Churches

Although I'm a bit of a heathen who's more inclined to worship trees than pay homage to a superior being, I do love old churches. Edinburgh is full of churches from the 18th and 19th centuries, many of which have intimate little graveyards attached. Now that there are fewer stern Calvinists to fill the pews, more and more churches have been sold or leased and converted to a variety of secular uses.

Oddly, more than a few are doing business as casinos, which is beyond irony. There's a beautiful specimen tucked into a corner in Shandwick Place, still blackened with soot from the Auld Reekie days. Its excess of decoration suggests it was built during Queen Victoria's reign, with ornate carving in every crevice and a lovely arched doorway, now spoiled by signs enticing people in to squander their money on fruit machines. Another Victorian next to the Playhouse Theatre at the top of Leith Walk has had its big heavy doors replaced with plate glass ones, which look absurdly out of place encased by heavily carved stone arches. I don't know what its current role is, or what kind of horrors have happened to its interior. Up the road a bit is another one, now used as a mosque.

Two churches at the west end are still used as churches though and I've mentioned one of them - St. Cuthbert's - before. I often walk through the beautiful old graveyard en route to Princes Street Gardens. Next to St. Cuthbert's, on the corner of Princes Street and Lothian Road, is what was once St. John the Episcopal but is now St. John the Evangelist, although its sign indicates it's still an Episcopalian church. I don't know what the difference is. For me, the word evangelist always conjures up Tammy Faye Bakker with her straw hair and 85 coats of mascara but I haven't seen her loitering in the vicinity.

I haven't been inside either church, although St. John's has a sign outside welcoming people in to look around and, one of these days, I will. While waiting for my bus home during the dark nights in December, the lovely stained glass windows were lit from within and I could feast my eyes on the gorgeous colours of those on my left and the castle lit up on its rock in front of me.

In the bowels of St. John's are a row of little shops selling tasteful gifts (from third world countries) and spiritual books. In one of these spaces is a coffee shop where I go sometimes if it's raining at lunch time, to read my book and have a cup of tea and a scone. Its ceilings are low and arched, built with bricks, and not much light comes in so it's always a bit gloomy. The tables and chairs are mismatched; the chairs not very comfortable, tables covered with grubby tablecloths. It tried to be a vegetarian restaurant for a while but the food was so weird, it just never caught on and the sign outside now announces new management. Nothing much seems different though, except they now sell sandwiches with meat in them.

The clientele seem much the same as before - an odd assortment of elderly women, middle-aged-to-elderly men wearing threadbare tweed jackets and polished brogues, and glasses with gigantic lenses. What is it with old men and the glasses taking up half the real estate on their face? Sometimes there are thirty-something mothers with babies or toddlers, having earnest conversations with a friend while spooning homemade baby food into the child. And there's me, of course - chunky middle-aged Jacko with crazy-madwoman spiked hair. Stylish glasses though.

I don't know why I keep going there really. The tea and coffee are rubbish and overpriced and I once foolishly risked having lunch there, which shattered any expectations I might have had of decent food. For £2.75, I got a shallow bowl of thin beige gruel trying to pass itself off as mushroom soup, accompanied by an allegedly homemade roll, the dough flecked with black specks. Chopped herbs? Charred paper? Insect bits? I ate it anyway. Their scones, on the other hand, are perfect. They're clearly freshly made (nothing worse than a scone more than a few hours out of the oven), with a dense cakey interior and a perfect crustiness on the outside. It seems blasphemous to have to eat them with the erzatz, fruit-free jam that comes in little plastic things. Cold, firm unsalted butter with my own homemade peach or strawberry jam would push them over the edge from delectable to sublime.

It's this kind of talk that made me chunky.

Miscellany

1. You may have noticed little Google ads at the top of the page. This is because I signed up for Adsense, which means something relating to the content of my post will be advertised. Every click on an ad earns me a few cents, although I don't get a sniff of it until it reaches $100. It was something I thought worth trying in case anything becomes of it.

