Perhaps it was this sudden early blot on my happiness that put me in a grumpy mood or perhaps it was the drippy rain I emerged into, but Edinburgh didn't look half so fine in daylight as it had appeared the night before. Now people plodded through the streets with umbrellas and cars swished through puddles with a noise that sounded testy and impatient. George Street, the core of the New Town, presented an unquestionably fine, if damp, prospect with its statues and stately squares, but far too many of the Georgian buildings had been clumsily abused by the addition of modern frontages. Just around the corner from my hotel was an office supply shop with plateglass windows that had been grafted onto an eighteenthcentury frontage in a way that was nothing short of criminal, and there were others in like vein here and there along the surrounding streets.
I wandered around looking for some place to eat, and ended up on Princes Street. It, too, seemed to have changed overnight. Then, with homewardbound workers scurrying past, it had seemed beguiling and vibrant, exciting even, but now in the dull light of day it merely seemed listless and grey. I shuffled along it looking for a cafe or bistro, but with the exception of a couple of truly dumpy discount woollens places where the goods seemed to have beendropkicked onto display counters or were spontaneously climbing out of bins, Princes Street appeared to offer nothing but the usual array of chain establishments Boots, Littlewoods, Virgin Records, BHS, Marks & Spencer, Burger King, McDonald's. What central Edinburgh lacked, it seemed to me, was a venerable and muchloved institution a Viennesestyle coffeehouse or treasured tearoom, some place with newspapers on gripper rods, potted palms and perhaps a fat little lady playing a grand piano.
In the end, fractious and impatient, I went into a crowded McDonald's, waited a century in a long, ragged line, which made me even more fractious and impatient, and finally ordered a cup of coffee and an Egg McMuffin.
'Do you want an apple turnover with that?' asked the spotty young man who served me.
'I'm sorry,' I said, 'do I appear to be braindamaged?'
'Pardon?'
'Correct me if I'm wrong, but I didn't ask for an apple turnover, did I?'
'Uh . . . no.'
'So do I look as if I have some mental condition that would render me unable to request an apple turnover if I wanted one?'
'No, it's just that we're told to ask everyone like.'
'What, you think everyone in Edinburgh is braindamaged?'
'We're just told to ask everyone like.'
'Well, I don't want an apple turnover, which is why I didn't ask for one. Is there anything else you'd like to know if I don't want?'
'We're just told to ask everyone.'
'Do you remember what I do want?'
He looked in confusion at his till. 'Uh, an Egg McMuffin and a cup of coffee.'
'Do you think I might have it this morning or shall we talk some more?'
'Oh, uh, right, I'll just get it.'
'Thank you.'
Well, honestly.
Afterwards, feeling only fractionally less fractious, I stepped out to find the rain beating down. I sprinted across the road and, on an impulse, ducked into the Royal Scottish Academy, a grand pseudohellenic edifice with banners suspended between the columns, which make it look a little like a lost outpost of the Reichstag. I paid .1.50 for a ticket and, shaking myself dry like a dog, shuffled in. They were having their autumn show or perhaps it was their winter show or perhaps it was their annual show. I couldn't say because I didn't notice any signs and the pictures were labelled with numbers. You had to pay an extra .2 for a catalogue to find out what was what, which frankly annoys me when I have just parted with .1.50. (The National Trust does this, too puts numbers on the plants and trees in its gardens and so on, so that you have to buy a catalogue which is one reason why I won't be leaving my fortune to the National Trust.) The works in the RSA exhibition extended over many rooms and appeared to fall chiefly into four categories: (1) boats on beaches, (2) lonely crofts, (3) halfclad girlfriends engaged in their toilette, and, for some reason, (4) French street scenes, always with at least one shop front saying BOULANGERIE or EPICERIE so that there was no possibility of mistaking the setting for Fraserburgh or Arbroath.
