat rack in which the hooks were made of deer feet. And yes, women’s coats that bear some resemblance to the red overcoat that Martin Freeman wears in The Hobbit.

Bussy-la-Pesle

On Monday morning Gonzague and I drove out to Bussy-la-Pesle, It’s a lovely little town, almost entirely yellow stone houses with red tile roofs. It’s nestled in a beautiful green valley, too picturesque for words. My paints arrived safely, and I’m looking forward to putting them to use.

The medieval wing of the chateau.

I can’t really do justice to the chateau in this post; suffice it to say that it’s awesome and still needs a lot of work. It took me a couple of days to work out the labyrinth of rooms, hallways, and staircases. The oldest part dates to the 1200s, so centuries of renovations have led to a pretty confusing layout.

My room.

My room is on the second floor of the east wing (18th century) and is beautiful.  Marion and Gonzague have focused most of their renovation efforts on this wing, so we have electricity, hot water, and even decent internet. As for the rest of the chateau… as I said, it needs a lot of work.

But the work I’ve been doing is not on the building itself but rather on the stone walls outside.

Jean-Claude and Stefan work on the wall, with Marion in the background.

Along with three other workers, I’m helping to rebuild a retaining wall that lines what used to be a moat. One side of the wall will be almost completely buried, but the other side will be visible so we have to place the stones in a way that is not only solid but also looks good. The stones are cut into rough rectangles, but they aren’t perfectly regular and it can be challenging to find the perfect fit. But I enjoy the work – it’s basically like playing with giant, heavy legos. I’ll post video of some of this work before too long.

The other big part of my stay here has been learning French. I meant to give myself a solid foundation over the course of the summer, but I hadn’t taken into consideration the fact that summer is summer, so it’s very difficult to accomplish anything. Then I was going to practice in Scotland, but what with the hiking and the whisky and endlessly entertaining Scottish accent, that didn’t happen either. So I decided to learn French on the two-hour train ride from Paris to Dijon. Totally reasonable, but the countryside speeding by outside my window was too alluring.

So.

I knew enough French when I arrived to think to myself, “Merde.” But it’s actually going pretty well. When people speak slowly and gesture a lot, I can usually tell what they’re saying, and sometimes I can even manage a slow and halting response. I’m doing especially well with conversations about construction. (It doesn’t hurt that the word for “cement” is “ciment”.) And if anyone asks me how I’m doing, I will answer without hesitation about either what to say or how to say it: Ça va bien.

In the Land of the Bens and the Glens

Alright, I’m finally getting to the highlight of my time in Scotland: hiking through the Highlands.

The West Highland Way extends ninety-six miles through the Highlands, starting at Milngavie and going to Fort William. Parts of this trip are not terribly exciting, so Julian and I decided to do only part of the trail: the thirty miles from Tyndrum to Kinlochleven.

We arrived at our starting point of Tyndrum at noon of our first day and started hiking along with Mark, a Londoner who had started a few days earlier back at Milngavie. The trail was relatively flat and very well maintained – almost a road at times – so we made the eight miles to Bridge of Orchy by 3:00. Bridge of Orchy isn’t really a town – just a few houses and a hotel – and it probably wouldn’t exist at all if it weren’t a stop on the railroad and the West Highland Way. Our bunkhouse turned out to be a converted railway station. It didn’t open until 5:00, so we left our bags at Mark’s room in the hotel and started a nearby mountain called Ben Dorain.

Julian looks out over Bridge of Orchy from Ben Dorain.

A path marked a relatively easy route, but due to a confusion in translating Julian’s obscure Gaelic terms, I led us off the trail and directly up the side of the mountain. In retrospect, a bad idea. It was very steep and hard going but the views when we reached the top were certainly worth the climb. Julian found the path we should have taken up and we had a considerably easier descent.

When we got back we met Steve and Helen, the couple who run the bunkhouse. They were superb hosts, and I strongly recommend that anybody visiting Scotland stop in for some of Helen’s cooking. The common room was well-supplied with books about trains, natural history, and to my delight, a collection of Calvin & Hobbes. Steve saw me open it and remarked, “Ah yes, one of your best exports.” Over a homecooked meal, Steve, Helen, Julian and I had a long conversation about British history. After dinner we headed down to the hotel pub where a Scottish folk band called North Sea Gas was playing in front of a lively house.

Our next day was a big one: twenty-two miles across Rannoch Moor and then up over a ridge before descending into the town of Kinlochleven. Julian, Mark, and I set out just after 8 and made good time. The trail was good, and although the sky was gray we were spared rain. As we walked Mark and I discussed American and British politics and other places we’d traveled to. Last year Mark motorcycled from Alaska down the West Coast to Baja California, where it turns out that he briefly traveled with Glenn Ehrean, the teacher who taught both Julian and me European History in high school. Small world!

