Notes from the North 3 2025




‘The imagination is the primary and first site of resistance. The market abhors all values that are not the values of the market. Children’s books, to a great extent, because they are written for those who cannot participate in the market, can offer resistance to a vision of the good life which is built on a hegemony of acquisition. Children’s books insist in having faith in vast truths that lie beyond consumption and display. Their utopianism is that of the Moomins and Pippi Longstocking: it offers an experiential microcosm of a more ideal world. (Kathleen Rundell, London Review of Books February 2025)


It was reading Rundell’s thoughts on the importance of books for children of all ages, that led me to visit Scotland’s Storytelling Centre on the ground floor of John Knox’s house on the High Street. The Centre is free to visit (you pay £7 to visit the museum in the rest of the house which is where John Knox lived in the last years of his life). It is open from 10 am – 6 pm seven days a week, has a café, a theatre, a large hall where the storytelling takes place and various other nooks and crannies for readers and listeners. At present there is an exhibition of Mike Turpie’s paintings of Edinburgh scenes which he describes as ‘a poetic interplay of colour, line and shape’.


 

Spend a few minutes looking over the notices on the pinboard and you discover all sorts of other story-related events happening at the Centre or close by. At intervals throughout the year there are Storytelling Ceilidhs with the Burgh Blatherers, or there’s Guid Crack, a regular monthly get-together upstairs in the Waverley Bar across the street. Burgh Blatherers’ meetings are from 7 – 9pm and are ticketed: £8 (£6 concessions). The next one is ‘Food for Thought’ on 16th April. If that’s not to your taste there is Guid Crack’s ‘What a Glorious Mess’ with Inés Alvarez Villa on 28th March, proposing to celebrate the joy of being alive and the wonderful chaos of it all - I quote.

 

It looks as though events like these are doing their best to stem the tide which is flowing fast in the other direction as evidenced by the closure or reduction in opening hours of ever more public libraries, and the decline in ownership of books. The National Literacy Trust estimates that nearly a million children in the UK don’t own a single book of their own. The UK government spends a dismal £12 annually per capita on libraries, far less than most European countries. 

 

The latest rescue plan by the Scottish government is laid out in a document with the unpromising title of Forward, a 2021-25 strategic plan for Scotland’s public libraries. The opening paragraph on the website made my heart sink: 

 

‘a dynamic strategy with a bold vision for the future of Scotland’s public libraries which are an essential part of Scotland’s social fabric, supporting and inspiring people to fulfil their potential for over 150 years. It is against this proud backdrop that this strategy sets out its vision to ensure public libraries in Scotland remain at the leading edge to empower communities.’  (the italics are mine)

 

And there’s a lot more just as bad, about ‘building on strong foundations’ and heading towards ‘a vibrant, sustainable future’. A Freedom of Information request last year established that between 2014 and 2024 forty-two public libraries closed in Scotland, a disproportionate number in rural areas which everyone knows have an above average need for such resources. A further thirteen libraries across Aberdeenshire, plus seven in Moray and five in Perth and Kinross are scheduled for closure this year. The disconnect between the words of the stated objectives and the reality is truly abysmal.

 

The poetry section in most public libraries is not usually very large and rarely if ever carries recent work by little known poets. But in times of crisis, such as we are living through, poetry often speaks the truth more clearly than prose. I have written about Palestianian poets before but circumstances demand that I do so again. 

 

Mosab Abu Toha was born in Al-Shati refugee camp in 1992. He attended, the Islamic University of Gaza, Gaza’s oldest university. Like the other institutions of higher education in Gaza the university buildings were destroyed in the early days of the IDF onslaught (teaching continues but mostly on-line). I haven’t been able to find out where Toha and his family are living now, although I do know they fled to Egypt after their house was reduced to rubble and relatives and friends were killed and I know he was at Syracuse and Harvard Universities as a Scholar-at-Risk Fellow in the years when the USA was still welcoming rather than deporting strangers in need of refuge. 

 


Alicia Quesnel to whom the poem is dedicated, is an ear specialist and Assistant Professor of Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery at Harvard Medical School. 

 

 

Things you may find hidden in my ear

(for Alicia M Quesnel, MD)

 

                        I

 

When you open my ear, touch it

gently.

My mother’s voice lingers somewhere inside.

Her voice is the echo that helps me recover equilibrium

when I feel dizzy during my attentiveness. 

 

You may encounter songs in Arabic,

poems in English I recite to myself,

or a song I chant to the birds in our backyard.

 

When you stitch the cut, don’t forget to put all these back in my 

ear.

Put them back in order, as you would do with the books on your 

shelf.

 

                        II

 

The drone’s buzzing sound,

the roar of an F-16,

the screams of bombs falling on houses,

on fields, and on bodies,

of rockets flying away – 

rid my tiny ear canal of them all.

 

Spray the perfume of your smiles on the incision.

Inject the song of life into my veins to wake me up.

Gently beat the drum so my mind may dance,

with yours

my doctor, day and night.

 

Mosad Abu Toha 

(City Lights Books 2022)

 

To end as I started, with children, here are some photos of the many heart and stars stuck on the windows of my local library in Piershill.








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