NOTES FROM MUD ISLAND PART 16

22nd September

Okay so I’m a tad obsessed over the definition of a castle but it isn’t that Jimmy’s wrong or the Blair Atholl Estate or Trust or whatever the fuck it’s called has it inaccurately – it’s just that my own boyhood visions of castles always involved roughly hewn stone, jagged battlements, moats, drawbridges, portcullises and a generous complement of soldiers to man the thing – preferably clad in armour or at least chainmail.
Blair Atholl or Blair Castle conjured up none of these childhood perceptions therefore it had to be wrong. Although Oxford Concisely – it isn’t wrong – it’s just – ah fuck it!
The following day we were embarking on a day trip and I harboured this secret hope that Karen would be a lot more impressed with Edinburgh’s famous castle than she had been by the mishmash of furnishings, displays and accoutrements of my own ancestral seat.
But first we were to route our trip via Rosslyn Chapel, originally highlighted as a place of interest in an esoteric sense by the writers Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh through their alternative Jesus/Mary Magdalene book: Holy Blood, Holy Grail and which Karen and I had read in the 90’s.
I had visited the place back in ‘99 on my last trip to Scotland and at that time the chapel had still been covered by an external structure to help dry it out during a period of renovation lasting over a decade.
Holy Blood, Holy Grail had certainly raised the profile of the little chapel which had enjoyed an upswing in visitor numbers after its publication and subsequent worldwide success but nothing prepared the Rosslyn Chapel Trust for the madness that was to ensue when one Dan Brown picked up on the Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh hypothesis and wove the concept into a blockbuster of a book called – yup – that’s right – The da Vinci Code.
After the DVC, the village of Roslin and the chapel itself was never the same again, thousands upon thousands of people flocking there annually just to see what all the fuss was about and hoping against hope that the present Earl of Rosslyn had suddenly decided to excavate the floor and reveal the holy grail or the remains of Mary Magdalene or even Christ himself.
No such luck, the Earl being a staid and canny fellow and reportedly dead against (ooh sorry) disturbing the graves of many of his forebears who seemingly repose in crypts below the chapel floors.
But the stories, the mythologies, the mysticism, the dreams and fantasies of the public fuelled by Dan Brown’s fertile imagination (at least that’s what they’ll tell you) are just that – pure and utter fiction but they refuse to be quelled.
The Holy Blood, Holy Grail authors weren’t quite as admiring of Mr Brown’s fictions claiming that he had usurped their hypothesis, which was firmly anchored in truth through factually referenced sources and years of painstaking research. Dan said that he had simply taken their ideas and woven them into a novel but as their own work was claimed to be factual and his was mere fantasy, how on earth could he possibly be called a plagiarist? The matter went to court and the judge found in Brown’s favour.
Ah well, armed with all of this insight and knowledge served only to compound the complexity of what you see inside Rosslyn, for the chapel is so ornate and full of stone carvings that it would take you a couple of weeks to go through it properly and enjoy every detail. You could take lots of photographs, one might say, and study them at home later, right?
Well, once you could – in 1999 you could but since a litigious wanker of an American stumbled on the uneven flagstone floor while photographing some delightful carving then tumbled over hurting herself and instantly sued the Trust, the owners decided after legal counseling to ban all comers from taking photos inside the chapel. If you want the detail, then buy the picture DVD from the gift shop through which you are compulsorily channeled before you reach the exit. Of course you are – ask Banksy.
But cynicism aside for a moment and notwithstanding the myth associated with Rosslyn Chapel, standing inside the small supposedly Christian edifice, one cannot help but be moved by the dedication that went into its creation. The apprentice pillar, the master craftsman’s pillar, the geometry, the symmetry interposed with a seemingly deliberate imbalance and the legends behind why this is so all contribute to the energy that abounds in this place.
The St Clairs may dismiss the beliefs of those who would attribute more to their family church but there is mystery here for sure and no-one knows exactly why this place was built in the manner it was nor why it replicates a portion of Solomon’s Temple yet is filled with pagan iconography to its core.
My own take on it is simple – I believe Rosslyn was a monument to spirituality rather than to the prescribed religion of the day hence its arcane symbolism, its Templar lore and its enduring magnetism. Messrs Baigent, Lincoln, Leigh and Brown didn’t do its reputation any harm either but their contribution to Rosslyn’s mystique has conversely diluted one’s ability to soak up that mystique in any private way due to its massive popularity.
Karen, I believe, was entranced and disappointed simultaneously as I know she would have relished the idea of being alone within the carved walls for just fifteen minutes to engage with the place in her own unique way.
As it was, we left with mixed emotions only to be confronted by a 1911 vintage car in the small gravel carpark, which immediately deflected our mood and provided new focus both for cameras and admiration.
“Nineteen eleven,” I thought, “the year before the voyage of the Titanic. So that’s what cars looked like back then – wow!”
The guys who alighted from the machine looked decidedly windswept but happy and we chatted for a few minutes while Karen photographed the car (pics which I have to track down on her return from Cape Town and paste on my facebook profile).
And so – on to Edinburgh just a lick up the road with Gabby’s destination set for Edinburgh Castle and my heart beating in my chest just that little bit harder as it always seems to do when I visit this beautiful city. And maybe, if we had time, I could take Karen down to 60 Bath Street, Portobello where I spent the first ten years of my life.

