North Britain with Ailsa

The train from Kings Cross traveled northwards, sometimes rushing, sometimes trundling. The first five hours I mostly slept or read newspapers – Telegraph, Guardian, Independent. Later I looked through Ailsa’s copy of Essentials, and then read some of her book (The Victorian Chaise-Longue, a ghost story by Marghanita Laski).

More sleeping. The sun shone and the humidity within the train became intense. The train stopped at the old military capital of North Britain, a big castle on top of a mountain (supposedly Bede’s Urbs Giudi).

Several members of the “national” basketball team for North Britain got on and sat at the table obliquely opposite to ours. They were taciturn and stone faced. When they got off I mentioned to Ailsa that none of them had said a word the entire time they were on the train.(she waved towards the passing landscape and said “All this distilled glowering has entered into the national character”).

More tea in card cups.

I began to pay more attention to the changing view outside the window.

Scots pines crowned the ridges. Bright-yellow gorse bushes covered the landscape like so many Mosaic burning bushes. Purple mountains in the distance.

The rail line was mostly on an embankment so that although the terrain was hilly I had the sense of looking down on it, until the ground heaved up into mountains in the distance. The overcast weather made the colours dull, but the landscape turned to a vibrant pea-green when the sun came out. Only once did it rain (heavily) as we went through an ancient capital of the Picts - we speculated what the Picts might have looked like (“nasty, brutish and short” said Ailsa in broad Glaswegian), and selected a candidate from among the passengers who got on when we stopped, but he turned out to be an American.



Above: only once did it rain, when we passed through an ancient Pictish settlement, now marked by a cavernous Victorian station.

Ailsa talked about the local nationalism, trying to alarm me with stories of how English people can be treated. When I failed to be alarmed she talked about false Ossianian romanticism. “If the BNP is a sinister Wagnerian production, the SNP is a comic Italian operetta” she said.

Mountains wrapped in grey veils of cloud like shawl-wrapped keening “Och, ochón!” women (Ailsa’s mock romanticism was becoming infectious). The mountainsides came ever closer so that we were traveling for miles through a narrow defile, the steep sides covered in thin forest interspersed with wild purple rhododendrons (the flowers past their best) cascading down like mauve waterfalls. Masses of ferns covered the ground, indicating the dampness of the environment.

Occasionally the defile would widen briefly and we would cross over nameless watershed rivers, shallow and full of light in the gathering “gloaming”. Horned cattle stood in meadows as if they had been arranged by Landseer. Sheep were grazing in strips of grass alongside the rivers.

The train rolled forward, maintained by a type of male railway operative that seemed to deserve their own anthropological classification. In railway uniforms, they were all slightly below average height, lean build, with middle-aged pinched and lined faces and youthfully-gelled spiky hair. They fussed and bustled up and down the train checking tickets, pushing trolleys of tea and coffee, collecting rubbish in giant bags, blowing whistles at the stations, waving paddles, running up and down on the platforms with incredible energy.

The mountains closed in, the trees came even closer.

We talked again about the local nationalism. “It’s based on fear” Ailsa said. “This is a fearful country afraid of being discovered and raped by the modern world” she said, adding matter-of-factly “England has already been raped and left for dead.”

Little half-hearted spatters of rain fell on the windows, lasting no more than a few seconds. Ailsa recounted a long list of grievances – clearances, evictions, diasporas etc. “All these jumbled resentments have been thickened with the blood of low-level conflicts so that they become a sort of ethno-nationalist black pudding, the gross ingredients seasoned with ethnic culture so that it becomes delicious to certain palates.”



Above: the landscape opened up

The landscape opened up and rolled away from the railway line. We crossed over rivers that were packed with smooth grey stones. White sheep studded the brown heather of the hills.

High up near the top of a rounded mountain I saw two long patches of white, incredulous that it could be snow.

The sun came out again at quarter past seven. We stopped at a station where ornamental trees had been twisted and stunted by the winds. Through woods of silver birch, a different sort of fern covering the ground.

Then we seemed to enter a holiday area, with chalets set down any-old-how and caravans in little parks. Plantations of conifers. We stopped at station where dozens of back-packers got off and walked down the platform purposefully, as if braced for mountain hiking.



Above: every table was covered with detritus.

The train suddenly seemed empty. Every table was covered with detritus (despite the rubbish-collecting forays of the staff). We went along a great viaduct curving forward towards the coast and the small city where the train would terminate.

Arriving at the terminus it was still broad daylight at eight o’clock. We had an hour and a half to wait until the branch line train would leave. We went out into the city centre which seemed half-deserted.



Above: the national heraldic beast had been set up on a column.

Gulls cried overhead. There was a persistent smell of curry from various Indian restaurants. We walked through a shopping plaza where the national heraldic beast had been set up on a column.

“This is the capital of the north?” I asked Ailsa.

“This is no capital, this is a shit-hole” she said, “you don’t want to be here on a Saturday night.”



Above: there seemed to be many outlets selling ethnic costumes, also available over the internet.

We looked for somewhere to eat, but nothing seemed suitable (we had been eating all day on the train, so were not really hungry). We were carrying our luggage and so could not walk too far. After wandering aimlessly for a while we went back to the station and sat down on a bench to wait.



Above: the railway terminus was festooned with banners proclaiming pagan fire festivals.

By twenty past nine the sun had gone but the daylight was still clear. The local train took us along the coastal branch line, beside a muddy flat shore. Long views across the sea, long shafts of light under the dull grey clouds, long pauses of melancholic contemplation as we neared the end of our journey.

“This is the Brighton of the north” said Ailsa as we got off at a small station and met her mother, who had come to meet us. We drove through the small town which looked entirely unlike Brighton. After about fifteen miles we turned onto a coastal road along one side of a peninsula, the bay beautiful on our right.

Ailsa’s mother lived in a small pebble-dashed bungalow. I was shown into my room, which was sparsely furnished and had a hard single bed. After a cup of tea and an hour of talking we all went to bed, although it took me ages to get to sleep (and I was conscious of mice scrabbling in the far corner of the room).