Je Suis Aylan

It started with a lie and ended with the image of a small drowned boy on a beach in Turkey. Except it hasn’t ended, of course. In many ways the crisis caused by the invasion of Iraq is only beginning.

There were no weapons of mass destruction. We know that now but don’t know the real reasons why the West invaded Iraq. It might have been oil, ego or some dark Orwellian global power play. But whatever the reason, its impact has been catastrophic. Hundreds of thousands have been killed in various wars that are the bastard children of that initial conflict. Disease and misery followed but worst of all, ancient enmities were stirred by the sectarian governments imposed by the West on Afghanistan and Iraq. Out of this hornet’s nest, ISIS appeared, Syria was thrown into Civil War and the rest as we know is history.

I don’t have all the answers. Sometimes I struggle to even know what the question is. But the image of a small dead child on a beach in Turkey had an effect on me like nothing has before. I was heading to bed when I decided to have one last flick through the TV channels. I happened upon the BBC news and the image of a Turkish policeman carrying a lifeless bundle filled the screen. I had clearly missed the “some viewers may find these images upsetting” message at the beginning of the report and the images hit me with no warning. I turned the TV off straight away and instinctively went to check on my own three year daughter. She was lying on her stomach breathing gently but in the same prone position as poor Aylan Kurdi was in that picture. A picture that has become as evocative as that of Kim Phuc, the napalm girl in that haunting photograph from the Vietnam War. I didn’t sleep well that night. I tossed and turned as though on a stormy sea and thanked God for my own healthy daughter.

Photos and TV helped to change public opinion in America and bring an end to the Vietnam War. Hopefully, that picture of Aylan will do the same to public opinion in Europe. It’s easy to demonise Asylum Seekers when they are a large unshaven mass of young men clinging to a barbed wire fence in Budapest. It’s harder when a photo shows that these are ordinary people desperate to escape war and find a new life.

Two weeks ago, I listened to Playback, a weekly summary of the best of Irish radio. They reported on two stories and failed to see the irony that connected the tales.

The first story concerned Walli Ullah who made his way from Afghanistan to an Irish motorway in July. He was picked up and despite not having committed a crime, was immediately put in Cloverhill Prison. He was then attacked by other prisoners. As far as I know he’s still in prison.

The second story related to an Irish girl who had overstayed her Thai tourist visit. You get 60 days to see Thailand, which you’d think would be more than enough for a student with limited funds. I’m assuming she had limited funds because she was unable to pay the fine that the Thai Police tried to impose on her when she pitched up at Bangkok airport. She was relaying the story to the Joe Duffy show, a daily staple on Irish radio that provides the lost and deluded with free airtime. She was laughing as she recounted her tale. She had called her Mother in tears to protest that those nasty Thai Police were threatening to throw her in Prison until she came up with the cash.

The Irish Mammy was outraged and demanded that her daughter put the Chief of Police on the phone, so that she could give him a piece of her mind. The daughter said, “There’s no point Mam, they just don’t get it”. A quick whip around the other Europeans in the airport departure lounge yielded sufficient funds to release the young Irish student from the clutches of her barbarian hosts.

When she said “They just don’t get it”, I assume she was referring to the God given right of white Europeans to go wherever we like in the world and to stay for as long as we like. As long as it not to another Western country. An Irish person who overstayed their visa in America and was thrown into prison there would receive no sympathy. But Asia, Africa and South America are seen as our natural play pens, to use and abuse as we see fit.

So the tale of an Irish girl who thought a Thai visa was an option rather than an obligation and a poor Afghan who was slung in jail as soon as he arrived in Ireland tells you all you need to know about how we see our right to the rest of the world and the rights of others to come to our country.

Like I say, I don’t have all the answers. But it seems to me that Europe was capable of the Berlin Airlift in 1948/1949 and was capable of raising millions for African Aid in the 1980s through Live Aid and other rock star ego stroking event. But most importantly to this argument, was able to raise an army of thousands to invade Iraq and waste billions in the process. So if we have the will, we can house and accept the thousands of war displaced refugees from Syrian, Eritrea and Libya. A fraction of the money spent on the Iraq War would be enough to solve the whole refugee issue.

And if we don’t have the will, then look again at that picture of little Aylan Kurdi lying dead on that Turkish beach. If that doesn’t stir us to action, then part of us is also dead. Our humanity has been drowned and tossed into the Aegean Sea.