Our view as we set out across Rannoch Moor.

Our trek across Rannoch Moor took us to the mouth of Glen Coe, where members of the Campbell clan massacred at least 38 of the local MacDonalds in 1692. It’s a striking landscape, a deep glen (valley) surrounded by steep bens (mountains). The mouth of the valley is marked by Buachaille Etive Mor, which towers above the moor below.

Another view from Rannoch Moor. Buachaille Etive Mor is in the center, and Glen Coe is immediately to its right.

But instead of continuing down through Glen Coe we went over one of the ridges beside it along a path called The Devil’s Staircase. I’ve found that when a trail is named after the devil it tends to be a good one, and this was no exception. But after a long descent into Kinlochleven our feet were more than ready for a rest and we for a glass of cider.

Kinlochleven was the end of our time on the West Highland Way, but with fond farewells, Mark set out the following morning to cover the last 12 miles to Fort William. Julian and I headed up into the mountains around the town. Scottish mountains are not particularly high in comparison to those in the United States – the highest is only a bit over 4,000 feet – but they are steep and rugged. Foolishly, the only food we packed was half a jar of peanut butter, but we made it up to the summit of Stob Coire a’ Chairn in good sprits.

A 360º panorama of the view from the summit of Stob Coire a’ Chairn.

On our way down we were met by two men (Lance and Bill) and a sheepdog (Heidi). They invited us to join them in their peak-bagging and offered a ride to Glencoe at the end. So we turned around to resummit the mountain we’d just climbed and then continue to Am Bodach, a nearby peak.

Lance and Bill play trombone and cello in the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and really should moonlight as a comedy duo. They spent the whole time we were with them alternating between trading insults and doubling over in laughter. At one point they couldn’t remember the name of Am Bodach. “Anne, Anne…”

Julian volunteered, “Anne Boleyn”.

“Yes, that’s it,” I said. “It used to be higher but then they off the top.”

Lance looked at Bill and remarked, “My my, they teach pretty good history in the Colonies, don’t they?”

The ascent of Am Bodach (note the climbers at the bottom of the photo). Stob Coire a’ Chairn is the mountain in the upper-right corner.

They’d been hiking with three others from the Faroe Islands, which Lance described as a place where the locals eat nothing but whales and puffin eggs. The Faroese had gotten lost, but eventually we saw them up ahead. Lance caught their attention with a yell of “Oy, Vikings!” and they joined us for the climb up Am Bodach.

It was a fantastic scramble: hard work but immensely satisfying. The path was steep enough that we could comfortably climb with all fours, just needing to avoid kicking loose rocks down on those below. The gluons lowered as we reached the summit, and suddenly the world was nothing but rocks and mist. Fantastic. At the summit one of the Faroese passed around a flask of whisky. A superb way to celebrate a successful climb.

Descending Am Bodach with Loch Leven below.

We finished the day with a visit to a pub in Glencoe, where Julian and I had our first taste of haggis. I’d been dreading it, but in all honesty it was quite good. I’m still a bit leery of the canned stuff, but I’m sure that won’t be the last time I eat it. We traded jokes (Why did the leper fail his driving test? He left his foot on the accelerator) and then eventually conversation moved on to more serious matters. Like so many of the people we talked with, Lance and Bill were very interested to hear our take on American politics. Everybody is shocked at the importance of money in American politics, and of course Mitt Romney’s Olympics gaffe was hot news in Britain. We are frequently asked who we think will win, and I usually answer that I think Obama will squeak through, but barely. In all honesty, I feel a bit out of the loop. After a week without news I tune in to find everybody discussing Clint Eastwood talking to a chair. Huh?

Anyways, that marked the end of our big hikes. We were lucky to fit them in when we did, because the next few days were marked by wind, rain, and clouds. Next up: Edinburgh!

St. Andrews

I’ve already posted briefly about St. Andrews, but I didn’t get a chance to include pictures. I thought it might be nice for those of you who know Julian to have a sense of where he’ll be spending the next four years.

St. Andrews as seen from the end of the pier.

St. Andrews is located along the seaside and a long pier extends across the harbor. A look back at the town from the end of the pier shows a skyline dominated by the ruins of the old cathedral. It’s a striking profile, and one that has changed little since the seventeenth century. In Edinburgh’s National Art Gallery Julian and I saw an 18th century painting of the harbor in a storm, and the cathedral ruins looked just as they do today.

