Arts and Crafts day in Edinburgh

I had until 5.30pm in my favourite city the day after Robin Ticciati's predictably wonderful Usher Hall concert with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. I needed a main objective, so in the absence of any exhibitions that cried out for attention, I decided to head for the Meadows Pottery to buy a bowl or two from Paul Tebble and Junko Shibe, parents of genius guitarist Sean Shibe. I'd seen their website, so I know there would be something I'd want to take home.

And on the way back to pick up my bags from Parliament House Hotel and head down the hill to Waverley Station, I stopped off at one of my favourite Edinburgh places of recent years, the Dovecot Studios housed in the former Infirmary Street Baths. The exhibition here was of a perfect small size: Daughters of Penelope, celebrating women weavers and artists connected to the Dovecot's glorious history.

Staying in Parliament House Hotel always puts me in a good mood (I'm not on any sort of commission to say so, by the way). I love it not only because it's close to Waverley Station, comfortable and quiet, but also because it's connected me with the Calton Hill side of Edinburgh, which never figured much when I was a student here. I made this point the last time I wrote about a short time in Edinburgh, which I see was a year ago and also close to a trip to Leeds (this time I travelled on from there, having seen an excellent performance of Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti and a disappointing one of Janáček's Osud, which I love, from Opera North).

Each room I've stayed in - and the latest was part of a refurbishment at the surprisingly extensive back of the house - has had fabulous views: the first over Calton Burial Ground, others looking north to Fife across the Firth of Forth and Leith like this one, view from one window of which pictured above.

Last time the cemetery had been closed, but here it was again chiming with the autumn mood,

offering its own view over Old College and the Castle one way

and its sister hill the other.

Autumn colours beneath the Nelson Monument

and a view across to Salisbury Crags and Arthur's Seat from one of the several flights of steps downwards past the Old Parliament Building (you see, I became a tourist yet again).

Headed up again past picturesquely ruined buildings which a council worker was, alas, denuding of the luxuriant growth on them, and came out on the lower end of the Royal Mile - again a part of town I only ever visited as a student when guests wanted to head to Holyrood Palace - and it still looked grand in the clear skies, swept by a warm wind after the freezing cold one the previous evening.

Up again past the Pleasance to the South Side, where I had a blissful half-hour at a friendly cafe serving Greek cakes and good coffee (started out in the sunshine outside, but went indoors as intermittent clouds dropped unpredictable rain). This is a view of said street from a pub with a sign that nicely conjures how it was - not so very different from now.

Another happy half-hour in my kind of bookshop which has sprung up near to where Seeds, our favourite vegetarian restaurant, used to be in West Nicholson Street - Lighthouse, 'home of radical books'. That disposed me to want to spend some money here. Serendipity led me to three volumes of nature-writing: Findings by Kathleen Jamie, whom I've admired ever since The Golden Peak, which reflected our own travels in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province and whose style is elegant here, but there's a bit of a 'why' about it for me so far; Thoreau's Walden in a Thrift edition (cheapskate that am, but it's pleasant to handle); and Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain, a revelation to set alongside the thrill of J. A. Baker's The Peregrine. I'll be waxing lyrical about both anon. Anyway, I liked the spirit of Lighthouse, and I have to agree with the comment above the book below, not least because I disliked Clegg's use of paradox to sell a book and the way he went about marketing it.

How had George Square and environs changed since the 1980s? Well, there's now the mosque nearby, which has a sensible notice outside making it clear that Allah is the God we all share, if you believe.

And I liked the shadow of the old chimneypots on a completely new facade.

The major damage was done in the 1960s, when nearly half of the square's Georgian houses were pulled down to be replaced by monstrosities like the David Hume Tower. I have very fond memories of hours in the classics library, though, and the views out were fine. The fifth and sixth floors are no longer home to the classics department, though, so having seen how the basement cafe has been transformed beyond belief and taken the lift up, I wandered down and snapped a view with which I became very familiar over four years.

On a sunny autumn day from the other side of the Meadows, even 'the DHT' doesn't look too bad.

Then it was into Marchmont, an area I for some reason envied other students for making their home, though I couldn't have been happier in Dundas Street. I could still live here. This is a nicely maintained front garden, not doing badly in the northern October.

And then I more or less sniffed my way to the Meadows Pottery. Junko, it turned out, was just in front of me as I crossed the road, though she disappeared to work while I spent what must have been nearly an hour chatting with Paul, not least about how Edinburgh had changed for the better since the 1980s. Here are Paul and Junko at the end of my visit, purchase completed.

