In the past few months, my brother and I have shepherded his move from our family home of many years to a nursing home, which he seems to have adopted as his new home. But it`s been a weird and even occasionally funny struggle riding along when his episodic fading hold on reality takes him.
One day, for example, during an extended hospital stay, he told me during a visit that for several nights the previous week, the “Chinese cleaning people” were sneaking into his bathroom and washing out their underwear in his sink. He honestly believed this to be true and offered as evidence the fact that the sinkside bar of soap was reduced in size each morning. I’m not recounting this to ridicule Dad. Rather, his situation is what it is and that is just one example. We actually laughed about it when I fed the story back to him during a subsequent moment of lucidity. Suffice to say the place my brother and I have come to is “one day at a time”.
I am not – you will be happy to hear – going to turn this into a diary of dying. Instead, I plan to use Baby Duck as an occasional escape capsule, and that’s the ride you’re invited to join.
So let me begin with an apology to anyone who reads this blog and also drops in on my Facebook updates. If you’re one of the latter, then you already know Leslie and I returned not long ago from a trip to Scotland. I covered some of those details in my Facebook photo captions of the 20 or so pictures I uploaded there, but our Scotland trip was an amazing experience and I plan to ramble on a good deal more about it here.
Rather than follow the example of our last major trip (the D-Day and WWI battlefields of northern France and a following week in Paris) that I wrote about in the order in which it happened, I plan to focus on Scotland as a series of vignettes – each built around a photo or two, to provide several tastes of that country’s wonderful variety of flavours.
I’ll throw lots of history at you, because it’s my blog and I really enjoy the history attached to the scenery. Treading the same palace floor as did royal feet as diverse as those of Mary, Queen of Scots and Queen Elizabeth II will do that to you. As, for that matter, will stomping about heather-covered land walked by Rob Roy, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Robert the Bruce and William Wallace.
And in no particular order.
But why the apology? (You ask.) It’s actually to those Facebook followers, because – as I mentioned – most of my Facebook photos will re-appear here (but with considerably more narrative, so please come along again, even if the photo is familiar).
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“High in the misty Highlands,
Out by the purple islands,
Brave are the hearts that beat
Beneath Scottish skies.
Wild are the winds to meet you,
Staunch are the friends that greet you,
Kind as the love that shines from fair maiden's eyes.
Towering in gallant fame,
Scotland my mountain hame,
High may your proud standards gloriously wave,
Land of my high endeavour,
Land of the shining river,
Land of my heart for ever,
Scotland the brave.”
The 2011 Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo. There simply is no sound on earth to compare to as many of 15 different pipe bands simultaneously skirling “Scotland the Brave”. It just sends chills through you.
In the first of these pictures, the front rank consists solely of pipe majors – parade leaders of bands. I think I can count about 15, which will give you an idea of just how many full pipe bands are arrayed in the huge crowd of neat ranks behind them.
Part of this performance involved marching back and forth the length of the outdoor arena. When the field is this crowded, to achieve “marching back and forth” leaves you pretty much with only one option – to complete a 180-degree turn and march the opposite direction between (!) the already close-packed ranks of those still oncoming bandsmen.
The second shot shows that manoeuvre partly completed – if you look REALLY closely, you’ll note that each line is facing the opposite direction of the two on either side of it. They were literally brushing each other’s shoulder epaulettes as they passed.
This year, they also featured what the official program called “probably the most unusual band in the world” – the Band of the Royal Netherlands Army Mounted Regiments – Music Corps of the Bicycle Regiment.
As if marching and playing an instrument at the same time weren’t enough of a challenge, the musicians in this 24-member unit play while cycling in formation. The musical unit was formed in 1917 (the bicycle corps itself dates to 1894) and in fact they still wear uniforms first issued at the start of WWI.
Obviously, they recognize that the dominant audience reaction is going to be laughter, because they do play the clowns during part of their performance. At one point, for example, one of the cycling musicians took what looked like an awful tumble. Instantly from the sidelines a medical team rushed out with a stretcher. In short order, they administered a quick tire pumping to the bicycle before carting it – not the rider – away on their stretcher.
Oh, if you’re wondering, the bass and snare drummers do indeed play while cycling. The official program again: “The hardest job in the band is perhaps the role of the snare drum. To free both hands for his drumsticks, the drummer steers with prongs running from handlebars to elbows.”
