Notes from the North 4 2025

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 through to Glasgow I see that even the M8, which must be the dirtiest motorway in the UK, is now more green than grey as new growth spreads out to hide the litter strewn along the roadside. 

Spring in northern Europe is a time of such generosity in nature that it’s tempting to forget the challenges we face in finding ways to live responsibly and more sustainably on a planet of finite resources. It doesn’t help that powerful people with all the wrong messages are being given too much attention, trying to convince us that the climate emergency is a fiction, that we can go on burning fossil fuels indefinitely without any negative effects. All of which made this year’s Edinburgh Science Festival more timely than ever. Spaceship Earth was the title and the theme was quite explicit:

 

‘Live like an astronaut’ - learn from the constraints of living on a space station, or a distant planet, where resources are impossibly constrained and every gram of material and watt of energy is precious. 

 

I can’t help feeling that Norah Geddes (1887 – 1967) would have been among the crowds at the festival had she been alive now. She was the daughter of Patrick Geddes (1854 -1932) and played a major role in the Open Spaces project started by her father. The project brought derelict urban plots back into use as play spaces and public gardens for Edinburgh’s poorer citizens who had no access to gardens of their own. 

According to quite a few who knew him Patrick Geddes was a disorganised sort of person with a tendency to flit from one project to another, perhaps partly because he grasped the interconnectedness of his areas of study which, then as now, were generally treated as separate and self-contained disciplines. 

He started his professional life as a botanist, studying and writing widely about bees and their key role in the pollination of plants (his bust in the Storytelling Garden behind the High Street sits on a beehive plinth). However he is probably best known nowadays for his pioneering thinking on urban planning. 

In Scotland Riddles Court at the top of the High Street is the most famous example of his ‘conservative surgery’ approach to the built environment. At the time he took it over it was a multi-occupancy slum building. He gave it a new and lasting make-over by demolishing the dilapidated parts and making what remained more hygienic and suitable for modern living. His other innovative contribution was to convert the main part of the building into one of Edinburgh’s first student halls of residence. 

His motto, Vivendo Discimus, By Living We Learnis carved over the entrance to the inner courtyard.

 

Perhaps what we should most remember him for however were two other associated ideas, what you could call the philosophical underpinnings of his practical actions. One was that it is not through the acquisition of wealth and possessions but through learning and creating that people find their greatest fulfilment and happiness:

 

‘This is a green world, with animals comparatively few and small, and all dependent on the leaves. By leaves we live. Some people have strange ideas that they live by money. They think energy is generated by the circulation of coins. Whereas the world is mainly a vast leaf colony, growing on and forming a leafy soil, not a mere mineral mass: and we live not by the jingling of our coins, but by the fullness of our harvests.’

 

The other is more relevant than ever in the turbulent insecure world of today, where for millions the reality of a stable, permanent home is an unreachable goal. They live their lives ‘in transit’, finding, if they are lucky, some safety and rest in temporary clusters of companionship, something like the knots he refers to below: 

 

‘Human existence unfolds not in places but along paths. Proceeding along a path, every inhabitant lays a trail. Where inhabitants meet, trails are intertwined, as the life of each becomes bound up with the other. Every entwining is a knot, and the more that lifelines are entwined, the greater density of the knot. Places, then, are like knots, and the threads from which they are tied are lines of wayfaring.’

 

I like to think Geddes would have appreciated the trails etched by the mower on the bowling green, and the groups of players acting out the sedate rituals of a bowling match - small knots in the fabric of the city.