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The Old Country They rolled four ramps up to the plane, so it emptied out a lot quicker than I had expected. We passed through the cheery International gates, limping from our confinement, and took the tram to the Entrance Hall. The tram was neat -- a little sign told us of its approach ("Two minutes to train" -- "One minute to train") and when we got in, a recorded, unctuous BBC voice told us "Please avoid the doors -- hold on tight, please." After all that, the trip lasted about 30 seconds. We walked into the Entrance Hall and stared in shock. It was a huge place, almost Reifenstahlian, with hundreds of people forming into long snaking lines to get past the passport inspectors. We were the first plane in that day, thank God, because by the time the flinty-eyed clerk stamped my passport "Leave to enter for six months -- employment prohibited" and let me by, I'd been in line 35 minutes and at least 2000 people from various flights (all the international flights arrive at basically the same time) were still behind me. Despite my delay, my luggage was just coming off the baggage carousel. Customs worked on the honor system -- there were two lanes, red and green, and if you felt you had nothing to declare you just marched through the green gate and left -- which I did, convinced that the customs officials lounging around in mock casualness could see vast evil in my every move. I followed the cheery orange signs to the "Domestic Flights" lounge at the British Caledonian terminal to wait for the connecting flight to Edinburgh. Out the picture windows, it was a brilliant, clear July morning at Gatwick. My brain, however, was telling me that it was 2:30 AM in Alexandria and that I should be in bed, and everything seemed slightly off-kilter and hallucinogenic. The lounge was decorated in big purple and green stripes which started to strobe on me after a while. My legs were killing me from being immobile for seven hours and then standing in line. I felt like shit. After a while, I got up the courage and painfully shuffled upstairs to Gatwick's in-house shopping mall to get a newspaper. It was my first chance to use British money and it seemed to work just fine. The big story in the Sunday Times was about some Tory MP who was up for a position in Prime Minister Thatcher's cabinet until he got decked in a bar fight the week before over some blonde divorcee, with, of course, hints of bizarre sexual practices and public drunkenness. I love British politics. My flight was assigned to the farthest possible gate, as usual, and I looked like a palsy victim dragging my luggage down the long narrow corridor. At one point I stopped to rest on a bench and a nice fellow about 30 years my senior offered to help carry my bags. I was very grateful for the offer, but turned it down in embarrassment. The BC gate was a little room, and we stacked our luggage by a swinging door for the ramp attendant to drag off and load into the plane. The plane was a BAC-111, the British version of the DC-9, named "The Isle of Hoy." Our stewardess was a cheery Scots lass in a kilt and tam, like all the BC stewardesses. I knew I was on my way to Scotland when one of the stewardesses asked the captain a question and he answered, "Nae, I dinna know." We flew to Glasgow first. The sky over central England was studded with large, sharply-defined clouds, affording occasional glimpses of the countryside. We passed over an immense shipbuilding facility that must have been Manchester or Birmingham. The countryside as we descended into Glasgow was beautiful, with a lot of golf courses. We had a 20-minute layover at Glasgow Airport, a single runway alongside a control tower barely three stories high. The long night was catching up with me, and I could barely keep my eyes open. Across from us at Glasgow was a DC-8, a plane I hadn't seen in a very long time. It was 52 degrees in Glasgow --hallelujah! The flight to Edinburgh was 10 minutes, through a rain squall and over the Firth of Forth. The Edinburgh airport was even smaller and tackier than Glasgow, resembling a small regional airport like those in Marion, Illinois or Appleton, Wisconsin, only older and moldier. It was obvious that the British do not look upon air travel as the primary means of getting around like we do, probably because the size of the country isn't too restrictive to other means of travel. My flight from London to Glasgow, which covers a large portion of the length of the whole island, took 35 minutes. I caught a cab, a Plymouth Fury of all things, in a light drizzle. The cabbie was a great stout