One biased section almost spoils this otherwise excellent book

Scotland’s Last Frontier: A Journey Along the Highland Line, by Alistair Moffat, jumps around a bit, both geographically and chronologically, but doesn’t suffer as a result, and I enjoyed most of the book and learned a lot from it, mostly about ancient, medieval and local history concerning various parts of Scotland but especially those areas around the ‘highland line’ with which this work is concerned.  I have been to presentations by Moffat in the past, and appreciated his expertise and speaking skills.  I have no idea, therefore, why he practically spoils what is otherwise a good and informative read by including a ridiculously biased section.

The section I object to is about the Highland Clearances.  Prior to misrepresenting the Highland Clearance process, Moffat writes about the bitter harvests and famine in Aberdeenshire in the 1690s which resulted from temporary climate changes.  He writes about the Monymusk Estate, near Inverurie, and the improvements made by the Grants, the landowners in the early 18th century.  Moffat describes the tumbledown houses of the locals, the open grounds divided into small parcels, the inefficient methods of cultivation, the ditches with weeds and stones in them, all of which were essentially an example of the medieval landscape of much of Scotland at that time.  Grant planted trees, millions of them, and he drained the land and cleared stones, making ditches around new fields.  He introduced new crops and new rotations, and better fields which allowed more milking cows to be kept alive during winter which in turn improved the health of the locals.  In addition, the invention of the swing plough virtually revolutionised agriculture by enabling deeper furrows (better drainage) with a requirement for fewer draught animals and labour.  Many areas east of the highland line turned to more efficient cereal production.  Moffat recognises that these agricultural changes often came with a human cost, but he sees them as improvements which transformed society for the better and helped new industries, such as textiles, to thrive.  During this same period, the early 18th century, in the Highlands there were fewer agricultural changes, due to the different geography of that region, though one benefit of the Act of Union in 1707 was to open up new markets for highland cattle.  He writes, “Highland chiefs and landowners were generally paid rents in kind rather than cash and cattle was the main currency.  Landowners also acted as agents for tenant farmers who had surplus to sell or they bought from them directly.  Many crofter-farmers had to sell their beasts on before the winter in any case since they did not have easy access to the new sources of fodder being grown in the Lowlands.  And cattle supplied their own transport.  They walked to market.”

So far, so good.  Moffat has accurately described the process of land improvement, enclosure, and agricultural and industrial transformations in the Lowlands which resulted in economic and health benefits for those concerned, and mentioned that in the Highlands developments had been much more piecemeal with a continuing subsistence-based economy supplemented by the sale of highland cattle (a trade which suffered after the end of the Napoleonic Wars).  Then he turns to the Highland Clearances (Fuadach nan Gaidheal) and rather loses the plot.  He writes “Increasingly absent and anglicised clan chiefs came to value their estates not for the number (and loyalty) of the people they could support but for how much of an income they could produce.”  In truth, the highland chiefs had become no more ‘anglicised’ than any of the numerous landowners elsewhere and in the Lowlands, (many of whom were also absent) who had improved their land, so why suddenly use that term, and in an inferred derogatory sense?  The Highland landowners had the same aspirations as their Lowland counterparts.  The poorer highlanders were also no different from their Lowland equivalents (apart from the language they spoke, as the Gaelic language had become much less common outside the Highlands).  Many of the Highland landowners also tried to improve their land, a little later than had happened in the Lowlands, but the desire to improve was no different.  The differences, however, and these are very important, were that their land was generally less fertile, the pressures on land from population growth by this time were more acute, and, unlike in the Lowlands, the new industries often failed (for numerous reasons).  Moffat doesn’t seem to grasp much of this, but instead falls into a fairly common trap of calling Highland landlords ‘brutal’, ‘ignorant’ and having ‘careless contempt’ for their tenants.  As I have written previously, this is an example of perpetuating some myths of the Highland Clearances.  Sir Tom Devine has written much more accurately on the matter.  Moffat even heaps praise on the ‘historian’ John Prebble.  As I have pointed out in other posts on this blog, Prebble never let actual facts get in the way of his yarns.  Prebble’s inaccurate interpretations have unfortunately had much influence on popular, especially nationalistic, perspectives of Highland history.

In the remaining chapters of Scotland’s Last Frontier, normal service is resumed.  There’s a very interesting description of the archaeological digs that revealed the enormous Roman fort at Inchtuthil, built after the Roman victory at the Battle of Mons Graupius (AD83) and abandoned five years later.  There is also an amusing account of the bungling, ham-fisted removal/theft/liberation of the Stone of Destiny from Westminster Abbey by Ian Hamilton in 1950; another story about a fight to the death between 30 men from Clan Cameron and 30 men from Clan Chattan in 1396; and an account of James Macpherson and the ‘lost’ poems of Ossian.

