The Rake Magazine

Tag: scotland

  • Travels with Mel

    Now that I
    have been in Scotland for a bit I have begun to notice the great shadow
    the infamous creator of Braveheart still casts over this hilly
    northern country. If you venture into any bargain store in Edinburgh
    or Glasgow you will find many bric-a-bracs aimed at spend-happy tourists. These items range from the relatively funny "kilt beach towel" to
    the aggravating "William Wallace doll." Now, there’s nothing
    wrong with the historical figure of William Wallace. The man heroically
    stood against the English in order to defend Scottish independence,
    and this I can respect. And I really can’t judge the people
    who are making money from the dolls themselves; far be it for me to
    begrudge anybody the right to strike gold by abusing national symbols.

    No, the William
    Wallace doll is an abomination because it is just a little version of
    that big schmuck, Mel Gibson. It is a vivid rendering, capturing
    accurately even the most Jew-hating contours of the man’s face (from
    an era before the expert ironist decided to grow a strange Abrahamic
    beard). I know Braveheart is one of the most profitable
    things that has happened to Scotland since whisky became the local manna,
    but when you hold a lil’ Mel in your hands you do not want to fight
    for your freedom, you just feel sorry for all the civilizations Mel
    Gibson has ripped off and made a mockery of (e.g. Scots, Mayans, ancient
    Israelites, and counting).

    I could forgive
    this if it were a phenomenon confined to shops that sell inflatable
    heart-shaped mattresses and "I’m not as think as you drunk I am"
    t-shirts, but unfortunately Mel Gibson has managed to worm his way into
    actual history. I went to the city of Stirling one day, and visited
    the National William Wallace Monument, a great 19th-century
    century-built landmark perched loftily on a lovely, green hilltop.
    After making my way down from the summit, I encountered something that
    morphed my good feeling into outright disgust. By the foot of
    the hill stood a big stone statue of Mel Gibson, mace in hand, screaming
    triumphantly. It seemed like stone-Mel knew he was ruining my
    time in Stirling and that there lied his ultimate victory over me. The word "FREEDOM" carved into the rock mockingly reminded me of
    how very trapped I was in the Mel-universe.

    Next to the
    statue there was a plaque with the story behind the work written on
    it. Some poor guy carved the thing because when he was down in
    the dumps (slowly dying from some horrible disease), he watched Braveheart,
    and the movie had been able to fill him with national pride and confidence. I thought it was strange how the one thing that made this sculptor so
    hopeful in his final days was the source of so much unpleasantness for
    me. Why couldn’t the guy have seen The Mary Tyler Moore Show
    on his deathbed and carved a statue of its namesake, like the one that
    dazzles in the streets of the fine city of Minneapolis, Minnesota?
    I guess some people just aren’t lucky enough to get Nick at Nite.

  • The Young Ones

    It is commonly accepted that the population of Europe would be declining in a pretty startling way if not for constant immigration. Unlike Americans, the people of Western Europe are simply not having very many children. Who can blame them? These are heady days for the European economy and I assume the citizens who work hard to make their nations prosper would like to benefit from their labors without having to think of the next generation.

    When I walk around Edinburgh, though, what’s right there in front of me is at odds with these statistics. Experts say how the population of Scotland, in decline since the 1970s, will continue to shrink unless immigration reverses the downturn. When I walk around the city, though, I usually encounter many, many people who look like they are in their teens. Many of them are schoolchildren cutting class to shout and cuss around beautiful St. Giles Cathedral. Others are chavs (in Scotland called "neds") playing silly games between sips of Scotland’s famed hangover cure, Irn-Bru. Indeed, not a day has passed that I haven’t seen kids on Edinburgh’s main streets and thoroughfares loitering and whiling away their time.

    Now, at my tender age, I must admit, I have little to warrant a dislike for the more unseemly behavior of foolhardy youth. At the expense of sounding like a stick in the mud though, I will say that sometimes I see kids here do things that I think are pretty stupid. For example, recently I saw a crowd of chavs congregate around a KFC, and two of these wannabe street toughs began to take swipes at each other. Their dozen or so companions watched as the violent horseplay escalated. The boys began to punch each other in the face: a brush on the chin, a cutting hit across the cheek, and so on. The kid’s smiles contorted into scowls and, as their punches got more and more audible, the crowd around KFC got bigger. I looked to my left and right and saw old ladies, men in ties, thirty-something-looking couples, all of us pulled to this spectacle by our shameless voyeurism. The kids continued to fight, until finally one pulled away, but fell. The other fighter, his faced stained red with exhaustion, lunged towards him. The boy on the floor jumped up and ran away, and then his opponent followed briskly, with a band of eager street-fight aficionados behind him in pursuit of the show.

