The World Cup: 'Anyone But England'

The football World Cup is once more upon us, and my local pub, the Barrels, known for real ale and live music, has replaced the live music with televised football for the duration. Here on the border, supporting England is a delicate business. There are certainly some England flags to be seen flying proudly on houses and cars round here, but not nearly as many as I used to see when I was working down south. Shops in Berwick are wary of putting large red-and-white ‘come on England’ type displays in their windows. According to the figures produced by the local regeneration activists, 65% of shoppers in Berwick are resident north of the border, and no trader wants to alienate 65% of their customers. Some of the Barrels’ regular clientele will only have gone along last night to cheer if England lost, and the English team obligingly gave them an enjoyable evening.

Several World Cups ago, back in 2002, I attended a conference in Belfast while it was on. As I drank my coffee in the local McDonalds, a radio commentary on an England match was playing in the background for the benefit of the customers. So far, so typical of anywhere back home. Then an outburst of cheering by the young staff behind the counter indicated that a goal had been scored, and it took me a few moments to realise that it was England’s opponents who had got the ball in the net. Having grown up close to Scots who behave the same way, I took this in my stride. I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that the Scots will confine themselves to gloating over the football and not follow the Irish example into any more direct physical manifestations of their dislike of the English.

Of course this sort of antagonism between near neighbours is not confined to the UK. When I was travelling in New Zealand I saw a tee-shirt that said ‘I support two teams – New Zealand and whoever is playing Australia’. I can confirm from personal observation that when Australia is playing England in a cricket test match the Kiwis will cheer for England. The attitude of Kiwis to Australia is not dissimilar to that of the Scots to England. They know it’s bigger and richer and a lot of them are obliged to go and work there and it doesn’t really feel like a foreign country, but OMG they want the world to know that their loyalty will always be with the smaller place they call home.

The real problems come when the England and Scotland football teams play each other. People in Berwick stay indoors and close the shutters then.  Joke!  I think.

At Last, a Serious Political Debate in Berwick

I live very close to Berwick youth hostel and go to its excellent cafe quite a lot. The manager, Sion Gates, is an able and energetic young man and has now pulled off something of a coup by organising the only public debate on the implications of the Scottish independence referendum for Berwick, in the said cafe. Many thanks and congratulations to him for swimming against the tide of political apathy engulfing Berwickers, many of whom seem like they won’t notice there’s anything out of the ordinary going on until the day they find their shopping trip interrupted by a police checkpoint.

I took this photo last summer in the hostel’s courtyard. At the time I just thought it was cute but now it kind of looks like a metaphor for different political institutions growing out of different ideological old shoes .... or something

At 6.40 last night I crossed the courtyard, showed my numbered ticket (no. 5 out of 110, I am very proud to report) and was in plenty of time to get a seat near the front.  My dominant impression of the evening is of the sheer pleasure of being in a room full of people who were all serious about and engaged with current events. The tone of the debate was heated but good-humoured.

The speakers were, on the No side, our Conservative candidate for the next Westminster election and a LibDem former MSP for the area just north of the border, and on the Yes side, an SNP minister in the Scottish government and some bloke from the Radical Independence Campaign. For full details see this photo of the poster. 

I have to say that I was not impressed by the RIC guy, who delivered the same sort of Left-Green speeches he has probably given a hundred times before with no real concession to the fact he was now on the other side of the border. The SNP minister, though, impressed me – he was personable and well briefed and managed to sound like he really cared about the English borderlands. The two No speakers both came across as very committed to the entirety of the Borders and they emphasised the sheer uncertainty of most of the variables involved and the impossibility of knowing exactly how Berwick would be affected by independence.

Unfortunately for Mrs Trevelyan, however, her position was undermined by her own party leader just last week, when David Cameron promised to give the Scots powers to set their own taxes even if they vote No. Since he worked hard to keep this option off the ballot paper, conceding it now makes it look as if he has been out-manoeuvred by the nationalists, and the SNP speaker last night correctly pointed out that it is simply ‘dishonest’ for any unionist to claim that the status quo is an option any more. I think myself that if Scotland raises income tax we would see a welcome flight of working people into Berwick, but most questioners last night were more concerned about the negative implications of Scotland reducing corporation tax to attract more investment.

The debate was chaired by Jim Herbert, a local historian whose blog Berwick Time Lines is linked to in my side-bar. It took me a while to recognise him because it was the first time I’ve seen him wearing a suit. (Sorry Jim.) He gave an introductory sketch of the historical background to Berwick’s unique situation, which included the suggestion that we may now be seeing a return to the position between 1603 and 1707, when the monarchies of England and Scotland were united but their parliaments and legal systems were not. I have never heard it put like this before and there is something reassuring about having Scottish independence presented as a return to a past situation rather than something radically new.

Except of course that in 1603 there was no European Union .... The Yes campaign believes that the idea that an independent Scotland would not be allowed to join the EU in its own right is mere posturing and bluff, and that the EU is desperate to keep countries in it at all cost and won’t let them leave if they try. I agree with this myself. However, I felt that the Yes speakers ducked the question of what will happen if a re-admitted Scotland is forced to join the Schengen common travel area while RUK stays out. That’s when the police checkpoints would pop up just north of Berwick’s largest supermarket.

The  most reassuring thing I gained from the debate was the panel-wide assurance that Berwickers will still be able to use Scottish health facilities. Since our nearest general hospital is north of the border, this has been a big worry locally. The SNP  minister stated unequivocally that the plans for an independent Scotland include a commitment to the maintenance of cross border health services, free at point of use, just like now.  So, as one questioner forcefully explained, we now only need to persuade the two national ambulance services to transport patients across the border, which they usually refuse to do even at present.

At the end Jim asked for a show of hands for and against independence for Scotland. The vote was pretty much evenly split, but since I know for a fact that there were some committed Yes supporters from north of the border in the audience, it was not an entirely fair vote. He also asked whether anyone would support independence for Berwick and a number of hands went up, including mine. I do seriously believe that the best option for Berwick would be to become a tax haven in the manner of the Cayman Islands  Pity we don’t have their climate

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.