Yet Another Seal Pic

My latest seal photo, taken as usual from the Old Bridge in Berwick with a zoom that's just not quite zoomy enough. I have posted in the past about young seals apparently being left on this sandbank by their mothers, but this is the first time I have ever seen two seals together there. It is an exciting development. Perhaps we can look forward to ever increasing numbers of seals by the bridge.

And a couple of weeks ago, I saw an otter! I'd heard reports from neighbours of otter sightings near the quayside but this is the first time I've ever seen one in the wild myself. No chance at all of getting a photo, I'm afraid - it moved like greased lightning.

Alnwick Has Pants

I said has not is. Stop sniggering at the back. A 'pant' is a term apparently unique to North East England for a public water fountain, of which there are several in Alnwick. This is the best known one, situated just below the entrance to St Michael's Lane and ornamented with a figure of St Michael slaying a dragon.

It still has water running from the spout and filling up the tank. Some people throw coins into it, an apparently conditioned reaction to any ornamental water feature, and every now and then some of the local clubs and societies come along and fish them out and donate them to good causes. In some of my impoverished periods I used to contemplate fishing them out myself, but the water is usually so disgustingly dirty that I couldn't face it.

St Michael, the dragon and the other Gothic curlicues are presumably Victorian flights of fancy, but the basic concept of a public source of water called a pant is evidently a very old one, as there are extant references to examples much earlier than those that have survived until now. What's more I don't recall anybody sniggering about it when I was young - I think the word was still too much in common usage to arouse any associations with underwear.

In 1997 the Alnwick Civic Society held a competition for the most plausible etymology of the word 'pant'. I won the first prize of a bottle of wine. My triumph was based on the rather unexciting suggestion that 'pant' is simply a variant form of 'pond'. Chambers dictionary says that 'pond' derives from the same root as 'pound', an enclosure where stray animals are kept, and that the core concept of a pond is thus a body of water that has been artificially enclosed.

This suggestion was backed up by Adrian Ions, a well known Alnwick history buff, who found an entry in a 19th century dictionary of northern speech confirming that in this region 'a pant is a public fountain of a particular construction, having a reservoir before it for retaining the water' and that  'pond was anciently pronounced pand, which may be derived from the Saxon pyndon, to enclose or shut up'. Adrian should probably have got the bottle of wine but apparently my entry arrived earlier.

Fifteen years after these findings were printed in the Civic Society's newsletter, a glossy new leaflet appeared in the Tourist Information Centre promoting 'a number of activities in 2013 themed around the old pants of Alnwick'. A box on the leaflet explains that 'a pant is a public water fountain, normally attached to a water trough. It is thought to be a form of the word pond'.

Should somebody be paying me royalties for the use of that piece of information? I need the money. If anybody would like to pay me to undertake any more historical research for them, just ask!

P.S. In case you are thinking that the boxes of produce beside the pant have been left there as the survival of some ancient ritual of offerings to the saint - sorry to disappoint you. The shop adjacent is a greengrocer's and regularly lets its displays overflow onto the pavement.

The Misty and Choppy Waters of Nationalism

I had to think hard about a suitable photo to go with this post, but ‘misty and choppy waters’ seemed pretty apt. Over the last week I’ve had several conversations with people at polar opposites of the spectrum of opinion on Scottish independence that have made me reflect on the nature of nationalism.

The first was with one of the main organisers of the Berwick and Borders branch of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Well, that’s what it’s called when it meets here, the members over the other side of the border call it the Borders and Berwick branch. It’s affiliated to the Scottish PSC, who thus seem to be in the vanguard of reclaiming Berwick as a piece of lost Scottish territory. I do not necessarily agree with the PSC on everything, but it’s always refreshing to spend an evening with local residents whose political interests extend beyond the demand for free parking.