Paul made the interesting observation that the big increase in Oriental students made street life much livelier: Auld Reekians tended to be closed in public, whereas these folk felt comfortable making public spaces their living room. And I'm glad I flourished my books, because that encouraged Paul to talk about his and Junko's close association with a poet and friend who, sadly, died just after their joint show. I can call her 'the wonderful Elizabeth Burns' because I bought on the spot the volume of poetry from which Paul read, Held, not least for its cover image of a Chosan Dynasty moon jar which I have to seek out in the British Museum.

Much here is about transience and mortality; the central sequence, 'The Shortest Days', was originally published as a pamphlet coming to terms with two then-recent losses. Paul hooked me simply by reading 'The enfolding', which I hope will resonate with you too.

As the potter enfolds air with porcelain,
making, in this new vessel,

a presence round an absence,
containing what's invisible,

and at the same time smoothing into being
something that the hands can cup,

so, walking through October woods
I find myself reaching out

in some ancient gesture
of holding and encircling

as if I clasped my hands
around your body in its sickness -

as if by this I could give you,
for a moment, strength,

fastening more tightly
your spirit to its fragile skin.

Already that makes me perceive the objects Paul and Junko craft very differently. Perhaps it was why I was especially attracted - and rightly judged that J would be less so - to the tea bowls or chawans, some of which are displayed here (I chose one for myself, and a different bowl for J).  I love the sensual feel of holding them, the spiral within inside a symbol of the energy between the hands.

There's also a poem in Held, 'In the butterfly house', which applies the difficulty of the creative life to a feeling for it within to Sean and his sister when they were younger. I don't want to spoil it by quoting the relevant lines out of context, but it seems Burns was prophetic, for  I've never encountered a performing artist more conscious of the responsibility to go deep and take time than Sean.

By the time I left, it was pouring with rain, so I stopped off at Richard DeMarco's transfigured Summerhall next door for a very late bowl of soup (excellent), and then popped in next door to that, a very odd second-hand shop where I had an odd conversation with an old Edinburgh eccentric about the LPs and blush to say I bought one of The Black Mikado, which for obvious reasons (not least its original cover artwork) isn't available on CD, and I'd never heard the treatment of G&S, which is extraordinary.

Jamie's essay on Surgeons' Hall reminded me that I've never visited, but time was too short as I passed to explore something new, so I reverted instead to Dovecot, and I'm glad I did. Daughters of Penelope was just the right size, and everything in the big space worthy of attention. The first thing I looked at screamed 'Delaunay', and it was - Sonia as realised in fabric.

More local were other eye-catchers in various mediums. Caroline Dear's Soundings iv – hearing the reed’s voice (2016) stitches together reed leaves and casts shadows which compliment the physical work (deliberate, I assume).

Joanne Soroka's For Irene Sendler (2015) rewarded on every level. Simply in the composition of its mixed mediums - cotton warp and wool, linen, metallic tweed and ash keys - it's harmonious.

But there is a deeper significance here. Sendler was a nurse who smuggled 2500 children and babies out of the Warsaw Ghetto - their number represented by the ash keys, which Soroka gathered from an Edinburgh cemetery and painted gold to signify their importance.

Soroka was Artistic Director of Dovecot from 1982-7, Fiona Mathison Director of Weaving from 1976 to 1984. Mathison kept her Sink (1972-3) of cotton warp and wool in her Edinburgh tenement flat, where visitors took it for the real thing. It's been recreated specially for the exhibition and seen for the first time outside her private dwelling.

I love it that the exhibition is haunted by the sound of Hanna Tuulikki's spinning-in-stereo (2013-14), the voices of herself and Mischa McPherson, a singer from the Isle of Lewis, on LP taking a traditional Gaelic spinning-song and treating it to a series of upward transpositions.

For once in an show like this, audio really does complement visual.

After the making, the demolition. I'd already seen and heard the work on razing to the ground the always unattractive St James [Shopping] Centre where Princes Street joins Leith Walk.

It has some resonances - after I'd graduated, I sold cameras in the Boots branch here until I got my summons to my first job in London, as Assistant Editor on Music and Musicians. There is always pause for thought in seeing something once regarded as terra firma so subject to the wrecking-ball of change.

I still had a bit longer than I'd thought I would before returning to the hotel, so I bought some honey and a slice of orange polenta cake in Valvona and Crolla, still somewhere to homage despite its transformation into a mighty empire shortly after I left university, and walked up the side of Calton Hill to catch the late afternoon light over Fife.

