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It was Friday, my last day in Edinburgh, and it was raining like a bitch. I suffered through one last Arden breakfast, the waitresses again taking forever to serve me. The gold-flocked wallpaper in the dining room was starting to get to me, as was the 20-foot ceiling and the little wall sconces. What a strange place to eat breakfast! Holding my umbrella like Excalibur, I wandered for the first time up through the Georgian streets of New Town. Row upon row of tall narrow townhouses, all with marble steps and a second residence (usually numbered with an "A") below street level. Parts of the streets looked remarkably like Baltimore, three- story residences packed against hardware stores and curry places, without a tree in sight. I had spent nearly half an hour studying the place and its curious lack of people when I realized I was lost. I stopped and peered around, trying to get my bearings. The sky was so dark I couldn't even find the sun. Ahead of me, I saw a young lady ducking from storefront to storefront, trying to stay out of the downpour. I offered to escort her. "Och, I'm just goin' up the street," she said, every word a glottal stop in her harsh Highlands accent. I said it didn't matter, and she ducked under my umbrella. She had high cheekbones and prominent teeth, her long straight black hair parted down the middle. She looked a lot like Elaine Giftos. "Loovly weatha," she said in a Ringo Starr deadpan. I said it sure was. She looked at me for the first time. "You're from the States. Here on holiday." Her accent had the effect of flattening questions into statements. I said I was, and that I'd been enchanted by her fair city. She smiled. I had found that Edinburghers were inordinately -- maniacally -- proud of their city. After a few moments of silence, my companion squeezed my arm and disappeared into an office building. I had neglected to ask her how to get out of New Town. I seemed to be heading the wrong way, because the neighborhoods kept getting worse. Finally, over the rooftops, I spotted the castle and headed for it. Saved again. I went into the Waverley mall and plopped my soaked self down in a little carry-out (or "take-away," as the British call them) which served a number of different ethnic dishes, very similar to a place called the Crystal City Dinery back home. I bought a large Pepsi and read my Yorkshire Ripper book. The Ripper, a young brooding lorry-driver named Peter Sutcliffe, had slashed about ten women around the Yorkshire town of Bingley over a period of eight years. The book dwelt at length on the nature of that part of Yorkshire, economically depressed and apparently about as pretty as a strip mine. The book was written in such a British style, full of the indecipherable (even on paper) Yorkshire accent and obscure local references, that I suspected that it, like the Sharpe books, would never be published in the US. At this early hour, I was the only one in the cafeteria. I saw haggis burgers advertised again, and managed to resist the urge. About 11.00, I got up and headed through the mall in search of gifts. My plan was to do a little shopping, then head back to my room, pack up and have a last dinner at Jackson's. I visited the single malt store again, and only the fear of taking liquor through customs stopped me from buying one of each type. I saw a bottle of Tobermory malt and smiled: I'll buy it tomorrow at the distillery. I checked out all the other shops and came up with nothing. What the hell am I going to buy everybody? I found myself at the end of the mall, on a little terrace that looked over the Gardens. The weather had done another remarkable flip-flop and the sky was sunny and cloudless. Up on Princes Street, a floor up from the terrace, a young man in a kilt was playing the bagpipes, and a small crowd, mostly American, had gathered to listen. As I watched, the Edinburgh constables stalked up in their strange headgear, had a few sharp words with the piper and ordered him to "move along." The piper appealed to the crowd, which turned nasty and harangued the constables. "Why are you bothering this man?" "He's not hurting anyone!" "Go arrest some criminals or something!" The piper "moved along" about twenty feet and started playing again to the cheers of the crowd. The constables disappeared. I felt badly that I couldn't find any gifts, so I headed through the train station and up to the Royal Mile for one last look in the shops. In the antique map shop, I found the perfect gift for my friend, a confirmed Francophile, who had driven me to the airport. It was a big, gorgeous map of Paris, dated 1805, with every building and bridge drawn in exquisite detail. The thing, for all its lithographed beauty, was only £40, and the owner, who remembered me from my earlier visit Monday, was only too thrilled to sell me another map. Her eyes gleamed as I gave her my American Express card. I wandered down the Royal Mile and ended up at the Kirk O' The Canongate, a very old Presbyterian church surrounded by a sloping graveyard. I visited the church itself, very simple and spartan, and spent a half-hour wandering among the tombstones. Among the famed dead people were a woman who provided the