On the Beat

I got the time of the boat wrong; fortunately arriving early, not late. I had two hours to spend in Aberdeen; I wandered around, had a coffee, had some chocolate. The centre of Aberdeen seemed badly hit by the downturn, with many shops closed out vacant; yet oil money was meant to keep the city buoyant whatever happened in the broader economy. It might be that the petrol dollars are not evenly distributed, and that the centre suffers whilst offer parts boom.

I went to the Maritime Museum, down by the docks. It is an excellent museum, though full of images of disaster. Oil paintings of wrecked vessels and drowning sailors abound; one display after another recount tales of bravery and folly at sea: while fishing fleets destroyed by a turn in the weather. Fishing families, poor at best, devastated as all the men drown. (This must be why so much of the folk music is full of despair.)

Worst of all was the detailed exhibit on the Piper Alpha disaster. Twenty five years ago, the drilling platform caught fire, killing 167 men (including some rescuers); the 61 survivors were scarred physically and mentally. (The father of a friend of mine was a psychiatrist who worked with survivors at an Aberdeen hospital - and apparently he found it traumatising enough.) It is hard to comprehend the horror. On a rig, there's nowhere to escape to. Even today, the disaster hangs over the city, which is dependent on oil.

After this litany of disaster - all of it heart-rending - I was surprised not to see an RNLI collection box anywhere. They'd have cleaned up. The museum is excellent, well put together and engaging, if a little depressing. That's life at sea, I guess.

Shetland is a long way, nearer Norway than Scotland; the Arctic Circle is nearer than Edinburgh. The ferry takes twelve hours to get there, ploughing through the rough waves and calamitous North Sea swells that caused so much of the damage described in the museum. Or, fortunately, not. On this occasion, the sea was flat as a pancake.

Aberdeen harbour is busy, full of oil support vessels and large rescue craft (in part a legacy of Piper Alpha). The quays are crammed with oil storage tanks and steel containers (everything is taken onto and off the rigs in containers). There are even ice-breakers.

The sky and the sea were the same gun metal grey. I spent a lot of time on the deck, watching the north east coast slip by until we were out of sight. The occasional splodge of bright orange set against the grey showed where the rigs were, the gas flames flowing unnaturally. (You can see the same from Edinburgh, from gas processing works in Fife, across the Forth.)

The ferry goes overnight, leaving Scotland in the evening and arriving in Shetland - Lerwick - in the morning. You can book cabins, but not wanting to share, instead I booked a "sleeping pod" - a kind of deluxe chair - largely because the idea of having to share a cabin really didn't appeal. Really bad plan! Firstly because the boat was pretty quiet, so I doubt I'd have had to share; but mostly because it was very hard to sleep in the ill-named sleeping pods.

It barely got dark. Six weeks before the solstice, the sun hardly dipped below the horizon. There was a strip of bright sky in the north throughout the night. At 2am, the darkest, the clouds have enough glow to cast a (very weak) shadow; a week later, it was possible to read outside at that time, without a torch.

There were distant lights on the horizon. Ships that pass in the night.
I was wide awake by 5am, full-Scottish breakfasted by 6, when the canteen (and bar!) opened, and on deck to watch us arrive in Lerwick at 6.30. Low cloud hung over Mainland as we passed the long spur that starts with Sumburgh and ends in Lerwick.

I first stocked up with food, as soon as the supermarket opened, and then drive north. Further north. Unst is a further two ferry rides from Mainland - Yell lies in between (home to its own fishing tragedy - 58 men drowned, 36 from the small village of Gloup). I took the back road over Yell, following the south and then east costs. I stopped at the community museum, which had some interesting displays (not least about Gloup, but also paintings and a bit about the wildlife), and had a coffee. Kind of. Nescafe, in fact, which I hadn't had for years. For reasons I don't understand, no one seemed to make real coffee on the islands. Everywhere I went, they had Nescafe. Good thing I bought ground coffee at Lerwick.

I was the only passenger on the ferry between Yell and Unst. It would be a quiet week.

My brother was in Scotland over his birthday, and, lacking ideas for a suitable present, I was prompted to steal one from Michael Portillo after watching the rerun of a rerun of a rerun of his travels through Britain by train. I booked two tickets on the Jacobite. Actually, since my brother had never travelled first class on a train, I booked first class tickets. (This was true at the time of booking; but by the time of the trip, he had travelled up the East Coast route to Edinburgh first class, since it was as cheap as second standard class.)

