The girl is mined

[Hurray! This post now has all its images - four more added Tues 29 Sept!]

Ah, Edinburgh, home from home. My visits to Jon and Vina's flat on Findhorn Place are becoming closer together (I was last here when I came up in May to run the Edinburgh 10K, although that seems aeons ago). I parked my van on their front drive, skilfully arriving just as the parking restrictions expired for the weekend. The van managed to squeak in with a few inches on each side, and I put my awning up so that we all had somewhere to shelter from the rain as we went across the lawn. Because, of course, it was raining. Again.


It was lovely to see them again, and their two boys, Hugh and Seth. I've mentioned them before I think - Hugh wants to put me right in my claim that it was a visit to Doune Castle with me that got him into fencing, because he had a sword before. So there's that for the record. Hugh is very like Jon, I think, a calm person who thinks deep thoughts, whereas Seth is a break-dancing, mountain-biking ball of energy - in fact he's seldom the right way up. I think the photos of the two of them point up the difference quite nicely. Hugh is reading a book, and Seth isn't exactly busting moves, but he looks like he might any minute. I missed the eldest, Liberty, this time, because she's in her first year at Bristol University.

Vina has great skill in making a home - she will deny it, but she's a very good cook, and we had a lot of very nice meals while I was there. They have the sort of fridge that has things like olives, mushroom pate, and many kinds of cheese in it. They have lots of flavours of tea, always use a milk-jug, and keep their butter in a proper dish in the shape of a turkey. They also have classical music on a lot and have an electric pepper-grinder with a light in it. And they have a fab book collection - I nearly always discover a new poet while I'm in their bathroom (I ask them not to watch while I'm in the shower). I see their way of living as graceful and rather inspiring, and have learned a lot from them - not least to the importance of filling your house and life with things and experiences that make the heart glad, that don't necessarily cost the earth. Things like music, going for walks even though it's raining, fresh flowers, good books, proper cooking, and amusing china - all food for the soul. I bought them a pink and green decorated bowl at Crail Pottery and was pleased to see it fit in right away. And also gratified to see that they are still using the soup bowls that Robert and I bought them from Morocco in about 1988 (I seem to think everything happened in 1988, but it's there or thereabouts).



One of the first things we did was go with Hugh to see Jon's newly-built Department at Edinburgh University, the Informatics Building. It replaces an unsightly carpark in the middle of the University quarter, right next to the Students' Union building. It is tall and graceful and has a lot of white detail and glass, a Paolozzi sculpture in the foyer, fascinating spiral staircases, and lots of nice areas for getting together with colleagues and sitting on fashionable seating. As you'll observe from the photograph, I got quite severely stuck in one of the beanbags, which was amusing and not very Professorial. But I'm not being a Professor at the moment (Jon is, and looks like a proper one) as you'll observe from my style of dress. The building is a real achievement, for Jon personally as well as for the discipline, because Edinburgh is a world-class centre for informatics (artificial intelligence, computer science, philosophy, cognitive science, linguistics, robotics, computer vision...I am sure I have missed a few) and it now has a building to match both its reputation and its ambitions. When I was there (it were all trees...no) we were in the old tenement buildings along Buccleuch Place, with computer science a mile or so away in King's Buildings, and another lot (the robot people) in Forrest Road and AI in a building on South Bridge that burnt down a couple of years ago.

We were among the first people on the planet to have email (1984) which consisted of the ability to send text files to people who were on the ARPAnet, who were mainly in California, as well as to each other. And we amusingly, now, shared a single computer with the AI department, so people in two buildings were competing for its attention. My relationship with Robert may be one of the first romances to begin over email. And so that we could all get on the computer when we wanted to, Jo Calder wrote a little program that would pretend you were using a terminal even when you weren't to avoid losing it to AI. Lor, how we laughed as we huddled together in those draughty tenement offices warming our hands in front of a glowing green screen. You had to make your own amusement in those days. There is probably an entire (rather geeky) book about the days before t'interweb, where your idea of sophistication was sending three lines of ascii text to someone you probably didn't know at Stanford or Berkeley, just because you could. And there were even real coffee filter machines, because some of the academics (and a lot of them were Dutch, let's face it - logicians are nearly always Dutch) preferred it - this was the height of sophistication to me, who'd grown up in a linguistics department at Nottingham with a silver kettle on a frayed flex, a jar of Bird's Mellow, a stained mug if you could find one and no milk. But I digress.

(Sorry, distracted for a moment there - Bonnie is running violently in her sleep, and apparently chewing on an imaginary something. I think it is Toffee, a pet rabbit we met today in a run in somebody's garden. In yer dreams, Bon. Toffee is all tucked up warm in his hutch, and not chewed at all.)

Anywayup, it was shortly after the Informatics visit that I realised I had left my washing in the dryer at Yellowcraigs, about 40 mins up the coast. Vina was very sensible about this and proposed a visit immediately, to go for a walk and retrieve the laundry. They go there quite a lot anyway, so we all piled into the car and (after finding the washing neatly folded by some kind camper, and all dry) did the walk from Yellowcraig to North Berwick again. In North Berwick we went to visit Jon's brother Eric and his wife Rosie, who gave us a very nice cup of tea in a lovely flat that is all corners, occupying the whole top floor of a stately house, with views from every side of the town and the sea. And Eric is very funny - I note particularly his suggestion for the Scottish version of YouTube, which is called (this is the nearest I can get to the pronunciation) 'Yeh choob, ye' (calling someone a 'tube' is a bit like calling them a 'muppet' in English).



On the way there and back Seth golfed all the way along the beach, and Vina did a bit, too - I have some lovely pictures. A particularly nice one of J and V which they say is the best they've had for ages.