inspiration for some of Burns' poetry and David Rizzio himself, the murdered valet of Mary, Queen of Scots. Rumor had it that Darnley was buried somewhere in the area (after he was blown up in a plot supposedly engineered by Mary, whose typically Scottish reaction to his death was to go out and play a round of golf), but his tombstone had been lost over the years. It was a pleasant place, overgrown with thorns in places and a little ramshackle. I love old tombstones, and many, like the one I saw Wednesday at the Holyrood Abbey, were touching and comical at the same time. Further down the Mile, just before Jenny Ha's, where I planned to drink my lunch, I ran across two old gentlemen, nicely dressed for the beautiful warm day it had turned into, lawn bowling on a narrow lot off the Mile. Many times in the last week I'd been treated to golf and cricket games on the pub TVs, the first dull and the second utterly incomprehensible. Lawn bowling, however, I could understand. A small brown ball was placed at one end of the field and the men rolled a succession of larger white balls from the other end. The point was to try to make their ball come to rest as close as possible to the brown ball without actually touching it. I watched for about a half- hour as the lead changed hands constantly. Around me, tourists' cameras were recording the match, and I joined in. I sat down on a bench and looked around. It was a brilliant clear day, the sky a deep opaque blue and the shadows hard and crisp. It was maybe 60 degrees and a light breeze was blowing. I was very happy to be alive. I glanced up over the Milton School across the street and pondered the Crag and, beyond it, Arthur's Seat. The Seat was steep and volcanic, named by English sailors who noted the mountain's resemblance to a throne from the North Sea and who corrupted the ancient Scots name, Ard-na-Saigheid, "the height of an arrow's flight." Like the Crag, it was covered with a rich, brilliant green, almost Irish in its intensity. Squinting, I could see people, tiny dark specks, moving about on its peak. That's right! I was going to climb it! With no more thought than if I was walking to the corner store, I headed down the Mile to the palace and stalked up to the base of the Crag. From Edinburgh, it was apparent that the Seat was merely a high peak of the Crag, so getting over the Crag would be my first step. The long steep path which ran around the Crag would take me too far out of my way, so I headed straight up the side of the Crag, a climb of only a few hundred feet at this low end of the rise. Steep don't describe it. Within a few seconds I was wheezing and aching, stretching in unnatural positions to reach footholds and handholds. How do I get myself in these things? Ahead of me, I could see a French family, all outfitted in matching windbreakers and knapsacks and babbling away in their awful language, casually pull themselves up the sides of the Crag, their children easily outdistancing me. After an eternity, I reached the top. Oh, shit. Between myself and the Seat stretched a valley, even lower than the plain I had started from. I would have to go down the Crag and start again at the base of the Seat. Overwhelmed by the prospect, I collapsed in a sodden heap upon the long waving heather. Gradually my strength returned and I sat up. Ignoring my unnecessary climb for the moment, I was on a beautiful slope of soft heather, facing an unpopulated valley and a steep jagged volcanic plug. The French family had disappeared down another route and, except for a few people at the top of the Seat, there was no sign of habitation anywhere. It was a nice sensation to find myself alone in a major city. Off in the distance, the North Sea was a cool blue. The heather bobbed and nodded in the breeze. Life could be worse, kid. As I soaked in the view, a flight of multiengined propeller aircraft flew over, sporting the roundels of the Royal Air Force. It seemed the perfect antique touch for the ageless, changeless scene before me. Gathering my wits, I noticed that the slope I was on eventually joined up with the slope of the Seat about 1500 yards to the south, so that if I crossed the slope at about the same altitude I was at, I could reach the side of the Seat without wasting my exhausting initial climb. My ankles screaming in protest, I traversed the slope and found myself on the back side of the road which wrapped around the two peaks. Well, at least it was flat and paved. I was on the other side of the Queen's Park from Edinburgh and was looking south over the small towns which dotted the flat plain all the way down to England. The flatness of the surrounding terrain emphasized the volcanic origin of Edinburgh's peaks, thrusting like Mount Ranier out of a dead level ground. Nestled under the steep sides of the Seat, hundreds of feet below, was the small parish town of Duddingston, a quaint village of steeples and quiet streets and serenity. Loch Duddingston bordered it on one side, and as a car sped down the high street of Duddingston, an amazing flock of geese, startled by the noise, sprang from the banks of the loch to the safety of its smooth blue waters. I continued around on the road, stopping to marvel occasionally at the subtlety of the