The Greek Tragedy

When I was in Primary school we had a teacher called Skigger Hamill. Even by the standards of the 1970s, he was a throwback to the old days when teachers were teachers and boys were scared. We got him towards the end of his career when his reputation was fiercer than his bite. He smelled of chalk dust and stale tobacco and used to leave us with a tricky maths question to solve four or five times a day while he disappeared. Nobody ever questioned where he was going. In hindsight it was probably for a sneaky fag behind the bike shed, although he may also have been whacking his head against a wall while ruminating on his career choice. It can’t have been much fun teaching a class load of boys who would have sat all day in the clothes  they came to school in through the rain that seemed to be constant in my childhood.

While I have largely fond memories of Skigger (certainly in comparison to some of the other psychopaths I had the misfortune to be educated by), he wasn’t adverse to the occasional bout of violence. Corporal Punishment was a given when I was in Primary School and violent acts were visited on small kids on a daily basis, at levels that the UN would condemn you for if you carried them out on terrorist prisoners.

Skigger had a particular technique however, which has haunted me all these years. When he chose you for punishment, he would first decide on the number of slaps he would inflict on your open palm. This could range from one for a small indiscretion, such as coughing during the rosary, to six for a major offence, such as being dyslexic or innumerate and failing at a reading or maths test.

He would then offer you two sticks. A short stubby one, which would not hurt too much on impact but would bring with it a long, dull pain often rising in intensity. The alternative was a more traditional cane, beloved of “Just William” books and certain participants in S&M activities. This would come down at speed on your trembling open hand and inflict a sharp stinging torment. But the pain would be over in minutes after vigorous hand rubbing and strained facial expressions back at your desk.

Leaving aside the morality of a grown man taking pleasure from the pained expression of ten year olds while they laboured over the decision of which type of pain to endure, this process did at least provide me with an important life lesson. Quite often, life throws you two options, neither of which is particularly palatable. And the key is to choose the least shit.

I was reminded of Skigger this week, as the Greek Debt crisis unfolds. They are having a referendum this weekend which is basically a choice between two types of pain. A quick loan from the IMF to dull the initial pain, followed by twenty years of slow austerity, unemployment and general misery. The alternative is to reject the troika and throw themselves into two years of madness when money will possibly run out and barter will be reintroduced. And then in the nature of things, order will be restored and the Greek economy will take off.

Like many people outside Greece, I’d encourage them to vote No on Sunday and take the quick sharp pain. I know it’s easy to lecture other people on what they should do in times like this. I don’t have to live with the consequences after all. But it seems to me that it’s the only way to end the madness of the ECB. I was a big fan of Ireland joining the Euro. But now I think it’s a crazy concept. It means that private German Banks could lend money to private Irish and Greek banks who would then lend it to developers, industrialists and various other criminals. When things go sour, as they tend to do in the crazy world of international capitalism and the developers and industrialists can’t repay their loans, it’s the ordinary people of Greece and Ireland who have to pay back the debt. Pensioners, single mothers and handicapped people didn’t borrow the money in the first place. But the nature of the Euro is that they have to repay it through cuts in social welfare.

It’s so patently unfair that it hardly needs to be articulated. The system is corrupt and evil and is promoted by a right wing European media that seeks to portray the Greeks as lazy tax avoiders and reckless borrowers. Nobody ever mentions reckless lenders. When I was studying Accountancy we learned that lenders earned interest because of the risk that the other side may default. And lenders have a responsibility to know the people they are lending to.

It turns out that they earn interest because they are greedy bastards and if they are a German bank then they don’t have to worry about the other side not paying the money back because if that happens the German Government will insist that some kid in a wheelchair in Greece will bear the burden.

We live in a world where the rich are allowed to avoid tax, pay bribes and destroy the environment. Those of us in the normal world pay our taxes in the hope that the money will go to help the less fortunate in society. It is the great unspoken civil contract. But that contract is being broken in Portugal, Spain, Ireland and Greece. The Greeks at least have the chance to throw a spoke in the wheel of this madness this weekend.

I hope they vote no, take the sharp pain and then get on with running their own economy and currency. Short, sharp pain was always the option I took with Skigger. Two years later I was in Secondary school and corporal punishment was banned. We look back now and think that hitting kids is madness. Hopefully in a few years we’ll think the same about the Euro.

