Resolutions and Reflections

It was dark when I got up. It’s always dark when I get up this time of year. True, I get up at a time others would consider insanity, but it’s the way I like it. This day was the last day for celebrating the new year. In Scotland New Year is a two day affair, the celebration of Hogmanay, a vestigial organ of Scottish life. It largely owes its existence to one of Scotland’s most influential historic figures and all round killjoy, John Knox. The demands and religious ideology of Knox’s flavour of Presbyterianism eventually saw the celebration of Christmas banned by the Scottish Parliament in 1640. Although the English republic, under Oliver Cromwell, would later also have a go at banning Christmas, in Scotland it actually stuck. Christmas wouldn’t be recognised as a public holiday again in Scotland until 1958.

Part of the reason that the banning of Christmas lasted in Scotland was that the Scots turned to pre-existing traditions and elevated them. Creating a replacement celebration around the new year. Due to its lack of any religious justification Hogmanay, as it became widely known, was far more difficult for zealots to eradicate. The canny Scots had found a thrifty workaround. As they’re famed for doing. I’m not a canny Scot, I’m an invader. I stared out of my living room window, coffee in hand, trying to figure out if the sky was overcast in the oil black of 5:30am. Invader isn’t quite right, I thought, more like refugee from Lancashire in the north of England, seeking liberty from Tories. Resolutions had been tentatively made. I would have to be leaving the flat soon to stick to them.

So it is that on January 2nd 2024 I got on a bus a little after 7am. I’d chosen to partake in a sunrise walk from Silverknows to Cramond along the esplanade. A new year resolution to go out for regular walks getting its first run. This area of the North West of Edinburgh is largely defined by its proximity to the Firth of Forth, otherwise known as the Forth Estuary and in earlier eras the Scottish Sea. I like to think of it as the Scottish Sea, partly because further east it barely resembles an estuary or river at all, but also because the term estuary, or firth, is just arbitrary. A liminal term defined by other definitions.

The esplanade running along the banks is not the usual ruler straight drone of asphalt like many others of its ilk. Although it was still conceived to resemble spaces for horse drawn carriages and ladies in wide crinoline dresses. Instead of straight rigidity you’re strolling the broad walkway as it winds with long, lascivious curves, only interrupted by the elegant frame of weather hardened trees. It’s as though the entire thing was a hint to what lay beneath those corsets and bustles of old. A hidden secret of spider silk strength and beauty that’s impossible to wholly repress. No matter how hard some men may try.

This part of the city does not feel like it’s much part of the city. For all of the structure and control that influences this stretch of shoreline, there is a raw expression of nature present. Undulating banks of broad golden sand, salt marsh and dune grasses, winding rivulets and shallow pools reach out to threaten the deep shipping channel. A promise to one day reposes the vain infrastructure impositions humans have tried to etch in rice paper perpetuity. These scars are not permanent, only long lasting, and the true beauty of the mistreated mistress of the Forth nevertheless shines bright as the morning sun. As though she is just waiting for sanity to prevail and the scars to sink back into her mist soft skin.

As I walked towards the saw tooth markers of the Cramond island Causeway, it struck me that sanity is something that was lacking for many of the remains along the waterfront. None is more visible and poignant than the causeway to Cramond Island. The island is one of the largest of the inner firth and had been used many times for fortifications. Yet it was during the second world war that the current remains would find their origins, including the causeway. The island has always been reachable at low tide due to the sand banks fully draining. Yet what was perhaps manageable by foot was not practical for early mid-century artillery. So a concrete causeway was constructed. This still floods at high tide though, and people using it to walk across to the island today are advised to check tide times first, incase they get stuck on the island for an extended period. An occurrence of some regularity it appears. That doesn’t help build confidence in the cognitive potential of people, I thought.

Just up the hill, in the heart of little white-walled Cramond village, are the remains of an extensive Roman fort and settlement. A reminder that the drive for conquest didn’t just disappear with the building of Hadrian’s Wall. Yet, no matter the desire for influence, wealth, and victory, the walls of the Roman fort have largely been eroded to vague lumps, swallowed into the rich, dark soil. This reflects how much I think about the Roman Empire. Something else that apparently makes me an anomaly. The robust wartime concrete also gets covered, by the high tide, gradually whittling it away, crumbling the hardcore and rusting the rebar. In the end all the grand ambitions have the same conclusion: to fade from sight and memory. It’s as though this collection of open air relics are Nestor offering advice and counsel, ready to influence what they cannot partake in anymore.

As I walked the broad path, pausing to make notes and photograph the goings on around me, the world began to awaken. The high jittering call of oyster catchers joined the songbirds and jackdaws. The occasional runner now dodging early dog walkers, wrapped like woollen Christmas stockings. After all the damp cold of Scottish winters bites to the bone, making you wish your marrow could shiver. Many of the dog walkers were older, some quite elderly, is there something about getting older and getting up earlier? I wondered to myself. I considered the lament of Agamemnon in the Illiad, remarking on the fading virtues of Nestor, at a time when the once great warrior would have been useful to his cause. It strikes me now that this has something of a second message, other than the fragility of life aspect. A message of how we often value people in terms of what we can get from them. When Agamemnon says:

“I wish that your body had stayed as strong

as the heart in your breast;

but old age lies heavy upon you.

