AND ANOTHER THING
0 wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us!
PAUL JOHNSON
To Edinburgh, where my third son, Luke, was celebrating the debut of the lat- est addition to his restaurant chain. We went by privatised rail, which is now almost as quick as air, decidedly cheaper and much more interesting. The historic monuments roll past in endless succession: Peterbor- ough Abbey, the magnificent parish church at Doncaster, York Minister, Durham Cathedral, the Elizabethan walls of Berwick, and castles galore. And finally, you emerge in the very centre of Auld Reekie, which vies with Prague, Nancy, Venice, Salamanca and Cracow for the title of the handsomest city in Europe. Indeed, I would rate Edinburgh top of the list were it not for that persistent east wind, which dis- courages all but the hardiest from standing and staring.
The locals are cock-a-hoop at the turn of events: the Tories banished from Scotland, a former grammar school already prepared for the Tartan Stormont, the high road to London more open than ever before. There was a triumphalist bellow in the Scottish Daily Mail from Alan Massie, one of those professional Scotchmen — Andrew Marr is another — who bray their syntactical bag- pipes in your face and whack you over the head with a verbal haggis. 'Why we have so much to boast about!' was the title of his Te Deum, which began: 'The takeover is com- plete and you may very well argue England is reduced to the status of a colony. It is hard to suppose that any Sassenach will dare raise his or her voice in New Labour's New Caledonian Cabinet.'
It is all an illusion of course. The Parlia- mentary Labour party is now once more overwhelmingly composed of MPs from English seats and that fact will soon make itself felt. Tony Blair has not the slightest intention of taking orders from Scots, Picts, Celts or anyone else from the fringe. The Edinburgh diet or cortes or bundesrat — or whatever it will be called — will turn out to be a talking-shop for otherwise unemploy- able nobodies, and may cost the Scots dear- ly in real power as their representation at Westminster is cut down and their right to tap the English taxpayer diminished. For all its beauty, Edinburgh has none of the feel of a capital. At 10.30 last Friday night, the lobby of its grandest hotel was a tomb and the streets, apart from a few knots of fight- ing drunks, were provincially deserted.
True, Luke's new joint, next door to the smartest bar in the city, was a seething mass of the well-to-do and beautiful young: long- legged dolly birds who might have been painted by Raebum, Cadell or Peploe, and thrusting lads who looked as though they were well on the road to their first lakh of bawbees. But I noticed something which you see today in London, but which is far more pronounced north of the border: the young men talk to each other, and the girls, touchingly turned out in their best kit, wait in vain for attention. 'Aye,' said a fetching redhead to me, 'it is so. The laddies stick together and ignore the lassies and then, when they're just about boozed up, they remember sex and start to paw us.' So what do you say, then — stop your tickling, Jock?' It's no' tickling, it's smash and grab. But I say to them, "Nothing doing, ma young loon, ye should have thought of us before."' However, we did not witness this moment. When we left the party, the sexes were still self-segregated and the young men, though plainly oiled, had not yet (as Michael Wharton puts it) 'gone critical'.
In any case, I doubt if giving the Scots legislative powers will produce a political rebirth, let alone a cultural one. Quite the reverse. After all, it was in the three or four generations after the Union that the Scot- tish Renaissance, one of the key events of modern European history, took place: Hume and Adam Smith, Ramsay, Robert Adam and Nasmyth, Burns and Scott and the Edinburgh Review were the products of fusion, not fission. And though the Massies and Marrs may boast, it is a curious fact that the three most civilised figures in Scots culture today — Julian Spalding who runs the Glasgow museums, Gavin Stamp, Pro- fessor of Architecture at the city's universi- ty, and Timothy Clifford, boss of the Scot- tish National Gallery in Edinburgh — are all Englishmen. What does that prove? Nothing, except that ethnic name-dropping is pointless, as well as naff.
I think I'll defect to the Tories to get some space.' This last gallery, as it happens, is one of the great joys of the north, thanks in part to the generosity of the Duke of Sutherland, the gems of whose magnificent collection of old masters are on permanent loan. The gallery is hung and arranged by a man who plainly loves paintings, as opposed to mere academic taxonomy, and it makes our own National Gallery look drab. It includes the work I would most like to own in all the world, Saenredam's 'St Bavo's at Haarlem', which the Scots had the foresight to buy in 1982, as well as the incomparable early Vermeer, 'Christ with Martha and Mary'. There are some good laughs too — not just Poussin's hilarious 'The Seven Sacraments', but Rubens's top joke picture, 'The Feast of Herod', subtitled (by me) 'And a Good Time Was Had by All'.
My complaint about the Scots is that, as I am getting a bit deaf (does anyone know where I can buy an ear-trumpet?), I find it increasingly hard to understand what they are saying, especially if they come from Glasgow. On the return train, the complex- ities of the new ticketing system baffled me, and I was bemused by the inspector's expla- nation. I assumed he was addressing me in Lallans and asked him to speak in English, at which he was mightily offended.
The Saturday train south, by the way, was an exciting experience. There was a large contingent of soccer fans aboard soon engaged in drinking the train bar dry, and they were joined at Newcastle by another thirsty mob, accompanied by their teenage groupies. One of the latter had contrived to provide herself with a delightful baby girl, already equipped with tiny gold earrings. This enterprising lass astonished us by washing her long tawny mane in the car- riage toilet. As we rattled south, the beer began to speak, then to shout, and ancient enmities, nursed since the days of the hep- tarchy, came out into the open. Suddenly, a frightened passenger pulled the communi- cation cord, the train came to a wheezing halt and, as if from nowhere, a posse of transport police, bristling with truncheons and handcuffs, and led by a terrifying giant over seven feet tall — Fasolt or Fafner tramped down the corridor. As if to com- plete the Wagnerian effect, the most tremendous thunderstorm erupted, light- ning flashed and cataracts and hurricanoes enveloped us. You don't get this kind of drama on British Airways, do you? I have seldom enjoyed a journey more.
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