Edinburgh 4

Tuesday 12th February

Although it wasn't bitterly cold today, it wasn't a very nice day so R. and I decided it was an indoor day and went to the National Museum of Scotland in Chamber Street. It was quite a pilgrimage for me as we passed the Old College where I used to have lectures in History, and went into Chamber Street, where I used to have some of my French classes. The building where I used to attend the French classes seems to have been knocked down, these are buildings nearby.

Everywhere looks different; there no longer seems to be a Refectory half way down the steps in Guthrie Street, and the building where I lived for a few weeks, which was where the Women's Union moved to in about 1963 is no longer a University building and looks quite run down. 

R. and I had gone to the Museum to see the Viking exhibition,

but we had a quick look round the museum first, which has been completely changed quite recently. It is extremely spectacular inside - this is what used to be the entrance hall.

There are many areas exactly calculated to appeal to children, with interactive areas and lots of historic forms of transport.

I took a good many photos as we wandered round. I did take a photograph of Dolly the sheep, but the lights in the case were too bright and it didn't come out too well.

We went into the exhibition which displays more than 500 objects from the collections of the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm. Apparently these objects are rarely seen outside Scandinavia - certainly I don't recall having seen them, even thought I'm fairly sure I visited the Swedish History Museum when visiting Stockholm in 1977. I suppose that was a lifetime ago. The objects were well displayed with a lot of attendant information, but unfortunately I wasn't able to take any pictures.

When we came out it was nearly 4 o'clock, so we hastily went for the bus, but just missed it. As the next one wasn't due for 20 minutes and it was too cold to stand about, we walked along the South Bridge, across the Royal Mile and down Cockburn Street

and then across the Waverley Bridge and into Princes Street, where we soon caught a bus home.

Edinburgh 3

Monday 11th February

This has not been a particularly busy day, as R. and I had several errands to run, and had to spend some hours doing this. Completing the errands was not helped by the fact that the road works associated with the proposed trams extend quite a distance from the west end of Princes Street to somewhere past past Haymarket. If you find yourself on the wrong side of the street, you have to walk right to one end of the roadworks or the other to cross the street. This is a nuisance, but R. points out it has been going on for 6 years, 3 years after it was supposed to be finished. She, and other Edinburgh residents, are utterly sick of it. She also says bus routes have to be changed constantly, so you never know where to get on or off the bus and bus drivers too are thoroughly fed up; I certainly found the bus drivers quite grumpy this morning.

Still, it was a beautiful morning, lovely and sunny with a beautiful blue sky. We fed the ducks and grebes in the park near her as we went out to run the errands, and after the errands went part of the way along Princes Street. We went to the Scottish National Gallery, where the opening of a special exhibition featuring Rodin's 'The Kiss' had been scheduled to open at the weekend. However, the exhibition had not opened and will not now open for a couple of weeks. This is because somebody had measured wrongly, and the statue had proved to be too big to get into the Gallery! The whole place doesn't exactly sound efficient. There was, in fact, nothing much on show at the gallery at all, so we were disappointed. Still, we admired the lovely views.

This is the plaza at the east side of the Scottish National Gallery.

Below is a view of Princes Street Gardens.

I particularly like the skyline of thevback of the buildings that line the Royal Mile.

On Princes Street, we admired the view of the Scott Monument.

Instead of a Gallery visit, we did some wandering down Princes Street and a little light shopping.

Edinburgh 2

Sunday 10th January

Today my friend R. and I decided to go to a couple of Art Galleries in the outskirts of Edinburgh. We particularly wanted to see the Samuel Peploe exhibition, at a Gallery that used to be called the Dean Gallery. I can't do better than quote Wikipedia about Samuel John Peploe (1871 – 1935), that he 'was a Scottish Post-Impressionist painter, noted for his still life works and for being one of the group of four painters that became known as the Scottish Colourists.'

We particularly enjoyed the early paintings, and a lot of the still life works - there was at least one of those we wanted to take home. Some of the landscapes were beautiful too, but with no photographs allowed I had to content myself with taking a photo of the poster advertising the exhibition. 

Peploe had a particular set of objects he liked to paint in his still life works and some of them were on the mantelpiece in one of the rooms, so I took a photo of them too. The coffee jug is the one from the poster and the two blue and white vases appear in many paintings containing roses or tulips.

