Unthinkable Wings

Yesterday I went for a wander down the Canongate in Edinburgh with mater; we discovered a wonderful recreation of a seventeenth century knot garden down a Dunbar Close. Amazing the things you just wander past!

I also went to the Grey Ladies Bookshop, which was full of fascinating and lovely things, though I confined myself to a book of Canadian Girl Guide songs, and Josephine Elder's Lady of Letters.

On another note entirely, if you haven't seen this, you may be amused (regardless of your political leaning, I hope):

Nominally this is a winter poem - but I think it works well for Passiontide, especially such a snowy one.

( Edwin Muir, One Foot in Eden )

There's actually an amusing thread on Comment is Free: On Haggis. Of course, it is the Guardian, so there's a debate about the ethics of haggis farming versus hunting...

The Grauniad asks: Should we mourn Flashman?

I must say I'm more inclined to mourn Pte McAuslan, J, the dirtiest soldier in the world, and his long suffering superior officer, Dand MacNeill, not to mention the rest of the regiment immortalised in three collections of short stories about life in a Highland regiment stationed in North Africa at the end of the Second World War. Screamingly funny, all of them, and in an unobtrusive way rather interesting accounts of the Scots, or at least of Scots men of various kinds and conditions. They also contain one of the best ceilidhs and almost certainly the funniest game of golf known to literature (whaur's yer PG Wodehouse noo?), and a series of curious yet believable characters and events. The language, too, is wonderful, though I suspect it might account for the lack of attention which the English obituries gave to the stories.

Gaiman fans, though, might note that one of the stories in 'The Sheikh and the Dustman' (a hilarious account of poaching and illicit distilling in Perthshire) is the source for an incident in Sandman - and I have a suspicion that Pratchett's Nic Mac Feegle owe quite a lot to Fraser's Scots soldiery.

If you google 'McAuslan', the first hit you get is a rather posh-looking Canadian microbrewery. I think I'd have difficulty trusting their products, though, associations with the Tartan Caliban being too strong...

"Ye see, David man, they'll be Hieland folk. There'll be some Frasers, I'm thinking, and some of the Gregara; and I would never deny but what the both of them, and the Gregara in especial, were clever experienced persons. A man kens little till he's driven a spreagh of neat cattle (say) ten miles through a throng lowland country and the black soldiers maybe at his tail. It's there that I learned a great part of my penetration. And ye need nae tell me: it's better than war; which is the next best, however, though generally rather a bauchle of a business. Now the Gregara have had grand practice."

"No doubt that's a branch of education that was left out with me," said I.

"And I can see the marks of it upon ye constantly," said Alan. "But that's the strange thing about you folk of the college learning: ye're ignorant, and ye cannae see 't. Wae's me for my Greek and Hebrew; but, man, I ken that I dinnae ken them--there's the differ of it. Now, here's you. Ye lie on your wame a bittie in the bield of this wood, and ye tell me that ye've cuist off these Frasers and Macgregors. Why! Because I couldnae see them, says you. Ye blockhead, that's their livelihood."

... I've been re-reading 'Kidnapped' and 'Catriona', and am forcibly reminded of how much I love Alan Breck, for all his faults.

Not to mention the pithy analysis of homesickness:

" So we went east by the beach of the sea, towards where the salt-pans were smoking in by the Esk mouth. No doubt there was a by-ordinary bonny blink of morning sun on Arthur's Seat and the green Pentlands; and the pleasantness of the day appeared to set Alan among nettles.

"I feel like a gomeral," says he, "to be leaving Scotland on a day like this. It sticks in my head; I would maybe like it better to stay here and hing."

"Ay, but ye wouldnae, Alan," said I.

"No but what France is a good place too," he explained; "but it's some way no the same. It's brawer, I believe, but it's no Scotland. I like it fine when I'm there, man; yet I kind of weary for Scots divots and the Scots peat-reek." "

Happy St Andrews Day, everyone!

In honour of Scotland's most famous poet (not, in fact, our best, but we love him anyway), born today in 1759, I bring you one of his finest lyrics - no, not 'My luve is like a red, red rose', though that's good also...

( Because there's more to Burns than whisky and sex )