Let's Hear It for Rabbie Burns

This is the window display put up by one of our local independent butchers here in Berwick to promote their haggis for Burns Night last Saturday. Pretty eye-catching, isn't it?  You will probably have heard of the 'address to a haggis' that is traditionally read at these Burns suppers. I looked it up today for the first time ever. It is written in a mock serious style and contrasts this splendid traditional food of the Scottish peasantry, responsible for raising a population of hardy tillers of the soil, with 'French ragout and fricasee' that would 'make a sow spew'. Take that, you celebrity chefs.

I have written before of my affection and admiration for the political views so eloquently expressed by Rabbie Burns, but to mark this year's celebration I thought I would quote him at more length. Probably his best known poem after the one about the haggis is the paean to the values of democracy and egalitarianism featuring the line 'a man's a man for a' that'. This was sung at the opening ceremony of the re-formed Scottish parliament in 1999, because it was felt to express the values that the parliament should defend.  The verse I really like is the one that comes after that line.

See yon birkie, ca’d a lord,

Wha struts and stares and a’ that

Though hundreds worship at his word

He’s but a coof  [fool] for a’ that

For a’ that and a’ that

His riband, star and a’ that

The man of independent mind,

He looks and laughs at a’ that.

 My 19th century edition of the complete works glosses 'birkie' as 'a spirited fellow'.  Hmm.  Chambers dictionary gives the meaning as 'a strutting or swaggering fellow' and suggests that the etymology is related to the verb 'to bark'.  Now that's more like it. Any number of 'coofs' in modern Britain who swagger about barking nonsense and getting away with it because they have 'lord' or some other aristocratic title in front of their name come to mind. And nowadays they're not just hereditary ones, we have the cursed invention of life peerages, largely used as a way of getting the prime minister's mates into parliament without the inconvenience of an election but sold to the public as an introduction of the meritocratic principle into the whole rotten aristocratic system. I would like to see this poem inscribed on a plaque and nailed over the entrance to the House of Lords. 

Why Berwicum Super Twedam Does Not Seem to Floreat Much

I snapped this ornate piece of civic pride hanging in the council offices on the sly while stewarding an installation for the film festival in there. The piece of rather naff Latin translates as 'may Berwick upon Tweed flourish' and so seems as suitable as anything to illustrate this report of a talk I attended this week.

It has become an annual custom for the speaker at the January meeting of Berwick Civic Society to be a representative of some branch of local government. I sometimes wonder why they agree to make the long trek to this furthest outpost of Northumberland on a freezing winter night just to be abused for a couple of hours by irate residents who don't get many other chances to express their dissatisfaction with what they get for their council tax.

This week the speaker was John Lord, the Berwick project director of Arch, a company set up by Northumberland County Council as an 'arms-length' deliverer of regeneration projects. Last January Mr Lord gave us what I thought was an excellent talk on the problems involved in regenerating Berwick. There are a lot of them. He was bold enough to make the point that nobody nowadays needs or wants to do their shopping in a 1950s style high street, because we have supermarkets now and we like them a lot more. This year he had expanded this point to an entire presentation, packed with quotes, graphs, charts and other assorted data to illustrate the massive changes in the way we live, work and shop over the last few decades. I was very impressed. I think I may have been the only member of the audience who was. Confronting some of the local activists with economic reality is a pretty thankless task.

A few examples of statements which may appear obvious to my readers but produced frissons of disapproval in the room. There is a general trend for local high street shops to move downmarket because they increasingly cater primarily for a captive group of consumers who cannot afford to travel far to shop. Anybody who has the means to travel to a large urban centre to shop does so, because it's just a much more enjoyable experience. It is 'not remotely true' that the rents of shops on Marygate, Berwick are higher than those on Princes Street, Edinburgh. (As if! I wonder how long it is since that questioner has been to Princes Street.)  The reason that most of the small towns in the Scottish Borders are much more attractive and prosperous looking than Berwick is because - wait for it - the people who live there are richer than the people who live here. At this point the chair helpfully chimed in with the information that average incomes in Berwick are the lowest in the whole of Northumberland. No data on how they compare with the Scottish Borders, which is a more meaningful comparison for Berwick residents, seemed to be immediately to hand, but we can guess that the conversion of places such as our namesake North Berwick into essentially dormitory towns for Edinburgh, with a bit of tourism thrown in, has raised the average a fair way above us.