We enjoyed this exhibition very much, so we crossed the road to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art for a very different experience. Some of the exhibits were quite strange, like the one of a material not unlike skin which made a tent-like structure supported on huge pillars.

The pillars were hollow and were filled with spices at the base, cloves, cumin and turmeric. The smell of cloves permeated the whole gallery, reminding me of the smell of Zanzibar.

The next room had an odd exhibit, a bright green carpet with white plaster objects which were vaguely plant-like scattered on it. 

Things deteriorated fast after that, as far as we were concerned. There were some extremely strange exhibits with very pretentious labels - R. and I are not fans of modern art, as you might gather. We were reduced to helpless giggles by one exhibit which seemed to have taken a child's cot and crossed the two long sides over one another; R. wondered if it was a cot for two triangular shaped babies! We left that room before our giggles caused too much offence to fans of modern art, who were regarding us with distaste. 

I have to say I wonder about some modern art. One set of drawings had a label, apparently devised by the artist,  which described them as '9 desperately shit-awful drawings'; R. and I could only agree.

Funeral in Edinburgh

Friday 8th February

My sister, my younger son and I all rolled ourselves out of bed at 6am in order to leave at 7 and drive up to Edinburgh for my cousin's funeral. In fact we left about 7.15 in the end, and managed the drive in 4 hours, so we arrived at 11.15; we needed at least 15 minutes to find somewhere to park though, as the church, which is on Dalkeith Road, a main road in the south of Edinburgh, is in a very crowded area with little parking. It was the same church where we had the funeral 4 or 5 years ago for my uncle, father of my cousin. My uncle had been a very active member of the church - he had been a sidesman in fact. We were sufficiently early at the church to meet the minister and some of the older members of the congregation who had been friendly with my uncle and his family.

At the start of the service, the minister spoke well about my cousin Douglas, remarking on his early promise at school; many of the older members of the congregation would have known him as a friendly cheery little boy, as I remember him myself. He left Edinburgh for London after gaining his degrees - I presume this was his PhD as well as his BSc, since after the service we met his PhD supervisor; Douglas and I weren't in touch at that period, so I didn't know much about his life at the time. The minister mentioned his studying in Munich, and another friend commented on his fluency in German. I know he had reasonable French too, and also some Arabic. The minister went on to talk about his being struck down by meningitis, leaving him severely visually impaired, and commented on the way he had made a new and very different life for himself, campaigning for better facilities for visually impaired people. As I said in a previous posting I would give the URL for his blog, it is still to be found at 
http://profwhitestick.blogspot.co.uk
I know I gave the URL for one of his posts in an earlier post here, but I was in France when I posted it, so the URL was .fr when it should have been .co.uk. I confess to being a bit confused by the URLs when using Blogger, but it would appear the URL seems to change according to the country where you are logging on.

We sang a hymn, and one of Douglas's friends spoke about their friendship, telling several typical anecdotes of my cousin. My sister had been asked to read a passage from the Bible, John Chapter 11, the bit about the death of Lazarus, which ends in Jesus saying 'I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die.' Then I had been asked to read a Robert Frost poem, 'The Road Not Taken'. After that, we had prayers and another hymn, and it was all over.

Then we all followed the hearse to the cemetery, for the committal.  Douglas was buried in the family plot with his mother and father. It seemed inappropriate to be burying anybody, because it was a such a beautifully sunny day, the sky a clear blue without a cloud and the cemetery very green and bright with flowers. It was very cold though. My son wasn't wearing an overcoat, and found it quite a cold experience. All three of us had to hold the coffin cords. I believe this is a particularly Scottish custom, when friends and family have to hold cords to help lower the coffin into the grave; it's only symbolic, the family don't take the weight of the coffin, the undertakers do that. 

After that we all went to a local hotel for hot soup and sandwiches, which was very welcome because we were all so cold. Like almost all post-funeral gatherings, it was quite convivial and we had a chance to speak to more of the people who had known Douglas in Scotland.

After it was all over, my son drove me to my friend's house (where I am staying for a few days), then he and my sister set off to drive back to Manchester.

