Notes from the North

What is a ritual? The dictionary says it is an act or a ceremony which takes place at a specific date or time and follows a prescribed form or order. It is most often carried out in a group or public setting but not always. So what might turn a repeated act into a ritual I wonder? The question occurs to me because the organisers of the Edinburgh Festival have chosen ‘Rituals that Unite Us’ as the theme for this year’s Festival. Perhaps they mean it as an indirect response to last year’s theme of ‘Where do we go from here?’     Using the dictionary definition, should we call the applause at the end of a show a ritual act? It certainly seems to unite the audience but I don’t think it merits the word ritual. Rituals are more than a practice, more than a habit. They seem to me to have a strong connection to belief, superstition, veneration, propitiation, like the ceremonial lowering of a flag, the sounding of the last post, the blessing of a new baby…    It is true that...

The National Library of Scotland is one of six copyright libraries in the United Kingdom. This means it has a legal right to hold a copy of every book published in Great Britain. There is as a result an almost unimaginably rich hoard of words, images and film stacked, micro-fiched, digitised and filed within its walls on George IV Bridge, at Causewayside where maps are held, and at Kelvin Hall in Glasgow. One of the best known of its many treasures is probably the last letter Mary Queen of Scots wrote, to Henry 3 rd   of France, the brother of her first husband, just six hours before she was beheaded on 8 th   February 1587. One of her final requests to Henry is to make sure her servants are paid, (something he failed to do but which Philip II of Spain put right). one page of Mary's letter To begin with the library was not a public resource. It first opened as the Advocates’ Library in 1689 and it was only with the passing of the copyright Act in 1710 that it began to assume ...

It is May. The blossom is showering down in drifts along the pavements and the air is thick with the twitter of busy birds finding mates and building nests, so Birds their beauty and their wellbeing - our wellbeing too - are the subject of this post.  Scotland apparently has 535 different kinds of bird. If we set aside the views of the owners of grouse moors who often don’t live in Scotland anyway, most of us probably agree that having laws to protect and increase our bird populations is a good thing. And fortunately, notwithstanding the murderous efforts of that gun-wielding minority, Scotland still has more species of large raptors than anywhere else in the UK – 18 in all.  Happily there are also dozens of voluntary organisations up and down the country dedicated to monitoring and protecting the country’s birds and their nesting sites.  Of all the raptors the golden eagle ( aquila chrysaetos ) is probably Scotland’s best known. Another less often seen but widely distri...

Edinburgh Science , founded in 1989, is the educational charity responsible for the Edinburgh Science Festival . This year was the thirty-fifth time the festival has been held, a fortnight of displays, lectures and activities organised to coincide with the school Easter holidays. In 1989 it was the first-ever large-scale public celebration of science and it remains to this day one of the biggest festivals of its kind in Europe. It is without doubt one of Edinburgh’s great successes, and should arguably be as big as the globally-renowned International Festival. But it isn’t, far from it, and perhaps part of the reason for that is a nervousness, even a negativity, in the general population about ‘Science’ in general, a feeling that, unlike the Arts, it is too difficult or too inaccessible.  The festival does an excellent job of dispelling those fears by providing all sorts of ways for people to play and learn.  The hunt is on at the national Museum. of Scotland The title of this...

  I didn’t think I’d write another post from Venice but here I am on my very last day before I ride more trains through the Alps back to France once more. I was prompted to this after reading about Niccolo Tommaseo  whose statue stands proud and high in the Campo Santo Stefano, right by the Instituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti.  His back is turned to a pile of weighty books. Those are just some of the eight volumes he wrote between 1861 and 1874, i l Dizionario della Lingua Italiana. I could hardly fail to celebrate a lexicographer, especially one of such industry, after my own many years of dictionary writing. Tommaseo was a Dalmatian Italian and is considered by many to be a precursor of the Italian irredentism (I got that from Wikipedia). Now irrendentism is another word I have had to contend with while being here – first of all to learn what it means and then to reckon with its power in the fluctuating and often disputed lands of central Europe. This I suppos...

I am halfw ay through a month-long stay in Venice, comfortably settled in a small flat overlooking the Campo de le Becarie which is right by the mercato del pesce, the fishmarket,  a nd fifty yards from the erberia, the fruit and vegetable market. By early afternoon the fish stalls are empty. Only a few piles of ice are still melting back into the flagstones and the men are out with their hoses and brooms, leaving only a raw, watery smell hanging in the air. It is reassuring to hear that the fish come mostly from the deep waters of the Adriatic and not from the polluted, shallow waters of the lagoon. Venice doesn’t stink these days although the city still relies heavily on the ‘gatoli’, the centuries-old system of underground tunnels which take waste water and human excrement from the houses into the canals.  Twice a day the canals are flushed out by the high tides and the waste sinks into the mud of the lagoon. Despite the enormous increase in human traffic and industry the s...