Taiko Connections

The other evening, Alette and I went to Queen's Hall to watch the Mugenkyo Taiko Drummers. It was a great performance, but also presented a number of interesting connections for me. As a performance, it was quite similar to Stomp, which we went to see in New York City a few years ago. Not that surprising I suppose, since both are percussion performances. Taiko drumming relies solely on, well, taiko drums (which, if you read the link, is redundant since 'taiko' actually means a Japanese drum). And if I remember correctly, Stomp relies on pretty much anything that makes noise (including a lot of garbage cans).

But there were other connections for me as well. Complementing the drumming was also some very good dance performance by Lale Sayoko. And Lale strongly reminded me of Inara, the "companion" from the tv series Firefly and movie Serenity. It might have been her variety of dresses, or perhaps a link with the oriental back-story in Firefly.

One of the taiko drummers, Teresa Brookes, strongly reminded me of Uma Thurman in her role as Beatrix Kiddo in Kill Bill. If you've seen the movie, don't worry, there was no sword play at the performance, only drumming. I think it was Teresa's stature and strength, and the way she carried herself on the stage. The blonde hair helped too.
On a final note, Queen's Hall serves up some good local beer from Williams Brothers Brewing. They serve from kegs, rather than casks, but I found it to be quite tasty. There's no real connection here. I just liked the beer.

Edinburgh, Where Christianity and Science are on Speaking Terms

Before I moved to Edinburgh, I heard the previous bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway, interviewed on CBC's Tapestry about reconciling science and Christianity, so I already had reason to suspect that organized religion might be organized a little differently over here. In October, Mike and I got a first hand glimpse at the warm relationship that appears to exist between at least some sectors of Christianity here and at least some sectors of science through the Gifford Lectures.

In 1885, Lord Gifford bequeathed money to Scotland's four original universities (Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Glasgow and St. Andrews) so that they could invite important, ground-breaking scientists and philosophers to come and talk about their work to the schools of divinity and to the public in general. I am paraphrasing and putting my own slant here. What Gifford actually left the money for was "natural theology", that is the idea that the work of God can as easily be seen in the findings of scientists as it can in "revealed religion". I'm not a theologian by any stretch of the imagination, so if you want to know more about natural theology you'll have to look elsewhere. In practice, the last will and testament of Lord Gifford appears to be interpreted in such a way as to lead to some of the most prominent scientists and philosophers in the world coming to talk in Edinburgh to interested listeners of all walks of life, who do not have to pay a penny to attend.

Some of the prominent figures who have been Gifford Lecturers include: Hannah Arendt, John Dewey (ditto), Paul Ricoeur, Noam Chomsky, Richard Dawkins, Werner Carl Heisenberg, Michael Polanyi and the list goes on. This year Michael Gazzaniga, a neuroscientist from California who made his name studying people with split brains was invited to give six talks in Edinburgh. I managed to get to all of them, Mike just missed one.

Gazzaniga gave a fascinating overview of what brain research tells us about who we are. He only had six hours to cram in a lot of interesting research, so it was just a taster, but a tantalizing one. A few tidbits I got out of it:

• The left-brain, right-brain thingee is a lot more complicated than pop culture allows for
• We are wired from birth to be ethical beings
• Brains fire differently in different cultures
• We can be trained at the neuron-firing level to stop recognizing some people as humans. That is to say, we can be trained out of Levinas' response-ability
• There is a part of the brain whose sole purpose is to tell stories about our experiences and our decisions, this part is associated with out sense of self and this part comes into play after decisions have been made

If I've said enough to intrigue you, you can watch all 6 lectures on the University of Edinburgh's YouTube channel.

Gazzaniga did not talk directly about religion, though he did touch on implications of this research on our ideas of free will and on the legal system. However, our neighbour (literally) the current bishop of Edinburgh, Brian Smith, attended all of the lectures (we even sat with him for one of them) and he led a discussion on the lectures after the last one was finished. Unfortunately, Mike and I had other engagements that evening.

