Trip to Scotland and England, 2004

2005-01-15T07:46:00.000-08:00

June 15th, 2004, Tuesday How Not To Begin a Vacation

I woke at 5:40am not in any mood to go traveling. My sister, Edwina, had arranged a ten days tour for the two of us to Scotland, ending in London, England. After that we would fly back to Glasgow, rent a car in Glasgow, and strike out on our own, exploring the land of our ancestors. No. I’m not going to bother you with the details of the preparation, making the reservations (all done easily on the internet), learning how to obtaining a foreign draft from an American bank and sending it for a deposit to the one place that couldn’t take credit cards, checking ferry schedules, and all of the countless minutia that busied the two of us for the prior three months.

Instead, there I was, almost awake, sitting on the side of the bed wondering if I was really up for another adventure of unexpected twist and turns in this turbulent world, even though Scotland and England were the safest in our current geopolitical reality.

I also had my doubts because I had had two angioplasties in January and February to put a total of five stints in my heart to open up the flow of blood. I had been on the verge of a heart attack and it was, hopefully, caught in time. The operations were done while I was fully conscious. I was amazed at the procedure, feeling no discomfort. My energy had returned and I no longer had the angina pain in my chest.

Pulling up my pants and standing up I remembered I had missed my two and a half miles walk Monday. On socks, shoes, shirt and I was out the door in the morning dim, already an orange on the low clouds left from the rain that night. Down the court, turning left onto the tall, lightening prone, long leaf pine and oak tree lined boulevard, looked over my right shoulder to the sky, now an intensity rose, with damp, warm colors, walking all the way down the dip where the creek crossed and up on the other side to the end, or at least where I ended half of the walk, then turned and back again. By now the sun was almost up and this tramp started feeling up for the trip.

Back home I ate a quick breakfast and disconnected the TV cable and computer cable modem and drove them to the Brighthouse (formerly Time-Warner) office so I wouldn’t be charged for while I was gone.

By then it was 9am and I had an hour to think of things to do, reset the thermostat, disconnect electronic plugs to protect them from the lightening storms, put a load of clothes in the wash and later, and, right before I left, throw the wash into the dryer.

Candy, my niece, came over at a little after 10am to pick me up and take me to the church in College Park, Orlando, where the tour group coming from Orlando would meet. We were the first there. But after 11:30 others started showing up. We left at 11:45 for the Orlando International Airport. As we arrived at the airport it began to sprinkle, an innocent way to hint at the problems that were to come.

We boarded the US Airways plane at 3:00pm, 20 minutes later than scheduled, and then we sat on the tarmac for two hours, as the sky decided to drop a few inches of rain on the airport, brilliant flashing of lightening a few miles away, while the sheets of water washed down on the outside from my window seat. Finally, around 5:00, two hours late, we departed. Not to worry, I thought, the plane to Glasgow from Philadelphia does not leave until 8:30 that evening and this is only a 1 hour and 30 minutes flight.

The flight was pretty uneventful. No bumpiness.

The storm in Orlando was a harbinger of what was to happen. Unknown to us at the time, early that morning, three girls had been arrested in the Philadelphia airport for being in a secured area, the news said they were trying to vacation in the Caribbean, and a teargas pistol was found in its holster in the women’s restroom with five fired and three unused cartridges. The airport had been evacuated and all incoming flights were put into a holding pattern and all departures were cancelled. The weather did not help as there were two hours of intense rain storms that prevented planes from landing or taking off, just like in Orlando. This set off a cascading effect that would turn that day into a hell for us. Even as we arrived, many hours after things had returned to “normal”, a large number of planes were still in holding circles above the airport.

We stayed in the holding pattern over Atlantic City for 45 minutes until another subtle change in airplane industry standards impacted us. To reduce the cost of air transportation by reducing plane weight, planes now carry less fuel reserves. Their time allowed for staying in a holding pattern has been limited now to around 45 minutes and we were at that limit. So the pilot announced that we would fly to Baltimore’s airport and refuel and head back to Philadelphia.

Once on the ground in Baltimore, we went to a refueling location, and waited for a fuel truck for about 20 minutes until it arrived. By this time the passengers were raiding the kitchen and drinks were on the house, er, plane. The passengers were in relatively good spirits and the interior turned into a tailgate party for all. The guy sitting next to me told me stories about golfing at Pebble Beach, his once in a lifetime indulgence. He and his wife and son were returning to home in Philadelphia after a vacation in Orlando. Yeah, sure. The entire plane partied while the tanks filled. But not all enjoyed the fun. The leader of our tour group was desperately on his cell phone to my sister, who had made it into Philadelphia, flying in from Greensboro, NC, and was waiting for the plane to Glasgow, which had also been delayed for the same reasons.