And then I found something. A round thing that looked vaguely familiar. I called the others over and they thought it might be something off a yacht, but something in my head was telling me it was a landmine. I showed it to Hugh on the camera when I got home and he thought that it was probably a float of some kind, but even so I went on the Maritime and Coastguard Agency's website (which is TERRIBLE by the way - someone ring them up and offer them a new one - Stewart? Martin C? Iain?) and sent them an email, with attached photo, and the subject line 'Is this a landmine?'

They rang back two days later and left a message for me to call them, so I did. The Coastguard sounded excited. They hadn't thought much of it either but had sent it off to the Navy Bomb Disposal just in case, and they got back and said yes, it's an anti-tank mine but only a practice one, because it was blue not green. Which means tanks go over it and a fuse goes off and lots of smoke comes out - it won't kill anyone but it might go off if you stand on it (which I didn't, but you'll see from the pawmark that Bonnie nearly did). The guy told me on the phone that the Bomb Disposal had already been out and 'marked it' (presumably they also took it away, eventually) but I was so pleased with myself I can't tell you. And then I realised that I had more or less been thinking, 'Oh great, it IS potentially dangerous to the general public!'. (I told Lesley in Lossiemouth this story and she told me that their house had once been owned by a fisherman who had caught a bomb in his net, brought it home, and put it under the stairs, where it ended up bricked in until Lesley and Luke decided to open up the area for a cupboard. The Bomb Disposal had to come to their house, too, as well as evacuating the neighbours. When they told the previous owner, she said, 'Oh, you found that, did you?')

I told the guy I'd recognised my landmine because I'd just watched 'Ice Cold in Alex', where they have to cross a minefield in Egypt in an army ambulance. And they were doing that in black and white, so it must have been so much harder to spot the mines. Anyway, I'm pleased to have shared a moment with the coastguard, because he agreed it was a jolly good film. It's worth looking at 'beach ordnance' or 'ammunition dump UK' on Google, by the way - there is apparently around 2m tons of old ordnance in the sea, a lot of it between the UK and Ireland, and according to some it's all getting a bit tired and dodgy and liable to go off (some of it's from WW1). What you can do with this knowledge I've no idea. Except keep an eye on the beaches after bad weather -- good luck with finding a working email address for the Coastguard from their website (or you could ring 999, but I thought that was a bit over the top. If the thing looks like any kind of missile, though, perhaps you should).


Unexploded ordnance aside, while I was in Edinburgh, too, Vina kindly offered to invite some people over so that I could see them - and so Claire, Marc, and daughter Catrin came for lunch (we were even able to sit on the lawn). It was great to see them. I used to share an office with Marc, who is very smart and funny in a dry way, and Belgian (I remember he once told me that English and German were both dialects of Dutch, which is one way of looking at it). I have some examples from him in my PhD thesis - I remember buying a new holepunch for myself and showing it to him - and he said 'But it was a STAPler I wanted', Which was amusing, but also told me a lot about information structure.* Then later on, when Claire came to Edinburgh, I shared an office with her for at least two years, and we became great friends. She even still has a plant pot in her office which I brought with me from home in 1984 - a big plastic pot that Annie had used as a bin. I know because it says 'A Delin Wastebin' on the side in green dymo tape. It's good to know that Claire is still watering the plant. Because she is a long-standing member of the Department she tends to end up with the plants of everyone who is going back to where they came from (Stanford or The Netherlands, usually, to wreak logic upon the whiteboards of other continents). I had five goldfish, but I took them with me when I left.

Last time I saw Catrin (here we go again, old Auntie stories) she was about four. She loved Bonnie - and rushed back up the beach at Portobello to tell us that Bonnie had smiled at her. She's now grown up. I am now doing a good impression of the embarrassing whiskery old aunt who smells of fags and old dog, and insists on kissing you even when you haven't a scooby** who she is. But when I grow old I shall wear purple, and it will be worse. So brace yourselves, kids. I will be kissing not just you, but your children, before long. Actually, I must say that Seth poked me in the arm while I was staying with Jon and Vina, and I take that to be a sign of affection. Thanks Seth. Poke. I know Hugh likes me because I make him laugh in spite of himself. He will deny this.




On my last day I went shopping at all the nice shops and made Jon and Vina a big lasagne for my last evening with them, bought three bottles of wine, made a fruit salad with some strawberries and that really sweet little yellow mango in it, and then snuck off the next morning after they'd gone to work. I then went up Arthur's Seat the steep way and admired the view, and decided not to leave Edinburgh right away, because I'm still stuck on the idea of getting a flat there, sooner or later, and I wanted to do some viewings. So I moved down to the campsite at Silverknowes for two nights and went in and out of the city on the (clean, cheap, regular) bus.

I also had some work to do. I'd managed to do a bit at Jon and Vina's but with them to talk to each evening I didn't persevere, so I set myself up a very nice workplace in the van at the campsite (I even got the table out) and had a thoroughly nice day. I really enjoyed the work. And thought, this is just about ideal - I can work with the dog for company, the kettle an arm's length away, and I can do little bits of tidying and go for a walk along the coast whenever I feel like it. It was great. Isn't technology wonderful. Happy client, happy dog, happy me.


* I once got a research grant for two years on the basis of something a European student said to me in Sussex. My office was next door to the admin office, and they were out, and this student wanted to hand her essay in. She poked her head round my door and said, 'Have you got any of that liquid that erases THINGS?' I thought, if I had, I'd be rich by now. Cue government-funded research project on pitch accent placement. Question: why doesn't that sentence work? Why should it be 'erASes things'?
** Scooby Doo = Clue. Is this Scottish rhyming slang, or is it English as well?