Many of the pictures indeed most were outstanding, and when I saw red gummed circles attached to some of them I not only realized that they were for sale but developed a sudden, strange hankering to buy one myself. So I started making trips to the lady at the front desk and saying, 'Excuse me, how much is number 125?' She would look it up and state a figure several hundred pounds beyond what I was prepared to pay, so I would wander off again and after a bit come back and say, 'Excuse me, how much is number 47?' At one point, I saw a picture I particularly liked a painting of Solway Firth by a fellow named Colin Park and she looked it up and told me that it was .125. This was a good price and I was prepared to buy it then and there even if I had to carry it all the way to John O'Groats under my arm, but then she discovered that she had read the wrong line, that the .125 picture was a little thing about three inches square and that the Colin Park was very considerably more than that, so I went off again. Eventually, when my legs began to tire, I tried a new tack and asked her what she had for .50 or less, and when it turned out there was nothing, I left, discouraged in my quest but .2 richer in regard to the catalogue.
Then I went to the Scottish National Gallery, which I liked even better and not just because it was free. The Scottish National Gallery is tucked away behind the RSA and doesn't look much from outside, but inside it was very grand in an imperial, nineteenthcentury sort of way, with red baize walls, outsized pictures in extravagant frames, scattered statues of naked nymphs and furniture trimmed in gilt, so that it rather brought to mind astroll through Queen Victoria's boudoir. The pictures were not only outstanding, but they had labels telling you their historical background and what the people in them were doing, which I think is to be highly commended and in fact should be made mandatory everywhere.
I read these instructive notes gratefully, pleased to know, for instance, that the reason Rembrandt looked so glum in his selfportrait was that he had just been declared insolvent, but in one of the salons I noticed that there was a man, accompanied by a boy of about thirteen, who didn't need the labels at all.
They were from what I suspect the Queen Mother would call the lower orders. Everything about them murmured poorness and material want poor diet, poor income, poor dentistry, poor prospects, even poor laundering but the man was describing the pictures with a fondness and familiarity that were truly heartwarming and the boy was raptly attentive to his every word. 'Now this is a later Goya, you see,' he was saying in a quiet voice. 'Just look at how controlled those brush strokes are a complete change in style from his earlier work. D'ye remember how I told you that Goya didn't paint a single great picture till he was nearly fifty? Well, this is a great picture.' He wasn't showing off, you understand; he was sharing.
I have often been struck in Britain by this sort of thing by how mysteriously well educated people from unprivileged backgrounds so often are, how the most unlikely people will tell you plant names in Latin or turn out to be experts on the politics of ancient Thrace or irrigation techniques at Glanum. This is a country, after all, where the grand final of a programme like Mastermind is frequently won by cab drivers and footplatemen. I have never been able to decide whether that is deeply impressive or just appalling whether this is a country where engine drivers know about Tintoretto and Leibniz or a country where people who know about Tintoretto and Leibniz end up driving engines. All I know is that it exists more here than anywhere else.
Afterwards, I climbed up the steep slope to the castle grounds, which seemed oddly, almost spookily, familiar. I hadn't been here before, so I couldn't think why this should be, and then I realized that a regimental tattoo from Edinburgh Castle had been one of the features of This Is Cinerama back in Bradford. The castle precinct was just as it had been in the film, apart from a change of weather and a merciful absence of strutting Gordon Highlanders, but one other thing had changed mightily since 1951 the view of Princes Street from the terrace.
In 1951, Princes Street remained one of the world's great streets, a gracious thoroughfare lined along its northern side with solid, weighty Victorian and Edwardian edifices that bespoke confidence, greatness and empire the North British Mercantile Insurance Company, the sumptuous, classical New Club building, the old Waverley Hotel. And then, one by one, they were unaccountably torn down, and replaced for the most part with grey concrete bunkers. At the eastern end of the street the whole of St James' Square, an open green space surrounded by a crowd of eighteenthcentury tenements, was bulldozed to make way for one of the squattest, ugliest shopping centre/hotel complexes ever to spill from an architect's pen. Now about all that is left of Princes Street's age of confident grandeur are odd fragments like the Balmoral Hotel and the Scott Monument and part of the front of Jenners Department Store.