Pride, In The Name of Love

I got married in a small church in New Zealand, shared between different Christian faiths. I guess there was no  storage room because you'd see the detritus of each congregation when you visited. The Methodists would leave behind an overhead projector, which always looked odd in a church. The Presbyterians would scatter stern looking hymn books around the place and the Anglicans were fond of flags relating to dead Anzacs.

We Catholics liked to add the occasional crucifix or morbid statue.

I chose my sister to be my best man, because she was best friend and because I could. I got married without having to worry about tradition or venue. I took all of this for granted as straight men tend to do. Only our shyness and ineptitude with the opposite sex stops us from getting married. Society and the law put no other impediments in our way.

Unfortunately not everyone is so lucky. The marriage equality referendum in Ireland made me realise a lot of things about the gay community. While we tend to only notice the most flamboyant members of the LGBT community, there are thousands more living quiet lives and desperate to be as ordinary as the rest of us. That includes marrying the person they love and spending the rest of their life watching box sets and doing house work. Most of the world denies them this ordinariness. And the few countries that have allowed gay marriage have done it grudgingly.

That's why I have never felt more proud to be Irish than I did last weekend. That was when Ireland became the first country in the world to legalise gay marriage through a public vote. The significance of this is that gay people in Ireland can now get married knowing that the vast majority of the public think nothing about it. In countries where the government brought in legislation, there must be a suspicion that the public still look at it with a strained eye.

I got strangely emotional during the campaign and don't think I've been as motivated about an issue since I stood for class representative in 3rd year and launched a passion fuelled campaign (I won on third count after the teacher imposed a single transferable vote procedure). The issue seemed so black and white to me, but I also sensed a new mood in Ireland and I wanted to surf on that wave.

I'm not sure when I met my first gay person. It was probably in primary school, although I didn't realise it at the time. He probably didn't either as sexuality wasn't discussed at that age. At least not in the Ireland that I grew up in.

I do remember the first gay person I definitively met. He was a friend, called Michael, that I knew when I was about 19. Michael didn't drink and owned a car. Two things that were as rare as hen's teeth when I was 19. The best night clubs where in country hotels set in idyllic countryside miles from town. Michael was happy to drive us there, observe our wild alcohol abuse and mainly futile attempts to shift (for that was the parlance of the day) members of the opposite sex. And then drive us home.

While we had a poor shifting record, we did all manage to find a girl occasionally. Michael never did but we passed no remarks of this. We all needed to achieve a delicate balance of inebriation. Just enough to get you jolly and to help you forget about your insecurities around girls, but not so much for it to turn you into a gibbering wreck. Most nights, we fell on one side or the other of this delicate nexus. But when it was achieved, it was devine.

We called it Dutch courage and assumed Michael's lack of success with the ladies was because of his deficiency in this area. Then he went to Sydney for a year and came back gay. Or more to the point  he came back from Sydney with the courage (and it wasn't even Dutch) to tell us that he was gay.

I remember the night that he told us in the pub and how little impact it had. We were only concerned about whether he could still give us a lift to night clubs.

The truth is that while most gay people in Ireland in the 1980s would have been nervous about coming out, the reaction they would generally get amongst friends and family would be positive. While the Church still exerted far too much control over people's lives, in the real world Irish people have always been understanding and generous. The best thing about last week's referendum was that it finally gave the Irish people the opportunity to express this.

I emailed a friend during the week expressing my pride in the election. He agreed and mentioned that his brother's civil union in September could now go ahead as a full wedding. I've known this guy for 17 years and never knew he had a gay brother. Now we can talk about these things as easily as saying that we have a sister with red hair. The ordinariness of the situation is the best thing about it.

I don't know where Michael is these days. While he discovered himself in Sydney, I hope he's not there now. While I love a lot of things about Australia, its social backwardness is sometimes shocking. They haven't even got around to legalising civil union yet and their Neanderthal Premier has set his stall out against gay marriage.

I hope Michael is still in Ireland or in one of the other countries that treat gay people as full citizens. We live in an often cold and unfriendly world. On May 22nd, 2015 Ireland opened the blinds and let a little warmth in. 

Anyone for tennis (or would you prefer a drink?)

Heinrich took up tennis when his knees gave out on him and he could no longer play central midfield for the West Dusseldorf Old Boys XI.