fellow, talkative and full of lore as we drove the four miles to the center of Edinburgh. I was immediately drawn to a large green cliff south of town, the Salisbury Crag, a fascinating feature that reminded me of the hills around the town in California where I grew up. The cabbie pointed out the American consulate ("Gi'e 'em a ring if ye get in a muckle, lad") and told me that President Reagan made it through his cancer surgery the day before. At about 11 AM, he dropped me off in front of the Arden Hotel in the Royal Terrace. The Arden is four beautiful Georgian townhouses in the middle of a long block of impeccable Georgians, all of which are now either hotels or consulates. The Royal Terrace is a boomerang-shaped road wrapped around the flanks of Calton Hill, one of the three hills of Edinburgh. The front of the Arden (founded 1956, it said on the polished brass plaque by the door) faces north, and through the trees I could see Edinburgh's port city of Leith and the Firth of Forth in the distance. The "lobby" was actually the old reception area at the base of the stairs, and the charming lass behind the counter told me my room wasn't ready yet. So I stashed my luggage in a closet and headed out for a walk. I felt as if someone was rubbing sand into my eyes. After all, it was 6 AM in Alexandria. I wandered down to the American Consulate, closed of course on a Sunday morning. I walked around the big bend in the road, almost a 180-degree turn, and could see the Salisbury Crag, very impressive and a brilliant kelly green when the sun came out. Between the Royal Terrace and the crag was a low area, Old Town, full of buildings dating back to the 1400s. On the edge of the terrace at the turn, before it drops off precipitously into Old Town, there is a monument to Robert Burns. I wished my late grandfather Bob Fleming, a big Burns fan, could have seen it. I walked back to the Arden, but my room still wasn't ready yet. So I walked back around the terrace and into Princes Street, the main street in Edinburgh. The valley between New Town and Old Town used to be a loch, which was drained in the 1700s to link the two towns and to get rid of a recurrent typhoid epidemic. It was now filled with the train station, very cleverly hidden under embankments and green glass canopies, and the Princes Street Gardens, a beautiful park which is home to the "world's largest floral clock." All of Edinburgh, in fact, looked very pretty, despite the grime on all the stone buildings, a reminder of when Edinburgh was know as "Auld Reekie" for its enveloping shroud of coal smoke. The smoke is gone now -- the air is very clear and clean and tinged with a salt tang from the North Sea -- and the city is sandblasting the buildings clean one by one. According to my guidebook, they expect to finish job around the turn of the century. A lot of people were strolling in the park. I could immediately tell the Americans with their cameras and their expensive clothes. The Scots are a more plain lot, but they seem to be having a better time. In the gardens I saw a few older men out for a stroll in their kilts, a fierce pride in their eyes and a warm smile for the tourists pointing at them and taking their pictures. At the western end of the park, near the sheer basalt walls of Castle Rock (atop which looms Edinburgh Castle), there is a monument to Sir Walter Scott, a hideous, plant-like intertwining of vines and spires over 100 feet tall. In the center is a badly-done statue of Scott, looking as if he's straining away on a toilet. My guide book said there was a stairway to the top, but I couldn't find any way into it. A lot of interesting cars were on the streets -- Morrises, Peugeots, a lot of stuff I'd never hear of before. I saw a flashy little Volkswagen called a Passat. Passing the German consulate, just down the street for my hotel, I saw a Mercedes pull up and four German Navy captains in winter blues escort a little guy with a trenchcoat over his shoulders into the building. I got back to the Arden at 12.30. (I had already adopted the British time-keeping, with periods instead of colons and a 24-hour numbering.) My room was #1, but it was a little cubbyhole in back of the second staircase, accessible only by walking through both dining rooms. It was small, about 8' by 10', but had a huge 12' ceiling with plaster vines and plants and cornices. It had a sink and a light, and my windows looked out on the garbage cans in the back of the hotel. The back yard sloped up steeply towards the top of Calton Hill. The toilet down the hall was a high-seated Victorian horror, and the shower (which was upstairs) was 3 feet off the