Later, when I was back home, I found in my AA Book of British Towns an artist's illustration of central Edinburgh as it might be seen from the air. It showed Princes Street lined from end to end with nothing but fine old buildings. The same was true of all the other artists' impressions of British cities Norwich and Oxford and Canterbury and Stratford. You can't do that, you know. You can't tear down fine old structures and pretend they are still there. But that is exactly what has happened in Britain in the past thirty years, and not just with buildings.
And on that sour note, I went off to try to find some real food.
SO LET'S TALK ABOUT SOMETHING HEARTENING. LET'S TALK ABOUT John Fallows. One day in 1987 Fallows was standing at a window in a London bank waiting to be served when a wouldbe robber named Douglas Bath stepped in front of him, brandished a handgun and demanded money from the cashier. Outraged, Fallows told Bath to 'bugger off to the back of the line and wait his turn, to the presumed approving nods of others in the queue. Unprepared for this turn of events, Bath meekly departed from the bank emptyhanded and was arrested a short distance away.
I bring this up here to make the point that if there is one golden quality that characterizes the British it is an innate sense of good manners and you defy it at your peril. Deference and a quiet consideration for others are such a fundamental part of British life, in fact, that few conversations could even start without them. Almost any encounter with a stranger begins with the words 'I'm terribly sorry but' followed by a request of some sort ' could you tell me the way to Brighton,' 'help me find a shirt my size,' 'get your steamer trunk off my foot.' And when you've fulfilled their request, they invariably offer a hesitant, apologetic smile and say sorry again, begging forgiveness for taking up your time or carelessly leaving their foot where your steamer trunk clearly needed to go. I just love that.
As if to illustrate my point, when I checked out of the Caledonian late the next morning, I arrived to find a woman ahead of me wearing a helpless look and saying to the receptionist: 'I'm terribly sorry but I can't seem to get the television in my room to work.' She had come all the way downstairs, you understand, to apologize to them for their TV not working. My heart swelled with feelings of warmth and fondness for this strange and unfathomable country.
And it is all done so instinctively, that's the other thing. I remember when I was still new to the country arriving at a railway station one day to find that just two of the dozen or so ticket windows were open. (For the benefit of foreign readers, I should explain that as a rule in Britain no matter how many windows there are in a bank, post office or rail station, only two of them will be open, except at very busy times, when just one will be open.) Both ticket windows were occupied. Now, in other countries one of two things would have happened. Either there would be a crush of customers at each window, all demanding simultaneous attention, or else there would be two slowmoving lines, each full of gloomy people convinced that the other line was moving faster.
Here in Britain, however, the waiting customers had spontaneously come up with a much more sensible and ingenious arrangement. They had formed a single line a few feet back from both windows. When either position became vacant, the customer at the head of the line would step up to it and the rest of the line would shuffle forward a space. It was a wonderfully fair and democratic approach and the remarkable thing was that noone had commanded it or even suggested it. It just happened.
Much the same sort of thing occurred now, for when the lady with the recalcitrant TV set had finished with her apology (which the receptionist, I must say, accepted with uncommonly good grace, going so far as to hint that if anything else in the woman's room was found to be out of order, she wasn't to blame herself for a minute), the receptionist turned to me and another gentleman who was also waiting and said, 'Who's next?' and he and I went through an elaborate afteryou, noafteryou, butIinsist, wellthat'smostgraciousofyou routine, which made my heart swell further.
And so, on my second morning in Edinburgh, I stepped from the hotel in happy spirits, at one with the world, buoyed by this cheerful and civilized encounter, to find the sun shining and the city transformed yet again. On this day, George Street and Queen Street looked positively ravishing, their stone fronts burnished with sunlight, the damp, brooding darkness that had suffused them the day before banished utterly. The Firth of Forth gleamed in the distance and the little parks and squares seemed alive with green. I trudged UP The Mound to the Old Town terraces to take in the view andwas astonished to see how different the city looked. Princes Street was still a scar of architectural regrettabilities, but beyond it the hills were thronged with jaunty roofs and thrusting steeples that gave the city a character and graciousness that had entirely escaped me the day before.