2. I'm always open to suggestions for content and have had some feedback by e-mail or in person about what people would like to read about. A recent request is for more stories about my family, my younger years in Edinburgh and what it was like to emigrate to Canada as an 18-year-old. I find my memory is triggered a lot these days by my surroundings, so you can expect to hear about some of the adventures I had when I lived here before.

3. Although not many people are leaving comments on this blog (it's not a very interactive blog really), I do love to hear from people by e-mail and really appreciate those of you who have written to tell me what you like and why. One of my new Scottish friends has even nominated this blog for an award in a local newspaper. Because of the positive comments I've received about my writing, I've now got the confidence to do what I've been talking about for years and submit some material for publication, starting with some local magazines. So thanks to all of you for your encouragement and for being interested enough in this to actually be impatient for the next instalment!

The Subject of Work

In researching the feasibility of a return to Edinburgh, I was heavily influenced by the number and variety of jobs of the sort I'm interested in. With 20 years as a legal secretary and paralegal specializing in family law, personal injury and medical negligence, I had a lot of experience working with people who were unhappy and stressed. This led me to work in British Columbia's welfare system, where the unhappiness and stress levels of the clients greatly surpassed anything I'd encountered before. The daily verbal abuse was something I had to get used to pretty quickly and learn not to take personally. My job was to interview applicants for welfare to assess their eligibility and also to manage a huge caseload of people already on the system and try to help them financially and emotionally.

The job was crisis-driven, relentlessly busy and emotionally draining, and I'd leave the office most nights feeling like a wrung-out floor cloth. But I adored it and felt I'd been born to do this sort of work. It had all the elements I needed for job satisfaction: helping people sort out their lives (ie bossing them about) and succeeding with a handful, learning something new every day, working with mostly like-minded people, autonomy, working all the time with complex legislation and policy, enough of a balance between unpredictability and routine. And the stories I and my co-workers collected from our dealings with all sorts of people were priceless - there was never a dull moment. I actually looked forward to going to work.

After just four years, though, the daily grind of dealing with emergencies, listening to horrifying, tragic stories and a growing indifference to the abuse and violence in the office by many of the clients, I burned out and began to lose my compassion. I moved to another department to investigate welfare fraud and spent nearly six years trying to take back the money I'd prevously handed out. I was never passionate about this job and, most of the time, didn't actually like it much. It wasn't in me to penalize people and I never felt I was much good at it - it just wasn't the right fit for me. Fortunately, I worked with a wonderful group of people, which alleviated some of my discontent and left me with a number of friends I hope to keep.

This decade of working with a segment of society that most of us try to avoid left me with a soft spot for drug addicts, alcoholics, prostitutes and homeless people. It also provided me with excellent skills in dealing with a range of people in all kinds of different situations. When my research of job opportunities in Scotland yielded information indicating a seriously strong social services network, I was hopeful about the possibility of finding work similar to my early days as a welfare worker. Recent legislation imposing a mandate for Scottish municipalities to provide adequate housing for all residents seemed promising in relation to my interest in working with homeless people and, after copious research, I decided I'd like to work as a housing officer.

About two weeks after my arrival here, I interviewed for and was offered a job as a housing officer with the City of Edinburgh Council. I was delighted, even though the job had nothing to do with homeless people. It wasn't the "helping" job I'd had in mind and I'd be dealing mostly with hostile people, but thought this could lead to something more to my liking. I was to manage a caseload of 150 people with rent arrears, pursuing repayment and taking them to court if necessary. The job was in one of Edinburgh's less savoury areas - a group of neighbourhoods with a total population of 4,500, consisting entirely of housing schemes thrown up in a hurry by the Council in the 1950's and 60's to rehouse people displaced by demolition of old town tenements. A sort of slum clearance, if you like, which begat a different kind of slum after several years. Anyway, I ended up turning down the offer because they were going to start me at the bottom of the pay grid, which wasn't enough for me to live on.