It turned out that this PSC organiser is also active in the Yes Scotland campaign, in other words he is a committed supporter of independence. He announced proudly that they got fifty people at a Yes meeting in Ayton – a very small place just north of the border – and appeared to take it for granted that the rest of us would also be happy about this. I said to him afterwards, I suppose if Scotland becomes independent then cross-border organising of societies like this will have to stop? He looked surprised and said, I can’t see why it would make any difference. I can think of several scenarios that would stop this enthusiast merrily driving to and fro between Ayton and Berwick, not to mention stopping Berwick activists doing their regular leafleting outside the Kelso branch of Sainsburys.

I can understand why those whose political campaigning is organised around the principle of ‘the right to national self determination’ would feel that an independent Scotland and a separate Palestinian state both arise imperatively from this. After all, nationalist communities in Belfast took up flying the Palestinian flag as well as the Irish one. The problem is always that this gets you into very messy and potentially nasty decisions about who is a member of the national community and thus has the right to determine its future.

Three days later I found myself chatting to a group of people in Alnwick, a small town thirty-five miles south of the border. The mere mention of the independence referendum produced an outburst of rage from one of them. Her son-in-law is Scottish but he can’t vote because he lives in England, while all these Romanians who are living in Scotland now can vote! It’s just not right!  There is an intuitive plausibility to this argument but a moment’s thought shows that the only alternative would be to define Scottishness in terms of ethnicity or place of birth, which nobody wants. There is no recognised legal sense in which somebody is Scottish although they live in England, because there is no such thing as Scottish citizenship yet. For the time being, Scottish people are those who live in Scotland, end of.  (The situation is complicated by the fact that citizens of other EU member states have the right to vote in some UK elections, including this referendum - hence the complaint about 'Romanians')

Returning to the Palestinian comparison; Israel provides an extreme example of an ethnically based definition of citizenship. So much so that, an Israel friend once told me, there is no postal voting permitted in Israeli elections because the constitution provides no means of excluding members of the Jewish diaspora anywhere in the world from claiming Israeli citizenship and thus the vote. We can readily see that the same thing would happen if the franchise for the independence referendum were granted to ‘people who are Scottish but not living in Scotland just now’. Where would it stop? What about all those descendants of emigrant Scots in the Americas and Australasia, who tend to be attached to the misty-eyed Braveheart view of Scottish history?  I can recall a few years back talking to ‘an English person who happens to be living in Scotland just now’ who was enraged by Alex Salmond’s call for descendants of Scottish emigrants to return to the mother country for a ‘year of homecoming’. This was, he claimed, a clear example of basing citizenship on ‘blood’, and where had we heard this before? That’s right – Nuremberg! 

I think this was a little harsh on Mr Salmond and the SNP, whose official line has always been that anyone who chooses to live in and work for the New Scotland will be warmly and equally welcomed. But I can kind of see what he meant. At the same event in Alnwick last week I talked to a friend of mine, a Scottish man who is married to an English woman. They live happily together in a beautiful part of Scotland. He is passionately opposed to the nationalist  movement, not least because he feels as if he is now being expected to hate his own wife. Oh dear.

The Wealth of Nations

A few weeks ago a professional day trip took me to Edinburgh, the furthest limit of the area covered by this blog, but also the source of much anxiety for its heartland in the Borders. While I was there I made the pilgrimage to the grave of Adam Smith, the founder of the modern discipline of economics, in Canongate churchyard.  It seems appropriate to show it here, because the name-calling and mud-slinging over the economic prospects of an independent Scotland has now turned really quite unpleasant. Companies are announcing that they will flee the country if it leaves the UK, because of the uncertainty over whether it will be able to continue using sterling as its currency. Were I a nasty, suspicious, political sort of blogger, I would suggest that George Osborne, the finance minister of the Westminster parliament, has been deliberately talking up the impossibility of Scotland using sterling in order to create just such a flight of capital and put economic pressure on the nationalists. But I'm not, so I won't.