I spent the morning doing touristy things I went to St Giles' Cathedral and had a look at Holyroodhouse, climbed to the top of Calton Hill and finally fetched my pack and returned to the station, happy to have made my peace with Edinburgh and pleased to be on the move again.
And what a fine thing a train journey is. I was instantly lulled by the motion of the train as we lumbered out through Edinburgh and its quiet suburbs and over the Forth Bridge. (And, gosh, what a mighty structure it is; suddenly I understood why the Scots are always on about it.) The train was mostly empty and rather splendidly posh. It was done up in restful blues and greys, which provided a sharp contrast to all the Sprinters I had been on in recent days and proved so deeply soothing that soon my eyelids were growing unsustainably heavy and my neck seemed to be turning to a rubbery material. In no time at all, my head was slumped on my chest and I was engaged in the quiet, steady manufacture of several gallons of saliva all of them, alas, spare.
Some people simply should not be allowed to fall asleep on a train, or, having fallen asleep, should be discreetly covered with a tarpaulin, and I'm afraid I am one of them. I awoke, some indeterminate time later, with a rutting snort and a brief, wild flail and lifted my head from my chest to find myself mired in a cobweb of drool from beard to belt buckle, and with three people gazing at me in a curiously dispassionate manner. At least I was spared the usual experience of waking to find myself stared at openmouthed by a group of small children who would flee with shrieks at the discovery that the dribbling hulk was alive.
Shrinking from my audience and daubing myself discreetly with the sleeve of my jacket, I attended to the view. We were rattling through an open landscape that was pleasant rather than dramatic arable farmland running off to big round hills under a sky that seemed ready to collapse under its own weight of grey. From time to time we stopped in some inert little town with a dead little station Ladybank, Cupar, Leuchars before eventually entering a larger, fractionally more active world at Dundee, Arbroath and Montrose. And then, some three hours after leaving Edinburgh, we were sliding into Aberdeen in a thin and fastfading light.
I pressed my face to the glass keenly. I had never been to Aberdeen before and didn't know anyone who had. I knew almost nothing about it, other than that it was dominated by the North Sea oil industry and proudly called itself the 'Granite City'. It had always seemed to me exotically remote, a place I was unlikely ever to get to, so I was eager to see it.
I had booked into a hotel which was warmly described in my guidebook (a tome that later went for kindling), but turned out to ' be a dreary, overpriced backstreet block. My room was small and illlit, with battered furniture, a narrow, prisoncell bed with a thin blanket and a single grudging pillow, and wallpaper doing its best to flee a damp wall. Once, in a moment of ambition, the management had installed a bedside console that operated lights, radio and TV, and incorporated an alarm clock, but none of these appeared to work. The alarm clock knob came off in my hand. With a sigh, I dumped my stuff on the bed and returned to the dark streets of Aberdeen looking for food, drink and granite splendour.
One thing I have learned over the years is that your impressions of a city are necessarily coloured by the route you take into it. Enter London by way of the leafy suburbs of Richmond, Barnes and Putney and alight at, say, Kensington Gardens or Green Park and you would think that you were in the midst of some vast, welltended Arcadia. Enter it by way of Southend, Romford and Liverpool Street and you would perceive it in another way altogether. So perhaps it was simply the route I took from my hotel. All I know is that I walked for nearly three hours up streets and down and I couldn't find anything remotely adorable about Aberdeen. There were some briefly diverting vignettes an open pedestrianized space around the Mercat Cross, an interestinglooking little museum called John Dun's House, some imposing university buildings but no matter how many times I crisscrossed through its heart, all I seemed to encounter was a vast, glossy new shopping centre that was a damnable nuisance to circumnavigate (I kept ending up, muttering and lost, in deadend delivery bays and collecting compounds for cardboard boxes) and a single broad endless street lined with precisely the same stores I had seen in every other city for the last six weeks. It was like anywhere and nowhere like a small Manchester or a random fragment of Leeds. In vain I sought a single place where I could stand with hands on hips andsay, 'Aha, so this is Aberdeen.' Perhaps, too, it was the dreary time of year. I had read somewhere that Aberdeen had won the Britain in Bloom competition nine times, but I saw hardly any gardens or green spaces. Above all, I had scant sense of being in the midst of a rich, proud city built of granite.