So here I am, five months later, still looking for the job that's right for me. I've spent an average of 8 - 10 hours a week, every week (except between Christmas and New Year) slogging through thousands of jobs on various websites and in newspapers, sending off my CV or filling out online application forms. I've spoken to employers at recruitment fairs, registered with 15 or 20 agencies, sent letters and CV's to targeted employers on spec, and have lost count of the jobs applied and interviewed for. Most of the interviews were favourable but sometimes the job wasn't as interesting as its description, many of them didn't pay enough (Edinburgh's cost of living is very high) and sometimes I simply didn't get the job.

I decided early on to also pursue Plan B, which was to temp as a legal secretary. Visits to agencies a year before I moved here had led me to believe this would be no problem. My CV was forwarded to a variety of law firms, trying to sell me as a paralegal or secretary. No takers. Almost all the firms declined to meet me because I have no Scots law experience. The only interview I did get was for a litigation secretary and, after about 20 minutes, the lawyer interviewing me said I was over-qualified and he didn't think I'd stay with the job.

It was coming up to Christmas so I decided to apply for seasonal work with the post office and Marks & Spencer. Eight weeks after my arrival, I got my first offer - 4 hours taking minutes at a market research group meeting. A couple of days after that, I took a one-week position as a receptionist in a law firm for not very much money. After two days, I was asked to step into a PA position for one of the partners to cover a 7-week leave, with a substantial pay raise. Relief!

And that's how I ended up working at one of Edinburgh's top four law firms for over three months, half of it in corporate finance and the other half in property - two areas in which I had absolutely no experience. The work itself was pretty dreadful but I loved the firm and the people I was working with. I finished on Friday and start a temp job at another firm on Monday doing litigation and family law, but I'm sad to leave the firm and the friends I've made there.

Next time, I'll make up for this dreary post and entertain you with snippets about all my new friends at Firm #1, but will mention no names. Hint: you guys thought my swearing was legendary; I'll introduce you to someone whose use of colourful language puts mine to shame. You'll meet the duet who break into song while hammering away at their computers to meet a deadline, and the rosy-cheeked, fresh-faced child lawyers burning the candle at both ends and still finding time to go to the pub.

Stay tuned.

More on the Demon Drink...

No - not me this time.

If you're squeamish about talk of vomit, you may want to give this post a miss.

Scotland and Ireland have long been synonymous with drinking alcohol in excess and it's certainly something I was very familiar with growing up here. If you search "binge drinking Scotland" on Google, you'll come up with ten pages of related information, which is quite shocking. It's not entirely fair though because it's going on elsewhere too. I read an article in the Globe and Mail a while ago about the problems caused by young women binge drinking in Birmingham (England, not Alabama).

Before I left Scotland for Canada in 1972, most of the pubs I was surrounded by catered to working class people. Pubs in Scotland were open Monday to Saturday between the hours of 11:00 am and 3:00 pm for the lunchtime crowd, then reopened at 5:00 for the after work business, closing for the night at 10:00. They were closed on Sunday, but you could go to a hotel bar for a drink as these were allowed to stay open. There was no legal requirement to serve drinks only when accompanied by food, as there was in Canada at that time.

The Scottish working class society in which I grew up was largely hard-working, with little money or time for having fun. For teenagers and adults, Friday and Saturday nights out were inviolable and very few people stayed at home on those nights. I babysat from the age of twelve for my sister and for my cousin so they could have their nights out. Traditionally, married women had a girls' night out on Friday nights and their husbands went out with the boys. On Saturdays, married couples went out together. I may be mistaken, but I believe these nights out invariably involved drinking. The people involved may have gone to see a film, or gone for a meal, placed a few bets at the track (greyhound racing) or gone to the dancing, but there was usually drink involved at some point. There was drinking Monday to Thursday too, of course, but I think a lot of this was limited to a man having a pint with his pals after work before going home for his evening meal, the preparation of which didn't leave any time or opportunity for his wife to go to the pub.

