Tag Archives: Edinburgh

Per Ardua Ad Astra

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Jack goes to great lengths to get his Wednesday post up this week – –

Wendy and I just arrived in Knoxville so completing the first stage of our journey to Scotland. Tomorrow we fly from here to Atlanta and then overnight direct to Edinburgh.

Apart from during the Covid 19 pandemic I’ve organized small group tours of Scotland every year since 2009. Two years ago I decided to stop, but requests kept coming so here we are again; the second final tour! There are already requests for the date of next year’s Third Final Tour.

They take a lot of liaising with an agency over there to organize bookings for hotels, ferries and visits. I also have to coordinate with my driver for the minibus. My longtime driver was an old friend, Colin, who sadly died a few years ago. Colin was much more than just a driver – a great singer and historian. However I had become good friends with another great singer and historian in the form of Alan Reid. He was one of the founding members of the well known ’Battlefield Band’, traveled the world with them and often drove their band bus. So a perfect fit!

Once I’m confident I have all the ducks in something resembling a row, I then start sending regular emails to the paying customers with travel tips and information about the tour.

Finally I have to start thinking about travel arrangements to Scotland for Wendy and me. Checking flight times and prices and deciding where to stay for a couple of nights before the tour starts,

Then I start to worry about whether I’ve thought of everything and what might go wrong, because there’s always something. We’ve had everything from an overnight hospital stay, an emergency dental visit, a ferry strike and bags that didn’t make it with their owner. We even had a family who missed a flight connection and arrived into Edinburgh on the second day of the tour!

But heck – once you’re three hours away from home there’s little point in worrying!

Whit’s fir ye will no gang by ye – que sera, sera – what will be, will be. Hi Ho Scotland here we come!

A Walled Garden

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19206160_1634797773197947_1339798747_nIn the city, space is a commodity. I’ve always thought of cities as incongruous lonely spaces – so many people, so little humanity interacting.

But we are staying with friends in downtown Edinburgh, not a mile off Princes Street (downtown) and they have a walled garden…..

I love walled gardens. Your own little bit of marked off territory for just sitting, thinking, being quiet and contemplative with a book and a cup of tea, or loud and boisterous with instruments and a bottle of wine and a handful of mates.

In the middle of the city, you can find the greenery and the fountains and the people who actually live in the cities, whose lives are rooted like the gardens they plant in their little secret places.

Perhaps my fondness for gardens stems back to the day after Jack’s mum died, and I was away from home in Ayrshire, in Wigtown, Scotland’s book city, and had nowhere to go to be by myself and have a good cry. And I spilled my guts to say as much to one of the bookshop owners, at Ceridwin’s Cauldron, and she took me back to her garden and brought me tea and told me to stay as long as I wanted. I spent an hour back there composing myself and being nothing but alone. Ever since then, walled gardens have been a special space.

The garden here at Barbara and Oliver’s has been a jolly place, shared for music and reminiscences and politics and the mystery of the noise coming from somewhere nearby. (Jack cracked that; it was a two-note sound not unlike the CLOSE ENCOUNTERS alien five-note theme, and he found the sewer pipe in the apartment next door was letting off gas, one note opening, the other closing. A farting building, in essence.)

Walled gardens are lovely, and every city has such little tucked-away spaces. Explore them when you can, with friends when you can. They are the heartbeat of humanity.