floor for some reason. I stretched out on the bed and immediately dozed off for an hour or so. I took a shower, dragging my robe and towel upstairs, and felt infinitely better. I hooked up my clock radio to the transformer I brought with me. The radio worked fine -- I could get BBC Radio One with no problem -- but the digital clock blinked and lost 10 minutes an hour. European electricity operates on 50 Hz instead of the American 60 Hz, something that hadn't occurred to me. Digging through my suitcases, I settled down to read the "Summer Reading" issue of Esquire magazine. One of the lugubrious little short stories (in the popular Ann Beattie/my-life-is-full-of-endless-somber-meaning style) was written by Frank Conroy, to whom I have the rather tenuous connection of being good friends with a woman with whom he had an affair a few years earlier. The Arden went on forever, with enough stairways and arches and tunnels to hide an army division. It had a strange musty smell, as a 200-year old building should, I guess. It was a sobering reflection on the scale of things that a 200-year-old building back in my neighborhood was usually an historic site, like Arlington House, Mount Vernon, Monticello or Gunston Hall, while an equally aged building in Edinburgh was a standard rowhouse; newer, in fact, that a lot of the buildings around it. An elevator had been rather clumsily installed behind the main staircase. There was a large parlor in the back which looked out into the garden. It was done in Wedgewood and was very quiet. That was something I had to get used to -- the Scottish people were rather soft-spoken by our standards, and for a city of Edinburgh's size the feel was one of unnatural calm and silence. The hotel bar was by the front desk, but was closed. Looking through the door, I could see that whisky was 90p a shot and a pint of Guinness 60p, damn good prices given the exchange rate of $1.28 to the pound. $1.15 for a whisky -- I've died and gone! I took another walk at about 3 PM, down the hill in front of the Arden towards the port. It was a steep little park which was bordered at the bottom by London Road. I stopped to sit on a bench and write in my journal. Squirrels snickered around me. Crossing the London Road, I looked the wrong way and almost got run over. Right-hand driving chauvinism is a very hard habit to break and one that almost got me killed a number of times in the next two weeks. I wandered through a fairly seedy residential area and bought a Drumstick (which the British call Cornettos) from a grocer. Continuing down the road, I ended up at Holyrood Palace, home of Scottish royalty, at the foot of Salisbury Crag. I couldn't see much of the palace behind the huge gilt gates. Holyrood is at the bottom of the Royal Mile, the main road running east-west in Old Town. It's actually four different roads, since the British have the strange habit of renaming the streets at practically every intersection. Main streets in Britain are known generically as "the high street," a phrase I've always loved. The Royal Mile runs steeply uphill from Holyrood up to Edinburgh Castle, past a whole lot of both historical and tacky buildings. As I walked up on this clear, fresh Sunday afternoon, I stopped in a little souvenir shop to get some postcards. About halfway up the mile, I came to Bridge Road, which crosses the old loch between New and Old Town on a dignified arched bridge. At the corner was a place called Pizzaland. It was definitely a tourist dive, but it was the only open restaurant I'd seen all day. Since it was about 17.30, I stopped in for dinner. I never really thought of American pizza parlors as anything distinctive, but these guys had it down pat, with a lot of ferns and green wood and chrome and pictures of cars and oceans. The Carpenters sang "Yesterday Once More" on the sound system. My waitress was named Lorna, but I managed to refrain from asking her if her last name was Doon. I ordered a salami, onion and anchovy pizza -- I know -- and the result proved that just because you look like a pizza parlour doesn't mean you are one. On top of that, Pizzaland wasn't "licensed" and couldn't serve liquor. In any event, it had to be better than the little diner I saw further down the mile, with a sign in the window advertising "Haggis Burgers!" The mind reels. Heading across the Bridge towards Princes Street, I noted that there were a lot of Americans on the streets, so flashy and cocky compared with the natives that if I were an Edinburgher, I might resent them. My goal in my visit to Scotland was to try not to look like a tourist -- I live in a tourist town and the