Manchester

Friday 1st - Thursday 7th February

On Friday 1st February I caught a train to Manchester to visit my son and family. I found it a tiring day as I didn't get to bed until about 2.30 am on Friday morning, on account of watching too much TV before kitchen clear-up, house-tidying and packing before finally falling into my bed. Then I arose at 7.30 in order to complete the packing etc before ordering the taxi.

My grandson was so excited to see me, he was too excited to go to bed early, also he had had his nap very late, so he only went to bed at 9. He's talking all the time now, though it's an effort to understand what he says. He repeats everything you say to him, so he's learning new words very fast. He wanted to know where Papi (Grandpa) is, so I showed him lots of photographs of Paul which he liked and he asked to see more - 'encore Mami?' (Mami is the French for 'Grannie' - he is speaking a mixture of French and English).

On Saturday it was sunny though freezing, and my son and I took my grandson out to meet his mother after she had finished teaching Saturday morning French School. He was a bit grizzly so we gave him his scooter and he scooted like mad around the playground of the school for ages. It was very cold just sitting watching him! Then he fell over and was deciding whether to cry or not, but a passing dog bounded up to him and kissed him better, so he felt more cheerful and decided not to bother crying. Then we went out to lunch. He had an enormous plate of fish and chips, and then was a lot more cheerful so perhaps it was hunger that was making him grizzly. 

Life was very noisy in Manchester on Sunday. My son did woodwork in the morning, so my grandson and I played and sang songs until he was clearly exhausted and had to go for a nap. His nap lasted quite a while, then everybody had to get ready,and we went to a friend's house for their daughter's birthday party - she is two. 

The party was amazingly noisy and chaotic; everybody did running about and screaming, especially my grandson! Later, the birthday girl got quite impressed by the bubble blowing, so she went upstairs and raided the party bags for bottles of bubble liquid and drank it. Then she was sick! So the lovely party frock suffered a bit, and she had to come back to the party in trousers and a tee shirt. And her mother had to spend quite a while scrubbing the carpets! Fortunately, I think it's mainly soap and water in the bubble mixture, so I guess the scrubbing wasn't too difficult after the bits of cake and crisp were all scraped up. 

On Monday it was snowing when I woke up. I am not looking forward to Edinburgh, where there is probably snow and even more freezing weather. I am really feeling the cold and Manchester seems very damp, which makes my bones ache.  I am sleeping in the attic bedroom, and last night the skylight leaked. I kept hearing a 'plink' noise, and eventually worked out it was coming from the part of the bed next to me. I watched carefully and saw big drips falling onto the bed from the skylight above. It was after midnight by then, so I didn't like to wake anybody. The bed was too heavy for me to move, so I found a plastic bag to put over the place where the drips were falling and added all my dirty clothes on top of it so the sound wasn't too loud. I decided somebody could sort it out the following night when he came home from work. (He says it was just condensation and has closed the skylight blind, which seems to have stopped it)

My grandson at 22 months is chatting away nineteen to the dozen, though it is still somewhat difficult to understand him as he can't manage all the sounds yet. Yesterday he came to find me to explain that he had lost the 'ca-ki' under the sofa. With visions of the difficulty of anybody driving anywhere with no car keys, I had a look, but could see no sign of any car keys. He then gave me a look of withering scorn and wriggled under the sofa to fetch his little car, which turned out to be a TAXI! He can't make those sounds yet, so 'ca-ki' was the nearest he could get to taxi. He can manage 'monkey' but 'giraffe' is a bit beyond him (fi-aff) and 'crocodile' is a bit difficult (ca-a-deal - he learned it in French first). These are important words, as he has a giraffe and a monkey, and lots of crocodile stickers. Today we were learning colour words with his cars and trains, so we can manage 'reh' and 'boo' and even 'geen' but we have some difficulty with 'lel-ow'. 

The highlight of our day was to visit the Trafford Centre where we hired a little yellow and green car for him to ride in. He didn't find it entirely satisfactory though, as it doesn't go where he wants to go, largely because I am pushing it. 