In my teens, walking home with my pals, it was a common sight to see people - mostly men, but occasionally women - staggering out of pubs, shouting, arguing and sometimes fighting. And there was a lot of vomiting. You always had to watch where you stepped, although most people tried to make it to the gutter. There was a pub on the corner of Great Junction Street and Bangor Road that I used to have to pass by often, coming home from a friend's house or the cinema. A few minutes after ten o'clock, the doors would open and out spilled dozens of men. They'd congregate on the pavement in small groups to carry on conversations started inside. One night, I was approaching the pub just as a man hurled himself through the door, grabbing the lamp post to steady himself and projectile vomiting into the road (and whatever traffic was unfortunate enough to be passing by at the time). It was all done in one smooth, fluid movement and I had to stop, spellbound. Three or four pints of Tennents lager arced across Great Junction Street as gracefully as the dancing waters of the fountain in Princes Street Gardens. Billy Connolly, that great Scottish comedian, wondered why there are always diced carrots in vomit and thought there was a wee man with pocketsful of them, distributing them where needed.

Another scene I remember vividly was a vicious fight outside a pub in the High Street, on the Royal Mile, where all the tourists go. Even if a pub's in a touristy area, it's still someone's local and there's still a crowd of drinkers who all kinow each other. This one night, just after ten o'clock again, the men surged through the pub doors onto the brightly lit street amid shouting and swearing and jostling. Then I saw one man strike another in the face with a broken bottle and there was blood all over the pavement. I had crossed the road to get out of the way by this time and got the hell out of there. That was frightening.

It's my theory that binge drinking (remember I started out talking about binge drinking several paragraphs ago?!) started because people only had a few hours to get their bevvying done so they'd swallow as much as they could in a short period. It's anybody's guess whether their intention was to get as drunk as possible during that time. When I started drinking at the tender age of 13, my friends and I would buy Carlsberg Special because it was the fastest way to get drunk (whoever looked the oldest was the one buying the bottles; there was no ID in those days). I remember trying to get drunk before an expedition to Kirkcaldy (for an innocent game of bowling) arranged by the Leith Community Centre for us little guttersnipes. Two of my friends and I hid round the corner from the bus that was taking us, swilling Carlsberg (which tasted bloody putrid) and trying to get drunk in the few minutes before we had to take our seats. Feeling sick from the taste of it, we ditched the empty bottles and pretended to be drunk as we walked to the bus because we thought that made us look cool. What a pack of bloody eejits we were.

Who knows what my drinking habits might have been if I'd stayed in Scotland instead of emigrating? Apart from those times in my teens, I've never been much of a drinker and never liked the taste of alcohol (I still don't like the taste of beer). I get drunk easily too - half a glass of wine and I'm on the floor, anybody's friend. I do enjoy a glass of wine once in a while and recently discovered the pleasure of gin and tonic with lime but if I end up drunk (once every year or two), it's because I wasn't paying attention and not because getting drunk was the plan.

I've noticed that, when people here between the ages of 15 and 30 (and sometimes older) are talking about their social lives, many of them rate their enjoyment of a social event by how drunk they were. They'll talk about how drunk they plan to get before going out for the evening. I've made this observation based on conversations I've had with people myself and on conversations overheard on the bus, in the street, etc. One man told me he didn't feel he'd had a good time unless he got drunk enough to lose a few hours and said he frequently couldn't account for large blocks of time when he'd been out drinking. Although he touched briefly on the disquieting aspect of losing hours of your waking life to inebriation, his overall opinion was that these blackouts were a way to measure how much fun he'd had, even if he had no recollection of what he'd been doing. I see the evidence splashed on the pavements every morning on the way to work of how much fun people were having the night before.

I've heard people speak with pride of their outrageous behaviour while drunk, try to outdo each other's stories of hangovers, and dismiss any physical damage they might be doing to themselves. I've done it myself in this very blog (see January 1). I know why people enjoy being intoxicated because I enjoy it myself. I'd probably enjoy it more often if it didn't scare the hell out of me because of family history. But because I like to be in control (of myself and others), I also don't feel comfortable in a mind-altered state. I think that's what makes me start reaching for water instead of wine at a certain point in my drinking. And maybe I just don't trust myself.

