Scotland - Debbie Young's Writing Life

Dorothy Was Right: There’s No Place Like Home

Posted on April 24, 2012July 18, 2016 by Debbie Young

Living as I do in an area that’s a tourist destination, I’m always curious when I go away on holiday to see whether I can find any other tourist spots that are equally homely. It’s rare to find another place that’s a match for our little corner of the Cotswolds.

I’m therefore taken aback to come across a small Scottish town that seems on first glance to meet my demanding criteria.

Late one afternoon, en route in our camper van from Perth to the coast of Fife, we encounter a small market town with a familiar air. Spotting brown tourist information signs to a nearby castle, we decide to stay the night and visit it in the morning. We find a place to park near the centre of town, and while my husband reads the paper and my daughter plays with her toys, I combine a recce with a run (I’m in training for the Bristol 10K).

I gently jog down the narrow high street, making a mental note of the facilities. There’s a craft bakers, an award-winning butchers, two charity shops with a high class of junk, and a useful old-fashioned hardware shop.There are signs to a library and a leisure centre and an edge-of-town supermarket. (Sound familiar, anyone?)

The calorific perils of a chippy, a Chinese and an Indian take-away are offset by a slimming club in the old market hall,which also hosts a cafe offering hearty soups, sandwiches and cakes. (Well, this is Scotland). I jog on to the end of town and I’m immediately amidst farmland, where fingerposts beckon me on to pleasant footpaths through sheep-strewn green fields.

Hmmm, this is home from home, I begin to think. I could get to like this place.

There’s even a local royal connection, albeit not one to ever make the pages of Hello magazine: Mary, Queen of Scots, was once a guest at the local castle and later a prisoner.

Turning left onto a footpath, I jog happily round the perimeter of the town and am rewarded with a glimpse of the castle, in the middle of a small loch. I pause to catch my breath by the ticket office and mentally book a family boat trip to it for tomorrow. Culture, a boat and a spooky-looking setting that would do Scooby-Doo proud – there’s something here to keep all the family happy.

When I head back into town, the charity shops are opposite me, and I notice for the first time that they are in aid of a Scottish children’s hospice. A little further down the road, in the direction of the other end of town, is a sign to that very hospice. A few yards further I pass the high school. It is closed down and boarded up, peppered with danger signs. I’m sure there’s no connection between the closure of the (dangerous) school and the presence of a children’s hospice, but it still makes me shudder with horror. I’m so sad for the children affected by either building.

I run on, hoping to find something cheery to negate the effect of these discoveries. A little ahead of me is a large building, by far the most grand and imposing on the high street. I run a little faster, spirits rising. Level with the gated entrance, I read the sign. It is a funeral directors. Now feeling thoroughly chilled, I turn on the heel of my trainers and plod back to the van, to find my family waiting. I couldn’t live here, not amidst all this sadness. After all, there is no place like home.

(This post was originally written for the Tetbury Advertiser, May 2012 issue.)

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like this one about the lure of home: East, West, Our Village Show’s Best or this one about another country dear to Mary, Queen of Scots’ heart: Lost In France.

Travel

New Respect for Old Fishwives

Posted on April 23, 2012July 18, 2016 by Debbie Young

photograph of fishwife Dolly Peel — What's not to love about the fishwife? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Don’t talk like that, you sound like an old fishwife.”

Until my Easter holiday in Scotland, I’d only had negative associations with the concept of a fishwife. I’m not sure how fishwives earned their reputation of being “coarse and shrewish”, to quote one dictionary definition, but the word had always conjured up in my mind a garrulous, nosy old lady in an apron, smelling of fish.

But then last month my visit to the wonderful Scottish Fisheries Museum at Anstruther in Fife (the bit of Scotland that sticks out above Edinburgh and the Firth of Forth) gave me a much more complimentary perspective.

Scottish Fisheries Museum, Anstruther, Scotland — The Scottish Fisheries Museum, Anstruther (photo: museum's website)

In small fishing ports such as Anstruther, fishing was not just the work of the menfolk. The men were the ones who braved the North Sea waves to bring home the catch, but behind every good fisherman was an equally sound fishwife.

The fishwife’s duties were not just to keep house, cook, shop, wash, iron and raise the children while her husband was at sea. Nor was she only an industrious craftswoman, knitting ingenious seamless socks and sweaters, made as one piece to prevent ingress of water. (The sleeves were especially short to avoid chafing the wrists with wet wool.) Weaving the creels (baskets) to carry the fish was another art at which the good fishwife was adept.

