Jokers and Thieves

This fine piece of calligraphy was created by local artist Arthur Wood for the Watchtower art gallery here in Berwick. The picture loosely evokes the building housing the gallery (originally a church) and the text is of course the lyrics of the classic song All Along the Watchtower. As I gazed at it during my most recent visit to the gallery, it occurred to me that the lyrics describe the current political situation in Berwick with an almost uncanny accuracy.

There must be some way out of here

Said the joker to the thief

There’s just too much confusion

I can’t get no relief.

There is an awful lot of politics going on here just now, and all of it is confusing. The impending referendum on independence for our friends on the other side of the Scottish border would be quite enough on its own.  Indeed, it was reported this week that cinemas in Scotland have decided to stop accepting advertisements by either side in the independence debate, because movie-goers at the end of their tether have complained that they go to the cinema to get away from the saturation coverage of the wretched referendum.

Then, on 22^nd May we had elections for the European parliament. As usual only about a third of the electorate turned out to vote in these, but the ones who did seem to have been motivated by an extreme level of fed-up-ness with the present government and all its local associates.  The UK Independence Party (whose only real policy is leaving the European Union) gained the most votes of any party nationally and came second after Labour in this area.  Under the peculiar voting system used for the European elections whereby MEPs are parcelled out in job-lots of three per large region, North East England now has two Labour and one UKIP members of the European parliament. Both Conservative and Liberal Democrats, who historically have behaved as if North Northumberland were a football to be passed between the two of them and all other parties were playing in some lower league, sank to ignominious third and fourth places.

The way that the debate over EU membership relates to the debate over the future of the UK is brain-torturingly hard to follow, especially for Scots. Basically: if you are a Scot who wants to stay in the UK but leave the EU, you vote UKIP; if you want to leave the UK but stay in the EU, you vote SNP; if you want to stay in both the UK and the EU you can vote for any of the three older parties; and if you want to leave both the UK and the EU, you currently have no major party to vote for. Meanwhile, those of us just over the English side of the border put our heads in our hands and just hope that none of the possible permutations of outcomes involve building a big wall across the motorway.

With all this going on you might think that members of Berwick Town Council would be gravely concentrating on the bigger picture and putting aside individual differences in a manner befitting the local government of a community on the front line of the most important political questions of our time. Instead, they have just plunged themselves into an extraordinary piece of in-fighting that to an outsider displays a combination of viciousness and pettiness that only very small towns can manage. I don’t wish to get into the details and personalities, merely to reflect that the town council appears to do almost nothing of any importance but to take itself with a seriousness inversely related to its usefulness. Some of its members are now calling loudly for the council to be dissolved pending new elections. This would seem to be a rather risky strategy - they might find that nobody missed it.

And just to round it all off, someone has written to the local paper suggesting tongue-in-cheek that, given recent unfortunate events in that country, the question of whether Berwick is still at war with Russia ought to be clarified as a matter of urgency. This hoary old story dates to when Berwick was a separate legal entity; the declaration of the Crimean War  listed 'England, Scotland and Berwick upon Tweed' as belligerents but the peace treaty concluding the war allegedly mentioned only England and Scotland.

I wouldn’t want to suggest (honest, m’lud, I wouldn’t) that any politicians - locally, regionally, nationally or internationally - are ‘thieves’, but a right pack of jokers they most certainly are. 

The Alnwick Column

This is the Column in Alnwick, located in the nearest thing the town has to a public park. (The Alnwick Garden is not a public park.) It is never, but never, referred to by locals as anything other than The Column, in the same way as hardly anybody in Newcastle has any idea who The Monument is a monument to. (Earl Grey, since you ask.) The formal name of the Alnwick Column, as found in guidebooks, is the Tenantry Column. It was erected in 1816 by his grateful tenants to their landlord, the Duke of Northumberland of the day, in thanks for his reduction of their rents during a period of economic hardship, and the inscription on the base says so, fulsomely.

It has probably occurred to you at once that if they could afford to put up this fairly impressive chunk of masonry they couldn't have been all that hard up, and indeed, the story preserved in popular memory is that the Duke took the same view and promptly put their rents back up again. I seem to remember reading somewhere that this story is historically unfounded. The most likely interpretation would seem to be that the tenant farmers saw it as a shrewd investment, a calculated piece of schmoozing that would make it hard for the Duke to become more demanding in the future.

The sculpture on the top of the column is the symbol of the Percy family, the straight-tailed lion. There are four more lions around the base of the column. The picture on the right shows the present writer (as they say in posh books) at a tender age beside one of them. The similarity to Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square is very evident, but the local sculptor wasn't in Landseer's league. The lions are kind of cute and cuddly rather than imposing. At least I thought so as a child. I was especially fond of the one whose tongue had been partly broken off, because I felt sorry for him, and I think this is what I'm pointing to in this photo.

Alas, it is no longer possible for children to climb all over the lions, because railings have been erected around the base to keep out the vulgar masses. This was part of the original design, but the original railings were taken away during World War 2 as part of the drive to recycle every possible piece of scrap metal into armaments. Because my grandfather was on the town council at that time, I have inherited a copy of the newspaper report of the council's debate on whether or not to agree to part with this piece of their 'built environment'. Some members were extremely unhappy about sacrificing their elegant railings, but my grandfather argued strongly that this was a very trivial sacrifice compared to what they were asking of their young men at the front, and his side carried the day.

And for sixty years or so the children of Alnwick played happily around the railing-free plinth. It was only a few years ago that new railings were put up, in line with the currently prevailing orthodoxy to Restore and Conserve everything in sight back to its Original and Authentic condition. Why can nobody ever admit that the original form of something is not always the best?

Riding the Bounds 2014

May Day, and here in Berwick the weather is most unsuitable for it. Wet, chilly, breezy, foggy. A typical day in the Borders in other words. I once saw a postcard on sale in a shop in Coldstream that depicted a freezing, windswept tourist with the caption 'I survived the Scottish summer'. Too true.

Because of the weather attendance was well down for the annual Riding the Bounds event, and I had no trouble getting a spot right at the front of the pavement as the riders came back into town in the afternoon. Excellent, I thought, at last some fine photo opportunities with nobody's head in the way. And then this keen type threw himself determinedly into the middle of the road. I think he may have been the official photographer from the Advertiser, because none of the stewards attempted to haul him out of the way with stern health & safety warnings about horses, which is what happened to everybody else who strayed off the pavement.

Two years ago I published a post about Riding the Bounds with more photos, taken in better weather, and more details about the event (here). I am still suspicious that it is far more of an 'invented tradition' than most locals let on.  But the essence of it can't have been invented that recently, because the Berwick Advertiser, in its intermittent 'snippets from 25/50/100 years ago' feature, once printed a report from the early 20th century about a couple of lonely riders turning out on May Day to observe the custom and finding nobody else interested in joining in. Of course that was when Berwick had many sources of income other than tourism. Read a very good post by local historian Jim Herbert about Riding the Bounds in the past here.

My favourite thing about the event is the proud display of the three flags, England and Scotland on the outside and Northumberland sandwiched between them. Thanks to the breezy weather this year they made more of an impression than they sometimes do. In this referendum year this symbolic display of our rather uncomfortable position in between England and Scotland seemed particularly poignant.

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.