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The Old Country I awoke Wednesday morning to a cold, grey rain outside my lace curtains. I usually find rain depressing, but for some reason the Scottish rain didn't bother me. Let's face it -- if I wanted a tan, I wouldn't have come to Edinburgh. I had another bland breakfast in the dining room, but at least the waitresses were starting to notice me. One came up, looked at me like I was an Iranian, and asked skeptically, "You're in 1?" Yes, dear. Bring me my food and leave me alone. I decided to use the day to do touristy things in Edinburgh. I headed out about 10.00 and walked through the chill rain to Holyrood Palace. I got in line with a bunch of Americans from a bus and paid my admission. We queued up and were eventually met by our tour guide, a tall fellow in full regalia -- kilt, dirk, Balmoral hat and a skene dughe, a nine-yard bolt of the family tartan slung over one shoulder, the source of the expression "the whole nine yards." He was a dead ringer for Joe DiMaggio, except that his eyes were a startling mixture of bright green and a thin light blue line around the edges. I was instructed not to use my camera inside the palace. We skirted a courtyard, grey and misty in the rain, and proceeded through a series of public rooms, each one surprisingly large and high and light. The majority of the palace, we were told, was built under the reign of Charles II, just after the Restoration in the 1680s. One of the towers, however, was a remainder from the time of the Scottish king James II, in the late 1400s, and the ruined abbey attached to the north side of the palace was "much older." For Christ's sake, how much older can you get than the 1400s? One of the public rooms was hung with a formidable phalanx of paintings of all the kings of Scotland, dating back to the Roman times. "Of course, there's no telling wha' most of these kings looked like, so all the paintings have the same face," our tour guide pointed out in an almost indecipherable accent. And he was right -- every king had the same face, not coincidentally the face of the king -- James IV, if I remember -- who commissioned the paintings. In the private apartments, where Elizabeth and Philip had just spent their annual fortnightly visit, the value and antiquity of some of the items was intimidating. An ottoman in front of "the Queen's reading chair" bore a small, delicate needlepoint of a cat chasing a mouse. The needlepoint, we were told reverentially, was done by Mary, Queen of Scots, while she waited out her seventeen years of imprisonment before being executed by Elizabeth I and the rest of the bloody murdering English. (I was getting into this Scottish stuff.) A lot of Mary's other possessions, still in everyday use, were equally poignant, given what we knew of Mary's fate. Also moving was the small room off the main dining room where Mary's psychotic husband, Darnley, murdered Mary's Italian servant and confidant, David Rizzio, in a cold-blooded execution brought about by jealousy and xenophobia. This event was very important in the national history, having far-reaching repercussions politically and also evoking much personal empathy for Mary's horror and sadness at the event. Mary is the seminal figure in Scottish history, studied and revered and idolized almost as fervently -- and in as distorted a way -- as we revere Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt. At one point, our guide halted us before a large tapestry bearing the Scottish royal arms, two crowned lions holding up the St. Andrews escutcheon and captioned with the ribboned motto Nemo me impune lassicit. "Thot's the Scottish national motto," our tour guide pointed out. "The English translation is `Strike me not with impunity.'" He paused and smiled. "The Scottish translation is 'Hit me and I'll hit you back.'" I was struck throughout the castle at the quality of the light in the rooms -- elegant and happy, but obviously coming solely from the wide windows and the overcast sky. I had never been in a palace before, and I expected something a lot darker and gloomier. All the palace walls were bright white. The quality of the workmanship, also, was astounding. Each room had intricate moldings and chandelier fittings that transcended mere decoration, beautiful bas relief sculptures of grape arbors, maple trees, small animals. The palace was overflowing in such plaster grace notes, all in white on white and older than seemed possible. Leaving the palace, we stepped out into a momentary lull in the rain and found ourselves in the abbey. In 1768, the roof of the abbey collapsed, and the Scots had never quite gotten around to replacing it. (Another abandoned construction project.) In contrast to the smooth, uniform walls of the palace, the abbey was made of fieldstones, plucked from the ground where the glaciers had deposited them and stacked randomly in tribute to the Lord. Inside, the drunken walls looked like an stone stockade fence around the packed dirt floor. Over the years, memorial plaques to various personages had been mounted on the walls, and a few people had even been buried where the pews and altars and trappings of both Catholicism and Anglicism had once stood, the gravestones unreadable with age. I was struck by one of the plaques, comparatively recent (1812) and bearing these sobering injunctions: Here lies the Body of The tour completed, I headed up the Royal Mile in the face of a driving rain which soaked my pants and threatened every second to pull my umbrella apart. I pretty much had the street to myself, and again I was filled with a sort of benumbed joy at my situation, despite the cold and the wind and the