What really puzzles me though - and I've said this before - is why people go out with the specific intention of getting as hammered as they possibly can when they know how ill they'll be the next day. I heard a young girl at the bus stop last Monday morning telling someone how proud she was that she'd stayed in on Saturday night, that it was the first Saturday night in six months that she hadn't been drunk, and how good she felt on Sunday. During the 5-minute wait for the bus, she commented in incredulous tones on both phenomena (staying in Saturday and not being ill on Sunday) three times. (Incidentally, she's one of the young women described in my cold weather post - with the heavy stage-like tan makeup, the bare blue belly spilling over the low-rise jeans and not enough clothes to cope with cold temperatures).

It seems appropriate, as I bring this to a close, that the song just now selected randomly by my music software is The Proclaimers "It's Saturday Night", a song about being drunk - "the drink that I had three hours ago has been joined by fourteen others in a steady flow" - and scratching cars with a key. Another line is "...if it doesn't leave my stomach, it will split my head."

I couldn't have planned better accompanying music for my penultimate paragraph. Too bad I can't include it here as a soundtrack!

Cold Weather II

This past week has been bitterly cold at times and there was even snow one morning. Just a little bit, but it made the castle look like it had been sprinkled with sugar. A lovely sight, but short-lived once the sun came out and melted everything.

Even though it's so cold, there are some signs of spring, with snowdrops and crocuses blooming and stiff daffodil shoots poking up through the hard ground around old trees in the central garden in Charlotte Square. The snowdrops are such a clean contrast to the weary-looking overwintered shrubs and leftover plant debris. During a lunchtime walk in the Dean Cemetery (I do love a nice bit of cemetery once in a while), I was captivated by the number of graves with clumps of snowdrops around them. Beautiful little vignettes of emerald green grass, grey and weathered stones wearing green and orange lichens, and the pure white snowdrops with their little bent heads on thin green stems. Lovely.

On the last Thursday of the month (Thursdays are late night shopping on Princes Street), there's a farmers market on Castle Street where the vendors produce the food they sell. Occasionally, there's a European street market set up for a couple of days and it was there last night and tonight. Vendors are from other EU countries and most of them are selling food so a person can buy French artisanal cheeses, breads from Poland and France, cured meats from Germany, olives, takeaway Greek food and Greek pastries, among other things. There's a Swiss guy who sells a hot potato, onion and cheese dish that he stirs constantly in a massive shallow pan, about 4 feet across. I haven't succumbed to the temptation yet (it smells delicious). I have given into meltingly fabulous croissants from the French bakery stall though. There were small shrubs and flowering plants for sale last night too -primroses, azaleas, tiny cyclamen and tempting baskets stuffed with crocuses about to flower. I wanted it all but have nowhere to put any of it, so that saved me a week's pay.

Walking to the bus stop along Princes Street after work tonight, it was bloody freezing and there was a bit of sleet falling. The town is heaving with Welsh people, here for the Wales v. Scotland rugby, and their lovely lilting accents were floating all around me as I walked. Several of them sacrificed the comfort of a warm coat to show off their national pride, mostly shirts bearing the Welsh symbol of a red lion on a yellow background (their national flag) and/or "Cymru" which is Welsh for Wales (I think). A quartet of young women took the prize for best costume though - yellow t-shirts identifying them as "mad taffs" (the Welsh are called "Taffy" - I don't know why and don't know if this is derogatory or not) and wearing replicas of the Welsh national dress, including aprons and black stovepipe hats. They must have been freezing. My sources tell me the Welsh invasion is as much about having fun in Edinburgh as it is about the rugby. I suspect the crowds I saw after work were heading to the pubs to warm up with a few drinks, so the streets will probably be alive with those lovely accents later on tonight.