If only Moffat hadn’t been so biased in his interpretation of the Highland Clearances, this would have been a better book.

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The Tall Thin One’s burglar alarm

My friend the Tall Thin One (TTO) had barely been on holiday for two days when Lindsey, who was in Crieff at the time, received an automated call from his security company – “The alarm at xx Royal Crescent needs attention.  If you are able to attend to this, please press 1.  If you are unable to attend, please press 2 and we will proceed to the next contact on the list.”  As Lindsey was in Crieff, she pressed 2, but then phoned me here in Edinburgh to tell me about it.

I was going into town anyway, so I dropped by Royal Crescent to see if everything looked OK at TTO’s pad.  I couldn’t see anything untoward from the front, but knew not how to inspect the place from the rear, as it’s a terraced townhouse.  Then I noticed a neighbour coming out of next door’s front door, so I asked him if he’d heard an alarm going off that morning.  He said he hadn’t, so I explained that I was a friend of TTO and was trying to check things were OK.  The neighbour was about forty, dressed in tweeds and looked wealthy.  You don’t get to own a grand town house apartment in Edinburgh New Town without being wealthy, and you don’t get to be wealthy at forty without being decisive, and the neighbour gave an example of this decisiveness by, after giving me a once-over and deciding that I was legit, taking me round the block to an alleyway which gave access to the back of the town houses.  He showed his decisiveness for a second time by quickly clambering up the six-foot-high wall to get a better view into TTO’s back garden, and said he couldn’t see anything untoward.

Then he told me that he could see from his perch that TTO’s back gate was not locked from the inside, so I opened it and inspected at closer range TTO’s back door and windows.  Nothing was untoward.

All this kerfuffle had obviously alerted TTO’s neighbour in the apartment above.  The window was raised, and a rather dignified older chap stuck his head out and asked us, in a typical plummy Edinburgh accent, if he could be of assistance.  I explained who I was and what I was doing.  It turned out that the neighbour was called Harry, and that the business with the alarm had all been Harry’s fault.

Harry had needed access to TTO’s back garden to let in some workmen to erect scaffolding to his second floor apartment, early that morning.  The TTO had left Harry his front door key and Harry knew the security code for the burglar alarm, but in his rush to attend to the workmen Harry had left his spectacles behind when he opened TTO’s door and could not see which buttons to press to deactivate the alarm, which had then gone off.

Not only that, but TTO’s phone had then rung (almost certainly from the security company to check if everything was OK) but Harry, without his specs, could not find the phone.  He’d picked up the TV remote instead and pressed the green button, which then meant that TTO’s alarm, phone and TV were all going at the same time, early in the morning.  Harry explained to me, as he hung out of his window, that he’d eventually got everything under control, and that peace had resumed at xx Royal Crescent.

The other neighbour, the decisive one, decisively announced that as the situation had been explained to his satisfaction, he would return promptly to his general business, and strode off, decisively, leaving me to chat for a couple of minutes with Blind Harry.

Looking up at Harry poking his head out the second-floor window, with his distinguished look and his plummy Edinburgh literati New Town accent, made me giggle when I thought about wifies of the past having a hing’ oot their tenement windae for a natter.  How things have changed.

What’s the Wi-Fi code?

It must be my age.

There are people I know from my information professional days who are completely au fait with just about all aspects of modern technology, especially those dealing with communications and social media.  They’re great!  They utilise what is available and make the most out of things.  They don’t seem to fear technology in any way, but see it rather as an opportunity to be investigated and utilised for the possible benefit of all concerned.  But, especially nowadays, they also realise that there can sometimes be a downside to it.  Everyone has to keep that idea in the back of their minds at all times, nowadays.

And then there are my non-information friends, a few of whom are fine with modern technology, but there are various others who sometimes struggle or who have a different perspective.  The other day I was trying to explain to one of the latter about using Bluetooth to play music from a phone to a speaker.  He didn’t understand what I was getting at, “I don’t really use my phone that much.  Only for phoning, really”.  Someone else who is a long-standing friend only checks his email about once a month.

There are others who are actually proud that they don’t own a smart mobile phone.  And then, of course, there’s my friend Fat Mac, who as regular readers of this blog will know, has a unique attitude towards modern technology. “Ah hate a’ this fekkin stuff, Rodz, it’s jez a constant war wi’ ra effin machines as far as Ah’m concerned”, he often complains, vociferously.  He hates all post-seventies technology.  Sometimes, I can’t blame him, as he inevitably seems to choose the short straw when it comes to technology, even when all the straws are long.

