The Invisible Spirit, Kenneth Roy’s history of post-war Scotland, will be published soon. The pre-publication offer ended at midnight on Tuesday: one reader ordered two copies two minutes before the deadline!
There will be a further opportunity to buy the book direct from us when it is published later this month.
The September anthology
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Contributors:
Douglas Alexander
Bob Cant
Thom Cross
Gary Dickson
Anni Donaldson
David Donnison
Russell Galbraith
Rose Galt
Katie Grant
Ian Hamilton
Christopher Harvie
Gerry Hassan
Andrew Hook
Walter Humes
RD Kernohan
Alan McIntyre
Marian Pallister
Lord Robertson of Port Ellen
Bob Smith
Iain Smith
Jill Stephenson
David Torrance
Kennedy Wilson
Alex Wood
Kenyon Wright
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Symington, Ayrshire
Photograph by
Islay McLeod
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The weekend picture
The Midgie
Rear Window
Bread and cheeses
Quote of the week
The weekend picture
The Midgie
Rear Window
Bread and cheeses
Quote of the week
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.