The Only Good Thing to Come Out of Scotland ....

  .... is the road to England.  So said Dr Johnson, we are told. I was reminded of this by an article in the Berwick Advertiser this week. I've borrowed this picture from them, because I can't be bothered to go out and take my own boring photo of a road. (So sue me - I've given you lots of free publicity on here, 'Tiser.)

The piece was about the ongoing and frankly extremely tedious debate about why the A1 ought to be converted into a dual carriageway and how to persuade central government to cough up the money to do it.  The tedium lifted for me when I read that the Member of the Scottish Parliament for the Borders area, John Lamont, has denounced the Nationalist government for failing to upgrade the A1, saying 'just because a road leads to England is no reason not to invest in it".  Posterity will be grateful to Mr Lamont for this immortal utterance. I laughed so much that I dropped the paper.  It's lucky I was at home at the time and not on public transport.

Residents of North Northumberland have been quietly fuming for decades over the inadequate roads in the region. What is now prosaically known as the A1 was historically called The Great North Road and is the central transport spine of the country, running from London due north all the way to Edinburgh. Unfortunately the bit of it that runs through North Northumberland tends to get blocked every time it snows heavily or rains a lot. Never mind being the main link with London and Edinburgh, the residents of Alnwick and Berwick are cut off from each other in bad weather. I was once on the last bus to make it through from Alnwick to Berwick before the water from rapidly melting snow made the road impassable, and that kind of thing is hard on the nerves.

The campaigners for improving the A1 have now leaped with commendable speed and agility onto the bandwagon of the Scottish independence referendum. Is the present government in Westminster not committed to the continuance of the Union? It is. Does it not wish to maintain and promote in every possible way the links between England and Scotland? Well, yes. So it must realise the importance of - drum roll please - the road which runs between the two countries?  Erm, suppose so. And so will it demonstrate its commitment to the continued existence of the United Kingdom by giving Northumberland County Council a big wodge of cash with which to build a sparkling new multi-lane highway to connect the council's taxpayers with the Scottish capital? Now hang on a minute ....

John Lamont MSP is, as you may have guessed, a member not of the SNP but of the party known north of the border as 'the Scottish Conservative and Unionist party'.  He has surveyed the portion of the A1 running through his own patch of 'Ettrick, Roxburgh and Berwickshire", noticed the same bandwagon trundling along it and joined Northumberland County Council on board. It must be a bit of a squash.

Mythical Water Beasts and the Downfall of an MP

I've used this rubbish photo of a seal before to illustrate the difficulty of getting good photos of seals, but I'm now really wishing I'd saved it for this post, which is inspired by a book I've just read about the Loch Ness Monster. Since I've been living beside the estuary of the river Tweed I am far more sympathetic to those who sincerely believe they have seen an unknown beast in Loch Ness. Please note, I do not say that I am more inclined to believe in the existence of a large animal unknown to science, which seems to me unlikely for a number of reasons, but I completely understand why you might think you've seen one. In  a large body of water with constantly changing effects of light, shadow and reflection, it is remarkably difficult to tell the difference between a seal and a shag (a black water bird related to the cormorant which paddles very low in the water and dives for fish) and sometimes even between a seal and a log of wood, unless the 'log' suddenly dives. In such a vast body of water as Loch Ness it must be even harder to be sure what that moving black blob really is.

Rab Houston says in his most useful book Scotland: A very short introduction that Nessie was originally simply an example of a 'kelpie', a kind of malignant water spirit  that features in Celtic mythology. This seems to be borne out by the fact that the earliest reported sighting of Nessie is associated with St Columba. The monster tried to drag a man into the water but was driven back by the Christian power of the saint, which is exactly what you would expect of a kelpie. Some versions of the story say that the man got into trouble as a result of skiving off for a swim when he was supposed to be listening to Columba's sermon. The motif of a pre-Christian spirit punishing a man for failing in Christian observance reminded me strongly of the story of the Lambton Worm. This is a story from County Durham, which is a bit too far south to qualify as Debatable Land, but one of the Lord Lambtons was the MP for the constituency of Berwick upon Tweed. I've taken the story here from Folk Tales of the North Country but I've known it since childhood.