If only this frailty had happened to someone else

and you remained at the height of your youthful vigour!”

He isn’t lamenting a loss that has affected Nestor, but rather what Agamemnon has lost that he could have utilised to wage his war. This is a reflection of selfishness, the dehumanising side of ambition. Especially the ambition of those who will, themselves, end in the same fashion as everyone else no matter what they do. The futility of fighting the inevitable. Attempting to defeat entropy through a vague concept of glory. An attitude that is all too common and yet when turned towards the ball of rock we inhabit becomes even more absurd. We cannot live without our home, there is nowhere else to go, no matter what some billionaires think. Our actions are fleeting moments to the planet, but to us those dalliances can be life threatening, existential threats to our and other species. Yet all around me I see something that brings… hope.

I’d made it up to the kirk and was stood surrounded by graves. I know, you’re now wondering where the hell the hope is, trust me I’m getting there. My thoughts of tragic history, of ambition and superiority, could have taken me to pay attention to the war memorial, its commemorative message now barely visible from the path. Yet what truly caught my attention were the much more numerous, far more modest, graves and memorials. Generations of families stretching over decades, in some cases centuries, marked in stone. Stories, faded and all but forgotten. People who had lived lives that had mattered, not because of any grand imposition they had foisted on others, but because they mattered to each other. After a brief moment in the peace of the kirk-yard, taking in the stone memories of those who were loved, I walked back down to the waterfront. 

The numbers of people partaking in an early morning walk had increased. My attention began to shift away from the history, nature and environment around me. I took my position on the masthead of singledom and observed the people going about their lives. What had been individuals and small groups increasingly became young families with toddlers and dogs, friends and neighbours, a community. The laughter of children clamoured in time with the oyster catcher’s trills. People told stories and joked, met and embraced, tied children’s shoelaces, helped someone elderly up from their seat. In amongst the fading histories of madness and triumphal ambition, people were sharing in joy. How lost those ambitious men of violence must feel, I wondered, To not realise that what really matters is so simple and easy to find.

The causeway had morphed into a unique experience and handy method of reaching a picnic spot. The Roman ruins were a school work discussion between parent and child, amorphous academic interest and imagined. “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there,” as L. P. Hartley says in The Go-Between. A book as much about the interactions of desire and social expectation as it is how people are the architects of their own destruction. A book about human life. Human life that I found myself surrounded by.

All around me people were getting on with their lives. Then I noticed one person, like me, a little out of place. Steadily and deliberately shuffling across the drifting sands was a metal-detectorist on the hunt for lost trinkets. They were out there, alone, bundled up in a multitude of layers, thick wool beanie hat and bulky headphones to hear the metal detector call. Then it struck me, we were more similar than at first appeared. We were both on the hunt for the discarded knick-knacks of humanity. Theirs were the objects of those foreign past-dwellers, mine were the moments and interactions of present lives lived. Perhaps we had similar motivations too. Did the detectorist also seek a sense of understanding? Insight to the maelstrom of human life and experience? Perhaps, or maybe they just liked finding shiny things. Then I had to consider, did I just like finding shiny things?

Deciding I was perhaps getting a little too esoteric, so was probably hungry, I headed to the little Cramond Bistro. I had intended to go to the Cramond Inn for excellent hand raised pie and chips, but my bank balance couldn’t manage that. It was another three days before payday and I was scraping the barrel after Christmas, winter fuel costs and the masters degree I’ve increasingly begun to resent undertaking. Architect of my own destruction indeed. Thankfully the Cramond Bistro is a delightful little spot with some interesting food options. Personally I chose a bagel with Cumberland sausage, cream cheese, and maple syrup. You can take the boy out of Lancashire but you can’t take Lancashire out of the boy, I thought. Not that Cumberland sausage is from Lancashire, it’s from Cumbria of course, but it’s always been pretty ubiquitous in Lancashire and the two counties are tied to each other culturally and geographically. Plus we used to have it when we visited my aunt and uncle in Ravenglass for Sunday Lunch.

I found myself a perch with a view over the Scottish Sea. It had to be a standing perch due to the soaking conditions of all the benches. The rain had evidently been relentless over night and the grey, damp, or as the Scots say, dreich conditions weren’t helping. Although they somehow provided this shoreline with a mist filter, soft-focus, golden age of cinema beauty. Standing there watching the waves lapping at the sand, golden morning sun spotlighting Cramond Island, I ate my bagel and dank my coffee. A quiet clatter at my feet interrupted by wistful thoughts. I looked down to see a diminutive Boykin Spaniel staring patiently at the stick she’d dropped there. After failing to explain to the pup that I was not their hominid, I picked up the stick and her excited reaction brought a smile to my face. After all, what was the harm. I threw the stick, the dog caught it mid-air and returned to where I stood. Perhaps I should get a dog, I thought, might help with the walking resolution.