For about ten years he’s been struggling to get the ‘photies’ he takes on his phone onto his laptop.  Even though there are about twenty ways to do exactly that, he can’t cope with nineteen of them.  If nothing happens when he connects his phone to his laptop via a cable, which is the only method he likes because he can physically see a cable going from his phone to his laptop, then he’s sunk.  One thing Fat Mac is not, is a technology problem solver.  Surprisingly, at the same time, he has mastered working all the zappers needed for his TV, and can quickly find a video on any platform of just about any boxing match from the 1970s (his main interest, apart from drinking).

Most of those friends who don’t like new technology and social media dislike the idea of what they see as a loss of privacy.  Well, that’s entirely up to them, I suppose, and you have to respect their opinion.  They’re the ones who are sometimes difficult to contact.

All of the above people, like myself, are pretty old or at least ‘getting on’.

Most young people, on the other hand, don’t have the same inhibitions/concerns when it comes to technology.  My two sons and their friends simply use technology to the full.

I always tried to be up-to-date with technology before I retired.  Back at library school in the mid-seventies I didn’t take the computer options, because it seemed to me as though computers, in those days, were not about people at all, but involved folk in backrooms loading punched cards, and doing things with them.  When DOS and then Microsoft Windows came along, everything changed, and that’s when I became interested.  Prior to that, I worked with an acoustic coupler, which was the latest gizmo at that time, only because it helped me answer researchers’ questions.  I had no interest in how it actually worked.  I disliked the tension it caused, because if you were slow or made an error it cost money, and I hated having to spend hours checking the bills.

More recently, technology has started to pass me by.  I don’t watch many DVD movies, but when I do, it’s often a struggle using the PS2 controller to get them on the big flat screen.  My sons don’t understand why this isn’t obvious to me, as PS2s have been around for ages, but I’ve never been a gamer.  Someone showed me screen mirroring recently, and this is surely the way forward.  People will have access to whatever and everything they are interested in via their mobile phones, and when they need to see things wherever they are on a bigger screen, they’ll use screen mirroring.

Another recent (I presume) thing is mindfulness and technology, #MindfulTechnology.  In order to stop his rantings against technology, I’m going to suggest that Fat Mac takes it up as soon as possible.

More Thrills Than Skills

It was my friend JJ who alerted me to this book: More Thrills Than Skills: Adventures in Journalism, War & Terrorism, by Paul Harris, and also to the fact that both JJ and myself went to the same school, Elgin Academy, as the author, Paul Harris.

JJ has quite a bit of memorabilia from the sixties relating to Elgin, Morayshire, and he also showed me a copy of something that Paul Harris mentions on page 22 of his book – an interview with Ian Smith, at the time the Prime Minister of Rhodesia, which was published in the Elgin Academy school magazine.  Getting that interview was a minor stroke of genius, but it was the sort of thing that Paul Harris managed on more than one occasion.

I can’t actually remember Paul Harris very well from my school days.  He was in the sixth year in 1966, and I think that that was the year I arrived in Elgin, half-way through the school year, and all I can say is that I was sort of aware of him and his friends.

Paul Harris went on to have a very interesting life indeed, mostly as a freelance journalist covering various wars, but he also got involved in various other ventures, including pirate radio and publishing, and this book covers much of this, the achievements, the scrapes he ended up in, and his experiences during hostilities in Bosnia, Croatia, Eritrea, Algeria, Sri Lanka and elsewhere.  Freelance journalists had to live by their wits, and it appears that they often received little remuneration for putting themselves at risk.  A surprising number of them didn’t survive.  More Thrills Than Skills covers all sorts of fascinating episodes.

The Sheltering Desert

The Sheltering Desert, by Henno Martin, is about how two men, Henno and his friend Hermann Korn, decided that they wanted nothing at all to do with World War II, and in 1940 went to live in a remote desert part of Namibia until, they hoped, hostilities ended.

They had gone to what was then South West Africa in 1935 to do geological research on the Naukluft, and by 1940 were threatened with Internment.  They were completely against the madness of the War, and decided to live and survive like Bushmen in the Kuiseb River canyon.  This is a very harsh part of the world, where there is little water and the temperature rises in summer.

The story was made into a movie in 1991, and you may be able to find it on Youtube.  The movie diverges considerably from the book, in that it spends quite a bit of time setting the scene in 1940s South West Africa, and also seems to overemphasize the search, by the authorities, for the two men, but it’s a watchable film and the scenery is wonderful.