    Sometimes the aggressive urges of the urban young are filtered in other ways, as when a group of older teens scrawl angry political manifestos like "END LONDON RULE!" and "SCOTLAND IS NOT BRITAIN!" in chalk, usually after a drunken night out. Of course, feelings of nationalism are not limited to the young or the bored. Respected Glaswegian author, Alasdair Gray of Lanark fame is an avowed nationalist, as is Alex Salmond, Scotland’s First Minister (the equivalent of a prime minister in the local parliament). The young Scots who make a patriotic mark on the sooty walls of their capital, in some not-too-distant future, might be likened, to the Irish freedom fighters of yesteryear, voicing the wills of a growing multitude. Their future countrymen may refer to these graffiti as a sort of shorthand "St. Crispin’s Day Speech," helping to rouse the feelings of millions of potential Bravehearts. For my part, I think it’s a better pastime than watching your friends get beaten up outside a fast-food place.

    Still, it’s wrong to judge kids so harshly, I suppose. Most adults probably fantasize about getting into spats about nothing and punching their colleagues across the mouth. I imagine that some of those weekday warriors watching the fight, their ties wound up to 11 and their palms sweaty with anticipation, were probably living through those kids, thinking at the time, "God – beating my best friend up would probably be so much cheaper than fucking therapy." But then they immediately think of potential complications like apology letters and anger management and other things society demands of the civilized, and all those violent fantasies disappear the way the dreams of getting a hot wife and a yacht did all those years ago. Mr. "Maybe Next Year" sinking irreversibly into the quicksand of casual Fridays and postponed pleasure. At least those kids seem to get what they want: a big, visceral smack in the face, the publicity of gladiatorial combat and a feeling of idiot grandeur.

  • Scot-Free

    NORTH, SOUTH, DOWN & OUT

    Hello everyone,
    I know it has been a while since my last post, but I have been busy
    accruing material for this one by traveling around this fair island. This blog-entry will concentrate on my recent travels outside Edinburgh. First to the capital of the UK and home to those English leeches: the
    monarchs of Britain; and secondly to Scotland’s biggest and most unsettling
    city, Glasgow.

    CHAPTER 1:
    GETTING TO LONDON

    I took a night-bus
    from Edinburgh to London to visit some friends from Macalester who are
    studying there at King’s College for a semester. A nine-hour trip
    in a tiny cramped seat is bad enough without miserable company; but
    I was unfortunate enough to get the full two-fer-one crappy bus-ride
    combo. The guy who sat next to me looked like the kind of guy
    Dilbert would refuse to be seen with in public. At first, I was
    excited because he was immediately talkative. I thought to myself
    that this was going to be fun, that my bus-partner and I were going
    to become friends like in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. Then the guy decided to tell me about his job working for an open-source
    version of Google maps, and everything started to turn.

    He blathered
    on about his job in a peppy and cartoonish way that I will refrain from
    here because it would alienate you as it did me. This is
    the gist of the one-sided exchange: He and his friends decided that
    it would be neat to set out on a quest to take pictures of the entire
    world to in order to submit these images to a league of powerful amateur
    cartographers. These other participants scrutinized them and put
    them together to form a map. This noble alliance between the camera-toting
    vagrants and the mapmakers led to what my delusional companion proudly
    hailed as a "more accurate version of Google maps."

    As he gestured
    wildly trying to recreate his madcap bike-rides through the Scottish
    countryside, armed only with a Nikon and a bottle of Powerade, I tried
    to drown out his goofy voice with the power of my own thoughts.
    I started to inwardly question the veracity of his absurd claims. How could a bunch of bored would-be Vespuccis do a better job than Google
    does? Guys who mainly specialize in the field of knowing all the
    lines from Monty Python movies cannot outdo a company that has employed
    its satellites to take pictures of the surfaces of the Moon and Mars.

    Of course,
    that was only one of many questions that popped into my head, along
    with "why didn’t you just take another bus to London?" and "why
    can’t God just disintegrate somebody for me just this once?" Everything got much worse when he decided to point at the street every
    time we came across a patch of land that he and his friends needed to
    "explore more deeply" for the project. This happened very
    often — so often that eventually I forgot all civility and tersely told
    him I had to go to sleep. This was a blatant lie: nobody could
    sleep on a bus-ride as cramped and uncomfortable as this. Except
    for the map-nerd. He slept like an oversized baby, snoring loudly,
    and shuffling his legs in a way that clearly violated my prized personals
    space.

    Eventually
    I did get to London; I parted ways with my nightmare-bus-buddy, and
    we have not crossed paths again.

    CHAPTER 2:
    LONDON

    The famous
    landmarks of London are so familiar to everyone that I will not waste
    time describing the spires of Westminster Abbey or anything as mundane as
    that. Instead, I will tell you about some other stuff that happened
    to me in the UK capital.