colors before me. At first glance, the sides of the Seat were simple rock, grey and black. Upon closer examination, I could see that practically every inch was covered with tiny flowers, almost invisible, of the most startling reds and blues and purple. I had never seen such an intricate expanse of foliage in my life. From the south side, the road led me around to the east face of the Seat and I found a car park, sharing a marshy strip of land with a moribund loch. From here, the top of the Seat was a short, steep climb up a well-established path. Ahead of me, whole families carried picnic baskets. Halfway up, I was approached by an unlikely pair, two Japanese students. In heavily-accented English, they told me that they were studying engineering at the University of Edinburgh. Part of their education included stopping average people and asking them a series of questions to sharpen their language skills. "We ask you questions?" Sure, why not? "You live where?" Alexandria, Virginia, outside of Washington, DC. Excited looks. "Why you here in Edinbuwa?" Vacation. Family ties. "How much money you make?" This was a decidedly unScottish question. About $38,000, or £29,000. Raised eyebrows. "What country build your car?" Germany. "Next car Japanese!" they chided, and they were gone. About 50 feet from the peak of Arthur's Seat, the mountain gave up the pretense of dirt and vegetation and became solid, shiny basalt and obsidian, dried lava in its purest form. The wind had increased to almost gale-force with altitude. Scrambling up the jagged last few feet, I stood at the peak of Arthur's Seat. The whole of the ancient kingdom of Lothia was spread out before me in a humbling vista, Edinburgh and Leith before me, the suburbs of Corstorphine and Dundas hazy in the distance. To the east, Bass Rock rose out of the North Sea in a perfect volcanic cone. Off to the west, a series of dark clouds were gathering, blotting out the beautiful sunshine, and it was clear it would be raining pretty soon. Great timing. The highest point of the Seat is marked by a stone cairn, about five feet high and covered with decades of self- congratulatory graffiti. On a lower area beside it, another cairn, about the same size, was topped with a stainless steel circle, intricately engraved with a compass rose and a guide to the various sights to be seen. In the center was the inscription: HEIGHT OF ARTHUR'S SEAT 250.5 METRES I tried to take some pictures of Edinburgh, but the encroaching clouds veiled it in darkness. I took a picture of myself with the timer, holding the camera in place on the compass rose to prevent it from skittering off in the howling wind. Soon the rain started, and realizing my umbrella would be useless in the roaring wind, I tried to hunker down under an overhang of rock with limited success. The Scots around me ignored the rain completely. After five minutes or so, I decided that instead of getting soaked just standing there, I should get soaked climbing down. Rather than the roundabout, stupid way I climbed the Seat, I decided to take the direct route down. Scrambling between outcroppings and finding various well-etched paths in the rock face, I was at the bottom in a surprisingly short time. Just as I reached the floor of the glen between the Crag and the Seat, the clouds skittered away as if on cue and I was bathed in clean warm sunlight. Jesus. I traveled down the valley towards the palace, the Crag and the Seat looming on either side. Up on my right were the ruins of St. Andrews' Church, crumbling walls dating back to the 9th (!) century. As I reached the mouth of the valley and Holyrood Palace came into view, bagpipe music from a palace ceremony drifted over me. I stopped, stunned by the theatricality of the moment at the bagpipes moaned, the heather waved and the salty air surrounded me. I worked my way back to Jenny Ha's and spent the next three hours downing pints of lager and reading Mary, Queen of Scots at a window table, dusty beams of bright sunlight dappling my table. Happy people scurried past, getting an early start on the weekend. I bought a pack of Senior Service cigarettes from the barmaid and puffed away, holding the cigarettes in the European manner, trying to look like a world-weary expatriate. It was a long, warm lazy afternoon and for long stretches I was the only customer in the bar. There is something about a quiet, deserted bar that makes me happy, and I wished I had some way of making time stop, so I could spend the rest of my life reading that book, smoking those cigarettes, drinking that Tartan and watching those people. About 17.00 I left and wandered slowly up the Mile in a happy lager haze. I took some pictures of the afternoon crowds in the bright sunlight. Turning off the Mile, I wandered into St. Giles' Cathedral, not huge as cathedrals go but beautifully built with high arched ceilings and bright stained windows with comparatively gentle scenes of Christian tortures and scourging. I tried to take a picture of the arches in the dim light and leaned against a column in order to steady the camera for a two- second exposure. I circled the cathedral and waited until 18.00 so I could make one last visit to Jackson's. The minutes dragged by as I walked the Mile, finally