Spring watch in Scotland:
That was the week that was
By HARRY McGRATH
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PHOTO: Graeme Murdoch
HARRY McGRATH with some of the local pool sharks at the Happy Valley Hotel Bar in Blackburn, Scotland.
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It's a sizzling 14 degrees. Spring has come to Edinburgh. Near the top of Arthur's Seat I am jackknifing into the wind when a fellow hiker billows past me on his way down. "The weekend's gonnae be roasting" he yells as we intersect for a nanosecond.
Being roasted seems a remote possibility as, like a wise Scottish sheep, I search for a declivity to shelter from the gale and meditate on the week that was. It doesn't feel much like spring in my hole in the hill but, nevertheless, things that have been bursting out all over - some of them bloomin' marvellous and some bloomin' ridiculous.
The week begins in Aberdeen where the boys from Cultural Connect Scotland (i.e. photographer Graeme Murdoch and me) appear at the Word literary festival as part of the endless quest to link towns in Scotland and their same-name equivalents in Canada.
We host a photography exhibition in Kings College at Aberdeen University and speak to a packed room at a "sold out free event" which, we conclude, must be an ancient Aberdonian concept we were previously unacquainted with.
There are 30 Aberdeens around the world and we had already been contacted by a local man called Frederick Bull who travelled 96,000 miles to visit all of them. We show a photograph taken by him in Aberdeen, Saskatchewan.
The night before our event we chat to James Kelman, Scotland's only Booker Prize winner, and watch in amazement as one of the organizers of the literary festival mistakes him for a tourist.
She explains slowly that he won't have access to all the buildings that weekend because there is a writer's festival on. I try to imagine this happening to, say, Alice Munro at the Vancouver Writer's Festival, but can't.
Back in Edinburgh the big story is that Michael Martin, the Speaker of the House of Commons at Westminster, has resigned. He is the first speaker in over 300 years to be forced from office.
Martin is an early victim of The Daily Telegraph's drip feeding of MPs expense claims which put him in an untenable position - unable to control the house and implicated in the expenses issue himself.
While it is hard to sympathise with Martin's situation, which is largely self-inflicted, there are elements of his story that have gone unexplored in the press and they feel personal.
Martin has been the MP for a part of North Glasgow since 1979. That means he was there when three of my four grandparents were still alive and residing on the north side of the city in areas that abutted his constituency.
They lived in communities that were deprived but aspirational and these communities were heavily populated by Scots of Irish-Catholic descent.
In 2000 when Martin became the first Catholic Speaker since the Reformation, it felt like the ultimate expression of that aspiration.
And when a right wing journalist labelled him "Gorbals Mick" (even though the Gorbals is on the south side of Glasgow and Martin is from the west and represents the north of the city) it seemed to symbolise everything that had to be overcome in order for him to achieve high office.
Unfortunately, some of the communities in Martin's constituency (and around it) are even more deprived now than they were 30 years ago, and the aspirational element has all but disappeared.
It might be unfair to lay all of this at Martin's door, but his anticipated accession to the unelected House of Lords will remove him even further from the people who once took so much pride in his achievements.
Something has gone agley here. A Radio Scotland breakfast show broadcast from the Springburn Shopping Centre in Martin's constituency was interrupted by a group of rats which emerged next to the presenter. That says it all.
While Martin has the front page of most of the broadsheet newspapers, Susan Boyle is still hogging the tabloids and towards the end of the week we make our way back to the Happy Valley Hotel Bar in Blackburn where Susan sang karaoke.
Our mission is to show bar manager Jackie Russell last month's piece in The Celtic Connection called "In Defence of Susan Boyle."
While I am chatting to Jackie, Graeme slays the cream of the local players at the pool table and is granted instant-legend status.
Jackie is delighted with The Celtic Connection piece and wants to make it part of a bar-display on Susan's media coverage called "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" with The Celtic Connection as "The Good."
They are gearing up here for Susan's appearance in the semi-final of "Britain's Got Talent,", but Jackie and most of the others we talk to are increasingly worried about the media frenzy surrounding her and her ability to cope with it.
As I write this, the weekend is approaching and the sun is splitting the heavens just as my prophetic hiking friend said it would. It is still not "roasting" though there are few people around who are feeling the heat.
Michael Martin's resignation was followed by nine other Members of Parliament with many more anticipated.
Susan Boyle won her semi-final with a rendition of the song Memory from the musical Cats but yesterday made an unwelcome appearance on the front page of a British tabloid which claims she had "two four-letter outbursts in a day."
But as this is a spring watch, we should probably end with an observation on nature. Today the beaver was reintroduced to Scotland (not from Canada, alas, but from Norway). It is 400 years since the beaver disappeared from Auld Scotia which must be a comfort to any newly blackballed politician who is considering a comeback.
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