Samhuinn in Edinburgh

Mike and I celebrated Samhuinn (pronounced Savane over here), the Celtic New Year's Eve, or Hallowe'en to modern folk, by going on a guided walk of Celtic Holyrood Park, followed by lunch at Scotland's oldest continually operating pub, The Sheep's Heid Inn, and then ghost stories at the Scottish Storytelling Centre in the evening. A good time was had by all.

Holyrood Park is a scheduled ancient monument and is managed by Historic Scotland. One of their rangers led a dozen of us on a walking tour of the park as a Celtic site. On the walk, we learned that there were several hill forts on the Holyrood hills during the Celtic era, the ditch and mounded wall of the enclosure are still clearly visible when you know where to look, as are cultivation terrarces. Apparently the local Celts spoke a variation on Welsh, rather than Irish and cultivated the land as well as raised cattle.

From the hilltops we walked down into the village of Duddingston, now fully absorbed into Edinburgh like Dean Village is. However, they still have their local pub, unlike Dean Village, which has good food and beer: The Sheep Heid Inn.

In the evening we went to the second last night of this year's Scottish International Storytelling Festival, which featured tellers from Canada, the US, Jamaica, New Zealand and Australia. Anne E. Stewart told a true to her mom's life ghost story from Australia. We heard an Iroquois story told by a Cherokee woman, Gayle Ross, about a vampire skeleton--surprisingly similar to European vampire lore. Amina Blackwood Meeks, the woman from Jamaica, told us the story of why donkeys sit down when there is a spirit nearby--it involved donkeys in bowties. We also got the tale of how fire came to the people from a Maori teller, Rangimoana Taylor. A Scottish teller, Grace Banks, told a witch tale, but I find I don't have the stomach to hear stories of burning witches, even when they are fairytales. Earlier in the week we had some classic Quebec stories about the devil from Isabelle Chartrand-Delorme and Melanie Cloutier which would have fit well with the Samhuinn mood as well.

We've been getting reports from Ottawa about numbers of children coming to doors for candy. We weren't home to find out if anyone came along our block here in Edinburgh, but we suspect not.

Happy Celtic New Year everyone.

Mel Bells is Closing

Those of you who came to visit over the summer will be as sad as we are over the news that our friendly, local organic grocery store is closing down next week. It looked exactly like a grocery store ought to look with lovely wooden shelves and a table in the middle covered in baskets of fresh produce. Unlike too many organic stores, this one was not vegetarian and we could nip in on our way home to buy chicken or lamb, or lovely merguese sausages.

Mel Bell's departure will leave a hole in our neighbourhood that will be difficult to fill.

Mel herself is off on another adventure: catering. So we wish her well.

Redecorating Glencairn

On October 1st, our original lease expired. In the lead-up to that date, Mike and I seriously considered moving out to North Berwick, a perfect little seaside village with a 30 minute commute to downtown Edinburgh. We looked at a number of holiday flats that owners let out cheaply over the winter months, but none of them had a landline let alone an internet connection, so we had to rule them out. We did find one place that was a regular rental, right across from the train station too, so it would have been convenient for commuting. It was in a relatively new building and had a landline already installed. We got all excited about the view of Bass Rock out the living room window and the huge kitchen with all the mod cons. Unfortunately, the landlord didn't return our calls for over a week and when she did she went back on the "fully-furnished" condition, so we had to turn it down. Fortunately, during that week long wait our current landlord offered us a new lease with a reduced rent, so we took it.

One of the things that I (AJW) got excited about with the North Berwick place, was that it wasn't decorated. You see our Glencairn flat came fully furnished including artworks. And while it was nice to have things on walls, the art is not what we would have chosen ourselves. So to compensate for the lack of a seaview, I made a few purchases of local art. Nothing fancy, nothing expensive, but something that we chose.

