The weekend picture
The Midgie
Rear Window
Bread and cheeses
Quote of the week
Photograph by Islay McLeod
The travel writer Paul Theroux, although his books are full of incident and humour, does not come across as one who is too fond of the human race. Oddly, he is particularly full of ire against animal lovers, and one wants to point out that if humans are such a bad lot as he describes, it would be odd not to prefer animals to people.
However, allowing him his little quirks, Theroux is still well worth reading for his gripping travel accounts (I’ve never read his fiction, so cannot comment there). Recently, I ended up rereading some of his older travel books – ‘The Kingdom by the Sea’ is an account of a trip he undertook around the coast of Britain in 1983, at the time of the Falklands war and just before the miners’ strike of 1984-5.
As usual, in this book Theroux is almost virulently critical of the people he meets – there are very few places in the whole of the UK that he likes, and even fewer of its residents strike him as good specimens of humanity. But he reserves the full onslaught of his ire for the city nearest to where I currently reside, Aberdeen. Having grudgingly allowed that Glasgow (by comparison with Belfast where the troubles were in full swing at the time of writing) is ‘peaceful, even pretty’, and Edinburgh a ‘handsome place still…the most beautiful city in Britain’ (although that is hardly saying much given his descriptions of the rest), Aberdeen is ‘an awful city… I came to hate Aberdeen more than any other place I saw’.
At this point the reader, especially if she knows the place, is inclined to say ‘Come on, I’m sure it wasn’t that bad in 1983, and at least you say the streets were clean, unlike nowadays’, but Theroux tells us exactly how it is:
‘In the face of such an onslaught [of money from oil], Aberdonians had found protection by retreating into the most unbearable Scottish stereotypes’ (he refers in this context to kilts, eightsome reels and ‘tartan tightfistedness’). ‘Most British cities were plagued with unemployed people. Aberdeen was plagued by workers. It made me think that work created more stress in a city than unemployment.’
He describes the young, male oil workers as having no hobbies other than drinking, and suggests that the Aberdonians (presumably the ones who at that point weren’t working in the oil industry) ‘hated and feared them’. And more: ‘It had all the extortionate prices of a boom town but none of the compensating vulgarity. It was a cold, stony-faced city which did not even look prosperous… It looked over-cautious, unwelcoming and smug…’ Summing up his impressions of Aberdeen, just in case the reader could have possibly mistaken his feelings, he goes in for the kill:
‘It was fully employed and tidy and virtuous, but it was worse than the poverty-stricken places I had seen, because it had no excuses. The food was disgusting, the hotels over-priced and indifferent, the pubs were full of drunken and bad-tempered men…the newspapers ignored [the Falklands news] and concentrated on the local money-making stuff – the new industries, the North Sea pipeline, the latest oil rigs..’ To sum it all up: ‘I never wanted to see another boom town again’.
It was that phrase – ‘boom town’ – which sprang to mind when I read a headline on the BBC news website: ‘City’s boom time’ – apparently house prices have doubled in a decade in two UK cities. Coyly, the reporter asks us to guess which two: ‘Two cities in the UK – one is a centre of commerce, has runaway house prices, and welcomes a constant stream of overseas property buyers. The other is London’. And of course, the first one is Aberdeen, booming once again, if it ever stopped. ‘Everywhere outside is doom and gloom, but it is boom time here,’ a local solicitor told the BBC.
So, clearly Paul Theroux did not succeed in putting people off wanting to live in Aberdeen. If they had read his books at all, most incomers would probably say they were coming anyway, either because they already worked in the oil industry, or they were coming from areas of the UK experiencing high unemployment. But would Theroux recognise the city he described so harshly if he returned today?
