Footsteps of Flodden revisited

  The exhibition on the life of Mary, Queen of Scots at the Scottish National Museum is superb.  The timelines of her convoluted personal and political life are easy to follow and  make it clear that so many of the problems that beset her reign were the unforeseen and, in some cases, unforeseeable, results of  her or someone else’s actions.

http://www.nms.ac.uk/our_museums/national_museum/upcoming_exhibitions/mary_queen_of_scots.aspx



Mary seems to have inherited her impetuosity from her grandfather, James IV, the  calamitous loser at the Battle of Flodden, an event that scarred Scotland for years.    Not so much from the slaughter of the nobility,  most of whom were only motivated by self interest and acquisition, but for the loss from the clerical and commercial classes. This set back for decades, the economic and intellectual life of the country, that had been flowering under the Renaissance ideals of James.
By the time Mary came to the Scots court,  it appeared unsophisticated  and dominated by the uncouth ruffians that passed for  the aristocracy, though the Reformation had brought the beginnings of  that far seeing experiment - a school in every parish- that was to lead to widespread literacy and, eventually, to the Scottish Enlightenment but what a struggle it was to get there.
 It is five hundred years since  James ‘s disastrous foray across the border to Flodden Field and, last weekend, a walk was arranged along  thirteen miles of the route taken from Edinburgh across the Lammermuirs to the mustering point at Ellemford on the Whitadder.  

http://www.lammermuirlife.co.uk/In-the-Footsteps-of-Flodden.cfm

 Play-lets and  encounters were set up to entertain the walkers and to give a voice to the “others”.. the camp followers, the commoners,  those pressed into service, those on the make…the ones that don’t appear in  the historic accounts.

In the Footsteps of Flodden - A knight and his servant have thoughts on their situation!

In the Footsteps of Flodden- a "penny-jo" accosts two young recruits on the march!

The day finished with “ Ghosts” a tribute to all the young men killed in battle since 1513,  in all the wars and campaigns. Men who were conscripted, duped or pressed into service of arms with no choice but to obey.   The finale was that ultimate in laments, The  Floor’s o’ the Forest, made all the more evocative by the soft summer rain that set in as the walk finished.



To paraphrase, or misquote, both Toynbee and Hubbard… history, like life, is just one damn thing after another.  In  most of Scottish history.. and probably the rest of humanity as well…it seems  to lurch from one calamity to the next with not much in the way of  reasoning or logic.  The religious or political philosophy that  there is a plan, divine or otherwise, behind it all, seems wide of the mark.    History like evolution , doesn’t seem to have any fixed aim or ending.  It just proceeds with sudden leaps or turns when a variation  of the norm occurs.
Even our planned walk had its twists, false starts and repeat performances but, by and large, it could be counted a success which is more than can be said for Mary Queen of Scots or James IV…their achievements were overshadowed by their mistakes.
 Poor old James, invaded another country, thought it would all be over in a few days, didn't have a real objective, didn't have an exit strategy,.......history doesn't always repeat itself but it does rhyme as somebody once said.  Somebody also said it is the sum total of things that could have been avoided.
 If only only we could learn from history but we never do so we seem doomed to repeat it ...and usually at the expense of young lives.

Requiem for a hedgehog

Usher Hall

August in Edinburgh means The Edinburgh International Festival.   There is also the Fringe where the old lady hoists her skirts and kicks her legs with the odd flash of garter but, for the Festival proper, she assumes her best going-out-to-the-theatre hat and makes her way to the douce sobriety of the Usher Hall.      So it was that a scruffy latecomer such as me, managed to squeeze himself into possibly the last available seat.

Perched in the vertiginous heights of the upper row of the upper circle, I exchanged pleasantries with my fellow alpinists.  We were a motley lot… American, Japanese…no doubt, there to hear their own Mitsuko Uchida’s expressive playing of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto… a city-suited gent, a collection of casually dressed tourists and formally dressed locals who had left it late to get tickets and had to settle for a seat in “the gods”.

Tchaikovsky’s Sixth is often described as a warhorse having been performed so many times in so many places but, no matter how often it played, it still has the power to speak to each person in the audience, an emotive appeal that’s individual to every listener.

Some of the audience were so carried away by the stirring march of the third movement that they burst into spontaneous applause…maybe they thought that nothing could follow it…but had to endure the anguish of the final movement and its conclusion of reflective, acceptance of the desolation of fate, of the end of a life

Getting back to the country, I stepped out into the garden to watch the beginning of the Perseid meteor showers.  It seemed appropriate given the theme from Tchaikovsky’s first movement was reworked into the pop song “The Story of a Starry Night”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUVBTP9JKXA

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ipn1qBTN8MU

  Head back, staring up at Perseus, his love, Andromeda, and his perfidious in-laws, the W-shaped Cassiopeia and Q-shaped Cepheus, I didn’t notice the hedgehog snuffling over the lawn, nor him, me.    As soon as I moved, he shot off into the shrubs.

 We haven’t had hedgehogs around here for years so the encounter lifted my spirits and, for the next couple of nights, I left some meal worms out for my guest hoping to encourage him to stay in the safety of the garden.

A week later, my new chum was dead on the road, like so many of his kind.      His race have been around from long, long before Perseus killed Medusa to win Andromeda, his prickles making him invulnerable. Yet now, we seem determined to exterminate his kind and are succeeding.

There is a slow, resigned sadness in this.  It seems inevitable.   Maybe they deserve the Pathetique more than we do.

"Was there ever a master of motor cars as Toad of Toad Hall?"

Mr Toad made a rare appearance.   We don’t see him around the garden but every so often he turns up.  The last sighting was in 2009.  Then, we thought it was prompted by the arrival of a new motor car, toads being known to have a predilection for motor cars.  Poop,poop !

 No such novelties were at hand on this occasion so he was probably just enjoying the humid weather with it abundance of the sort of delicacies that toads like to eat.

Toad and his adventures with motor cars on the open road mirrored the experiences of early drivers and resulted in the creation of the RAC and the AA, organisations that existed to help stranded motorists.  I can remember the patrolmen on their motor-bikes saluting the cars that carried their badge.  It used to be believed that, if they didn’t salute, there was a speed trap ahead.

 After getting my first car, I duly obtained my badge and the key to the roadside boxes from whence help could be summoned.    Much to my later disappointment, I left my badge on my first car when I sold it and never liked the modern version but, strangely enough, I still have the key.

It was with delight that I came across one of the few remaining AA boxes at Cappercleuch near St Mary’s loch.    A reminder of pre- MOT motoring when cars, especially the kind I could afford, were completely unreliable, when fan-belts were regularly replaced by a nylon stocking, radiators boiled over and hoses perished.

I’m sure Mr Toad hankers after those days but not me, I like surround-sound, climate control, warning lights and beeps of every possible kind.  I’ve no wish to go back to standing in the rain trying to figure out why a pile of unresponsive metal won’t move.

Still, it was nice to see an AA box again.

An unexpected sight


Apparently ,out of eight hundred boxes, there are nineteen left and eight of them are Grade II listed buildings

A " listed" building


Mr Toad  would have approved of them.  He needed  all the help he could get on the road.