Notes from the North - 2

Despite the soaring cost of energy, households across the UK have been lighting up the winter darkness. Christmas is coming. Trees have been bought and decorated. Windows are shining with stars, candles, wreaths and strings of light. Ditto hedges, front doors and fences. In our street there are no Santas, snowmen or reindeers but there is a large stuffed dog a few doors along, chained to a bench in the front garden. 


 The city has installed its giant Norway spruce on the Mound and below it, in very large sparkly capitals, EDINBURGH, perhaps with the televised New Year fireworks in mind. 


At the Scott Monument there is a frantic Christmas market – food, drink, fairground rides and stalls selling over-priced Christmassy baubles. On the other side of Princes Street there’s a more ‘up-market’ spectacle. You have to pay for entry to Christmas at the Botanics and you go on foot through swarms of laser fireflies, past glades of ghostly trees and along tunnels of white light. 



Be prepared to follow a single path – there is no wandering off into the mysterious dark reaches beyond the dazzle. Cost-of-living crisis or not, the crowds are out and determined to enjoy themselves. 

 

I’ve done lots of bus travel in the past month, which means I’ve had plenty of opportunities to listen in to or even join in random conversations between strangers, something I never in the past associated with travel on public transport in Edinburgh (Glasgow was always where you went for that kind of random chat). But there I was one chilly late afternoon on a very busy no 26 bus when an Old Man got on with his zimmer and parked it beside a Young Mum whose little boy was in a buggy beside her. Their conversation went like this - 

 

OM: ‘Cold the night. I’m all right but. I’ve got ma soup in ma bag.’ He settles himself on his seat and unzips his anorak revealing a red Christmas jersey with a bold pattern of snowflakes and reindeers across the front. He leans down, fishes an egg and cress sandwich out of his shopping bag and takes a giant bite. Crumbs shower down on the jersey. The child watches, fascinated but clearly not sure about being so close to the action. He reaches out for Mum. She lifts him out of the buggy and sits down beside the OM. 

 

YM to OM: ‘That’s a nice Christmas jersey you’ve got on.’

 

OM: ‘Aye. It’s Rudolf.’ He points to the child’s boots – ‘They’s good boots.’

 

YM: ‘They’re new, a present from Granny.’

 

OM finishes his sandwich, screws up the paper bag and brushes the crumbs off his front: ‘This is ma new anorak I’m wearing. I’ve got two, this one and a white one in ma bedroom. It’s ready for going up to ma brother’s new house for ma Christmas dinner. And a tartan shirt.’ 

 

YM: ‘You’ll be smart in that.’

 

OM: ‘Aye, an’ warm too.’

 

There is a large Salvation Army depot close to my home. So far it has sold me a hall carpet runner (£8), a small wardrobe (£30), a linen basket (£1), a set of six never-used, mixer glasses (£2) and a television (£15). In Paris I was used to shopping occasionally in the big Emmaus in the Centre 104 on rue Aubervilliers but there was nothing on the scale of this charity outlet – or others like it elsewhere in the city. 

 


A few yards up the street from the Salvation Army is the local public library. It is a welcoming space but despite offering warmth, books, DVDs and internet access it’s always practically empty when I go. I think back to the crowds using my local library in Paris and I wonder what it would take to get people here used to borrowing books again. I don’t know the answer to that but I’m fairly sure it won’t be by offering ‘period products’, free to anyone in need. A table full of them is the first thing you see when you go into the library. 



I’m aware that I’m venturing onto sensitive ground expressing an opinion like that. Gender issues and all the many problems/dilemmas/campaigns that surround those two words are top of the news just now. The Scottish goverment has finally voted through the Gender Recognition Act after months of wrangling and internal dissent. Westminster is frothing and threatening to block it and the Trans lobbyists are jubilant. 

 

The library may be ‘on the right side of history’ by stocking free sanitary pads but whatever fancy additions they add to their traditional resources it won’t stop more and more of them being shut down all across this sorry island. No matter that serving on every Council there are adults who remember with gratitude how doors were opened, their lives made more interesting because they could borrow books from their public library. Hundreds of libraries now depend on volunteers to keep going. Perhaps this is yet another example of that community activism so graphically evoked by Darren McGarvie in the third Reith Lecture, ‘Freedom from Want'. Are we going back to an older model of local self-help as the state abdicates responsibility for… well, for almost everything? That’s certainly what it looks like. 

 

But it’s Christmas and, for now, the lights will stay on. 








 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Notes from the North 6 2025

Image
It’s the last Saturday in June. There is a warm wind blowing strongly through Edinburgh. Tourists and locals are sprawled out on the dry grass in Princes Street Gardens and I am with them. I am waiting to go to the opening of the exhibition celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Talbot Rice Gallery.  one of the Shawky glass marionettes Across the grass I can hear the voice of a woman speaking to a crowd which has gathered in the square outside the National Gallery. She and they are protesting the occupation, starvation and killings in Palestine. I have been out on other Saturdays lately and seen similar actions: outside St Giles Cathedral (a collection and a choir singing), outside Barclays bank (‘blood bank’ and other slogans chalked in big capitals on the pavement). I wonder how these signs of dissent and anger will be handled if the government persists in its decision to designate Palestine Action a terrorist organisation. For the moment their documentary To Kill a War Mac...
Read more

Notes from the North 7 2025

Image
  Less than two weeks ago I looked out from my sitting room window and saw plumes of thick smoke rising over Arthur’s Seat. After weeks of no rain the flames were rampaging across bone-dry gorse and grass. This was not the first time the hill has gone on fire but it jerked Edinburgh out of its usual complacency and reminded us all that Scotland, reputedly the land of rain, mist and lochs, does burn too.       Flames and floods are what we are learning to expect everywhere, as the planet responds to centuries of human destruction and warfare.     The Festival is in its last days. The crowds show no sign of thinning but the temperatures are lower and there is more than a hint of autumn in the bright red of the rowan berries and hips. Here at home I have emptied my potato bags, picked the last of my small crop of beans and peas and am now out along the back lanes getting blackberries to make bramble jelly.    The theme of the Festival has been...
Read more

Notes from the North 4 2025

Image
April marks the start of the bowling season. From my kitchen window l can watch the man with the mower pushing backwards and forwards across the turf almost every day, leaving perfectly straight green lines behind him. His efforts result in a lawn so smooth and firm that you could as easily play marbles on it. It’s the bowling green equivalent of a number 2 haircut at the barber’s.   In the Meadows, all along Princes Street, in the Botanics, in other public parks and countless private gardens there is an explosion of cherry blossom, showers of pink petals floating to the ground at the slightest breath of wind. I stop on my way back from town, first to listen to and then record the song of a thrush, a rarity these days, out of sight in one of the trees near the Parliament. Then one morning I find lots of tiny feathers scattered across the grass in my little back garden. It looks like the local sparrow-hawk has made off with an unlucky bluetit. And when a day later I’m on a bus throu...
Read more