First we had to get to Fort William, a great if apparently dangerous drive. Strangely, the two possible routes (north then west, or west then north) take almost the same length of time (according to Google maps!), so having been through Glencoe several times in the last year, we went north up the A9. There were still patches of snow on the hills. At one point we were stuck behind a convoy of two massive transporters carrying huge earth movers and their police escort; the vehicles were wider than a single carriageway, so even on the dual carriageway bits the police wouldn't allow overtaking. They pulled over into one of the large parking areas just past Drumochter to allow the mile-long queue of traffic to pass.

We turned off ourselves at Dalwhinnie, stopping for coffee at Laggan before heading west in the shadow of Creag Meagaidh and the ridge of mountains to the south, leading to Ben Nevis. We were early at Fort William, and wanted around the town a while. I haven't stopped at Fort William fit several years, despite driving through many, many times; but there isn't actually much of a reason to stop.

The train was in the station. Steam trains are very beautiful. I can't explain why, but there is something about a stream engine that is attractive in ways that other locomotives are not. I went to a steam rally a few years ago, and it was the same there - steam traction engines have an allure that modern industrial power doesn't. (Unless, perhaps, you are a young child obsessed by tractors and lorries.) Perhaps it is simply nostalgia.

Either, the large black engine (my brother knew the type, but it's not really important to me) was at the platform, breathing fire. We took our seats, plush, broad seats designed for the Fat Controller. The train was full, mostly of middle aged men, many with their wives or partners. Needless to say, everyone was a tourist.

The train was going from Fort William to Mallaig. And back again. I have made this journey - the West Highland line - several times, most recently by rail a year ago; I know the road well too. The town of Arisaig is one of my favourite places, and I love this bit of the north west Highlands.

I would be surprised if many of you were not also familiar with much of the area, though you may not know it. Large chunks of the Harry Potter films were shot here; the Jacobite is the Hogwarts' Express. (During the school holidays, they rebrand the train for some rides, just as other steam trains become Thomas the Tank Engine on occasion.)

Most famously, the line traverses Glenfinnan on the Glenfinnan viaduct. (In the movies, it's where the car is flying, trying to catch up with the train.)

The whole thing was pretty wonderful, but the Glenfinnan viaduct was particularly memorable, a broad curve with mountains on one side, and a sea loch (where Bonnie Prince Charlie landed - hence the train's name, and the reason for the Glenfinnan monument, and much of the historical interest in the whole coastline. There are a very many caves marked as "Bonnie Prince Charlie's cave") on the other.

All along the route, the views are excellent - Ben Nevis at the start (head in the clouds), various lochs and sea lochs, forests and mountains; empty beaches and views across the sea to the small isles and the mountains of Skye. It is all wonderful.

We had fish and chips in Mallaig, and a pint, and walked along the quay. And back. There's not a lot to do in Mallaig. We are our fish and chips sitting on the quayside under the watchful eye of greedy gulls.

Travelling by steam is very different from more modern forms of rail. The rhythm of the pistons, the noise of the steam, the very chuffing from the chimney, all add to the experience.

I don't often take photographs of art-works, because there is little that a photographer can add.

The exception is sculpture, where the subtleties of shade and texture can be reflected in a photograph: the way one see a piece is open to interpretation, and that can be captured in a photograph.

I was going past the National Gallery of Scotland today and I thought I would pop in to see Rodin's "The Kiss", which they have on load (until next March, I think).

It is a truly stunning, evocative piece. It is strange how cold stone can contain so much life.

I have blogged elsewhere about some of the events I went to in the Edinburgh Science Festival this year, but the first talk I went to seemed to fit better here than there.

It was about "Patterns in Nature", though it was more about how we use nature's patterns to create non-natural forms in art and engineering. As Neil Cooper, the chair, said, humans are pattern recognising creatures, and pattern is fundamental to the way we interpret the world. (Indeed, we are so good at recognising patterns that we see them when they are not really there...)

Peter Randall-Page is an artist (predominantly but not solely a sculpture). Many of his pieces are based around phyllotaxis - the patterns made by leaves, flowers and buds in plants. Phyllotaxis itself commonly follows the Fibonacci series, which includes the golden ratio, which itself was the basis for a lot of design in art and architecture. For instance, the Palladian architecture of Georgian Britain (including much of Edinburgh) is based around the golden ratio.

