Available Light

A Scotland supporter obligingly takes a pic for some Wales fans beside the statue of Greyfriars Bobby a few hours before the Welsh walloped the Scots at Murrayfield. What can I say about Edinburgh, other than that if I was ten years younger and/or a little less anchored where I am I would move there like a shot. The weather was not much while I was there and I know from past experience and present observation that the parking wardens are feral, but I simply love this majestic, gray, quirky, noble, self assured, cultured, elegant, ancient and trendy city. It is a little disconcerting that the street names are all the ones I know from back home and that they run off each other in quite a different order than I am used to. It is disconcerting also that despite the disparity in age and size there is something of the feel of Dunedin about Edinburgh. It is not just that we colonials have aped Edinburgh in trivial details of naming and aesthetics, but rather that somehow the values wh...

The journey from London to Inverness doesn't seem so far if you sleep most of the way, which I did. I had checked my bag into the left luggage place at Victoria, had lunch with Alastair Cutting, walked to the Tate Modern, saw the artworks, got lost walking back, found a tube station and thus my way again, had dinner, got my bag again and boarded the Caledonian Sleeper, so it had been tiring afternoon. I was glad to have a wee dram in the dining car before retiring to my rocking swaying little cell to sleep. At about 2 in the morning I awoke and peered out my window at a station with an unpronounceable Gaelic name and saw that there was about a foot of snow on the platform. At about 7 I got dressed, and raised my blind to watch the gray dawn rising on countryside that seemed at once familiar and utterly other. At Inverness I was met by Bishop Mark Strange, who appeared, reassuringly large, talkative and casual, a minute or two after the train disgorged its passengers into the fro...

Photo copyright Nick Wright 2009 I have a problem, but not the usual problem I have with blog posts. Usually I am scrabbling around trying to come up with something to write about. Today I am so overwhelmed with topics, I can't quite decide what to leave out. It's now our last week in England, and looking back at the three months or so since we left Dunedin, I suppose I have put 5 or 10 % of the things that have happened to us onto Available Light. There are some fairly minor but still remarkable things I might have commented on: in Spain for example, on the Camino there are drinking fountains all over the place. One of them has two taps. One dispenses water, the other wine: good, rich, fruity, deep red, Spanish wine in unlimited quantities and absolutely free. In Hong Kong there is a pet shop where I saw for sale a toucan and large trays of wriggling live maggots. There are some other things of more significance. On our last day on Iona I was privileged to help scatter the ash...

Columba landed in Iona in 563. He had recently left Ireland after a dispute over a psalter had got out of hand and led to a pitched battle in which many men were killed. Filled with guilt and remorse, he was determined to work for the Lord by converting the pagan Picts and Gaels who inhabited the west coast of Scotland. So he arrived, on the stony beach of what is now Columba Bay and set to work to build a monastery as a base for his evangelical operations. The Island is small and the soil thin. It only rises a few hundred feet above sea level but it is riven with cliffs and crags and rocky outcrops. In winter the wind reaches 70 mph and there is rain all the year round. He prayed, built his community, prayed, collected a library of holy books and prayed. He became known as a holy man and many miracles were attributed to him; consequently, he was trusted by the Pictish chieftains and became arbiter and diplomat between them. His evangelical efforts were wildly successful. When I follo...

I'd like to write a bit more about Iona but need to take a detour first. At the moment we are in Carlisle, Clemency's birthplace. There is a castle, a real one, and a magnificent cathedral and a maze of tiny streets opening onto a market square. It is all quite picturesque, although dreary and careworn at the same time: this is a working city, not a tourist oriented museum. We have looked at the street where Clemency was born and the vicarage (now a Buddhist centre. These Buddhists are everywhere!) where she grew up. And we have looked at the cathedral. Carlisle has a smallish cathedral, built in the late eleventh century to serve, alongside the castle, as a demonstration of Norman power. It has been overrun by the Scots on numerous occasions, and been subject to the indignities which various reform movements have inflicted on the church. Nevertheless, it is more completely original than most other cathedrals I have seen. The bulk of it is still the eleventh century original an...

This trip has been full of surprises. One surprise is that Iona has proven to be the point of it all. It is an astonishing place, and one which has affected me in ways I might take a very long time to explain to myself, let alone to anybody else. I'll write something about it later. We had a look at Cambridge, and then left Norwich and drove north early this week in Chronos time, but about ten years ago in Kairos time. First stop was Durham, with its huge and lovely cathedral and its quaint old city spread over the banks of a river and its university with students noisily bustling about the place everywhere you look. Then it was Lindisfarne. The holy island is just off the main road, and is approached via a causeway when the tide allows it. We got to the causeway at exactly the right time. It was dry enough to drive on, and there was a silvery mist obliterating the bounday between sea and sky. Sea birds flew and swam. People stopped to look and stayed looking, it was so ethereall...