News from Nowhere

We are about to set off for another short break in Scotland, planned around a long weekend helping D. cemebrate his birthday at the Old Place of Monreith.

D. and valydiarosada will overnight with us tomorrow before setting off to do their own thing, arriving at the Old Place on Friday. That gives us an extra day to get ready before we set off on Friday morning to join them there. It will be a fun weekend in company with those who have been present for other birthdays in the past, and I am looking forward to it.

On Monday we scatter and do our own several things. I had planned to linger in very much that part of Scotland, with a couple of night in Wigtown - because hey, it's a booktown, what better base could we have? And three more nights in Kirkudbright, because I read good things about it in an article which I thought I had logged here, but can't now find.

This morning brought an e-mail from booking.com: sorry, your accommodation in Wigtown has cancelled (the business has changed hands). I have found an alternative - not in Wigtown, but in the Isle of Whithorn, which will do nicely. I'm happy to substitute 'sea view' for 'above the bookshop', and we still get to explore the same area in a slighly different order.

But this morning's ontended task (ordering from Ocado) was more rushed than I liked: I hope I've remembered everything!

Courtesy of The Guardian, Smailholm Tower all lit up to celebrate.

( It used to go like this ... )

Meanwhile, in Paris, they celebrate a different anniversary: also from The Guardian's picture gallery, marking 150 years since the Commune.

I recently read two books which were burning a hole in my To Be Read pile. I read them end to end because they seemed to fit together: both quite new, both set in Scotland, and both novels about the crime of murder - and this post has been on the back burner so long that Mark Lawson has got in ahead of me, and included them both in his best crime books of the year. I liked the symmetry of bringing together that most literary of literary things, a novel shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and a crime novel with the impeccable genre credentials of the seventh mystery featuring a series detective as seen on TV. But such a very literary novel of a crime novel, and such a gore-spattered yarn of a Booker contender.

The literary novel is Graeme Macrae Burnet's His Bloody Project, and I'd like it on the record that I bought it before it was Booker shortlisted, because I was intrigued by the Guardian review, and pleased that a small press publication should have made it onto the Booker longlist. The crime novel is Ann Cleeves' Cold Earth, with the usual disclaimer: Ann is a client and a friend, and I wouldn't be writing about her book if I didn't like it. Warning: may (will) contain spoilers for earlier books in the series.

( Graeme Macrae Burnet: His Bloody Project )

( Ann Cleeves: Cold Earth )

I am reading Boswell's account of his travels with Dr Johnson to the Western Isles, in preparation for our own trip. "Ah," says durham_rambler, "you always have the most up-to-date guidebooks!" So far the narrative has not progressed beyond Edinburgh, but this passage seemed pretty topical:

I here began to indulge old Scottish sentiments, and to express a warm regret, that, by our union with England, we were no more—our independent kingdom was lost.

JOHNSON. 'Sir, never talk of your independency, who could let your Queen remain twenty years in captivity, and then be put to death, without even a pretence of justice, without your ever attempting to rescue her; and such a Queen too! as every man of any gallantry of spirit would have sacrificed his life for.'

Worthy MR JAMES KERR, Keeper of the Records. 'Half our nation was bribed by English money.'

JOHNSON. 'Sir, that is no defence: that makes you worse.'

Good MR BROWN, Keeper of the Advocates Library. 'We had better say nothing about it.'

BOSWELL. 'You would have been glad, however, to have had us last war, sir, to fight your battles!'

JOHNSON. 'We should have had you for the same price, though there had been no Union, as we might have had Swiss, or other troops. No, no, I shall agree to a separation. You have only to GO HOME.'

Just as he had said this, I to divert the subject, shewed him the signed assurances of the three successive Kings of the Hanover family, to maintain the Presbyterian establishment in Scotland. 'We'll give you that,' said he, 'into the bargain.'

The National Trust for Scotland has started posting excerpts from the diary written by Alice MacLachlan between 1906 and 1909. Alice's husband Peter was a minister, and the current set of entries, for February 1906, describe their life in his forst post, in the village of Garve, north of Inverness: the weather, the visits (young Hugh, recently promoted from a child's smock to trousers, comes to show off), the reading of improving books.

What Alice does not yet know is that in August Peter will take up a new posting, on St Kilda.

Background information.