The fishwife also played an important role before and after the fisherman’s seafaring adventures. She helped make and repair the nets, gathered the bait (shellfish were picked on a cold beach at daybreak) and stuck the bait on numerous hooks on fishing lines. After all this, she was required to give her man a piggyback to his boat. She paddled barefoot through the shallows, skirts and aprons hitched up, so that the fisherman could set off with dry feet. When the catch was brought ashore, it was the fishwife who gutted and cleaned the fish, packing them into barrels for export.

Girls processing fish — How ever will they get that one in the box? (Photo: Fisheries Museum website)

You didn’t have to be married to earn the dubious privilege of helping with the catch. Hordes of single girls followed the fishing fleet around the coast, packing the haul whenever and wherever it was landed.

Fishwives’ reputation for gossip was perhaps borne of the closeness of these fishing communities. They supported each other when anxious for their menfolk out at sea in storms, or widowed in the inevitable tragedies of “those in peril on the sea”, as the memorable old hymn goes. They were hugely comforting to friends, family and neighbours who lived with the knowledge that their men were risking their lives daily.

Fishwives baiting lines for their menfolk — Baiting lines (photo: Fisheries Museum)

But most impressive to me of all the fishwives’ attributes was their ability to bait the hooks on lines to be dropped into the sea. These lines could be as long as – wait for it – a MILE in length. There are pictures and room-sets in the museum with these extraordinarily long lines piled neatly into the aforementioned home-made creels, waiting to be cast swiftly into the waters. Speaking as one who can’t put her iPod earphones cable in her handbag without it emerging in an inexplicable, inextricable tangle, I cannot imagine how they achieved this.

So from now on, if anyone calls me a fishwife, I’m going to take it as a compliment. Or at least I won’t rise to the bait.

If you liked this post, you might enjoy these other thoughts about educational outings to museums:

Reliving history in Northern France

The Ring of Truth

Family, Travel

Girls In Their Summer Clothes

Posted on March 28, 2012July 18, 2016 by Debbie Young

Debbie and Laura about to buy Sancerre at source — "Have red shoes, will travel" (Buying Sancerre at source in France last summer)

If the weather turns wintry tomorrow, blame me. Because this afternoon, I dragged out from under my bed the big plastic storage box in which my summer clothes have been hibernating since October (cue for a snowstorm).

As I spread flimsy dresses and crisp cotton shifts across the bed, images of last summer flitted across my brain like the apocryphal flashbacks of a drowning man. All of these images featured me in these clothes.

There I was on the Avignon tourist trail in a floaty, floral Cath Kidston number. This cool cotton lawn frock was the only thing keeping me on the right side of sanity in the sticky, seething streets. And it was the perfect outfit to “danser sur le Pont” (as you do).

And then there was the cappuccino sleeveless linen shift, short skirt sticking to my legs as we cycled across the cobbles of Senlis to reach the open-air municipal pool. Splashy French shrieks of excitement and distant foreign children’s laughter lured us in the right direction, even though we couldn’t see the pool till the very last minute. It was raised on a balcony above street level – an upstairs open-air swimming pool! Who’d have thought it?

Debbie and Laura on top of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, Summer 2011 — No prizes for guessing which city we're in! The terrace on top of the Arc de Triomphe provides a whole new perspective on the Eiffel Tower

The tiered navy sleeveless Gap drill dress didn’t show the dirt on a hot, dusty day spent giving my daughter her first taste of Paris. Laura didn’t like Paris. “It’s too city-ish.”

It obligingly withstood another day’s wear at Disneyland Paris – a twelve-hour shift to get our money’s worth. Now that Laura did approve of.

And then there was the blue and white stripey jersey shift, too short and shabby to be worn beyond our back garden really, but perfect for the long haul south in our camper van, my feet on the dashboard as we ambled down the valleys of the Loire and the Rhone to Provence. (Don’t worry, my husband was driving.)

For a second, I allow myself to believe that the act of trying on my favourite summer clothes will magically transport me back to the south of France, far from the woolly jumpers of home. I gaze at my favourite cotton lawn sundress with the wistful longing that as a child I’d project on an old wooden chair, hoping it would sprout the wings of Enid Blyton‘s famous Wishing Chair and whisk me away. (How those magical children’s stories stay with you forever!)

But this year we won’t be heading south, whatever we wear. We’re spending this summer is Scotland – and as my daughter likes to say, “You don’t go to Scotland for the weather”. I’ll still be taking my beloved summer clothes. But I expect I’ll have to wear them all at once.