Then another rule kicked in as the existing pilots exceeded their allowed travel time limits and we had to go to a gate to get another crew. That took another 30 minutes and we finally departed. We landed in Philadelphia around 10:30, and as we landed the plane to Glasgow took off at the same time, without waiting for us.

We were not the only people headed for Europe that were affected. I talked with a couple I had met earlier in the Orlando Airport who were headed home to Manchester, England, after vacationing in Disney World. He and his wife had a bakery and looked well fed. They talked in glowing terms and tones of their wonderful breads, desert, and meat pies, until my mouth watered thinking about them.

I burst out of the plane as soon as I was able and rushed to the counter where the Glasgow plane should have been and learned it had left. Returning to the group we begin our odyssey for recourse that evening, walking about a mile through the airport to near the baggage claim area to see what were our options. As I walked I was told by others not in our tour group that when planes were late due to weather, they did not provide a food and lodging. I learned that was only partially true, or it is true if you are an individual traveling by yourself and had no clout with the airlines.

The leader of our group went into a huddle with an agent at the ticket counter exploring what our options were. She finally provided us with coupons for lodging at the local Ramada Inn, supper and breakfast coupons, warning us to not mention it to anyone else on the flight. By around 11pm we were at the Ramada Inn, only to find that they had no rooms available. We asked them to explore their options while we went across the road and ate a late supper at Denny’s Restaurant at midnight.

June 16th, 2004, Wednesday Getting to Edinburgh

When we returned to Ramada Inn after midnight, they had arranged for a return to the airport for us, where we were promised lodging in downtown Philadelphia at the Holiday Independence. We returned to the airport, received new coupons plus ones for transportation there and back and took cabs into town. We also had learned that we would be put on a plane to Chicago(!) the next afternoon at 1:30pm and then a flight from Chicago to Glasgow that evening at 7:35pm, arriving a day later than our original plans.

Soon we were in our rather nice rooms. I had a room to myself on the eighth floor, the top floor, called for a 9am wake-up call and went to sleep. The bed was great but I could have slept on the floor as it was 3am when I closed my eyes.

The next morning we had a leisurely breakfast and checked out about 10:30. Then I learned that the graveyard for Benjamin Franklin was just around the corner.

I was out the door and left to the corner, then a left turn and there was the graveyard almost to the next corner. A donation and gift booth at the entrance, which I ignored. Ben’s grave was immediately to the right along the wall almost to the corner. Took a picture and also of the brass plaque on the brick wall with his self written obituary. A few more photos and back to the hotel, boarded the airport limousine and made it to the airport, picked up our boarding passes and got on the plane at 1:30 and flew to Chicago. This time the flight was pretty uneventful. And I’ve written these notes as I’m in O’Hare Airport waiting for the flight to Glasgow in another two hours, not looking forward to the many hours in a confined space.

As I finished writing the above words, I unplugged my laptop from the floor socket and started putting it away. Another computer user in the terminal eagerly plugged in his laptop and sparks flew as the floor plug disintegrated into a shower of glowing metal. So I didn’t continue writing this log until the next day.

Instead, as we would attend “King Lear” while in Stratford on Avon, I brought out the Cliff Notes paperback on the play, which I had bought from a used bookstore a few days ago, and read a badly written, flowery description of the play.

The plane boarded without incident a little after 7:30 and was able to take off an hour later. The plane headed north along the west side of Lake Michigan and then after fifteen minutes angled over the lake to the northeast corner and into Canada. The flight would take a little over seven hours and we were scheduled to arrive around 8:30am the next morning. Drinks were handed out and after another 30 minutes suppers were served. After two hours we were over Goose Bay, Canada, cruising at 37,000 feet at a speed of 555 mph and an outside temperature of -41 degrees, both Celsius and Fahrenheit. The low temperature of the flight was -59 degrees, Fahrenheit as we passed over the southern tip of Greenland. Pretty cold.

The movies shown that flight were substandard. The first was about the airhead daughter of a fictional President. Why are all President daughters airheads? I watched it with the sound turned off and was not impressed by the cliché body language used by the actors. And the second was a trite bunch of young journalist working for “The New Republic” getting involved in some internet issues of making up stories. Neither attracted my attention or interest.