Anyone familiar with the Edinburgh Tattoo simply holds his breath when the show approaches its finale, because it ends the same way every year. A solitary piper stands on the battlements of Edinburgh Castle, bathed in a single spotlight, and plays a lament. This year, it was “The Parting Glass”, a song traditionally played as a farewell at memorials. Any shivers that went through me at this point in the evening had nothing whatsoever to do with the cooling night air of the Edinburgh.
Dad was a military bandsman during his 20 years in the Royal Canadian Air Force and all I could think was how much he would have enjoyed seeing this show. But as Leslie said to me, when I told her why tears were streaming down my cheeks, “We’ll just enjoy it for him.”
When Hollywood myth meets history – and mytheth it entirely
This is the National Wallace Monument.
It’s dedicated not only to William Wallace but also Scotland’s “Hall of Heroes” in an exhibit that includes busts of warriors, authors and even economist Adam Smith, the man who largely slammed capitalism in “The Wealth of Nations”, because in his experience, most capitalists are driven only their own gain and their own security, and “never [was] much good done by those who affected to trade for the publick good”. (Every entry on this blog is an education in itself, isn’t it?)
The first thing Leslie and I did after getting up on day 1 was join a day-long guided bus tour through the lowlands and into the highlands away from Edinburgh. I confess I was full of doubts about how much I’d enjoy it – but we booked it because it came with tickets to the Tattoo and it was otherwise sold out.
As it turned out, I can now recommend exactly this experience. First of all, if you’re like most people, you need a little time to tune your biology – which is still five hours out of synch – with what the local clocks are telling you that you should be feeling. And secondly, in the hands of a competent and entertaining guide, you can find yourself having a heck of good time!
So back to William Wallace. As our tour guide informed us in no uncertain terms, a lot of Scots really dislike this “bloody Australian dwarf” – Mel Gibson – entirely because of his movie, “Braveheart”.
Most egregiously, for heaven only knows what reason, Mel’s movie has William Wallace being betrayed by Robert the Bruce. Didn’t happen, and since both are national heroes in Scotland, Scots especially dislike Mel for this.
History records that Wallace’s greatest victory was at the Battle of Stirling Bridge, a site within view of this monument. It’s called Stirling Bridge because its critical element was, duh... a bridge. Mel made the battle look like an open-field brilliant tactical win with no bridge to be seen anywhere. In fact, not so much a Wallace win, the battle was actually an English loss, because of some appalling strategy on their part. Their heavy mounted cavalry could only cross the bridge two abreast and Wallace – though outnumbered -- simply waited until about half the English had crossed. Before the whole army could form up and use their superior numbers, he threw a small defensive force onto the bridge, splitting the English army, and wiped out those on his side of the river.
The remaining English army, having watched the annihilation of half their number, decided discretion was the better part of valour and abandoned the battle.
Even this monument, which predates “Braveheart” by more than a century, had been criticized for being too... *ahem*... “upright” for Victorian sensitivities. But since “Braveheart” was released, visits to it and the rate of inflow of tourist dollars have skyrocketed. Bottom line: this monument appears to be doing to the Stirling sky what many Scots feel Mel’s “Braveheart” did to Scottish history.
In an hilarious sidebar story, a Facebook friend steered me to this monstrosity, which may or may not still be on the grounds. (We missed it and all I’ve been able to discover online is the existence a widening movement to have it removed. Apparently, the highly impressionable sculptor did his work very shortly after seeing the movie, according to a woman who works at the Monument’s gift shop – a story she told to blogger David English, who writes on his blog:
“This statue stands at the base of the William Wallace Memorial near Stirling Castle in Scotland. Wallace was the 13th-century Scottish rebel warrior, who was portrayed by Mel Gibson in the movie, Braveheart. So what’s wrong with this picture? The statue’s face looks more like Gibson than Wallace. I asked the woman at the gift shop about this, and she explained that the sculptor completed his work just after seeing the movie. She seemed a little embarrassed about the mistaken identity.
Update: I've been told there's a movement in Scotland to get rid of the statue because it doesn’t represent the historical Wallace. After the officials in charge stated they wouldn't remove it, someone sprayed it with red paint. The officials then encased the statue in Plexiglas, in order to protect it from similar incidents.”
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That’s all for now. But it’s more than enough to get my feet back into the waters of Blog Lomond. I’ll be taking you round and about Scotland for a few updates, but if an occasional unrelated excuse for a rant presents itself, I’ll go there too.
Until la prochaine.