This was Britain in the autumn – I thought it would be the perfect time on both hemispheres for a trip – Britain in autumn – not too cold, not too rainy and South Africa in spring - pushing into summer when we returned.
I remember thinking before we left SA (usually while sitting on the bog with a Mojo or Classic Rock magazine in my hands) how cool it would be to have all that musical talent around because we were bound to catch a gig either in England or Scotland – a little Sting perhaps, or maybe Portishead or Morcheeba or Paul Weller or Steve Harley or Bad Company – anyone actually. But fuck me if every single gig that was worth a wank wasn’t either in August or October onward. It was as if September didn’t exist for rock stars or they all went into detox for that month or something – absolutely stone to the wall fuck all – and I mean nothing!
So it was in Edinburgh for we were there the month after the Royal Military Tattoo which is held each year in August. The sum total of what we witnessed of the event was the dismantling of the massive seating scaffolding as we walked up the forecourt toward the portcullis. I say, dismantling but it was really a bunch of Jock “workers”, some idly leaning on brooms under the structure while one lethargic guy loosened steel struts and planks then slid them downhill to a team of three who even more lethargically piled them in a kind of a stack in readiness for some more contemplation tomorrow perhaps. All the while they did what all good construction workers do and took in the passing talent leeringly and with much more relish than anything occurring on the scaffolding.
But I run ahead of myself again.
Karen’s response to Edinburgh and her reaction to the castle were even more passionate than I had anticipated. She loved the place and was in awe of the castle even though I took pains to make no comparisons with Blair Castle (chortle). I didn’t need to. The castle seduced her, embraced her and titillated her far more than any lascivious construction worker (or Blair Castle) ever would.
We spent an idyllic couple of hours meandering the castle grounds, lunching at the castle café which enjoys a panoramic view of the city and where I got to crack a couple of jokes with an Afrikaans family who were dining at the other end of the room.
When I passed them by clad in my distinctive Springbok windcheater, the father of the family piped up: “Waar loop jy met so ‘n jas, meneer?” (“Where are you going wearing that jacket, sir?”)
I stopped, smiled and responded in English: “After our kak performance in the tri-nations, they were giving these away gratis at OR Tambo…”
They all laughed and I made my way to the khazi for a call of nature. On my return I passed the table again and made another little chirp, which had come to me while gazing at the porcelain tiles over the urinal a floor below the dining room.
“Y’know,” I began, “we are actually in the wrong place…”
Raised eyebrows all around.
“Ja,” I went on, “We saw all these signs saying CASTLE and we followed them thinking we were heading to the beer tent!”
More laughter and a wink or two and then I was back with Karen relating my interaction with the Seffricans before we continued on our rounds of the castle.
Gazing out over the Scott Monument to the magnificent backdrop of the city beyond is an awe inspiring sight for those who are used to the view; breathtaking for those, like myself, who’ve seen it more than once but have forgotten its majesty; and just indescribable for first-timers like Karen.
It isn’t that Edinburgh is more grand than London or has a more imposing natural setting than Cape Town or that it boasts an Eiffel Tower for it doesn’t perhaps match up in any of those departments but the pure beauty of its cityscape seems to be imbued with an energy that somehow infects the viewer to a degree that wows you. So it was for Karen too who confessed that she could easily live in this city and for the first time since arriving in the UK, I had to confess that I felt the same way. There’s just something about the place.
I felt just a little smug knowing that my wife loved my hometown as much as I’d hoped – perhaps even more than I’d hoped, in fact. When we’d walked the cobbles of Edinburgh Castle as much as we had a mind to, Karen suggested we head off to my boyhood home in Bath Street. I just grinned madly and said, okay.
Setting the address in Gabby showed us that we’d be there in around fifteen minutes, which I thought to be impossible – surely I had lived further from the city centre than fifteen minutes…? I mean, everything had been so far away back then. The swing park had been a walk from the house, Towerbank Primary further still and Joppa Rocks had been on the other side of the planet. Well, it had been a lick around the coastline hugging the Firth of Forth, a name Karen insisted was a drunk man ordering a measure of whisky or something which I suppose it does, in fact, sound a bit like.
And true to form, within twenty minutes we were driving down Bath Street, Gabby being unable to calculate in my poor interpretation of her directions at Portobello High Street which ran us around a little detour and then the snail’s pace down my old boyhood stomping ground taking me by surprise with its narrowness and then the single lane transition at the bottom end of Bath Street where I misjudged the oncoming traffic, got a little too close to the parked cars and clipped Sally’s passenger side wing mirror on one of them. Oops! But no damage done and after a swift three-point manoeuvre at the bottom of the road and an even more rapid parking move outside (what used to be) Cullen’s Pub now The Espy, we were safe from any nosy witnesses or the squillion cameras that dot the British landscape. More on those later.
End of this part