Market Street in St. Andrews

The town of St. Andrews is mostly laid out along three streets that run parallel, east to west. These are lined with bakeries selling meat pies, specialty golf shops, Scottish memorabilia stores, etc. Parts of the old wall that once surrounded the town remain, so while exploring the town we frequently passed under beautifully weathered stone arches.

Julian in front of his residence hall.

We stopped by John Burnett Hall, which will be Julian’s dorm for his first year. There were renovations in progress inside so unfortunately we didn’t get a look at the interior. Needless to say, Julian is hoping that he gets a room in that turret.

St. Andrews is also home to the world’s oldest golf course, just across the street from Julian’s dorm. A walk across the close-cropped grass takes you to a long wide beach, famous for being featured in the opening scene of Chariots of Fire.

Julian on the beach.

Before long the town will be bustling with 6,000 students starting a new year of classes. I’m happy to think of Julian starting school in such a vibrant town, and of course he’s even more excited than I am.

Uisge Beatha

Just a few hours ago I arrived at my hosts’ home in Asnieres, near Dijon. Not the chateau – I’ll be going there on Monday. It’s wonderful to see them again after ten years since our last visit, and they’ve welcomed me very warmly. I’ll post more about France once I get to see it in daylight, but in the meantime I’ll start catching up on the rest of my time in Scotland.

The last couple of weeks were filled with great hiking through incredible landscapes, encounters with wonderful people, and my first taste of haggis (actually pretty good).  I don’t think a single post can do justice to it all, so I’m going to take it one thing at a time. And today’s one thing is Uisge Beatha, Gaelic for “Water of Life”. You may know it as Scotch Whisky.

Gold barley on the gate at the Blair Athol Distillery.

On Wednesday Julian and I visited the Blair Athol distillery just outside of the picturesque town of Pitlochry. Its a quaint little place with old stone buildings, and wrought-iron barley stocks adorn the gate to the main courtyard. Although it produces 2.7 million liters of whisky each year, Blair Athol is considered a relatively small operation. Of this, about 10% is bottled as single malt Scotch Whisky and sold under the Blair Athol label. The remainder is sold to Bell’s where it is blended with about 35 other whiskies to make Bell’s Blended Scotch Whisky.

We took a tour of the distillery, but we weren’t allowed to take any pictures inside the building so I’m afraid that this is a little light on the illustration. Our guide took us through the process from start (a handful of barley) to finish (samples of the final product). The process of making whisky begins with soaking barley in water, which converts the starches in the grain into sugars. The barley is then heated to dry it out. Methods for this vary, but distilleries that burn peat retain the smokey flavor in the finished whisky.

The dry barley is ground and yeast is added, and over the course of two days in massive tanks called washbacks, the mixture begins to froth and bubble as the yeast activates and the sugars in the ground barley are converted into alcohol. Portholes offered glimpses into the interiors of four washbacks in different stages of the process, and the metal sides of the most active vats were warm to the touch.

A whisky still on display in the National Museum in Edinburgh. This particular still used to reside in the Glennfiddich distillery in the Speyside region of Scotland. I have a particular fondness for Glenfiddich because, as with many Speyside whiskies, it was founded (and is still owned) by a Grant.

Next we moved into a loud room dominated by six big cone-shaped copper stills. Signs warned us not to touch them so as not to burn ourselves. This is where, in order to concentrate the alcohol, the mixture is added into stills that are heated to just below the boiling point. Alcohol boils at a slightly lower temperature than water, so it evaporates and is siphoned away from the still, where a cooling unit condenses the vapor and produces distilled spirits with an alcohol content of at least 60%.

Finally, the resulting spirits are stored in oak casks. The drink can’t legally be called whisky until it has aged in the cask for three years, but high-end Scotch will stay there for 12 or more years. (Unlike wine, whisky does not continue to age after it has been bottled. Thus, a 12-year whisky will always be a 12-year whisky.)

At this point in the tour, our guide suddenly got very excited about an obscure American law that suggests that corporate influence in politics can have some rather pleasant side effects which soften the blows of rampant corruption and economic collapse. At the end of the 19th century, the American cooper and lumber industries pressured Congress to pass a law decreeing that barrels used in the production of whiskey (spelled with an “e” unless it’s from Scotland) in the United States could only be used once. That law has never been repealed, so Scottish distilleries such as Blair Athol can buy used American barrels quite cheaply – roughly £100 each. They use them for the spirits that will be sold to Bell’s to make blended whisky.

The barrels that are used to make the Blair Athol single malt are another matter. The distillery purchases them for around £500 each from producers of sherry, port, wine, etc. In its many years lying in the cask, the whisky will take on some of the color and flavor of the drink that preceded it. If you look on a bottle of single malt whisky, you will see a description of the casks in which the drink aged.