surfeited with its shops and history. Across from the cathedral stood the Edinburgh Town Council building, the city flag, a castle on a hill (the literal translation of Edinburgh) fluttering in the breeze and a big banner proclaiming "Edinburgh -- The City That's Improving Services and Creating Jobs!" draped across the front. Goddamn British socialists. Six o'clock finally rolled around and I headed into Jackson's. As usual, the place was cool and airy and remarkably empty, except for three young ladies seated at a back table. I was surprised to see that one of them was wearing a William and Mary sweatshirt. They were American, their blond hair and blue eyes startling after a week of dark-eyed Scots. They were attending a summer program in English literature at Cambridge before starting their senior year at W&M. The program included a week of lectures at Edinburgh, and they were catching the train Saturday morning to return to Cambridge. When I told them I had graduated in English from UVa, we all greeted each other like cousins. They sat for a portrait, Lynne helping with the pose, as I waited for my duck in raspberry sauce. During dinner, they got into an argument about Blake and Faustus (an unlikely pair) and I felt as if I was back in class. After the ladies left, Lynne and I talked for a long time. She and her husband lived on a farm about thirty miles from Edinburgh, raising sheep. She looked as unlikely a farmer as I could imagine. She was a one-third owner of Jackson's, and I asked if the lack of business was worrying her. "Och, it'll pick up. Have to gi'e people time to find us." I told her I would certainly recommend the place to anyone I could, but I didn't know very many people who went to Edinburgh. (Strangely enough, a year later a friend of my father's ended up in Edinburgh on a tour of Great Britain and, on my recommendation, had lunch at Jackson's. He enjoyed it immensely, and said Lynne remembered me.) I took a picture of Lynne, shook hands with her and the chef and wandered into the night. Taking a cab and overtipping horribly, I dumped my shoulder bag in my room and headed down to the Arden's bar for a nightcap. Behind the bar was a tall, angular woman with the kind of overbite I always associate with North Carolina. Her name was Christine and she and I struck up a conversation. She had been the Friday night bartender at the Arden for four years, a little extra income to supplement her daytime job at the Edinburgh City Council as an unemployment clerk. (We drank to bureaucrats everywhere.) She was planning to visit New York in the fall, a trip she had been planning for a long time. I told her to call me when she got there and I'd drive up and see it with her. I handed her my calling card, and she was one of the few people I've ever met who didn't laugh at it. I told her about the liquor prices in New York and she was appalled. "Two pounds seventy-five for a beer?" she asked after I translated the prices. "Pull the other one!" Sad but true, Christine. As I ordered Laphroiag after Laphroiag, people started wandering in. A few Americans, talking loudly, ordered Manhattans and retreated to a table by the windows. A few of Christine's friends showed up and gathered around the bar. Steve Hastie and his fiancée Jan Glen were a cute couple in their mid- twenties. Steve had the sort of latent baby fat around his face that made Paul McCartney look so cute, and Jan looked like a young Barbara Babcock. Steve had just graduated from Strathclyde University in Glasgow with a degree in electrical engineering. Jan proudly passed around the pictures of the ceremony, and I found myself drawn into a nice, easy discussion with them, the kind of camaraderie one always hopes to find in a bar far from home. I couldn't hide my Americanism from them, but they didn't seem to hold it against me. They said that they hadn't spent much time talking to visiting Americans, and took the opportunity to ask me a lot of questions. I mentioned some things about Scotland I found interesting -- the city (they agreed with me, with a proud gleam in their eye, that Edinburgh was the most beautiful city on the face of the earth -- "Bet'r than fookin' Glesga, tha's for shoore"), the weather, the quiet. I mentioned that I thought they had pretty money, and they said they had never seen American cash before, which surprised me. I still had some greenbacks in my wallet from Friendship Airport, and I passed around a $1, a $5 and a $20. "They're all the same color!" Jan said in surprise. "And the same size! How d'ye tell them apart?" I'd never thought of that before. We talked about music. Five years earlier, Steve had played with a band called AVO-8 (he explained the name, but I can't remember the reason for it) and they had released a few singles. (The music business in Britain is much more geared to small, independent labels than in America.) He'd been away from the business for a while, but he and Jan had recently formed a new band, as yet unnamed, and were about to record a single and play a few club dates around Christmas. "We're just doin' it because Jan wants to be a star," Steve said with a grin. I mentioned that my favorite musicians happened to be Britons, like Elvis Costello and Squeeze