Because the terrain was so harsh in the Kuiseb River gorge area, and at times the wild game and water ran out, they found it difficult to survive.  They lived off what they could shoot with their pistol and fish that they found in some pools.  After a year, they found themselves getting philosophical, and had discussions between themselves about whether evolution was purely mechanically determined by the interplay of hereditary and environment.  Their conclusion was that animals with specialisations were less likely to evolve, and that man had evolved particularly because of a lack of specialisation.

The Namib sounds like an interesting part of the world.  It was inhabited by scattered Khoikhoi for thousands of years, and Martin and Korn found numerous stone tools near their various camps.

All Gone to Look for America

All Gone to Look for America, by Peter Millar, was one of a handful of books I bought at the same time as Almost Heaven.  Almost Heaven was published in 1998, and All Gone to Look for America in 2009, so both are slightly dated.  Both are travel books.  Both authors are British.  All Gone to Look for America isn’t a road trip book, as Millar travels almost exclusively by train, making an anti-clockwise journey around America, with a side-trip up to Memphis.  Millar enjoys visiting microbreweries and drinking their produce at other venues.

He isn’t very impressed with what has happened to many inner cities, and describes large areas where buildings have been pulled down, leaving only parking lots.  This certainly put me off going to some of the places covered.

“As I am becoming ever more acutely aware, pedestrians inhabit the same world as drifters and hobos, a world middle-class Americans try to ignore, oblivious to any concept of interdependency.  Nineteenth-century buildings – the sort that are being restored in Manchester or London’s Docklands – sit, separated by patches of tarmac half-populated by gigantic empty SUVs, slowly going to seed.  A few, dotted here and there, have been turned into flourishing bars or shops, but too few, and too far between.”

One of the worst seems to be Memphis, which has few redeeming features outside the few downtown blocks.  The car is king, in the USA.  At one stage, Millar wants to go to a soccer match in Los Angeles to watch LA Galaxy, and tries to get there by public transport.  It is almost impossible.  The car park at the venue, on the other hand, holds more than 15,000 vehicles.  At the end of the match, Millar waits at a bus stop to get back to his hotel.  There are only three other people using public transport, out of a crowd of about 15,000 who attended the match.  Two of them are Scottish!  I’ve looked up the Transportation Guide to the LA Galaxy StubHub stadium.  There’s no mention of public transport that I can see.

There’s a very amusing chapter where Millar describes trying to find the entrance to the hotel at which he has booked a room, in Reno.  He arrives, having walked from the train station.  But there is no entrance to the hotel by foot.

“It takes me three attempts to work out that all the obvious entrances from the street lead straight into the main, slot-machine throbbing casino floor and that to get into the hotel which towered above it, with the reception and lobby on the first (in American: second) floor, you’re expected to drive straight to the underground parking.  Or failing that, be chauffeured through a cavernous concrete-pillared approach about as pedestrian-friendly as the docking slot on a Death Star.  Despite it being less than a five-minute walk most people coming here from the railroad station catch a cab” 

Throughout his journeys, Millar tells us what he sees from the train window, and gives his opinion on various tourist and other attractions at the places he gets off the train for the night or occasionally two, but the best bits are the descriptions of, and dialogue with, the various characters he meets on the way.

Elgin Academy athletics team 1966

Yesterday I enjoyed a very pleasant afternoon through in Glasgow with JJ, No Longer Grim Jim, and Heppie, three people I went to Elgin Academy with, in the 1960s.  JJ had brought along all sorts of memorabilia, photos, school magazines, newspaper cuttings and such-like.  He has a good collection, and when I got home I looked out some of my own old photos.

I haven’t posted the above photo before, which I think is of the Elgin Academy athletics team and I think was taken in the summer of 1966.  We seem to have won a trophy.  Hopefully, someone will tell me if I’m wrong (you can do so by making a Comment on this post – and you can do this anonymously if you wish).  The only names I’m completely sure of are: back row middle – myself; other people include Ally Blackburn, Barbara Spence, Anne Mackenzie.  Maybe someone else can fill in some more details.

Update: these other names have been suggested to me: George Inch, Graeme McDonald, Jim Anderson, Vivien Welsh, Drew Baillie, Martin Firth, Ogg twins (Hilary & Rosemary). Perhaps Ali MacDonald & Ragna Tulloch.

Other old posts about Elgin in the past on this blog include: Elgin – the past, The Two Red Shoes, Working in the sawmills, Black Eck at the bakery, and Mad Dave and the Cromdale Mob – A short story of the late 1960s.