The original inscription on the grave is not easily legible now, but if you can get a zoom cursor on it you may be able to make something out. I'm fairly sure that when I first visited Canongate, about thirty years ago, it was possible to walk right up to the stone and get a better look. The railings and the gravel and the fancy carved quotation (underneath the rain puddle) are newer additions. Was it thought necessary to protect the grave in this way? From adoring admirers kissing it to pieces or enemies wanting to smash it? I can imagine that the Edinburgh branch of the Occupy movement might have blamed Adam Smith for making economics seem like a respectable way to plan society and thought it was worth making the trek from their camp in St Andrews Square to Canongate to leave evidence of their disapproval.

Canongate churchyard lies only a few minutes walk from the Scottish parliament building at Holyrood. (Here is a picture taken just outside the parliament's entrance, for no better reason than that it's a pretty view.) So any MSP struggling with the present day economic problems of a Scotland possibly about to become independent can easily take a packed lunch down there and commune with the spirit of the great man. It is impossible to resist speculating on what Adam Smith would have thought about the modern independence movement. He was born in 1723, only sixteen years after the Union with England had taken place, and would no doubt have been very conscious that Scotland was driven into union by running out of money. I know that's not as romantic as the Braveheart version, but by 1707, honestly, it was all about money. And in 2014 it still is. 

Fortress Berwick

This photo was taken from the defensive walls of Berwick, looking across the estuary of the river Tweed at low tide to the village of Spittal. It gives a good sense of Berwick as an armed frontier town. At the risk of harping on the same theme more than I usually do, I have decided to stick with the issue of whether Berwick would find itself an international frontier in the event of Scottish independence, possibly even the border of the European Union.

This photo reminds us that this state is not something that exists purely in the realm of political fantasy, it was the actual historical condition of Berwick for centuries, before the political union of England and Scotland. Its inhabitants lived cramped and restricted lives within defensive walls that totally encircled the town, dependent on the say-so of the military and political authorities to pass through the gates and go about their daily lives.  There are cases recorded of Berwickers dying because doctors had to wait so long for permission to enter the town during the hours of curfew. We don't want to go back to that. We really don't.

These are the gun emplacements along the walls. The cannon themselves were removed during World War Two as part of the drive to recover all scrap metal to use in making more up-to-date weapons. But it wouldn't be hard to mount some modern automatic-loading night-sighted rifles there!

There is a theory being floated in Berwick just now that if we did become the frontier of the EU the powers-that-be might want to move the border back to the river to make it more easily defensible. At present it is located in a rather random position on the road just north of Morrisons supermarket. Since I live right on the north bank of the river, this appeals to me. I am indulging in a fantasy of the Scottish government placing a compulsory purchase order on my property so that they can turn it into a border checkpoint, paying me a big wodge of compensation and allowing me to retire on the proceeds to some sun-drenched spot far away from both England and Scotland.

In the cold light of current affairs, however, I think that the present events in the Ukraine would make the EU very wary indeed of setting a precedent for moving an international border without consulting the local residents.

By the way, a Scottish friend tells me that the Wooler twins born on either side of the border, about whom I once wrote a post (here), have now been adopted as poster children for the Better Together campaign. Aah. 

I Hate to Keep Going On About This, But When Can We Expect the Barbed Wire?

This is the Old Bridge in Berwick-upon-Tweed at high tide during one of the wet, windy, miserable days we've had a lot of recently. Though not nearly as many of them as the poor people in the south of England have been having. I had a vague idea that this would be a suitable picture to illustrate a post on the theme of 'choppy political waters ahead'. Go on, groan as much as you want.

Now that the referendum on Scottish independence is only - quick count on fingers - about seven months away, Westminster politicians and the London based media have started to take it seriously. Last week there seemed to be a major attack on independence by a politician and an earnest 'whither the UK' piece on every news programme. I got rather irritated at the way the rest of the world seems to have only just thought of the issues that have been bothering those of us who live on the border for years. Well - they've been bothering me for years at any rate, and if you've been reading this blog you will be well up to speed on the issues.