He wasn’t much good at tennis, the gammy knees saw to that, but he didn’t need to be. Nobody else at his local tennis club was either. There would be a cheer from the bar when anyone managed to get a first serve over the net. It was more a social activity and the highlight was the annual trip to Majorca for the tennis camp. His club went to the same place every April with a view to honing their court skills before the summer inter club tournaments took place.

The truth however, was that Heinrich and his mates were less interested in having their tennis skills improved and more concerned with being first to the poolside bar back at the hotel. They had some competition in that regard as several other German Tennis clubs were making the same pilgrimage.

Tennis is not a mixed sport in Germany for some reason. So the groups were single sex. Seven or so middle aged men at one table, struggling with the concept of sporting fashion and the smoking ban. Beside them, but at a discrete distance, sat a smaller but better dressed coven of female German tennis mums.

Never the twain shall meet it would seem, apart from at the mixed doubles tournament that the Hotel organised and which the all trundled off to reluctantly.

The Germans are nothing if not efficient and Heinrich and his mates would rise early to get the awkward tennis stuff out of the way before racing back to the Hotel for midday and their favourite table by the pool. The pool it must be stressed was merely there to provide a picturesque backdrop to their drinking activities. They had as little interest in swimming as they had in tennis.

I had spotted them on our first day in Majorca. I saw straight away that none of them would be troubling the Grand Slam circuit. Their gear as much as their physique told me that. I guess we’re used to seeing Nadal and Murray arrive on court with a bag as big as a family would take on a month long safari. Five or so rackets, a couple of changes of clothes and enough isotonic drinks to pickle an elephant’s kidneys.

Heinrich and his mates had perfected a more minimalist chic. They carried one racket each, the cover for which had clearly been lost years ago on a similar trip. If a string broke at 9.05am, just after play had commenced, it would have generated a nonchalant shrug from its owner and a look of envy from his colleagues as he bade his farewells and headed back to the Hotel for three hours extra sleep before the drinking started.

Apart from his racket, Heinrich carried a tracksuit top which was old but not quite old enough to qualify for retro coolness and a small towel that spent the rest of the year soaking up beer spills when he watched Schalke on TV.

All of these were packed into a small non-descript backpack. He was a paradigm of sporting fashion compared to his buddies however. One of them carried his racket and towel in a Lidl carrier bag!

We have been travelling a lot recently. Apart from this jaunt to Spain, we travelled to Luxembourg for Easter with a couple of days in Germany at either end of the trip. The people I met in Germany all worked in shops or restaurants. Even if I tried my schoolboy German, they would reply in perfect and slightly patronising English.

In Spain however, I got lots of opportunity to speak the tongue of the Fatherland. There were lots of English people there too but they tended to be older and interested in doing nothing, apart from drinking by the pool that is. So when the German tennis crowd turned up at lunchtime, the scrum at the bar resembled Juno beach in 1944. 

We borrowed bikes on most of the days we were there and headed out along the majestic Mediterranean coastline. The people we encountered along the way were mainly German and I guess they assumed we were to. As a result, I spoke more German than I did in my five years of secondary school. By the Thursday, I was almost fluent and engaged in a profound conversation with a couple from Magdeburg. The subject was 1980s East German punk music, a subject I would not previously have felt comfortable discussing in English.

Once we had established that “Du Hast Das Farbfilm vegessen” was indeed a classic of that genre, we moved on to horticulture and a discussion on the trees of the Mediterranean and their Scottish equivalents. My Kiwi wife looked on in amazement at my previously unmentioned skill. Little did she know that to their ears, I sounded like Manuel from Fawlty Towers.

I did make me realise however, that much of what we learned in school still sits somewhere in the dark recesses of the brain. It makes me feel more confident that when my daughter arrives home from school seeking help with her homework, I may be able to recall how to solve quadratic equations or to name the three longest rivers in Africa.

We think that most of what we learnt in school was useless (spending thirteen years learning the Irish language certainly falls into that category) but perhaps it does have one purpose. Apart from allowing us to help our children with their homework, it also provides a foundation for countless meaningless conversations with strangers on holidays. I’ve never used German for work purposes for example, but it did allow some sweet tongued mumbling to Frauliens when I travelled in my twenties, as well as to East German tourists now.

But most of all it gave me an appreciation that there is a big world out there, full of language, exotic food and clay court tennis.

A dog and a kid walk into a bar...