I always have fresh experiences each time I return to the Alma Mater, and this splendid day was no exception.

Between the James Plays

Though I may not have seen a single thing on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this year, three days in or near my Alma Mater gave as good a panorama of events as any I can remember. Central, of course, were Rona Munro's three wonderful James Plays: enough said about them already on the blog except to note that seeing them on consecutive evenings was a real festival experience, with much musing between.

James I: The Key Will Keep the Lock cheered us after a dreary first afternoon in Edinburgh; J had been up since the weekend and it had stayed unremittingly cold, drizzly and grim. Then off he went back to his tiny cubby-hole in the otherwise spacious New Club, still in the thick of his conference, I to our dear friend Ruth Addinall's in Gilmerton (no further from Princes Street than Belsize Park is from the centre of London). Waking there was bliss. Ruthie had gone off for her early morning swim, so I padded around snapping. Here in quick succession are glimpses of the space where she teaches her lucky pupils, looking out on the wee garden she's always coveted,

the studio

and the desk beyond the kitchen, quite a picture in itself.

Avian activity in the garden continues, despite the loss of a favourite blackbird to a sparrow hawk. The Putins are still here, Mrs P always eager to take berries from the lady of the house's hand.

Wish I'd been here when a flock of waxwings* landed early in the year. One is preserved in an Addinall special.

After a typically generous and healthy breakfast, I took the bus to the Queen's Hall for one of the best recitals I've ever heard, friendly cellist Alban Gerhardt and a pianist who should need no introduction, the versatile Steven Osborne in Britten, Tippett and Beethoven (with a melting Schumann encore). No need to reduplicate anything on the Arts Desk review here. Then lunch up the road at Mother India, a Glasgow branch of which I'd taken the student godchildren to recently, and to the nearby Dovecot Studios, a favourite venue since the discovery of both it - no longer the Infirmary Baths of old, which I well remember - and the work of the wonderful John Burningham.

Before we hit the studio proper, J wanted me to see what he'd already watched - four very beautiful films featuring the special Harris Tweed designs of Dalziel + Scullion, immersing the models in four different Scots landscapes for the exhibition Tumadh (publicity image pictured above). I have to go to Lewis with its inland beaches, and the river-valley setting for Recumbent, allowing the wearer to lie down boulder-like with its pads on the back, was so evocative. I'd have liked a Recumbent myself, but at c. £3,000 for a tailor-made commission it's a bit beyond my budget. Sadly there are no available images of the tweedwearers in landscapes beyond this one.

Upstairs, on the balcony of the main studio where the Burninghams had been hung, the space was shared by a delicious selection of Craigie Aitchison paintings, etchings and tapestries, and a celebration of the links between Dovecot Studios and the Australian Tapestry Workshop. A few of them appear below, above work in progress on Magne Furuholmen's Glass Onion design.

I'd forgotten what a strong painter Aitchison was. This showcase from the Timothy Taylor Gallery included several of his Crucifixions: apparently his Slade tutor had told him that the subject was 'too serious' for him, prompting the devil of opposition.

Over the road in the Talbot Rice Gallery of Old College, the show Counterpoint was more variable -  a selection of eight artists representing '25 Years of Contemporary Art in Scotland'. Most topical was Ellie Harrison's installation After the Revolution, Who Will Clean Up the Mess?

On 18 September, 'the four large confetti cannons installed inside Talbot Rice's Georgian Gallery will only be detonated in the event of a YES vote'. Which, of course, is coming to seem increasingly possible, and all the very best to the idealists and their unknown future if that happens**.

The one exhibit I'd like to follow up is Alec Finlay's Global Oracle, much preoccupied with the future (futurist fantasy) of bees. The book produced on the subject, with a fine compilation of poetry and prose, is one I have to get. Below, Navstar Satellites.

The calm of Old College, with only a lone seagull for company

was in marked contrast to Potterville (see It's a Wonderful Life) down in the Cowgate. I guess it was always a mass of drinking dens - we used to enjoy frequenting Bannerman's, especially around concerts in St Cecilia's Hall, but now, or at least in festival time, the street has a daytime reek of beer and is lined with big pubs offering multiple screens (and free fringe events - godson Alexander and his new band Tumfy and the Deecers played a gig at 2am after I'd left. He says, none too approvingly, that the Fringe is really the Edinburgh Festival of Drink).