The highlight of Tuesday was a visit to the Library, but unfortunately not for the books. It is a nice big space, wonderful for running up and down, and it has a colourful circular carpet, suitable for encouraging little boys to turn round and round in circles until they get dizzy and fall over. Usually he is interested in all the books, but not this time. He was interested though in a new game. A couple of days ago I remembered another nursery rhyme I haven't sung him before, 'One Two Three Four Five, once I caught a fish alive.' He liked it very much and after a couple of repetitions was soon singing it himself. (Just the tune and the 'one, two, three, four, five', he can't manage many of the words) So the new game, found in a charity shop, was with number tiles, to see if we can put down the tiles in the right order. He can recognise the first five numbers, though putting them in order is more difficult; the next five numbers are a bit more of a problem to recognise, 6 and 9 are too similar, and 5 is not that different. Still, he is learning all the time. 

My son and I were intrigued in the evening to hear him singing bits of 'Old MacDonald had a Farm' and making all the animal sounds. The visit to the charity shop had also produced one of those shape puzzles, and this one has a pig, cow, sheep and chicken so that reminded him of the song I suppose. Anyway, the animals were all taken out of the puzzle and spoken to, there was a lot of singing of 'moo moo here, baa baa dere and snort' (I can't spell the sound he made)!

The most successful and exciting thing so far has been the bubble mixture; it was so successful, we had to buy more.

He was pretty hard to photograph, he danced about so much; he was so active, you can see that one sock has come off!

On Thursday night, my sister arrived prior to our visit on Friday to Edinburgh for my cousin's funeral.

Hearing at the Old Bailey

Tuesday 29th January

My sister and I both attended this first hearing at the Old Bailey to learn about possible outcomes following our cousin's death. The Family Liaison Officer met us outside the Old Bailey at about 9.45 and took us inside with her so that we would be able to sit in the court itself rather than in the public gallery. This meant that we only had to switch off our mobile phones; if you sit in the public gallery, you have to leave all your electronic gadgets outside somewhere - according to the Old Bailey web site, there is a shop nearby where you can deposit them for something like £3 each.

We sat on a sofa outside the court for some time, as the hearing didn't begin promptly at 10. I expect it would have done had we been late though! We met the woman from the CPS just before we went in.

We were challenged by the clerk of the court when we went in to the court, and had to explain that we were the family. We sat on the side of the court, along with three reporters. We were able to see the young man accused of Douglas' attack on a video screen at the other side of the courtroom; he was sitting at the end of a big table in the secure hospital where he is being held. There were two warders, one on either side of him, just slightly behind him, and there were other prison staff sitting at the side of the room - there must have been 6 other people in the room. The figures were really tiny though, we would have needed binoculars to see any of them clearly.

We all had to stand when the judge came in, wearing a short wig and red robes. My sister said she found all the formality - the wigs and robes, the standing, the bowing - quite daunting and very alien to her normal life.

The points under discussion seemed to be two - jurisdiction to try the case, whether here or in Germany, and the mental state of the assailant. I was hampered by the extremely quiet voice of the CPS barrister, who was inaudible to me for about 50% of the time; she had her back to me, which didn't help. At least I could hear the judge, though even this became difficult when some stupid person in the room at the secure hospital made a phone call, and there were some loud but muffled sounds of conversation over the video link; I was a bit surprised that the judge didn't call them to order, though he looked at the video screen very crossly from time to time.

The judge referred to the Terrorism Act when discussing jurisdiction, which surprised us; but I found it less surprising when I read his biography on Wikipedia - he has presided over a number of terrorism cases.

Anyway, the hearing about the jurisdiction is set for a date in March. The Detective Sergeant who is involved in the case later told us how officers from Germany had just been granted permission to come over here to pursue  their investigations into the  German murder; without this permission, the British police were not even allowed to give them fingerprints or DNA, and of course this person had been previously unknown to the German police, so none of his details were stored anywhere. As the Home Office is heavily involved, nobody seems clear how long it will take to resolve this jurisdiction question.

It also seems to take a long time to produce a report on a person's mental health; in our innocence, we did wonder why this had not been already started. They have had him for two months already, after all. Anyway, the CPS barrister asked the judge to make a court order to expedite this, and he did so, setting the date for this to be in May.

