Notes from the North

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 throu...

‘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 day...

The non-Catholic cemetery in Rome is a good place to spend some quiet time in. By mid-February the camellias are in flower and the box hedges make a sturdy fretwork of green through the grey crosses and tombstones. Keats has his grave here, as do Shelley and Gramsci, and many others less well-known.   Backing onto one end of the cemetery is the huge centuries-old pyramid tomb the praetor (magistrate), Caius Cestius commissioned to hold his bones.  It is still so perfect you might think it’s a monstrous testament to a 19 th  century rich man’s arrogance rather than the mausoleum of a Roman citizen who lived some time around 12 BC. But that’s Rome all over - the ruins and vestiges of ancient imperial grandeur and self-delusion still cluttering large parts of the city, rendering even the most superficial digging up of the roads and parks a delicate - and costly - business.    The Centrale Montemartini is in the Ostiense quarter of the city a little further south fr...

embroideries (detail) Guadalupe Maravilla David Talbot Rice (1903-1972) has an Edinburgh art gallery named after him. He was an expert in Byzantine art, appointed to the Gordon Watson chair of Fine Art at Edinburgh University at a young age. Like Giles Henry Robertson, his successor in that post, Talbot Rice went through the English public school system (in his case Eton) to Oxford and into the higher reaches of public office by virtue of the openings those institutions gave him. By all accounts he used his advantages of birth and education well, doing important work in various archaeological sites in Turkey, Iraq and Iran before becoming a professor.   A s well as being an archaeologist and scholar Talbot Rice was an innovator. He introduced a new degree combining Fine Arts and Art History and wanted to establish an arts centre in the university. He died before he achieved the second aim. It was left to Giles Robertson to take the project on and the Talbot Rice gallery was finally...

Edinburgh seems to have gone mad for Christmas although perhaps it feels more unhinged and frantic than usual because the lights and tinsel are in such marked contrast to what we know is happening in other regions of this plundered and war-torn planet. Even the august frontage of the Royal College of Physicians at no 9 Queen Street has decked itself out to look like a landlocked lighthouse  By the late afternoon Princes Street is all but impassable on both sides of the road. The screams from the fair-ground rides echo out far above Walter Scott, sitting impassively in his monument.   As to what Adam Black (1784 – 1874), would have to say about the hordes milling round his statue in Princes Street gardens, snacking on frankfurters and donuts and glugging down lager or warmish red wine … it’s just as well he’s a speechless stone effigy.  Black was a publisher active during the heyday of the Scottish Enlightenment. He bought the copyright of the Encyclopædia Britannica in 18...

I am not the first to wonder why it is that Edinburgh has the largest number of private schools of any UK city other than London and therefore the highest proportion of children educated outside the state system. As a point of comparison Edinburgh (population 515,000) has 17 private schools while Glasgow (population 1.7 million) has 8, none of them boarding. Nationally in Scotland about 4% of all children go to an independent school (7% in the UK as a whole) whereas a startling 25% of Edinburgh children attend private schools.  St Georges School for Girls The cost of doing so is a significant drain on a family’s finances: annual fees in Edinburgh for day pupils can range from £11,000 to £17,000 and for boarders from £26,000 to a little over £37,500. From January 2025 those fees will go up by 20% to cover VAT that the new government will introduce.  The Edinburgh fees are high but still don’t come near the current cost of sending a child to Eton College – approximately £53,00 p...

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...