I lived in working class Dublin for about eight years and quite often woke up on Sunday mornings feeling a little dusty. I would hobble around the house for a few hours and then head out like a hungry bear in search of food. On one memorable occasion I stumbled into a suburban pub that was advertising carvery. 

It was about 3pm when I opened the door and stared into its murky interior. This being the days before the smoking ban, the air was thick with nicotine and the odour of over boiled potatoes. As I stood in the doorway trying to focus I was suddenly whacked on the shin by a kid on a skateboard. As I regained balance and turned to watch him skate past me I was hit again by his two siblings who were chasing after him, screaming their young heads off in a sugar fuelled frenzy.

I grew accustomed to the light and gazed at the Babylonian scene within. Each table consisted of three and sometimes four generations of a family, with granny nursing a gin and tonic while her daughter and son in law got stuck into pints and vodka as though the Government was going to bring in prohibition at midnight. At their feet were buggies containing children too young to walk, while the ones who could were racing around the pub like football hooligans rampaging through a City Centre.

The tables were littered with the detritus of a hundred unfinished dinners.

I turned on my heels and headed home. Swearing to myself that I would never again darken the door of an establishment that let minors consume Coca Cola. I was the sort of curmudgeonly old git who would write to airlines requesting that they create a separate space, preferably in the hold, for families travelling with infants. Despite a rumoured policy of never seating a single male traveller beside kids, it always seemed to happen to me.

I grew to avoid places were small kids would be found, like the Zoo and the sweet section in Supermarkets.

That was of course, until I had a kid myself. I am a poacher who has become a gamekeeper. A former addict who has come clean and I speak with the sort of certainty that only comes from the recently converted.

I realise of course, that children are like farts. You only really like your own. But that doesn’t stop me from getting offended when a café owner or publican fails to see my daughter for the sweet little angel she is. This is ironic, because I knew she’s a strong willed little general who often exasperates me with her behaviour at home. Yet when we take her out we have this naïve belief that she will sit at the table and behave like a child from a Dickens novel, who is seen and not heard, or better still like an adult.

This was never a problem in Melbourne. Pubs there always sell food and are set up with high chairs and children’s food options while cafes offer baby chinos and mini croissants. We took it for granted at the time but Australia in general is a very child friendly place.

I wish I could say the same for Edinburgh. It is a much older city of course, filled with cobble stoned laneways and basement cafes. This makes it very awkward when you’re pushing a buggy, which if nothing else, has given me an indication of the difficulties that people in wheel chairs must face on a daily basis.

But they don’t just make physical access difficult. Many places are openly hostile to our small friends. 

On our first weekend here, we were turned away from three restaurants and stumbled around our neighbourhood like Joseph and Mary in search of a manger. Finally, we were welcomed into the arms of Pizza Express who have cornered the family market. They openly welcome prams and offer cheap children’s menus, which has the amazing effect of stopping the parents from realising that they have just paid eight quid for a bottle of beer.

We have expanded our knowledge of child friendly establishments and I have to admit that I prefer taking our daughter to places where her antics will be matched and bettered by a hundred other kids. When you are nervous about your child’s potential behaviour it is best to bathe yourself in the comforting blanket of others in the same situation.

I am fairly sanguine about all of this, having previously been, as a said, a purveyor of adult only eating establishments. But one thing does annoy about the places here that won’t let kids in. They are quite happy to have dogs on their premises. In Australia, as I’m sure it is in all civilised countries, dogs are not allowed in places that serve food, for reasons I would have thought were obvious. That doesn’t apply in Scotland. Pubs in particular allow dogs but ban children. I was in a local establishment one night when I noticed two of the largest hounds on the planet ambling around as though they owned the place. One of them came over and sniffed me contemptibly as though I’d brought in something foul on my shoe.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m nervous around dogs but I also don’t like them sticking their noses into my dinner and scrambling around my legs to pick up the crumbs that fall from my table.

Last week, I visited my local pub to watch football. I asked the barman if it would be OK if I brought my puppy in next time I visited. He said, “of course, why do you ask”. I mentioned that he had a sign in the window saying No Children Allowed and wanted to know if the policy applied to all species or just humans. He looked at me with narrowed eyes and moved on. We live in a strange world were people think more of dogs than children.   

Scotland the Brave?

My grandfather was sixteen when the Easter Rising took place in Dublin. His adventures in that April week in 1916 are the stuff of Boy’s Own stories, involving shoot outs, jumping on and off moving trains and escaping to Liverpool on a coal boat.

