Notes from the North

The main art exhibition at this year’s Festival has been Grayson Perry’s ‘Smash Hits’ (on until 12 November). I haven’t been to that. The pink-plastered pillars at the RSA entrance hint at the colour inside but they don’t entice me in. Nor does the prospect of the naked Grayson or more Alan Measles, the teddy bear we know too much of. There are lots more challenging artists on show. The most obvious one is at the City Art Centre behind Waverley Station,  a Retrospective of Peter Howson .  The exhibitions at the CAC are usually free. The Howson is not but you get a wristband that allows you to leave and come back later in the day. Perhaps that’s no bad thing as there are about 100 works spread over 3 floors and none of them makes for easy viewing. Peter Howson wasn't born in Scotland, but Prestwick in Ayrshire, was his home from the age of 4. He studied at the Glasgow School of Art but the programme doesn’t seem to have suited him. He failed the first time and dropped o...

You can read the question on billboards, programmes, street signs and banners throughout the centre of Edinburgh. Can you read it in Wester Hailes, Craigmillar, Granton or Muirhouse? Perhaps not. Like the multitudes of visitors streaming up and down the streets of hectic Edinburgh, I haven’t been to those parts of the city to find out.  I am fairly sure though that, despite Festival director Nicola Benedetti’s good intentions and best efforts, the event she’s in charge of is still stuck hard and fast in the inner reaches of the town. So, one answer might be – ‘ Why don’t we start by going to the out-lying parts of the city? ’ That would tie in rather well with the themes Benedetti has chosen to underpin the ethos of these three weeks of intense (and generally quite pricey) culture. They are:     1.       Community out of chaos 2.       Hope in the face of adversity 3.       Exploring a perspec...

The parkland in front of the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art – One on Belford Road is sculpted into what their website describes as a ‘stepped, serpentine mound reflected in pools of water’.  It was designed by the landscape architect Charles Jencks who is also known for his magnificent Garden of Cosmic Speculation at Portrack House in Dumfriesshire.  Garden of Cosmic Speculation  photos taken on a wet day in May 2015 The Garden of Cosmic Speculation is only open to the public for 5 hours one day each year when 1500 tickets go on sale to raise money for the Maggie Centres, a cancer care charity named after Maggie Keswick Jencks, Jencks’ wife. The park in front of the Edinburgh art gallery hardly bears comparison but is inspired by the same cosmic concepts that Jencks was able to express more fully in his own garden. The Belford Road site is also open all year round.    At present the gallery building itself is displaying Work no 975 by Martin Creed, a hopef...

I spent five days in Moniack Mhor in the last week of May, most of them in sunshine which one evening gave us a sunset such as one would more usually expect to see over on the western coast. The curlews were calling, the gorse a dazzling yellow and I don’t think I have ever seen quite so many hares, young and old, bounding about on the fields.   Moniack Mhor is Scotland’s best-known writing centre. Started thirty years ago by Kit and Sophia Fraser of Hootananny fame (pubs in Inverness and Brixton), the centre was partnered with Arvon ( www.arvon.org ) until 2014 when Creative Scotland, still one of Moniack Mhor’s core funders, stepped in with a grant and enabled them to go independent.     Besides being a haven for all sorts of writers and would-be writers – the list of those who have taught there includes some of the greatest Scottish poets and writers of the past half-century - Moniack Mhor works to live lightly on the land. To that end it grows quite a bit of its ...

The title is misleading. I am in Paris having first spent some fine days in an Airbnb in Ghent with bikes provided. Belgium is much ahead of anywhere I’ve been, except perhaps Berlin, for bike use and bike lanes and the bike parks at the train station are a wonder to behold. I took a train from the gare du Nord to Lille then on to Ghent which also gave me plenty of opportunity to see how many houses, or at least those near the train lines, are now using solar power. The route north-south from Edinburgh to London is a solar/PV-panel desert in comparison .  However, I didn’t take the train to Ghent to ride bikes or study the levels of solar panel use but primarily to see the restored altarpiece painted around 1432 by Hubert and Jan Van Eyck in the cathedral of Saint Bavo. This was something I had promised myself a long time ago but which had been delayed because of covid restrictions and other practicalities.     Eve holding a fruit which is not an apple (for once) some of ...