On top of that, I couldn't settle on a place to eat. I hankered for something different, something I hadn't encountered a hundred times already on this trip Thai or Mexican, perhaps, or maybe Indonesian or even Scottish but there seemed nothing but the usual scattering of Chinese and Indian establishments, usually on a sidestreet, usually up a flight of stairs that looked as if they had been recently used for a motorcycle rally, and I couldn't bring myself to make that terrible climb into the unknown. In any case, I knew exactly what would be up there low lighting, a reception area with a padded bar, twangy Asian music, tables covered with glasses of lager and stainlesssteel plate warmers. I couldn't face it. In the end, I engaged in a desperate session of eenie meenie minie mo on a street corner and opted for an Indian. It was, in every degree, exactly like every Indian meal I had had in the previous weeks. Even the postdinner burp tasted exactly the same. I returned to my hotel in a dim and restless frame of mind.
In the morning, I went for a walk around the town sincerely hoping that I would like it better, but alas, alas. It wasn't that there was anything wrong with Aberdeen exactly, more that it suffered from a surfeit of innocuousness. I had a shuffle round the new shopping centre and ranged some distance out into the surrounding streets, but they all seemed equally colourless and forgettable. And then I realized that the problem really wasn't with Aberdeen so much as with the nature of modern Britain. British towns are like a deck of cards that have been shuffled and endlessly redealt same cards, different order. If I had come to Aberdeen fresh from another country, it would probably have seemed pleasant and agreeable. It was prosperous and clean. It had bookshops and cinemas and a university and pretty much everything else you could want in a community. It is, I've no doubt, a nice place to live. It's just that it was so much like everywhere else. It was a British city. How could it be otherwise?
Once I had packed this small thought into my head I liked Aberdeen much better. I can't say I ached to up sticks and move there but then why should I when I could get exactly the same things, the same shops and libraries and leisure centres, the same pubs and television programmes, the same phone boxes, post offices, traffic lights, park benches, zebra crossings, marine air and postIndiandinner burps anywhere else? In an odd way the very things that had made Aberdeen seem so dull and predictable the night before now made it seem comfortable and rather homey. But I still never had the slightest sense that I was in the midst of a lot of granite, and it was without regret that I fetched my things from the hotel and returned to the station to resume my stately progress north.
The train was again very clean and nearly empty, with more • S0othing blues and greys. It was just two carriages, but it had a trolley service, which impressed me. The difficulty was that the young chap in charge was obviously keen I had the impression that he had just started the job and was still at the point where it was fun to dispense teas and make change but as there were only two other passengers and just sixty yards of carriage to patrol, he came by about once every three minutes. Still, the constant ruckus of the passing trolley kept me from nodding off and falling into a state of embarrassing hypersalivation.
We rode through a pleasant but unexciting landscape. All my previous experience of the Highlands was up the more dramatic west coast, and this was decidedly muted in comparison rounded hills, flat farms, occasional glimpses of an empty, steelgrey sea but by no means disagreeable. Nothing of incident happened except that at Nairn a big plane took off and did all kinds of astonishing things in the sky, climbing vertically for hundreds of feet, then slowly tipping over and plunging towards earth before pulling out in a steep bank at nearly the last moment. I supposed it was some sort of a test base for RAF planes, but it was more exciting to imagine that it had been hijacked by a suicidal madman. And then an arresting thing happened. The plane began coming towards the train, really bearing down on it, as if the pilot had spotted us and thought that it would be interesting to take us with him. It got larger and larger and nearer and nearer I looked around uneasily but there was noone to share the experience with until it nearly filled the window and then the train went into a cutting and the plane disappeared from view. I bought a cup of coffee and a packet of biscuits from the trolley to steady my nerves and waited for Inverness to appear.