The young heir to Lambton Castle was, we are told, 'a wild and rebellious youth' who had no patience with his duties and cared only for pleasure. He took this to the shocking extreme of going fishing on a Sunday when he ought to have been at church. For this sin he was punished by catching a nasty looking aquatic creature instead of a fish. He threw it down a well and forgot about it and subsequently went off to serve as a soldier in foreign parts. While he was away the creature grew into 'a monstrous worm', climbed out of the well, wrapped itself round the hill on which the castle was built, continued to grow and terrorised the country for miles around, being pacified only by having the milk of nine cows delivered to it every day. Eventually the young heir, now older and wiser, returned home, was appalled by what he found and went to consult a convenient local witch about how to kill the worm. She told him not to challenge it on land but to stand on a rock in the middle of the river Wear so that when he cut it into pieces with his sword they would be swept away by the water and would not be able to join up again and come back to life, as the creature had done before. This trick seems to involve shifting the mysterious power of water away from the creature to the benefit of the human. It worked and the monster was soon no more. The sting in the tail is that the witch had told young Lambton that if he succeeded in slaying it he must kill the first living thing he saw on the way home - another common motif in folk tales. He had told his aged father to stay well out of the way and release a hound as soon as he heard his son blow his horn to signal the death of the monster. But the old man was so overcome with joy that he could not restrain himself from running out to greet his son. The son could not bring himself to kill his father and killed a hound instead, but because he had thus dodged the condition a continuing curse fell on him and all his heirs.

The story relates that for nine generations no Lord of Lambton ever died in his bed. It does seem to be the case that the Lambtons had a habit of coming to unfortunate ends, though their rate of death in battle may be no higher than the average for the aristocracy. In recent times the political career of one Viscount Lambton did, as it were, die in bed. His stint as MP for Berwick was abruptly terminated in 1973 when photos of his activities with several prostitutes were sent to the press. As MP for our constituency he had been scheduled to speak to my school a couple of weeks later but the invitation was speedily withdrawn, since, as my father memorably remarked at the time, he was 'definitely not the kind of man we want to come and talk to young girls'. That Lambton had in fact renounced his title in order to be able to continue as a member of the House of Commons, but he apparently insisted on being addressed as Lord anyway. He sounds like a true heir of the young Lambton who brought down the curse of the worm.

Fun At the Seaside in the 1950s

This post exists purely and shamelessly as as way of sharing these great photos with the world. The blog description above does say that it includes 'the merely entertaining'. And the photo on the left is just too entertaining to keep to myself! I've been sorting through some boxes of Inherited Stuff, which is a tedious, finicky and emotionally draining business, but every now and then you are rewarded with a find like this.

I'm fairly sure that this photo was taken at Alnmouth, a village on the coast of North Northumberland. It is only a few miles from Alnwick and has the distinction of having its own railway station on the main East Coast line because although the line was intended to go to Alnwick the Duke of Northumberland of the day refused to allow the nasty thing anywhere near him. So ever since travellers to Alnwick have had to negotiate a hopelessly inadequate bus service from the end of the road where the station is located - which is, if you are being really pedantic, not even in the village of Alnmouth but in a tiny cluster of houses called Hipsburn.

One of the ladies enjoying a paddle, or 'plodging' in the local vernacular, is my grandmother and the others are presumably her best mates. There is no date on the photo but judging by the dress styles and by my grandmother's age I would put it sometime in the 1950s.

This second photo is helpfully dated by the processor 'February 1957', but since nobody sits on the Northumbrian coast in a sleeveless dress in February I reckon it had been sitting in the camera since the previous summer. It shows my other grandmother and her family and friends outside my grandparents' beach hut, which was located at a place known locally as Seton Point, just a few miles along from Alnmouth. This hut stayed in the family for another twenty years, by which time it had become a museum of 1950s artefacts covered in sand. Sadly I was too young to have any say in what became of it - if I'd had the chance to keep it I would probably be living in it right now.

Our Enduring Links With Scandinavia

I have written a couple of times before about the close links between this area and Scandinavia and those posts have been quite popular, so I thought I'd go back to that subject. This is a picture of the memorial to Danish seamen who were based in Britain during World War II which has been placed in the Cathedral of St Nicholas in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. It was originally located in the Danish church in London, but when that closed down Newcastle cathedral felt that it was the most appropriate permanent home for it, because most of the Danish sailors it honours were based in the ports of Tyneside.