and Joe Jackson. Steve, amazingly, wasn't familiar with any of their stuff. What was his favorite? "The Dead Kennedys!," Steve and Jan replied in unison. The Dead Kennedys? With all the great new wave and bar bands in Britain, their favorite was a thrasher band from San Francisco, known for lead singer Jello Biafra's frequent arrests and their unairable classic "Too Drunk to Fuck." "'Specially `Holiday in Cambodia,'" Steve further explained. He and Jan though "Holiday in Cambodia" was the best song ever written. I promised to get a copy of the song when I got home. I asked about television. The PBS station in Washington played a lot of British series, and I asked what they though of some of the ones I had grown fond of. To The Manor Born? "Yuch!" Butterflies? "Good God!" What about Fawlty Towers? "For kids." Yes, Minister? "Borin'." No, Honestly? "Twitty." Well, what was their idea of a good show? "Miami Vice!" Steve leaped from his barstool and twirled around, cocking his fingers like a Beretta. "I loove Miami Vice! I told them I'd never seen it before and they looked at me like I was crazy. I started to wonder if I had stumbled on some very strange people here in the remains of the British empire. The Dead Kennedys and Miami Vice? Then it hit me: they were Americanophiles, an exact mirror image of my Anglophilia. They would never admit that America interested them, but everything from there held a fascination. I supposed they watched Dallas too? "I loove Dallas!" The same with Dynasty and Knots Landing and all the other crap we sent over. On a hunch, I mentioned the one American I knew an Americanophile had to love. Bruce Springsteen? I was right. It was Springsteen's big summer, with Born in the USA on top of the album charts in both America and Britain. I had read earlier in the week that Springsteen's previous seven albums, dating back to 1973 and a lot better than Born in the USA, were only now being released in Britain. I told Steve and Jan to go get them immediately, that I still remembered the first time I heard "Born to Run" and "Thunder Road," chills running down my back. I guaranteed them that they would like them. Steve proceeded to caper around the bar, playing air guitar and singing "Born in the USA" at the top of his lungs. Another of Christine's friends showed up, an older fellow named John who had just succeeded in marrying off his daughter the weekend before. "I videotaped th' whole thing!," he said in a booming bar-story voice. "Y' should see it. C'mon!" Christine only barely managed to talk him out of dragging all of us down the street and subjecting us to the wedding tape. In retrospect, it might have been a hoot. I had been drinking steadily all night, first Laphroiag, then a few bottles of the dark German beer that Steve and Jan were drinking. The talk turned to liquor and I mentioned the Margarita as my favorite mixed drink. I was met with blank stares. "What's thot again?," John asked. "A Margate?" Here was my chance. Raleigh introduced tobacco to Britain, Columbus smallpox to the New World. I would introduce the Margarita to Scotland. Except . . . I couldn't for the life of me remember what went into one. Tequila, I know . . . "Got that," Christine said, grabbing an unopened bottle that looked old enough to have been left by an Army Air Corps officer off to bomb Schweinfurt. Uh, lime juice . . . . She squeezed three limes into a glass. What the hell was the third ingredient? Some kind of orange liqueur . . . . "Curacao?," Christine said, reading labels in the back of the rack. What the hell. And of course, ice and a blender. "No ice and no blender." Christine smiled. "This isn't bloody New York, y'know." So we ended up mixing the three ingredients neat in a tumbler. It looked like Aqua Velva and tasted as bad as it looked. "Thot's a right awful drink y' got there, lad," John commented, and I had to agree. Eleven o'clock came around. John left, and Christine rolled the big grating down over the bar and locked it up. The four of us, feeling no pain, headed down the street to the Claymore, another hotel on the Royal Terrace which was licensed to stay open until 01.00. The bar was much bigger than the Arden's, and at one end a blowsy bleached blonde was perched on a barstool, crooning music-hall stuff into a microphone, accompanied by a two-piece band. I switched to Tennant's and Steve, Jan, Christine and I talked a while longer. I realized I was getting very drunk when I started singing along, in a loud and soulful voice, to "I Left My Heart in San Francisco." Jan joined in (she knew all the words, even the overture -- what kind of person listens to both the Dead Kennedys and Tony Bennett?), and the singer finally stopped and looked at us with narrowed eyes as we finished it up for her. above a bluuuuuuue I tried to set my alarm clock for 6.00, but in my befuddled state I couldn't figure how to do it with the 70-minute hours caused by the different electrical frequency. I fell into bed, but kept sitting up because the bed felt as if it was slowly tipping over backwards in the classic drunken swirl. Finally, at 02.00 I staggered to the basin under the window and threw up. That seemed to stop the swirling, and I fell unconscious. The ugly American lives. |
