July 15, 2015
Edinburgh, Scotland: Memories of the past
I'M ALWAYS touched by industrial relics. Blow Stonehenge and the like: these are the machines my father, my grandfather touched. Or men like them, men who did more than tap keyboards or shuffle money.
We came back to the coast at Musselburgh, which Karen insists on pronouncing Mussel-burg, to go with her individual pronunciation of Edinburgh as Eddin-borrow. And there, abandoned but kept as a park beside the road, was what remained of coastal mines. Machines were turning orange in the rain; crane hooks hung still and unused; railway waggons waited for loads that would never again come. Weeds were taking over. It was as sad as a burial. Which is what it was, above ground but the internment of the people, the community that had once worked here.
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It's a park now, with picnic tables, tables that had been more than vandalised. They had been destroyed. I asked a man walking his dog and he blamed gypsies. They had camped at the far end of the park, he said, and their litter was still there. They'd wrecked the benches for firewood.
But the wood hadn't been taken. Other wooden fittings had been left untouched. Low fences were still there, wood easier to take than tables. And nobody had touched anything nearer to where the gypsies camped. Which led us to wonder if someone had objected to the end of people's working lives being turned into a recreation area. Desecration. And maybe he'd made his feelings visible. A century of industrial and community life had been trivialised.
Well, we'd never know. But undeniably there was a sadness, a darkness, to the place. Maybe the pit was no longer viable. Maybe it would have closed anyway. Two burly Glaswegians in a café blamed the Thatcher era, saying it had destroyed all the area had and left whole communities devastated. He was insistent, bitter, but Thatcher can't be blamed here: this pit closed in the 1960s.
"What are you doing here?" we asked.
"How do you mean?"
"You're Glaswegians. You're on the edges of Edinburgh. I didn't think that was allowed."
He laughed. There's a big cultural gap between snooty Edinburgh, the capital, and muscular Glasgow, where hard work makes money although rarely enough. A British writer called Miles Kington called for balance between the cities. There was already a Duke of Edinburgh to ride beside the Queen and wave and smile. Surely there should be a second carriage, for a Duke of Glasgow, who'd belch and sing and throw out beer cans.
"We're working," the man said.
"At...?"
"We fit lightning conductors. That's what we're up to."
"You feel comfortable down here on the ground?"
"No," he said with a straight face. "I get nose bleeds. But it's worse'n thut. I used ta work doon pitt."
Translation: he was once a miner. From whence his contempt for Margaret Thatcher.
Today's ride: 58 km (36 miles)
Total: 2,061 km (1,280 miles)
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