An English translation of the inscription is provided on the small plaque just visible on the left. It says: 'A memorial to the Danish seamen of all ranks who gave their lives in the service of their country during the years 1939-1945. As you read these names, remember. They died for Denmark, they died for freedom, so that we like they might live as free Danes.'

I love this memorial to the wider community of the North Sea. The most important reason for the north-south divide in England is that historically the south of England has been oriented to the Channel and the Mediterranean, to France and southern Europe, while the north of England has been oriented to the North Sea and the Baltic, to Scandinavia and Germany. This extends to the accents and dialects of northern England and southern Scotland, which are closely related to the languages of Scandinavia. Until very recently the British education system paid no attention to this and treated them simply as deviant and defective forms of speech which should be eliminated. I am really hoping that the present popularity of so-called Scandi-crime on television, and even more so the huge popularity among the opinion-forming class of Borgen, a Danish political drama about the trials of a liberal woman prime minister, may lead to a greater appreciation of our indigenous inheritance from Scandinavia.

One of the best known features of the speech of north-east England is the use of 'wor' where standard English has 'our'. This is held in such affection by native speakers that even some people educated to degree level will use it in certain situations. A light went on in my head when I heard someone on the radio explaining that March 25th is celebrated in Sweden as Waffle Day and that Waffle is a pun on the Swedish for Our Lady, which is Var Fru. Even back when I was at school, my German teacher commented that students with a strong local accent could acquire a decent German accent more easily than those down south who spoke posh, but that this was not reflected in any of the teaching materials.

So I am very happy to say that the theme of the Berwick film festival 2013 will be exactly this: the cultural connections between this area and the lands of northern Europe across the North Sea. Look it up here. 

Happy Easter

A very happy Easter to all my readers. On this holiday weekend I am reduced to showing you photos of flowers taken a few years ago, because not a daffodil or forsythia blossom is to be seen in the Borders at the moment. This is partly because Easter is quite early this year and partly because this spring has been exceptionally cold. As I celebrate the first anniversary of this blog, I have realised that it has coincided with the worst period of prolonged bad weather in living memory. A radio presenter the other day referred to 'our fifteen month winter' and that's about right. So the pics are here to symbolise spring, new life and new beginnings, rather than to represent the reality outside my window. I've known it warmer at Christmas. Seriously.

Yesterday I found a dead puffin on the slipway at Tweedmouth, but I felt you wouldn't want to see a photo of that. The Farne Islands rangers, whose blog is linked to in the sidebar, have been reporting worryingly large numbers of dead birds washed up all along the east coast. They were hit by a very unusual spell of bitter cold and high winds just as they were beginning to return to the Islands to breed. This is one of the years they take a 'puffin census' so in a few months time we'll know how badly the population has been affected.

Since it fits in with both the theme of new beginnings and the anniversary of my blog, I want to acknowledge the announcement of the date for the referendum on Scottish independence. It is now fixed for Thursday 18th September 2014. All elections and referendums in the UK are held on Thursday, even though this has not made any sense since 1832 when the franchise began to be extended to people who have to work for a living. Maybe an independent Scotland would hold its votes on a Saturday, wouldn't that be exciting. Anyone who is following the independence debate seriously may be interested in these two articles, one on the widespread sentiment that Scotland has a different political culture from England, here, and one on the surprisingly large difference in the attitudes of men and women to independence, here.  Whatever happens in the next two years, I'll still be here, giving the view from the border.

Local Food for Local People? No, not really.

This is the Craw Inn in Auchencrow, a very small village or possibly hamlet in the Scottish Borders, about half an hour's drive from Berwick. It is near Reston and I ended up there while trying to track down the old school in Reston, as mentioned in a previous post. It is one of those places which started off as a traditional village pub and still calls itself a pub but is in fact now essentially a posh restaurant and mini-hotel. When I found that the pub in Reston had closed down many months earlier and just hadn't bothered to take down the large sign at the entrance to the village advertising its menu, a friendly bus driver deposited me at the Craw Inn. This experience took place a few weeks before I started this blog and was in fact what finally prompted me to start it, because it brought home to me the weirdness of some aspects of life in the Borders.