The Blair Athol Single Malt

We rounded out the tour with a tasting of Blair Athol’s single malt. Our guide told us to warm the glasses in our hands to bring out the flavor. He advised against ice, saying that it “constricts the flavor”. (This will revolutionize the way I enjoy Ben & Jerry’s.) Then he told us to stick our nose in the glass and breathe deeply. All kidding aside, this was a good idea. When you’ve only got a small mouthful of something, you might as well enjoy it with as many senses as you can possibly use. It smelled good. It looked beautiful. (As for sound, meh.) Finally, we drank it. And it was good. A strong taste and it burned gloriously as it went down the gullet.

That was not the end of my adventures with whisky. Today I flew out of Edinburgh International Airport, so of course I had to take a look at the Scotch collection in the duty-free shops. (All of the bottles were way bigger than I wanted, so I left empty handed.)

There was the usual assortment of whiskies that I’ve gotten used to seeing in Scottish pubs. But many of these were far more expensive varieties than anything I’d seen before. A 40-year Balvenie was marked at £2000. I thought that was high, and then I looked below it and saw a 46-year Dalmore for £20,000. I asked a man stocking the shelves if people actually buy the really expensive ones. He laughed and said yes, and then directed me to a booth further down the terminal.

The Dalmore “Constellation Collection”

There I found an additional 21 bottles of Dalmore labeled as the “Constellation Collection”. Each bottle was hand-blown glass, with a handmade silver stag’s head on the front, and the color of the whisky was a bit different in each. On the neck of each bottle was a label reading “Bottle 10 of 88” or “Bottle 10 of 224”. The attendant explained to me that the second of these numbers referred to the total number of bottles of that variety produced. It’s very similar to the way printmakers label editions of their prints. But these bottles had been assembled into a special collection because they were all the tenth bottle of their respective varieties. They weren’t for sale as individual bottles – you had to buy them as a complete set.

That would cost you £158,000, or roughly $250,000.

That was a wee bit outside of my price range. But I talked for a while with the attendant, a pleasant young man who seemed quite aware of how ludicrous the collection was. But he was very knowledgable and happy to tell me about how the whiskies from different areas of Scotland differ. (Speyside whiskies are smooth, Islay whiskies taste of peat and smoke, Lowland whiskies are weaker, and Highland whiskies are a mixture of all those traits.) As I left to board my flight he gave me a sample from one of the Dalmore bottles which sells for £105 per bottle. A fantastic last taste of a country that’s treated me well.

Stay tuned for stories and photos of hiking through the Scottish Highlands. Until then, sláinte!

 

 

Violence and Road Signs

I’m writing from St. Andrews, a lovely seaside town on the east coast of Scotland. It features the ruins of a castle, destroyed in the seige of men who’d broken in and murdered a cardinal, and a cathedral, destroyed in the height of the Protestant Reformation by a crowd riled up by a fiery sermon condemning the excesses of Catholocism. These excesses were embodied in the cathedral’s decadent trappings and the fact that it had walls on all sides and a roof overhead. The reform-minded crowd scaled this down to a much more reasonable one-and-a-half walls.

St. Andrews is also home to the oldest university in Scotland. It, too, has a troubled past. A timeline of important events in the university’s history includes a mark at 1470 reading “Several Masters and students expelled for attacking the Dean with bows and arrows.”

But it seems that Scotland has since moved on from such charming acts of violence. There are plenty of other sources of charm here to take their place, from the weathered stone carvings to the famous Scottish brogue. Sometimes this local charm is not what we need at the moment.Halfway through a marathon drive across the country, our family pulled into a rest stop for a quick nap. We found ourselves parked next to a kilted bagpiper belting out the Scottish national anthem. Stirring fare, but no lullaby.

But out of all there is to choose from, I find myself most enchanted by the gentility of street signs.

A sign with the profile of a squatting dog reads “No Fouling”. Firm, but polite, and above all, dignified.

On the narrow roads of Skye, road signs warned “Oncoming Vehicles in Middle of Road”. The words themselves are rather terrifying, but the sign presents them calmly, in black and white rather than neon and flashing lights. Imminent death is, if not soothing, at least acceptable.

Another sign warned cars to be on the lookout for 18-wheelers hauling logs out of pine plantations in the hills. America’s muscular term “Logging Trucks” was replaced by the dainty “Timber-Lorries”, which to my ears sounds like a brightly-colored candy.

All this gentility can be hard to get used to, and I suppose my mind looks for the most exciting interpretation of the facts before me. After the hostess at our Bed & Breakfast told us that St. Andrews has many wonderful psychopaths, it took me several moments to figure out that she was talking about bike trails. Cycle paths.

Charming accent!