rain. Maybe there is some sort of deep racial memory in us, a memory that in my case lead me to revel in Scotland's peculiar summer weather. Maybe it was the reason I so liked San Francisco and Seattle, places also blessed with but two seasons, Nice and Crummy. All I know is that my walk up the Mile that morning in the rain is one of the best memories of the trip, and I have no idea why. It was lunch time, so I started looking around for a restaurant. On a little side street near the castle, I found the Witchery. The light beside the front door was a big iron black widow spider, her abdomen a stained glass globe. Inside, the walls were covered with pentagrams and "666s" and other satanic symbols. The waitresses were all dressed like Morticia Addams and the menu was full of ghostlore and witchlore about Edinburgh. It was pretty camp, like watching Elvira host a movie. I had a girlfriend many years ago who actually thought she was a witch and who made me sit through endless boring hours of powdering chicken bones and making fires inside circles of stone. She would have loved the place. If I only knew which mental institution she was in now. . . . A place like the Witchery in the US would have been shut down in a week by the same fundamentalist bozos who got Proctor and Gamble to get rid of their classy corporate logo. The rain had let up after I finished my Aleister Crowley sandwich and I wandered farther up the Mile. On my right was a tower, about six stories high, housing a camera obscura, a device used in the 18th and 19th centuries to project a silhouette of the Edinburgh skyline onto a flat round table for the public to admire. It was open to the public for a £3 fee, but I could see enough of the skyline from where I stood. Ahead, the castle loomed. There was a vast esplanade as I reached the end of the Mile, a parade ground for the troops who still ran the castle. (The British never discard anything -- the castle is still an operational military outpost.) Right now, the plaza was filled with two giant tiers of temporary grandstands, covering a number of statues of famous Scots. One of them was of General Douglas Haig, the man who almost single-handedly lengthened the First World War by two years by his temerity and stupidity; one of those honored heroes, like Robert Falcon Scott, whom the British seem to revere in inverse proportion to their accomplishments. The stands were in preparation for the Edinburgh Festival, which started in three weeks. The Festival is one of the largest art gatherings in Europe, attracting hundreds of acts and performers and exhibitors, and thousands of visitors. But in recent years, the Festival had been overshadowed by the even bigger Edinburgh Fringe, gatherings of acts who didn't make the A list for the real Festival. My guidebook said that for the two weeks in August when the Festival and the Fringe were in town, Edinburgh was "the San Francisco of Europe," meaning, I suppose, that it was filled with people with no sense of reality whatsoever. Well, the weather was right for it. As I approached the castle, the esplanade started to drop away on both sides, so that for the first time I got a real feeling for the actual height of Castle Rock. It was an old volcanic core, a solid cylindrical slug of basalt about 250 feet tall. It, Calton Hill and Arthur's Seat to the east are the only remnant of a gigantic volcano which once covered the whole of Midlothian and which was swept away by a gigantic glacier in the last Ice Age, a glacier estimated to have been over a mile thick. (It's one thing to marvel at the antiquity of Edinburgh's buildings and history, but how long does it take for a volcano to wear away? The stretch of time involved is positively scary.) Passing the guard booths, occupied by kilted guards with incongruously real rifles, I entered the castle grounds. The "castle" was actually a collection of buildings sharing a common yard, surrounded by high crenelated walls. There was no charge to enter and grounds and look around, but a £4 ticket was required to enter the buildings. Still in my strange penny-pinching mood (for the day, at least) , I decided to hold off on the buildings and just wander the yard. Getting to the yard, however, was not easy. From the plaza, a path wandered uphill, ranged by high masonry walls and studded with portcullises, a particularly vicious gate which was drawn straight up like a stage curtain and, studded with lethal spikes along the bottom, kept ready to be dropped on unsuspecting invaders. I hurried under them nervously. Emerging from the tunnel-like path, I stood on the first tier of battlements overlooking the city. A sheer drop -- and I mean sheer -- of 450 feet led to the beautifully manicured lawns of the East Princes Street Gardens, and beyond them the main shopping district along Princes Street. Beyond that, I had my first good look at the "classical" part of New Town (older than Alexandria's Old Town), full of stately Georgian manors and Grecian temples. The drizzle had stopped, but the sky was still dark and low. Turning, I started to examine the yard. Many of the buildings looked not so much built as grown, most incorporating a spur of the volcanic rock itself into the walls and foundations. They were built to be strong and impregnible rather than distinguished. Over the main tower, the Union Jack fluttered in the brisk wind. Standing guard over the battlements were a variety of cannon, still in good repair and ready to defend the castle should any mongrel hoards storm the Rock. One of them, called Mons Meg in old Gaelic, was at 2 1/2 tons, one of the heaviest cannons ever built. A smaller cannon is set off every day at 13.00 (1 PM) to