Time out in the comfort of the New Club quickly yielded to Sister Marie Keyrouz and the Ensemble de la Paix in Greyfriars Kirk. The chief virtue for me was getting to hear music inside the Kirk for the first time ever. I never went in during my university years, even though my most regular haunt in first year, the Bedlam Theatre, is as close as could be, and only once or twice walked through the extraordinary graveyard. Anyway, quick shot of the done-over interior

and of the Greyfriars Bobby merchandise.

The faithful wee doggie's grave is close to the main entrance

keeping most tourists away from the fascinating decrepitude of the rest. I don't have any details about the chapels abutting the houses to the south, but admire how buddleia and ferns thrive.

This ensemble on the north-eastern side struck me as so quintessentially Scots.

So to James II: Day of the Innocents, a late-night drink in the astonishingly transformed space of the Dick Vet College and back to the Lambtons' at Chapelgill, Broughton-by-Biggar, where we've seen the godchildren grow up over the years. Here's the beauteous Kitty, sweet 18 and soon off to Aberdeen Art College, with her new kitty Milo (I could bore you with some very cute solo kitten shots but let's leave it at this).

The next morning was taken up with review writing and other chores, but we managed an afternoon excursion to one of my favourite botanic gardens, or rather arboretum, nearby Dawyck. I always like to head up the hill via the mossy stone terraces of Sir John Naesmyth's commissioned 1830s stonework

and the view towards the (private) house, designed by William Burn to replace the one that burnt down in 1830

towards Heron Wood and the cryptogamic sanctuary. The beeches were looking lovely as ever - father Lambton is inspecting a grey squirrel in a trap at the foot of the nearest, part of a campaign to save the reds -

but there was little sign of above-ground fungal activity other than these young 'uns barely visible.

I love the mosses and lichen wrapped around, or dripping from, the silver birches at the top of the garden, but I've already shown them in all their glory in a mycological post as well as one from 2009, so here's a record of one of the oldest trees, a European larch (Larix decidua) planted in 1725. I like the idea of Naesmyth going round planting this and its like in the company of the great Linnaeus.

Nearby is the peeling bark of Betula chinensis, the Chinese dwarf birch, looking in both layers like a pianola roll (aren't the dashes purely ornamental?)

One conifer I should have noted down the name of really does boast blue cones

and the variety of greens across the valley was especially stunning at this time of year.

Must go back at the right time in spring to see the amazing blue meconopsis, which I've failed to grow down here. But that will depend on the future of Chapelgill; by then, Christopher may have moved back to Edinburgh.

After tea and cakes from Dawyck back home, it was time to catch the bus from Peebles for James III: The True Mirror and excellent fish and chips next door. This time J accompanied me back to Ruth's afterwards and we had another sunlit morning in her ineffable company before heading back for the train via lunch with Alexander in the superb Cafe de St Honoré. It won in two categories this year at the 2014 Catering in Scotland Awards - 'Sustainable Business of the Year' and 'Chef of the Year' (Neil Forbes, who uses only sustainable local produce). Check out the website, a beautiful piece of work. Over two days, J could attest to the restaurant's excellence across the board, though I'd have liked more spice and/or seasoning on my risotto. Since the diplo-mate does not permit any but the most remote of shots, here's a severed shot of our boy, much in demand now as a saxophonist, at lunch with J's hand to the right.

More on Alexander 'Betty' Lambton and Kurt Vonnegut in a post to come.

*Thanks to Sue below for banishing the 'lap'
.
**It didn't, and Europoliticians J knew didn't think it would, despite the polls. Received some quite strong pleas from the 'bettertogether' campaign which I brushed aside. Had I had the chance to vote, I would probably have abstained, if there had been a politically-active category for doing so, since the polyphony of voices pro and con never resolved for me. And from what I gathered from reading a City analyst, a 'yes' result most likely wouldn't have been a financial disaster, just have made things either a little bit better or a little bit worse.

Anyway, I'm not unhappy with the result, and nor, it seems, were many of the 'Yes' voters interviewed in Glasgow's George Square by the World Service (apart from a very unstable sounding Australian Gaelic speaker). Scotland has wrung more measures from a panicky Cameron, so - onwards and upward for that country I love so much. 

22/10 But oh, it could all turn nasty if the appalling self-interest of Cameron in threatening to limit the powers of Scots MPs in Westminster goes through. Is this man totally cut off from the real world, and so in fear of the lunatic far-righters that he would so go against popular opinion? It seems so. All the more reason, then, to carry on what 84 per cent of Scottish voters began.