I pulled out “The Spiral Staircase” by Karen Armstrong. My sister had read the book after we had watched an interview with Karen on Books Reviews on weekend CSPAN. Her declaration that religion was not about belief was one of the few profound and sensible statements made by anyone committed to religion I had ever heard. After reading T.S. Elliot’s “Ash Wednesday I”, in her book, I wrote a poem:

Ash Wednesday in Glasgow

Turning back,
damn this pen!,
to Ash Wednesday,
because I do not hope to know,
not that knowing the problem,
or the ignorance,
nor the “I”.
Yet that Trinity
in this airplane
lifts its wings in song
joined by the cries of infants
that this duration
and its confines,
though rushing towards
the darkness of tomorrow,
yet this time and space,
as every moment does,
glows with a certain certainty,
an intensity of man-made wings,
motionless metal crushing
the forward air, underneath,
and past, and through the night,
as angels fall through their eternal day,
through that inhuman air outside,
colder than pain, while the glow
inside, and the exhausting joy
of a lesson to unlearn, forget,
and renew, I am reborn.

Karen Armstrong was dealing with her own self-identity issues. They were different from mine. Mine were more involved with the issue of “what is an authentic selflessness?” But we both are concerned with “what is the real me?” Is the self one’s beliefs, commitments, political party and ideals, religious community? Just what is it, assuming there is such a thing as a self or consciousness as a thing at all? I’m pretty sure that the self most people think they have doesn’t exist at all, as it is an illusion. I’m pretty sure about that. That is fairly well documented by cases of death experiences, shock, and psychotropic drugs, not to mention the Buddhist studies.

But let’s assume there is a self. What determines what the self is? Is it its beliefs, its values, its priorities, or loves? If it’s that could we not just dispense with the self and talk to the beliefs, the values, priorities, or loves without the self?

For many people that seems to be the case, especially the young and the ignorant. In those cases where the sense of self by the believer is the strongest are the times I don’t feel I am talking to a human self. There is no self there, only beliefs and such, usually quite rigid, and that is always a disappointment, as I can get that from watching a TV show if that is all I want. If I want political ideals all I need is to listen to a politician. If I want some emotional content, I can just watch a soap opera. A TV show can easily replace most people.

Ironically, when the sense of self is the weakest in another is when I sense the most authentic self. Please understand, I am not talking about damaged selves, or people with low esteem problems and such. I am talking about mentally healthy people.

Those who insist they are their beliefs or such, I think, cheat themselves out of being more than their beliefs and such. They violate the one promise we all have of being far more than we can imagine. And they sink into routines of complacency that complete the process of diminished returns because of diminished giving. Their lives of minimized risk provide a historic humanity with one more begat and little more, if even that.

My numb feet and restless legs started feeling uncomfortable. Got up to walk around several times, while some watched the movies and some slept. I couldn’t do either. A minor ordeal not to be able to sleep on a plane, so I was exhausted when we finally landed in Glasgow the next morning.

Went through immigration. Wanted to know how long I would be in the UK. Until July 9th. And went out with the tour group to collect our luggage. (No problem with the luggage in spite of the circuitous path it followed us on.) Found our tour guide outside and loaded onto the bus. Other than an extra 20 minutes to wait for a few more people who arrived soon after, flying in from another airport, we were soon on our way to Edinburgh. “What is that clam shaped building that looks like the Sidney, Australia, opera house?” “Oh, that is the new convention center.” End of Glasgow tour.

Yesterday, my sister, having made it to Scotland, had a bit more of a tour in Glasgow. The bus stopped at the oldest building, the stone Provand’s Lordship building, in Glasgow and the Glasgow Cathedral across the street from it. The Glasgow Cathedral was unique in having two huge stain glass windows of frontal nudes of Adam and Eve. Pretty graphic with no attempt at modesty, or what American society thinks is modesty (which is not modesty but fear or perversion). Her group then made it to Edinburgh, checked into their rooms, and, as planned, and took a tour of Holyroodhouse Palace (no photos allowed inside). I had been in Holyroodhouse with its ancient abbey ruins attached on the side in 1987 when I was sent to Great Britain on business and had the opportunity of celebrating Hogmanay (New Year’s Eve) in Edinburgh that mild winter. But when I returned in 1997 with my daughter during the summer, the Queen was in residence and no one was allowed to tour the palace.

When my group finally arrived in Edinburgh on Thursday, our first stop was below the Castle’s south side on Johnston Terrace. Ironically it was just outside of the Castle Rock Hostel, where my daughter had stayed the summer before. I took a few shots of the hostel and ran to catch up with the group walking up, going south, to St. Giles Cathedral. We encountered a music group in the street protesting job layoffs that had been announced. I went looking for Edwina and eventually found her, across the street from St. Giles, buying postcards. We split from the group and went to have a quick lunch as I was hungry. She supplied me with about ₤100 she had already converted while in the States for cash until I could convert my money.