The nub of the problem is that Berwick upon Tweed is a bit too far from both Edinburgh and Newcastle to attract affluent commuters, but near enough to both of them to attract locals to do their shopping there. So the economic forces drawing money out of the town are stronger than those pulling it in. Add in the reluctance of most Scots to live cross border, and we're stuffed, really. 

What Does 2014 Hold?

This is the Sallyport in Berwick, shown here to give me an excuse to say: as we finally emerge from the long dark tunnel of 2013 towards the faintly visible light of a new year, what can we expect here in the Borders?

Are We About To Be Over-run with Immigrants?

The media yesterday were doing their best to give the impression that we are. At one point after listening to the BBC radio headlines I peered gingerly out of the window, thinking that I would see a gradually thickening flock of Romanians and Bulgarians advancing stealthily nearer to the house, like the seagulls in The Birds.  But I couldn't see a single one, and the real seagulls were no more threatening than usual. The only effect of the lifting of restrictions on these migrants' right to work in the UK that I expect to see immediately is that Illi, the nice Romanian man who has been patiently selling the Big Issue in Alnwick since the shop he stands outside was a Woolworths, may finally be able to get a proper job.

Will the Scottish Independence Referendum Return a Yes Vote?

This is the big one. The polls all say No but some well-informed commentators urge against complacency. A Glaswegian activist told me recently that the result would be much closer than everyone is predicting, and added with complete seriousness, 'Alex Salmond is a master politician'. I was interested to see that no less an authority than the Financial Tines,  in its predictions for the year ahead, backed this up, saying that 'the campaigning genius of Alex Salmond should not be under-estimated'. So a few more people here in Berwick had better wake from their political stupor before September.

Does Anybody in the English Borders Actually Care About Any of This?

On the whole, I would say that the average Berwicker would only take an interest in Scottish independence if they thought it might affect the number of parking spaces in the town. Or the quantity of seagull droppings or the frequency with which the gutters get cleaned. If a resurgent Scotland ever decides to pursue a revanchist policy towards Berwick, it would scarcely take a campaigning genius. The place is anybody's for a multi-storey car park.

A very happy 2014 to you all!

Santa Claus Is Coming To Town

A very Merry Christmas to all my readers. Here is Santa visiting Spittal yesterday. Accompanied in his sleigh not by an elf but by the Spittal Gala Queen. His journey down Main Street was the culmination of a very well attended Christmas fete, with a funfair in the street and the Norham school brass band playing in the church hall while you browsed the stalls and refreshments.

The great attraction of the Spittal Santa is that he comes complete with real reindeer. Or rather, the last time I was there he came complete with a whole team of reindeer from the Cairngorm herd who earn their keep by being hired out to pull sleighs at Christmas. This year he was drawn by one single solitary reindeer. Maybe this is yet another example of Austerity Britain - perhaps we didn't put enough money in the donations tins last time to cover the cost of hiring a full team again. I was sufficiently concerned about this to put £1 in the bucket on the way out of the church hall, as well as spending £1.50 on the cup of tea and a mince pie meal deal. On the other hand, it could just be that the limited number of reindeer in Britain are in such demand at this time of year that their agent could only spare one for this little town.

I took this photo two years ago when half a dozen reindeer came. I spotted their transport parked outside the local school playing field, where they were being shown off to the children before leaving to prepare for their sleigh pulling shift. I did see them being led back to the van but could not get close enough to grab a picture, as their minders were understandably careful to prevent them being mobbed. And of course photographing a single reindeer in the dark is even more challenging. I did not feel comfortable about letting off a flash in the poor creature's face. I wonder if these reindeer go on the sort of training course that police horses are put through, to get them used to noisy crowds? They certainly seemed very stoical about it all. Maybe they have just understood that if they play along with this human idiocy for a couple of weeks a year their reward is to roam free and happy in the Scottish mountains for the other fifty.