I had seen Randall-Page's work, though I hadn't recognised his name before he showed some examples of his work. His biomorphic shapes, based on Fibonacci spirals but cut into naturally occurring rocks, and hence imperfect, reflect the shapes found in pine cones and the heads of sunflowers (and many other plant forms). He described the spiral pattern as efficient - the optimal way to organise plant structures.He views the spiral as the theme, and the imperfections as variations on a theme - indeed, much of what he said sounded like improvisation around the theme, with a tension between the randomness of the imperfections and repetitive pattern.

Alistair Elfick is an engineer who works in "synthetic biological engineering". He was quite critical of engineers, believing that they had forgotten how to play, being constrained by professional standards and an avoidance of failure. It has to be said, though, that for most engineers, an avoidance of failure is a good thing - I'm not sure I'd want to cross the bridge built by an engineer who was happy playing - and failing...

For Elfick, bioengineering and "synthetic aesthetics" involves biomimicry - learning (and stealing!) from the natural world. The user of synthetic materials, he felt, created a whole new taxonomy - a new branch to the tree of life: the ability to develop synthetic biology. (He pointed out that much of this ability is based on our use of organic chemistry to make and manipulate synthetic, organic compounds; many of which our derived from or based on compounds made by organisms long ago in the earth's history. Not so novel, then!)

Like Randall-Page, the patterns discussed by Elfick are based on simple models: chemical diffusion and reaction can create complex, chaotic patterns using very simple formulae.

The debate after their presentations came up with some interesting topics. Many interesting things happen at the edges - the liminal is an interesting place to be. But the scientific method is reductive in its approach - it is linear. Science works on the differences between things, not the connections that can be made.

Man, however, is a pattern recognising creature: we look for meaning in things, including art, science - and religion! Ancient people looked at the night sky and joined the dots, turning the stars into pictures and giving the constellations names. We look at clouds and can see pictures in them. Music is attractive because of the patterns we hear (and exciting because of the surprise when the unexpected happens!).

For all the examples they used, I've occurred to me that something went unmentioned. Man has been stealing fron nature's patterns for a long, long time: it isn't new. The roof of the large, newly renovated Victorian main hall of the museum resembles nothing so much as a vertebrate ribcage from their collection!

When I was in London last month, I went back to one of my old haunts, the Vortex jazz club in Dalston. I had noticed a tweet from a band I like that they were playing whilst I was in town, booked a ticket, and here I was. Well, after an excellent meal and three bottles of wine with friends. (That was about a bottle of wine each of those drinking. I would notice that the next morning.)

Led Bib are an interesting band. Part of the modern British jazz movement - stable-mates with Polar Bear (and occasional band mates, too) - they have two alto saxes in the front line. Their music is kind of danceable improvised-jazz-funk-dub - with a nod across to Ornette Coleman. I guess that's to be expected with two altos.

It was a great gig.

Once I got there, I was impressed by Greenwich. I went often as a child, but only once in adult memory, a couple a years ago when I was exploring Canary Wharf and took the tunnel under the Thames; I didn't really look around much.

This time, Cutty Sark was back, and I looked around many of the grand Wren-designs on the way to the Royal Maritime Museum, where the Ansel Adams show was on. (When we were children, my brother and I spent many afternoons looking at the large model boats they have - or at least, I had - I didn't look much around the museum, though I was impressed with its architecture, both classical and modern.)

The painted hall and the chapel were stunning.

As I was leaving to find the station, I saw the start of a beautiful sunset. So I stayed on, wandering around, looking at the effect of the sky on the buildings.

The tide was coming in at Wardie Bay, beside Granton Harbour. I looked over the wall and saw a crowd of birds huddling together on the remnants of the beach, thousands of birds.

They were grey plovers - I think.

I watched as they were spooked and flew up as a flock.

I stayed for ages, watching and photographing.

On the way back an hour later, the tide was fully in and there was no beach at all. The birds had migrated onto floating platforms, harbour-furniture, filling all the available space. Every so often, the birds would rise and flock again, circle the harbour, and return to the platform. I wondered whether all the birds got back on, or if they were playing a game of musical flocks.

Climbing Ben Vorlich in mid December meant a short day but lots of ice. The path was treacherous (though easily avoidable), the ground rimed and the burns, though free-flowing, had iced their edges.

It was very beautiful.

Back in October, we had some wonderful days. I went on several walks. And took many photographs.

Up Arthur's Seat

North Edinburgh and the Water of Leith

Modern, New Town, and Old College

I forgot to include these in my post on public art in Edinburgh yesterday...

St Bernard's Well.

North Bridge.

Specifically, the monument to the King's Own Scottish Borderers.