A couple of years ago he revisited a tour around the eastern hemisphere which he had first written about 30 years earlier – and he had not mellowed about that part of the world. He might well suggest that Aberdeen is much dirtier in 2013 than when he first saw it, with intermittent attempts by the city council to brighten the place up with hanging baskets, and a more concerted effort to rebuild and smarten up some areas of the place, regardless of the ongoing controversy about the refurbishment – or not – of the Union Terrace Gardens. If indeed a boom is occurring, he might regard it as odd that so many shops on the city’s main thoroughfare, Union Street, are boarded up. The small local shops which made it so different from other UK high streets have all gone but there are other reasons than recession for this trend.
Oddly, though, several Aberdonians I consulted, whilst far from the vicious criticisms of Paul Theroux, were hardly complimentary about their city. ‘I suppose granite is quite difficult to clean’ remarked one, although that didn’t explain why some of the wonderful old granite public buildings which used to be banks or post offices and were now nightclubs or Starbucks seemed to sport so many weedy buddleias from their rooftops or drainpipes.
It seems self-evident to me as an incomer (although not an ‘oily’) that Aberdeen has the potential to be a most beautiful and fascinating city. It has wonderful public parks which just need a bit of a clean-up and more paid wardens to keep an eye on them. It has the same changes of height and attendant flights of elegant steps which Edinburgh does, yet little is made of the different views. It has fantastic granite buildings with intricate detail which are currently grubby and uncared for. Even Aberdonians will admit that most people, whether incomers or aboriginals, don’t really seem to like the city much. A current campaign to stop the plague of chewing gum in the streets exhorts people to remember: ‘Aberdeen – it’s our city’. But that idea has not taken hold.
In a phrase oddly reminiscent of Paul Theroux, an Aberdeenshire friend, from the country, said: ‘The people there are as hard and cold as the granite it’s made from’. As an incomer, I could not have made that point, but I wonder. Before the oil boom, industries in Aberdeen were largely shipbuilding, fishing and agriculture, industries that could be cold, hard and dangerous, especially so with the fishing. Perhaps only the toughest people survived and would have considered the work of the oil rigs to be only slightly more unpleasant. There is still a difference in culture between the country folk and the city slickers, the former possibly retaining more of the mutual support networks of farming communities and often quick to point out that the expatriate culture of the oil industry makes it hard to maintain such values.
Not least, if the oil industry has brought economic boom to the north-east of Scotland, what else has it done for the place? There are huge swathes of what used to be rural landscape around the city now turned into vast building sites for multi-national oil companies, yet those same companies are hardly noted for their civic generosity in funding projects which might enhance the culture of the town.
There is a good art gallery in Aberdeen and a strong visual arts culture supported by Gray’s School. But there is no large central public museum and few specialist examples. There is no international-sized concert hall, and, perhaps as a consequence, international performers often tend not to come further north than Edinburgh.
Compared with Dundee, which was quite reasonably shortlisted for the City of Culture award instead of Aberdeen, there are relatively few major arts and culture projects, in spite of many well-intentioned amateur efforts. For art, music and culture, Aberdeen still seems to lag behind other Scottish cities, yet the hugely wealthy oil companies show little evidence of wanting to invest in arts projects, preferring to support initiatives such as the Union Terrace development. Cynics suggest this is because there may be more money-making spin-offs in the latter.
Perhaps the problem is that the energy sector also has failed to think along the lines of ‘Aberdeen – it’s our city’ – for it isn’t really theirs. When asked about what will happen when North Sea oil becomes too expensive to extract, Aberdonians tend to adopt an optimistic attitude, suggesting that the big oil companies will still want to retain their business here: ‘It’s midway between America and the Middle East’, they suggest. ‘Aberdeen is the energy centre of Europe’. ‘There will always be more oil to find’ et cetera. Perhaps they are right, although sentiment has never been a feature of big business, and I’d suspect most multinationals would be away like a shot if better opportunities beckoned.
Meanwhile, those lucky enough to enjoy the high salaries offered by the oil companies, even if their working conditions are less than enjoyable, may continue to appreciate living in a ‘boom town’. I would love to invite Paul Theroux back to see what he thinks might have changed – if he could ever bring himself to revisit the city he hated more than any other.