Family, Travel

Laura’s Fishing Tips

Posted on July 31, 2010July 18, 2016 by Debbie Young

A walk along the banks of the River Ness suggests my seven-year-old daughter Laura might be destined for a scientific career.

“Why does the ground stay there and not get washed away by the water in the river?” she asks me.

Cue for some improvised theorising, concocted by the very unscientific me, drawing on vague memories of a documentary about soil erosion and news stories about flooding.

Strolling further along the river bank, we pause opposite the lay-by where fisherman park their cars. They cluster together, comparing notes, planning strategy. It’s clearly a very serious sport around here.

We see several cyclists arrive, perilously dangling their fully extended fishing rods behind them. We hope they won’t hook any passing pedestrians.

We watch them don thigh-high waders before they trudge through the fast-moving shallows to cast their rods into deeper waters.

“Don’t the fish notice them?” queries Laura.

I fail to dredge up any memories from school biology lessons about the fish’s field of vision.

“Maybe fishing rods are always brown or green or grey so that fish will think they’re just tree branches hanging over the river,” I suggest. “After all, you never see fishermen with brightly coloured fishing rods. And they tie things called flies on to their hooks – bits of feather and suchlike that are meant to look like naturally occurring river insects that fish usually eat.”

Laura considers this proposition.

“Then I think they should stick leaves on their rods, too, to make them look more like branches. Otherwise I’m surprised that the fish fall for it.”

I was wondering why we’d never seen the fisherman catch anything.

POSTSCRIPT ON 18TH AUGUST 2010

Venturing into a branch of Aldi for the first time yesterday, I was rather pleased to spot something I’d never seen before – a “fishing t-shirt” and “fishing sweatshirt” for sale entirely patterned in camouflage suitable for a riverbank. Where Laura leads, others follow…

Family, Travel

Travelling Light

Posted on July 28, 2010July 18, 2016 by Debbie Young

A toy saxophone, two rag dolls, three cuddly toys and a life-sized toy border collie: these are my daughter’s ideas of essential items for in-flight hand luggage.

We’re supposedly travelling light, flying to meet my husband in Inverness where we will begin our Scottish holiday.

He’s joining us from Durham, where he’s been attending a week-long residential course in geology. He’s travelling in our camper van, which we packed before his course with our main holiday luggage. This included Laura’s complete collection of Barbies and their clothes and other essential toys.

Eventually I negotiate her hand luggage down to a harmonica, a meerkat keyring and her iPod, with the rag dolls tagging along on condition that she carries one in each hand.

My husband, despite being several hundred miles distant, manages to swell our streamlined hand luggage with a few last-minute requests.

“Can you bring my kilt in case we go to a ceilidh?” he drops casually into a brief phone call, conveniently forgetting the weight and bulk of his authentic Scottish woollen plaid. “Oh, and my waterproof.”

This from the man who has just spent a week on a field study course in the north of England.

“How did you cope in Durham without your waterproof?” I enquire.

“Oh, don’t worry, I went through all your things in the van and found yours – I’ve been using that.”

I dread to think what state my neatly packed bag will now be in.

My own essentials for travelling light are more obvious than Laura’s, though the list has been reduced by the latest anti-terrorist restrictions. I reluctantly set aside my tiny Swiss Army knife, hardly a lethal weapon. I pack lipsalve, moisturiser, iPod stuffed with podcasts and, most important of all, the notebook and pen with which to while away any delays. Travelling alone, I’ll happily scribble for hours for my own amusement, but with my daughter in tow, it’s more likely to be used for her current favourite game: Consequences.

If you’ve never played Consequences, it’s a great game with which to fill any idle moments. Each player takes a sheet of paper and writes, in order, an item from the following list: boy’s name, girl’s name, where they met, what he said, what she said, and what happened next. After each entry, you fold the paper over to conceal what you’ve written, and pass the sheet to the next player. After writing the final item, you pass it on once more. Then each player unfolds their strip of paper and reads the resulting story.

It’s a delightfully silly game, suitable for all ages. Children soon fall in with it and write entries that appeal to their age and sense of humour. When playing with a seven year old, toilets, kisses and vulgar noises feature frequently. It’s guaranteed to stave off cries of “Are we nearly there yet?” on any journey, and I’m hoping that our flight to Inverness will be no exception.

But, thanks to Laura’s packing, if Consequences fails to keep us amused, there is an alternative – she can always get out her harmonica.