During the Festival Season in August there was a big craft fair in one of the old central graveyards. Unfortunately, I only managed to make it to the fair on the last day, but on that day I spied some funky, reasonably priced print-on-canvas art by local crafter and graphic designer, BoxArt. So I ordered a set of 5 8X8 canvases to go over our bed (pictured above). BTW, according to lease agreement we are not allowed to put any holes in the wall, so all the art purchased had to fit our landlord's previous hanging arrangements. The second purchase I made was a poster for an exhibition of bird prints by Alice Melvin at an Etsyesque shop called the Red Door Gallery on Victoria Street in the Old Town.

So now we have two rooms that look a little more like places where Alette and Mike dwell.

Storybikes Across Fife

This past summer, long-time storyteller and Edinburgh resident Andy Hunter started up an environmentally-friendly, narratively-informed, tourism business: Storybikes. His goal, to get people to slow down, get out in the fresh-air and re-learn how to see the world through stories.

At the moment, Andy runs tours in Fife and along Hadrian's Wall. Mike and I were busy all summer with visitors from Canada, so it wasn't until this past weekend that we were able to fit in some storied-cycling, joining Andy on a weekend trip around Fife. (He offers both week-long and weekend tours). The only other two people on this particular journey were a travel-journalist from the Guardian, Kevin Rushby, and his 6 and a half-year old daughter Maddy. Maddy rode behind her dad on a tag-a-long.

Public transit is fabulous over here and very accommodating of cyclists. On the local train routes, every second car seems to have a bicycle rack, so it was simple enough for Mike and I to get ourselves and our rented and borrowed bikes out to Kirkcaldy Saturday morning, where we met up with the rest of the group.

From the Kirkcaldy train station, Andy took us down to the banks of the Firth of Forth, to Ravenscraig Castle, where we had our first story, this one about the fair Rosabelle St. Clair. We followed the coastline for a wee while to Dysart, where monks used to retreat to their equivalent of the "desert". We had tea at a lovely little tearoom/info centre/community centre called the Harbour Master's House. From there we turned inland heading through Thornton and Glenrothes and then over to Vane Farm, one of the Royal Society for the Protection of Bird's nature reserves. We had lunch in the Vane Farm cafe, which overlooks Loch Leven and its marshes and meadows. There were several thousand pink-footed geese in temporary residence in the nature reserve. Every once in a while something would set them off and they would all take off squawking and wheel in a circle before settling down again.

After lunch we took a leisurely cycle around the Loch, stopping for stories about St. Serf and to watch the pirouettes of the local gliders. Not only is Loch Leven a destination for birds, it is also a destination for tourists, having two major historical sites: St. Serf's Inch, or Island, where he founded a priory; and Loch Leven Castle, one of the many places that Mary Queen of Scots was held prisoner, and one of the various places that she escaped from. As you can probably gather by now, this is a very storied landscape.

We spent the night in Kinross, which is a town that has definitely seen better days. You know you've hit on bad times when your beautiful old town hall is boarded up and on the market. We stayed in the Salutation Hotel right in downtown Kinross. The food was good and was served in a separate dining room, which was good since it was Karaoke night in the bar. We shared a few stories before taking our sore muscles to bed. The room was also fine, but the rowdy drunk and singing locals kept us up a bit later than we'd have liked. And the guy climbing the chain link fence onto the neighbouring roof, also kept us from falling asleep.

After a huge Scottish breakfast we set out away from Loch Leven up the Cleish Hills and then down to Dunfermline. At the top of the hills we had a small break to hear a traditional tale about a farmer outsmarting a highwayman and in Dunfermline there were tales of Saint Margaret. From Dunfermline, Mike and I caught the train back to Edinburgh. And that was our introduction to storybiking. I have to say that biking 40 miles in two days after not setting one's butt on a bike seat for at least 13 months, is not necessarily to be recommended : )

mtnoise do Scotland

For a whole other perspective on our Edinburgh life, we invite you to check out the travel blog of our friends Wayne and Trish, who made a stopover here in between London and Berlin on their great journey east to the Far East. We envy them the adventure they are on and we are grateful that Scotland made it onto their final itinerary and we had the chance to show them around.

See: Haggis Today, Haggis Tomorrow, Haggis Everyday
and Scottish Delights
not to mention their fab photos on picasa