Storm Surge

This was the scene beside the Tweedmouth end of the modern road bridge across the river Tweed this morning, a bright, calm day after a wild day and couple of nights on Wednesday and Thursday. Very strong winds combined with an unusually high tidal rise of 5.4 metres caused the river to overflow its banks at high water yesterday, which was at 16.03 according to the book of tide timetables on sale in the local angling shop, a copy of which I usually carry in my bag. After consulting it I went out at 4 pm to have a look. I know that makes me one of the sightseers loathed by the emergency services, but I like to think that I am not a complete idiot, and I stayed well out of the way of the rising water and of the workers.

At 4 pm in December it is nearly dark and so I was unable to take any photos, even if I had wanted to risk getting any closer to the action. The water was pouring through this gate across the road. Police had blocked off the road with cones and firemen were wading (or 'plodging' as we say here) around knocking on doors and delivering sandbags. A care home is located just at the end of the old bridge, and the prospect of having to evacuate many elderly and ailing residents must have been worrying the police considerably, but luckily the turn of the tide came just before the water reached their door.

On the other side of the bridge the path beside the river was completely flooded and the police had fastened a criss-cross of their blue-and-white tape across the entrance to the path, for the benefit of any members of the public who can't be trusted to rely on the evidence of their own senses. On the quayside the water was level with the top of the harbour wall and breaking over it, until the benches where one can sit and enjoy the view in more clement conditions were swimming halfway up their legs in water.

Only a couple of hours after high tide the water had all receded and as far as I know had not entered any properties. There was some worry about what would happen at the next high tide at 04.43 am and I expect some homeowners stayed awake to see. That was predicted to be a rise of only 5.2 metres though and also the wind had died down, so it was okay. This morning the yellow highways agency signs saying 'harbour and seafront closed' have been taken down but the sandbags remain for the time being.

I confess that I found it exhilarating walking around in the twilight cold, observing a force of nature that we cannot control. But of course I would not be saying that if I lived in the house shown above. I used to envy the folk who live along the Tweedmouth river bank. Not any more! 

Alnwick Mechanics Institute

This is the Mechanics Institute in Alnwick, in Northumberland, a building that is what in other places might be called a community hall. It has several rooms that can be booked for meetings of clubs and societies, dance classes, etc.  Many hours of my life have been spent in this building, one way and another. Then for a while one of the rooms was used as the office of the local registrar, to whom one is obliged to report all births and deaths. This meant that when my father died I had the strange experience of having to register his death in a room a few steps away from the larger room where he attended the meetings of the Alnwick Camera Club, every Wednesday night at 7.30 pm, for years and  years.

Because this building was so much a part of my everyday experience, taken completely for granted, I was well into adulthood before it occurred to me that the design of the doorway is a bit odd.  In fact it looks like an Egyptian tomb. You can see on the picture of the upper part of the building that the theme is continued all the way up in the 'pylons' feature.

I thought about this again when I finally got round to reading the book Black Athena by Martin Bernal, which traces the history of scholarly attitudes to ancient Egypt. By the high Victorian period the racist belief that Africans could not possibly have contributed anything to the culture of classical Greece or of the rest of Europe had become dominant, but in earlier times there was a positive craze for and veneration of all things Egyptian. Bearing in mind that Alnwick has always been some way behind the trends in the metropolis, I reckon the Mechanics Institute must have been built when this craze was in full swing. Bernal also explains that the Masonic movement has stayed loyal to the veneration of ancient Egypt through all the shifts in intellectual fashion and still uses a plethora of symbolism derived from it. I wonder if there was any Masonic involvement in the building of the Mechanics. If anybody knows, do please leave a comment.