mark the time. Why not the more conventional 12 noon? To save eleven bags of powder, of course. This is Scotland, lad. Having decided not to enter any of the buildings, there wasn't much else to do at the castle, so I headed back down. Just after the plaza, I took a left onto a steep street which headed down towards the Gardens. On the way, I passed the old campus of the University of Edinburgh, (alma mater of Arthur Conan Doyle, among others), a few steepled buildings, stately and grim and deserted for the summer, and wound up on the Mound, a low hill spanning the drained loch and built from the debris of all the shanties and markets demolished for the building of New Town. (Even the hills are literally full of history.) On the Mound were the Scottish Museum of Industry and the National Gallery of Scotland. The first was a real snore, full of steam engines and treadles. That stuff is more my father's bailiwick than mine. The Gallery, however, was small but filled with what was, to my untrained eye, a magnificent selection of paintings. One in particular fascinated me. It was a 15th-century painting by an Italian artist whose name I didn't recognize, depicting the Virgin, the baby Jesus and John the Baptist. They were outside, a city behind them. The picture was painted from a strange, low angle, looking up at the three people, and distorted in a way similar to a wide-angle camera lens. Odd, ominous shadows crowded them. The perspective was so shockingly modern, almost Diane Arbus-like, that I checked the date again. Yup, 1476. Remarkable. I also liked a Titian painting, the three stages of life represented by an strange scene of babies rolling naked on a hillside while a young couple groped each other under a tree and, in the distance, an old man sat on a crumbling wall, contemplating a skull, while around his feet, rats ducked in and out of other skulls. On my way out, I checked at the museum shop to see if I could get posters or slides of the two paintings to take home with me. They were out of both. I guess the public knows what it likes. Back in my room, I finished off my second Tom Sharpe book and started the third, Ancestral Vices. Radio One informed me that it was 11 degrees, a figure that confused me until I remembered that Scotland uses Celsius. I never could remember the formula for converting to Fahrenheit, and in my head figured it was either 52 degrees or -26 degrees. Probably the former. At 16.00, the fire alarm sounded, and someone came running to all the rooms yelling "False alarm! No reason to panic!" At 17.30 I combed my hair and walked over to Waverley to get the European versions of Time and Newsweek, curious to see what was going on in the world. I was very pleased with the ease with which I wandered around Edinburgh. Waverely was a 20-minute walk from my room, a distance I would never have thought of walking if I had a car. But, as with the lack of television, I was finding the lack of a car to be sort of a blessing. (Without television, I was certainly reading more. During my two weeks in Scotland, I finished 16 books.) I was seeing more of the city, having more contact with the people and feeling fairly healthy in the bargain by walking everywhere. I vowed to walk more when I got home. The Euro magazines had the same style and content as the American editions, but were curiously sans any advertising. It's amazing how little space the actual news in those magazines takes up. The Euro editions felt more like pamphlets. I kept my promise to Lynne and returned to Jackson's for dinner. I chose the veal piccata this time. Along with it, Lynne recommended a bottle of Silver Birch wine from Inverness (yes, Scottish wine!), made from the sap of birch trees. It tasted like a nice cross between a dry California white and tej, Ethiopian honey wine. Across from me was a Connecticut couple, retired and touring Europe. I told them I was from Alexandria, Virginia. They surveyed my spartan attire and beard. "Student at the Alexandria seminary?," they asked. God, I didn't look that hard up, did I? I finished the whole bottle of Silver Birch and left in a mild haze. I walked back down to Waverley and bought the Euro edition of Penthouse for a little low-brow thrill and, feeling expansive, hailed a cab. The cabs in Edinburgh (and in all of Britain, for that matter), are black high-roofed Austins, blessed with an amazing expanse of space in the back. I yelled across the void to the driver to take me to 19 Royal Terrace, and we raced through the twilight, zipping through the left-handed traffic circles (or roundabouts) at a truly horrifying pace. The driver kept up a running stream of entertaining patter. Imagine, having to come all the way to Scotland to find a cabbie who spoke English! The ride came to 90p and I gave him £2. Overtipping is one American trait the Scots don't mind. I was having a Laphroaig in the hotel bar when at 21.00 the bartender and the patrons ran off to the TV room, which I hadn't yet succeeded in finding in the vastness of the Arden. This was the night that Bobby Ewing was to die on Dallas, and it had been practically headline news all week. I finished my drink and returned to my room. Radio One was playing an interview with Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart, the rock group Eurythmics, and they were discussing all their favorite songs and what influence they had on them. It was interesting, because a lot of obscure songs I liked were on their list also. Great minds think alike. I read Ancestral Vices until midnight and went to sleep to a radio program on birdwatching. At midnight. The British absolutely fascinate me.
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