I still plan to do a post called By Bus Round the Borders detailing the trials of being reliant on public transport in such a sparsely populated area, but I feel silly taking photos of buses. In addition to being a non-driver I am a non-foodie, which can also make life in the Borders difficult. Personally I can't see the point of driving miles around empty countryside just to get to a remote outpost of culinary sophistication, and I also dislike the way that driving under the influence of alcohol is in consequence a way of life in rural areas. The trick is to stay just below the limit. Every week there are reports in the local papers of people who haven't quite managed it. And losing your licence is a very serious matter in the Borders. It could mean that you can't get to your job. It could even mean that you have to live like me, and I don't think that the customers of the Craw Inn would be very happy about that.

When I was in there wasn't a Scottish accent to be heard in the place, but it seems that even being English does not confer enough cultural distinction on some residents of the Scottish Borders. The next time I came across the name of Auchencrow was when I saw a poster advertising their village jumble sale. Except they didn't call it a jumble sale or a car-boot sale, they called it a vide grenier. I did a double-take when I saw this. Later I checked with a native French speaker and he confirmed that vide grenier means literally 'empty attic' and is the French version of a jumble or car-boot sale. Just how posh do you need to be to feel that the only way you can contemplate buying anything second-hand is if the sale has been given a French name? But I suppose it fits in with the assiette de fruits de mer in the local restaurant.

To me this illustrates some of the paradoxes of the whole 'buy local' agenda which is so powerful now. Oysters were a common food of the poor in coastal areas in the past - when I went excavating for old bottles in the abandoned rubbish tip in Alnwick I found lots of oyster shells. But ordinary people certainly aren't eating oysters any more. The shellfish may be caught locally but it's turned into dishes that are given French names, sold at luxury prices and eaten by people with non-local accents who got there by driving nice cars. Many of the people whose ancestors have lived in this area for generations can't afford to eat in places like that. Sometimes they can't afford to run a car, so their experience of the place they live is truly local, intensely concrete and limited, in a way that those who make so much of local community, traditions and food barely understand.

Richard III is welcome in our car park

Like many people I have followed the events surrounding the excavation of the grave of Richard III under a car park with great interest, but I never expected that they would have any relevance to Berwick. Then this week a letter appeared in the Berwick Advertiser from one CW Ross arguing that the late king ought to be ceremonially re-buried neither in Leicester, where he died, nor in York, where he lived, but here in Berwick, because he was responsible for the town's final capture for the English, 'routing the Scots in the process'. Well, that sent me straight back to the history books.

As previously explained in this blog, the town of Berwick upon Tweed has changed hands between Scotland and England many times but the last time was in 1482 and since then it has been under English control. The victory of 1482 is conventionally attributed to King Edward IV. But maybe it's true that a lot of the hard graft was performed by the king's younger brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who later succeeded him to the throne and became Richard III. It does fit with the reports of Richard's skill and courage on the battlefield which were quoted by the historians investigating his grave.

I imagine that Mr or Ms Ross had his or her tongue firmly in his or her cheek, and there is of course no possibility of anyone taking the suggestion of this letter writer seriously. Staging a triumphalist ceremony to honour the man responsible for vanquishing an army of Scotland and seizing a chunk of its territory might upset the Scots of today just ever so slightly. I can almost see Alex Salmond quivering with rage on Newsnight. There have been other battles between England and Scotland since then, notably the epic tragedy of Flodden in 1513. As the heritage industry gears up to cash in on - sorry, respectfully observe - the 500th anniversary of Flodden, studied neutrality between the parties is the order of the day. The official memorial on Flodden Field is inscribed 'to the brave of both nations', and quite right too.

I was initially stumped about what photo would be a suitable accompaniment to this post, but finally decided that a view including both the parish church and a car park would hit the right note. It occurs to me that if any archaeologist wanted to dig up a car park in Berwick the overwhelming response from the residents would be outrage at the loss of parking spaces. The typical Berwicker appears to believe that there can never be too many parking spaces. They must be free, they must be right outside wherever you want to go whenever you want to go there, and the best use that could be made of any empty building would be to knock it down to create lots more lovely parking spaces. There was a great piece in the New Yorker magazine a couple of weeks ago, written in the style of a Shakespearian tragedy and having fun with the idea that Richard was killed in a fight over a parking space because the markings on his horse clearly showed that it was only entitled to be stationary there during certain hours 'which are not now'. I can see that happening in Berwick. I can absolutely see it.