I've already done at least two posts showing the bridge across the border at Coldstream as an accompaniment to questions about whether this is really a defensible frontier that could cope with being the border of the European Union. The bridge at Berwick is not the border any more but I may as well continue the theme. Everyone in Westminster is threatening the Scottish Nationalists with the alleged impossibility of staying in the EU if they leave the UK. So is some EU commissioner whose name I forget. From where I'm sitting, this looks like pure gamesmanship. There is no way that any EU commissioner who had visited Berwick or Coldstream or Norham or Paxton would be prepared to allow these towns to become the edge of the European Union. It would mean turning sleepy, remote villages into armed camps and erecting miles of barbed wire across rivers. I am quite certain that a newly independent Scotland would be fast-tracked through the process for re-admission in its own right, however many backstairs deals would have to be done to get all the member states to agree.

I am now more interested in the scenario raised by an expert from LSE, whose name I also forget I'm afraid, on Radio 4. He pointed out that all new member states of the EU are obliged to join the Schengen agreement, which allows free travel on a single visa through all states that are signatories to it. At present the UK is not a signatory. So that raises the prospect of England-'n'-Wales, or Rest of UK as the Scots call it, outside Schengen and a newly independent Scotland within it. Leaving Berwick and all the rest of the border towns as the new frontier of the free single visa travel area, which is only marginally better than being the frontier of the EU altogether. It would still turn us into a heavily policed land border between significantly different political entities, whereas we are now a border marked only by a couple of cheery flags and welcome signs.

I know that Holyrood can't really be expected to care about the English side of the border, but I would have thought that they would care about the impact on the Scottish border towns. If only because their inhabitants have votes in the September referendum.

Cameron Calls For Unionist Missionaries

This is a picture of the impressively large Union flag that hung outside the Northumberland Hall (an 18th century assembly rooms) in Alnwick during the period of the 'Jubilympics' in 2012. A few days ago David Cameron, Prime Minister of a so far still United Kingdom, decided that the best way to persuade Scots to vote against independence was to stand in the Olympic stadium and remind us all of the great achievements of Team GB in the summer of 2012. That's right, he thought that the hearts of Scots would be warmed by being reminded of an event in London - in London - that cost several billion pounds more than it would take to enable all five million of them to live in luxury.

Now, we had already worked out that David Cameron is not the sharpest tool on the parliamentary gadget belt, but one assumes that he has advisers to help him with this sort of thing. If so, no. 10 should probably review its recruitment procedures. (Unless, as my friend Kate said, trying to make David Cameron look clever is just too big a job for anyone.) This was a catastrophically misconceived speech, and the main message Scots will have taken from it is not any of the actual words coming out of his mouth but the loud and clear call: Vote for independence and you will never have to be governed by an English nincompoop like me ever again!

The most bizarre aspect of the speech was the PM's call on everyone in England and Wales to use all their powers of persuasion on any Scots they may happen to come across to win them for the No side in the September referendum. This responsibility weighs particularly heavily on Berwickers. Are we expected to travel the few miles to the other side of the border on a regular basis to act as missionaries for the Better Together cause? Should we perhaps set up our soap boxes in the high streets of Dunbar and Melrose and ask the crowd, in the manner of an evangelical preacher, if they have heard the Good News of Unionism? I am sure that Conservative Central Office would be happy to supply some suitable pamphlets for distribution on such occasions, setting out in bullet point form the saving power of the United Kingdom, the most extraordinary country in history. (Yes, Mr Cameron really called it that. He must have been studying Michael Gove's preferred school history curriculum.)

I have always said that, although the polls have continued to show a clear majority for a No vote in the independence referendum, we should never underestimate the ability of the Westminster government to shoot itself in the foot. I think that a Yes majority has just become significantly more likely.