I found all these details in Ireland’s national archives and the image of my grandfather it portrayed was very different to the kindly old man I remember in my childhood. He was a revolutionary none the less and did his bit to ease Ireland out of the suffocating cloak of colonisation and to give the Irish people the opportunity to make a balls up of their own country. While there are many revisionists who seek to question the wisdom of Irish independence, I think my grandad’s generation were right to take up arms against perfidious Albion.  He was a working class Catholic and they didn’t have many rights and privileges in the United Kingdom at the time. His religion would have barred him from high office in politics, law and the civil service and his social class and nationality would make him a 2nd or even a 3rd class citizen in his own country. His language and culture were also strangled by an occupier who didn’t understand the people it occupied and showed no inclination to learn.

Add to this the risk that he might be conscripted into the imperial armies that were busy slaughtering each other at the time. So like Serbs, Poles and many other people in those turbulent times in World history, Ireland took the first baby steps towards independence.

My grandfather’s adventures came to mind this week as the Scottish independence referendum reaches its conclusion.  I find myself temporarily living in this country at a time of potentially momentous change and ironically I’m entitled to vote and to be a part of it.

I fear however that my vote won’t make a difference. Despite news that the polls are closing and that the Yes campaign is gaining ground, I personally don’t think it has a prayer. The Scots will vote no and agree to be governed by Westminster ad infinitum despite the lust with which they belt out ‘Flower of Scotland’ before football matches.

It is a classic debate between Hope and Fear, similar to Obama v McCain in 2007. Hope won on that occasion because the global financial crisis intervened and queered the pitch. The only kind of similar event that could make Hope win in Scotland would be the discovery of a secret pipeline taking all their oil to England. Unfortunately in these debates, fear still cheats and wins more hands.

But the Yes campaign will fail for a more insidious reason. People just don’t care enough. The birth of most countries is painful and comes out of revolution or social change, not polite conversation or intelligent debate. South Sudan did not come about through a vote and some friendly banter. Croatia and Slovenia were delivered with the rumble of tanks in the background and even that great example of velvet revolution, the break-up of Czechoslovakia, came about through the social turmoil that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Which reminds me, what happened the ‘Os’ when the Czechs and Slovaks went their separate ways? Are they wondering the Carpathian Mountains looking for a homeland?

Scotland has no such impetus. It has been part of the United Kingdom since 1707 when an ill-advised attempt to get into the Central American colonisation game led the country to virtual bankruptcy and caused the Scots to go cap in hand to their former enemies in London. Thus they became the only country in history to be become a colony after trying to make some other poor souls become one.

They have been relatively quiet for the three hundred years since, apart from the occasional attempt to pull down the goal posts at Wembley. Ireland on the other hand had a revolution every generation after her Union with Britain. And the Scots share a language (sort of, some of the accents here are impenetrable) and a physical island with the English.

So will they have the confidence to cast off and sail for the promised land of independence? I fear not. Inertia is a powerful emotion. The London press and particularly the organs owned by a Mr R Murdoch are running a scare campaign around money, oil proceeds and currency.

The mistake the Yes campaign made was to allow the campaign to become about money. A people are more than an economy after all. They should have concentrated on the emotional stuff. But I’ll be voting Yes nonetheless. Even though I do feel like a lodger in the house of a married couple who have asked for my opinion on their possible divorce. The Edinburgh Festival has just finished and there were a couple of good jokes about the referendum. Like how Scotland used to have lots of oil but used it all up with their deep fat frying. How England and Scotland should stay together at least until the Welsh grow up.

But most of the debate has been dull as dishwater. It’s none of my business but I wish there was more passion in this campaign. There are no flag waving rallies through the streets, no bonfire vigils outside parliament, no scuffles between opposing supporters. It’s all too civilised for what is such a momentous decision. Ireland’s independence came after a campaign that had been building since the 1860s. But they do reference Ireland occasionally in this campaign. We were the first to weaken the chains on the British Empire. India and many parts of Africa followed us.

My grandfather played a small part in the break-up of the British empire. I’ll do my best to carry on his legacy on the 18th September. I wonder how many Scots will be brave enough to vote with their hearts and not their heads. Will Scotland the Brave step forward? Unfortunately I don’t think so.