    Being in a
    major city, the amount of options available to you can be overwhelming,
    disorientating, even paralyzing. Matt, the friend I was staying
    with in London, was kind enough to tackle this problem before I got
    there by losing his job. Now, we were free to roam the streets
    of the capital unhampered by the responsibility and indecision that
    come with that burden of burdens: money! No tours or fine dining
    for us. Instead, we had plenty of time to witness other more "idiosyncratic"
    attractions.

    One afternoon,
    when we were walking on London’s Strand we noticed some very colorful
    shapes moving about in a small alley near us. We walked towards
    the alley and the shapes came into focus. Before me, I saw what
    seemed to be the gaudy entrance of a nightclub and next to it were several
    individuals fully costumed to look like different animals. A fox
    in a policeman’s uniform cuffed a yellow rabbit in a baseball jersey. A purple wolf with robot-parts stared my friend and me down with his
    laser-eyes. Some other critters completely ignored us and went
    around taking pictures of each other in weirdly suggestive poses. My friend and I exchanged confused looks with a hint of trepidation,
    realizing that we were in the territory of some pretty wild deviance. Like lower mammals responding to a base instinct, we began to take pictures
    of these people who enthusiastically obliged us by strutting around
    in a way that can’t really be called "sexy" but which I can perhaps
    best describe as "uncanny."

    After this
    brush with perversity, I visited many other, more conventional sights. I saw Britain’s largest manmade crack in the Tate Modern and a host
    of pictures of historical luminaries with weak chins at the National
    Portrait Gallery    . I even heard a recording of James Joyce’s
    shrill aunt of a voice at the British Library! Every day was rich
    with activity! However
    stimulated these activities kept my eyes and ears, the call of a grumbling
    tummy inevitably brings me to my next topic: food

    People often
    complain about British cuisine. They say it is unhealthy, unsavory,
    and unsatisfying (and not worth the £5.00 you pay for it). I
    like deep-fried things, though, so Scotland has been good to me. Fish ‘n’ chips, deep-fried pork rib, and analogous dishes are exactly
    what clogs my heart and arteries with joy as well as fat. London,
    on the other hand was not as delightfully greasy a romp as its Scottish
    counterpart, Edinburgh.

    There, I went
    to what may well be the worst Chinese buffet currently in operation.
    It was an awful place where the bits of chicken tasted like crusty soap
    and all the desserts were cubic. Everybody at the restaurant,
    save myself and the friends who were with me, looked absolutely depressed. They ate the food with heir heads hanging in despair, as if somebody
    were making them do it. Frankly, I think that by the end of our
    meal, we also must have looked like we had just endured some especially
    cruel and ancient torture. Nevertheless, we swallowed down several
    plates of this shitty matter, because it was, after all, an all-you-can-eat
    buffet, and we jumped at the chance at finally getting
    the most bang for our quid.

    The moral of
    this story is: when in London, refuse the food. No matter how
    hungry you are, it is not worth the pain and sadness you will feel after
    your stomach is full of toxic bile. This I learned the hard way.
    Soon after my culinary travail, I had to take the bus back to Edinburgh.
    I spent the whole trip looking out the window; trying hard to fight
    back London’s take on the ol’ buffet blues.

    Now, on to
    the next stop on this tour of the Isle:

    GLASGOW

    A few of my
    friends and I decided to travel via train from Edinburgh to Glasgow
    in order to take in this city. I knew little about my destination,
    and God knows I wasn’t going to bother myself with doing research. Thankfully my flatmate, Knut, had some helpful information to provide.
    From him, I found out that Glasgow was the "knife-fight capital"
    of Scotland and that I should "definitely
    avoid needles" at all costs.

    Soon after
    I arrived at Glasgow, things took on a sinister bent. The city
    had many beautiful buildings, but the sight of encroaching urban sprawl
    was something that had become alien to me in tidy Edinburgh. As
    we ambled down the causeways and closes, I noticed cultural artifacts
    like smack-spikes and dirty shoes abandoned in strange, muddy gutters.
    Then I saw a group of chavs shout obscenities at a couple of women. The women screeched back some non-words in self-defense and gave them
    the two-finger "screw you" salute. I made it past this battle
    and came to a plaza. There, a man stood on a ladder, and hysterically
    spat passages from a big book (The
    Bible? Dianetics?    ) at a group of onlookers. Sometimes he took
    breaks to tell us passers-by that we were "Scum!" and "Damned!" This city was obviously no place for the faint of heart.

    For some odd
    reason, we decided to go to the Glasgow Necropolis. Deep in my
    stomach, I felt this was a bad decision as it meant getting closer to
    the tombs of Scots killed in the knife-fights I was told about.
    We went, though, and I saw where John Knox was buried. After that, nothing
    else really happened. Hopefully, next time I go to Glasgow I will
    get bludgeoned by a wino with a bloody dirk and I will get the "real
    Glasgow experience" I was hoping for. Until then, cherished
    memories of rudeness and creepy fanaticism will have to do.