Notes from the North - 4

It was while I was sewing buttons onto the cardigan I had just finished knitting that I found myself thinking about basic mending jobs I learnt as a child. I was taught the ‘correct’ way to sew on buttons while a Brownie. It was a task you had to perform satisfactorily to earn one of those badges that went on the sleeve of your uniform. I don’t suppose there’s a badge for button-sewing in today’s Brownie world or that you have to swear to ‘do your duty to God and the Queen and help other people every day, especially those at home’, the pledge I parroted out quite happily - like the daily recitation of ‘our Father which art in Heaven’ in school assembly - without ever wondering what doing my duty to God or the Queen might require of me.

There’s no difficulty finding buttons in charity shops. All you need is the patience and time to sift through the boxes, but when I asked at the Salvation Army shop if they had any knitting needles for sale I was told they do but they don’t put them out on display because, being pointy, they have the potential to be used as weapons. That made me think of a meeting I attended many years ago between a group of Swedish men working in childcare in Sweden and a group of male childcare workers in Glasgow. At that time the kind of outdoor activities the Swedes were already practising had not yet reached Scotland’s mainstream nurseries and after-school clubs. The reaction of the Glasgow men on hearing that Swedish children went off into the woods, made fires and used knives was to insist that it could never happen here. Knives were dangerous weapons not useful tools. The Swedes were mystified. They knew nothing of Glasgow history, how the blade – the chib - was the weapon of choice in gang warfare. 

 

We spent a lot of time last autumn clearing out books, papers and other relics, many of them dating back to an era before I or either of my sisters was born. In one drawer among balls of wool, knitting patterns and off-cuts of material there were two large wooden darning ‘mushrooms’. We didn’t keep them. Does anyone darn socks these days? A mixture of western affluence and low-wage labour in distant places mean that when socks go into holes they go in the bin. Millions of socks must be mouldering away in landfill sites. Which thought immediately conjures up another image - of that mountainous pile of clothes at the centre of the Christian Boltanski’s 2010 Grand Palais exhibition, PERSONNES. 

For me that was the most affecting of the Monumenta exhibitions I have been too – the wall as you entered and the clothes and heartbeats filling that glassy space.

 

These days, like most big cities, Edinburgh has cooperatives a bit like the Louve coop I belonged to in Paris.

The Louve functions on the same lines as the better-known Park Slope Food Coop in New York. 

Cooperative membership and the right to shop there necessitate doing 3 hours on-site service once every four weeks. Edinburgh’s coops don’t seem to be so rigorous in their governance but have good links with other like-minded enterprises and associations. Like everywhere else Edinburgh also has food banks, some of which according to the City Council website are only accessible by referral from one of the ‘helping agencies’. The same site lists a number of ‘food pantries’ which don’t need a referral but are not completely free. Most of these are located in or close to the less affluent areas of the city. The Hearty Squirrel runs a weekly stall in George Square and caters mostly for the student population. They stock bread from Garvald bakery and have a tie-up with Glasgow’s Greencity. You can find all that information and lots more by subscribing to their newsletter – Hearty Squirrel Chewslettter - the tone of which is indeed determinedly hearty.

 

The most interesting city-centre place of this type I have been able to find so far is definitely the Shrub Zero Waste Hub on Bread Street. Their aim is ‘to empower the community to live a low-carbon life’. The enterprise gained full charitable status in 2018 having started out as a student initiative. There is still a large student component to its users but it is gradually becoming more diverse. The day I visited there were a few old men at the café tables and one or two middle-aged women searching through the clothes in the back of the shop. The café is not licensed to serve hot food at present – staffing problems and the need to meet health and safety standards for the preparation of hot food are the blocks on that - but it’s a welcoming space and although I paid the same as I would pay in any café for my cup of tea, it’s definitely fulfilling some of its core aims. There are boxes of vegetables, shelves of loaves and other basic essentials you can take away. 

Away from all this buying and swapping and eating and making the natural world is waking up. The rooks are getting feisty and argumentative with each other, circling in wild loops over the hill and the swans are drifting, one of them with its head tucked in, on the loch at the back of Arthur’s Seat. 

There are benches at intervals by the path up to that loch, some of them with little brass plaques, speaking also of love and loss and transcendent togetherness.