Our Friends in the North

I lived in Luxembourg in 1995 when it was awarded the title of “European
City of Culture”. This was greeted with a lot of cynicism from within the
ex-pat community (who made up more than 50% of the city’s population). We
were of the opinion that a pot of yogurt contained more culture than you
would find in that place. Despite its wealth, the Luxembourg authorities
where keener on building swimming pools that were 1cm short of fifty meters
and therefore couldn’t be used for official meetings and bowling alleys in
windswept suburbs than they were in opera houses or theater.


From a literature perspective, the only evidence of notable achievement was
a plaque in the town square to commemorate the fact that Victor Hugo had
spent a night there on his way to his holidays in Alsace. In short, the
culture there was so shallow, you could paddle in it.


I say all this to mark the difference between that and my current abode.
I’m now living in Edinburgh and arrived just before the annual festival
kicked off. There is so much culture available here that it’s a little
overwhelming. The International Arts Festival hosts opera, ballet and the
other elements of the arts that are understood by few but patronised by
many with more money than sense.


The official festival also hosts ground breaking plays and (let’s be
honest) a lot of rubbish. The key it seems is to see a performance in the
early weeks that will take off and become a West End or Broadway hit. Then
you can smugly say to your friends that you saw the next Les Miserables
when it was being performed in front of 4 people in a public toilet. The
only problem with this strategy is that you either have to see a lot of
shows or be right on top of the word of mouth process.


The upshot is that if you want to see a show in the third or fourth week of
the festival and can get a ticket, then it’s probably not worth seeing. All
the good stuff will have built momentum and will sell out. This is a
particular problem for the likes of me who have a day job. I can’t sit
outside box offices reading reviews of last night’s shows, like the
thousands of American tourists who throng the narrow medieval streets of
city centre.


But the official festival is now completely swamped by the Fringe Festival.
Google any comedian you have ever seen (apart from the dead ones) and
chances are they will be in Edinburgh at the moment. The sheer number of
performers and shows means that they kick off at 10am in the morning and
take up every venue available from Churches to phone boxes.


The fringe festival has become so big that it now has its own offshoots,
like the free fringe and the “we’re too cool to be part of the bigger
thing” festival. And if that’s not enough, there is also the International
Book Festival and a couple of music festivals going on at the same time.


I may of course have arrived at an opportune time and Edinburgh is a
cultural wasteland for the rest of the year. But somehow I doubt this. You
can’t laugh for a month and then keep a sour look on your face for the rest
of the year.


Otherwise, it feels a bit odd to be back living in the UK, twenty years or
so since I left it after my last stint of paying taxes to keep the Queen in
Corgis and the British Army in tanks. There is an air of familiarity about
the place that reminds me of my time in London in the early nineties. But
there is also much that has changed. Coffee shops have replaced the old
greasy spoon cafes, gastro pubs have taken the place of the smoked filled
dens I used to drink in and the high streets offer a greater choice of food
than an Indian and Chinese takeaway.


But the things that are the same surprise me most. The most obvious is that
quaint British obsession with queuing. If you stood behind a friend on the
street, you would soon have twenty others standing behind you, all working
on the assumption that there must be something at the front worth queuing
for.


You see this best at bus stops where strict protocol exists. Most people
stand in a straight line even if this means snaking out the back of the bus
shelter and standing in the pouring rain. Occasionally somebody breaks off
to have a cigarette or to corral a noisy child. Their position in the queue
will be memorised by everybody else and their place preserved, even if this
means waiting for them to finish their fag when the bus arrives. This is
very unlike Australia where the arrival of a mode of public transport
causes an outbreak of panic and an exhibition of Darwinism involving
survival of the fittest.


This process gets disrupted in August when thousands of tourists arrive for
the festival. A party of Germans tried to get onto a bus I was queuing for
on Saturday and approached it from the right hand side, oblivious to the
fact that fifteen Scots were in an orderly queue on the left. The resulting
standoff reminded me of the siege of Tobruk as the Scots Guard stared
menacingly across no man’s land as the stubborn Germans tried to advance.
Thankfully, the driver stepped in and put the tourists in their place.


The message seems to be getting through because the queues outside the
comedy and theatre venues are a picture of orderliness. Americans and
mainland Europeans line up like soldiers on parade as they wait to be
entertained. Most shows pride themselves on their anarchic nature. It’s
ironic that their audiences are so orderly about getting in.


There is a lot of culture here. It’s just a shame that that the beer isn’t
as good as Luxembourg. But that’s another story.