The other interesting thing about the Mechanics Institute is of course the reason for its existence, the fact that it was erected out of the purposeful idealism that aimed at 'diffusing knowledge among artisans'. This was a widespread movement in the 19th century.  Birkbeck College in the University of London, of which I am a proud alumna, started out as the London Mechanics Institute.

In the second half of the 20th century we were finally blessed with universal provision of free public libraries and the need for private libraries and newspaper reading rooms disappeared. Or has it?

My views on this have recently diverged from popular orthodoxy. Many British public libraries are no longer doing what they were originally supposed to.  They are full of mass market fiction, DVDs of Hollywood films and CDs of popular bands. Serious non-fiction is squashed into a small corner. Encyclopedias have entirely disappeared. In one way this is, of course, fair enough, since the internet is now a much more efficient way of distributing knowledge to the masses. But that means that the priority now has to be ensuring equal access to the web, and public libraries are not even managing to do that. The computer system of Northumberland public libraries is disgracefully inadequate. It is very slow and the versions of all the software are several release numbers out of date. It refuses to show any adverts at all, even ones that might be useful, or any user-generated photos, just in case they're 'inappropriate'. It has a very crude content filter which regularly blocks book reviews and history blogs because they have used a trigger word. And sometimes the whole system just falls over and dies for no apparent reason.

I would no longer take to the streets to protest the closure of public libraries. Frankly I wouldn't miss them. I am a loyal supporter of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle upon Tyne, a triumphant survivor of the age of private library provision. I feel that a second age of the necessity for it is dawning. And I would love to see the return of a (suitably re-named) Mechanics Institute, diffusing serious knowledge to the workers.

Berwick Barracks: a facility soon to be needed again?

This is the main courtyard, or parade ground, or whatever they call it, of Berwick Barracks. Complete with original old cannon. The barracks are of architectural importance as they were designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor, on a short vacation from building London churches, and are apparently a rare example of purpose built barracks continuing in use for that original purpose from the 18th century until modern times. The last soldiers only moved out in the 1960s. They were members of the King's Own Scottish Borderers, Berwick's local regiment, even though Berwick is in the English and not the Scottish Borders. Anyone who's been following this blog will not be surprised by that characteristic Berwick anomaly.

So there is now a rather splendid chunk of 18th century architecture sitting there seriously under-used. A small proportion of the buildings houses three museums: of the town's own history, of the regiment, and the one containing a portion of the Burrell collection, better known from the much larger portion in Glasgow. All of these are theoretically free to enter but you can't get into them without paying the English Heritage admission fee for the barracks complex as a whole. To add insult to injury English Heritage is now refusing to open at weekends, thus making it impossible for any local residents who work office hours to visit their own museums. Well done, esteemed custodians of our cultural patrimony. As a very small compensation the barracks were open free to all over the weekend in September when the Heritage Open Doors event is held. I took these photos then, because I refuse as a matter of principle to pay a penny to English Heritage.

There has been some fairly lively discussion on suitable future uses for the buildings. A hotel seems the obvious one  And of course that large tarmac area just says 'car parking' to the typical Berwick mind-set. I though foresee a darker future for the barracks. They will make a perfect detention or internment camp for illegal immigrants, subjects of control orders on whom the authorities haven't managed to pin any actual crimes, or the new 'sturdy beggars', recipients of Jobseekers' Allowance who persist in being unable to find a job no matter how often the government tells them they jolly well ought to.

Some Scots believe that if Scottish independence becomes a reality the Westminster government will declare zones of English sovereignty around the nuclear submarine bases in their country. In that case they'll need somewhere on English territory to lock up stray Scots who wander into the exclusion zone. In all seriousness, if the political row over military bases continues down its present course things could turn very nasty. In that case we could see Berwick barracks being used once more for their original purpose, housing English soldiers in a location where they can advance across the border at a moment's notice.  Never mind being under-used, they'll probably have to build an extension.