After this, we went outside to meet the CPS woman again, and the very nice Detective Sergeant. He gave us a great deal of information in response to my questions, assuring us that the alleged assailant would be kept in custody because in his opinion he was very dangerous. Apparently he does not present as somebody deranged; he is 19, very intelligent and highly educated; he speaks 4 languages, and his English is so fluent he needs no translator. 

I won't write all the details about the history of this young man, but it would appear that his mental health problems began very recently. When the police here caught him after he is said to have attacked my cousin, he apparently also confessed to killing a woman in her home in Germany, leaving the scene after killing her, so there was no indication who had done it when she was found. A few days after this, he bought himself a plane ticket to England. I am not sure how long he was here before he saw my cousin and apparently decided to attack him.

The Detective Sergeant also told us how extremely fortunate they were to catch him; this was down to the very prompt actions of the neighbours in calling the police, and the instincts of a policeman who was passing in a police car on the way to the incident, and had a feeling that he should first investigate a rather strange looking young man he could see pushing an empty pushchair (which it transpired he had taken from outside a house) along the pavement. He pointed out how unlikely it would have been that he would otherwise have been caught, as he had committed no known previous offences and was unknown in Britain. 

I can hardly imagine how awful it would have been for all of us had somebody not been caught and charged with this attack; there would have been horrible investigations, probably into all of us, to see if Douglas had any known enemies or if anybody had a grudge against him. Most people are killed by somebody known to them, so we would all have been left looking at one another and Douglas' friends and neighbours and wondering who had done it, perhaps for years. We really have to thank Douglas' vigilant neighbours and the unknown policeman with the instinct to stop the odd-looking young man.

It all took just over an hour to go through this, but my sister and I both felt exhausted after it all and had to go immediately to drink coffee and sit down to mull it over. We ended up in the Royal Festival Hall while we discussed the rest of our day. We ended up spending it in London but we kept having to go to into places to sit down and rest, we found the whole experience quite draining, and I had a bad attack of stress indigestion so we had to find a pharmacy. We didn't seem to get much done. After we had eaten an early supper, we went on to the theatre, but sadly it did not cheer us up at all.  We were on our way home by about 10.10 but it took me until 11.50 until I was back at home, by which time I was only fit to fall into bed.

Memorial Service

Thursday 24th January

On Thursday night, we held a memorial service for my cousin. This is a photo of him.

The service was well attended, there were probably 50 or 60 people there, family, friends and neighbours. Friends and acquaintances spoke about Douglas and told anecdotes about him. We had various readings, and listened to music that he liked. We also sang two hymns, and had some short prayers.

Most of the talks concentrated on Douglas' recent life since his blindness, and there was little mention of his formidable intellect, though one of his friends mentioned his fluency in German, acquired when he was studying in Germany as part of his PhD in Chemistry. One of his friends did mention his prestigious job, full of international travel.  There were several mentions of the meningitis and shingles which struck him down in 2002, leading to his severe visual impairment. There were few comments about how he adjusted to this, but I have to say my sister and I were so struck by the fact that we never heard him complain about the fact that his life had been totally destroyed. He had to retire before he was 50, and instead of a life of international travel, had to get used to the fact that travelling down his own street was difficult. Instead of international conferences, he spent his time in Day Centres - rather a difference. He took up painting with the little sight he had, and very much enjoyed this new hobby. You can see one of his paintings on his blog at
http://profwhitestick.blogspot.fr/2012/04/tate-modernboetti-and-kusama.html
though I prefer the landscapes he used to paint and send as Christmas cards.

Mention was also made of his interest in Art and visiting Art Galleries,  and the fact that after he lost his sight, he got a BA by studying at the Open University.

Everybody commented on his sense of humour, and there were also many remarks on his campaigning on behalf of visually impaired people, and the numbers of public bodies he took on when he found their provisions inadequate. He could be difficult, and even abrasive at times, but he was both focused and determined, and he put all these qualities to good use when dealing with people who he felt should do better in their provisions for visually disabled people. 

In spite of our sadness, it was a good way of celebrating Douglas' life, and most people stayed on in the church afterwards for wine and crisps and a lot of chat. We didn't leave until about 9.15, so it was a very late night for me; it was a long journey from West Hampstead right across London to London Bridge, and then there were no taxis at Oxted when I arrived, so I had a very long cold wait.