little ignorant bastards, badly dressed and always looking vaguely disappointed, have always driven me nuts. At least none of my clothes had the bold colors and brand-name sportswear the Americans seem to prefer, and I carried all my stuff -- umbrella, camera, journal, passport, money -- in a fairly discreet shoulder bag. My reddish beard and pale skin didn't hurt, either. I eventually wandered back to the Arden and read in my room for a little while. On the way back, I noticed the path that led up to the top of Calton Hill in back of the hotel, and as the sun got lower and redder in the sky I headed up the path to see if the view was worth it. It was. On the city side of the hill, Princes Street runs straight away from Calton, so I could look down the whole length of it. It was thronged with shoppers and cars in the low, cool light. The hill was the perfect height for a picture of the castle and New Town, and I took plenty. On the north side of the hill, Leith, a moribund city full of cranes and docks, sat on the firth, which is about three miles wide at Edinburgh and widens quickly towards the east and the North Sea. Off Leith, a small island in the firth is called Inchkeithing. Legend has it that an ancient king of Scotland, curious about discovering the "natural" language of man, sent two infants and a mute nurse to live on Inchkeithing for ten years, with no contact with the mainland. At the end of the ten years, the king reported that the children spoke perfect Hebrew. In the red light, the firth looked almost mystical. In the distance, the ancient Kingdom of Fife was low and wooded. On the hill itself, there were some interesting buildings. The most prominent was the Nelson Monument, tall and crenelated and leaning a bit with age. Calton Hill seemed an odd place for a monument to an English naval hero -- no doubt it was forced on Edinburgh during Victoria's reign, when she desperately tried to bury Scotland's identity, even going so far as to rename Scotland North Britain. (You can imagine how much the Scots liked that idea.) Victoria gave up on that particular crusade, however, when she started "keeping company" with her Scottish footman, John Brown, late in her life. But the most interesting structure on the hill was the Scottish War Memorial. Started in the 1850s and intended to be a copy of the Parthenon, the money pledged by the citizens ran out after only the front of the building was completed. It looks very odd and amputated against the firth, and is more commonly known now as "Scotland's Disgrace." Coming back down the hill on the city side, past the huge Victorian facade of the North Britain Hotel, I finally found an open pub, the Guilford Arms, in a small alley off the part of Princes Street that passes over the Leith Road on a tall narrow bridge. The Guilford Arms was great -- high tin ceilings, mean booths, huge mahogany bar, dark wood everywhere and not an American in sight. On the TV, some lugubrious production was going on with David Morse of St. Elsewhere in the starring role. The patrons were a surly lot, most with little lorry-driver hats and work shoes. I had a beer, my first in Scotland. You can't just ask for a beer, however. Do you want a lager or a bitters? What about an ale? Pint or half-pint? I had done some reading on this before I left home, and confidently said "Pint lager," mumbling slightly to hide my accent. It seemed to work, and I sipped my Tennant's Lager in peace. It was now getting near 21.00, and the sun was still up over the castle in the long northern twilight. Back at the Arden, I noticed that the hotel bar had finally opened, and after a little more reading I wandered in. It was small, about the size of a rec room, with a very homey bar and brocade chairs around little tables. The lady behind the bar was large and friendly and vastly enamored of anything American, including me. Within ten minutes, as I sipped a 90p Laphroaig, I had learned that she was single, had a "darling" daughter, and was looking for an American to settle down with. Getting nervous, I finished my drink and escaped to my room, where I wrote a little in my journal and got ready for bed. What a day! Actually, two days, for I hadn't really slept since I woke up in Alexandria 36 hours earlier. Now I was finishing up my first day in Scotland with a warm beer-and-whisky glow as Radio One played the Top Ten. (The Number One song in the UK that week was "Axel F.," from Beverly Hills Cop, by Harold Faltermeyer.) Lulled by the gentle buzz in my head, I drifted off in the immense quiet of my first Edinburgh night.
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