I enjoyed the first series of The Trip: Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon drive around the Lake District, being entertaining, admiring the scenery and eating at good restaurants, what's not to like? Well, plenty, of course. As Steve Coogan says in this interview: "I get a bit fed up when I hear actors saying, 'Get a load of me, being myself and laughing at myself. Aren't I cool and post-modern in my self-deprecation?'" Not to mention that said actors are not only in receipt of a very desirable freebie but being paid for it. Nonetheless, it worked - the series was funny and entertaining and the right degree of melancholy - and the scenery was terrific.

We are currently watching the new series The Trip to Italy. Again, I was uncertain - could they do it again, would I find Italy less appealing than the Lakes, or more enviable as a freebie? Again, it works. The pair have mellowed, but this doesn't destroy the humour (since I find the humour of discomfort distinctly uncomfortable, this may just be my opinion - but that's all I have) and once again, the scenery is stunning.

As it happens, the Guardian travel section had just devoted an issue to Italy, and I had already bookmarked an article on the Cinque Terre - somewhere that has long been on our list of places to visit without quite reaching the top of that list. The paths that had been destroyed by storms have now been reopened, it seems: I wonder whether my knees are up to the challenge of those hills? Two more articles offer Giorgio Locatelli's recommendations in Sicily and a piece about the wetlands of the Veneto (not, I think, the area we didn't really succeed in visiting, but north towards Trieste).

I seem to have hung on to an earlier article about Rene Redzepi's Copenhagen, too.

And since I'm gathering the travel recommendations here, lil_shepherd has been to Glasgow and has some great photos of the Riverside Museum - have I posted about that before? I remember reading about it in the Guardian. Over on FB mevennen recommended somewhere to stay in Glasgow - so it all comes together.

This is all in the misty distances of the future: but we are off to Fife next week.

I had an unexpected conversation with my friend J last night. She had asked our friend F for her thoughts about the referendum on Scottish independence, and F - a Scot by birth and upbringing, but who has lived in England for all the 40 years I've known her, and whose children and grandchildren live in England - replied rather vaguely that she didn't suppose it would make much difference. J was outraged: how could the break-up of Great Britain not make much difference? We should all have a vote in this decision that affects us all...

This was a new way of looking at it: I'd been regarding the vote on independence as very much Scotland's decision to make. That's not because I don't think it will affect us: if Scotland is no longer represented in the Westminster parliament, then the north of England is in deep trouble, because we'll have permanent Conservative government. But there's an obvious problem with letting the majority decide whether the minority should be independent.

I have no idea how much difference the presence of an independent Scotland would make. "There'll be Scots on booze cruises to Berwick-upon-Tweed," says durham_rambler; but minimum unit pricing for alcohol is something the Scottish government has already used its power to implement. Could Scotland keep the pound sterling? I don't see why not: the Channel Islands do, and the Isle of Man, and Ireland ran on something very closely related to sterling until it joined the euro. Looking at this the other way, Scottish banknotes are widely accepted in the north of England, but I wouldn't try spending a Clydesdale Bank fiver in London. In so many ways, Scotland is already another country.

Should the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland become the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Scotland and Northern Ireland? Or perhaps the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland? It's cumbersome, admittedly. But I don't feel any emotional attachment to the idea of British nationality. I regard myself as English, whether I like it or not. I was born in England, so were my parents, so were my grandparents. Further back than that it gets more complicated, but then that's part of how I understand Englishness. And I regard myself as European, but British nationality is just a legal convention. But J says no, she thinks of herself as British, she corrects her Italian friends when they describe her as English, Britishness means something to her, and she is hurt that Scotland wants to diminish that.

It's not a view that I share, but it makes its own kind of sense, and it's not dismissing it to say that it also made me think of this:

One last visit to a stony little beach, from which we watched the ferry emerge from Scapa Flow into the bay - time to board!

We left the islands in sunshine on smooth seas, disturbed only by a cacophony of car alarms (not ours, fortunately; we have learned how to turn it off). We sat on the sun deck and watched the islands pass by.

And now we are in the Highlands, at the Balavil Hotel in Newtonmore, where the internet consents to speak to me (that at the Creel didn't, for some reason; it preferred durham_rambler). But it must be time for dinner...

Home tomorrow.

Unexpected among the weekend city breaks and cafés of jazz-age Paris, the Guardian Travel supplement sends the extraordinary Sara Maitland to the north of Scotland in search of ancient woodlands.