We returned to the Cathedral and she had me take photos of the new Robert Burns stain glass window in the Cathedral front as well as other glowing windows. Then she led me into the Order of the Thistle Room and showed me where the knights set with the Queen and others of the royalty in their annual meeting. I took more photos of the beautiful woodwork and a unique brass doorknob in the shape of a child with the banner “Pax” on its front.

Returning to the group outside, we returned to the bus and did a tour of the University of Edinburgh (actually only part of it as it is spread across the city), and then up to the Castle, where our guide provides us with detail descriptions of each part of the castle’s buildings. The high points were St. Margaret’s Chapel and the room where Robert the Bruce’s crown lay a few feet from the Stone of Destiny, the Stone of Scone. An actor performed a well-written monolog, some parts improvised, as the defender of the Castle for Queen Mary of the Scots, who was captured and executed for being loyal to Queen Mary. Edwina and I both took turns being photographed with him when he finished. He held his dirk to my throat as Edwina took our photo.

On the way out I bought several small 5cl sample bottles of whiskey, including: Laphroaig, for my daughter per her request; Benromach, one of the top whiskeys of the Spayside area, not imported to the USA; and Talisker, a peppery whiskey of the Isle of Skye, which I had been looking forward to tasting. I also bought Edwina a small bottle of Drambuie, a spicy liqueur that I have always enjoyed, after being introduced to it by a fellow chemist at the DuPont Research Center in 1962.

On returning to the bus we had a tour of the New Town area of Edinburgh and were let go again for an hour on Leith Street, near the east end of Princes Street, with a push towards the shopping malls. Edwina and I took the opportunity to cross the bridge over to the Royal Mile and walk down to Cannon Gate Church. There I found Adam Smith’s grave for her and we took a few more photos. Stopped on the way back to buy a square of fudge and then raced, walking through the Waverley Train Station, back to the bus, which had not returned yet. While we waited I walked up a set of stairs off of Leith Street and found a statue to Abraham Lincoln in a graveyard. More photos.

Finally the bus returned, we boarded, our Braid Hills Hotel room keys were passed out and we drove out to the hotel, arriving at 5pm. I wasted no time and went to my room to sleep for two hours. Woke up when my luggage was brought to the door. Took a shower, put on fresh clothes and made it down to the dinning room for supper. Afterwards I returned to my room and brought this log up to date. Now for some serious sleep.

June 18th 2004, Friday St. Andrews and Fife

Wake up call at 7am. Breakfast at 7:45. Soon on our way across the Forth Bridge to points north. Someone in the group passed out a homemade Baptist hymnal and three songs were sung and a devotional was done. What is this nonsense!? I had not idea beforehand that the trip would be used as an opportunity for the religious in the group to import their metaphysical dogmatism. I don’t appreciate being a captive of any religious or ideological group, especially one that sang hymnals while on vacation. I felt as trapped and as uncomfortable than I would have been as a forced participant at a Fidel Castro harangue or Mother Jones coal miner’s union speech. Baptist hymnals always meant mindlessness and reinforced propaganda for a form of Christianity that I found repulsive. They were a hothouse dogmatism. And I had to put up with this for another eight days! My sister said that she thought they were going to sing Scottish songs. Sure. And I bet she sang Turkish and Greek songs when she toured with them in Turkey and Greece two years ago and Russian songs when she toured with them in Russia last year. Sarcasm.

First stop was St. Andrews and we parked on the street where the first and last hole for the Old Course began and ended the 18 holes. You need to make reservations a year in advance to ensure that you can play at a time of your selection, but there is also a daily lottery in which you can compete with three other players as to who gets to play. Obviously, the astute and greedy player with two friends can play what day he likes if the friends are paid well enough, I imagine.

I took a few camera shots of the unimpressive looking but beloved course and walked over to the caddie shop, where half of the obligatory caddies looked to be in their seventies. Inside the gift shop nearby, Edwina bought Walt a St. Andrews cap and matching coat.

Back in the bus we drove to the ruins of St. Andrews cathedral, not that far away. We walked as a group through the ruins, a mix of Romanesque and Gothic styles. The cathedral was destroyed and left for ruin by the followers of John Know, the Christian equivalent of the Allatolah of Iran, a theocrat who believed in the dominance of government by religion. A backward, ignorant, destructive, ignorant man.

From there we walked to the Bishop’s castle, also a ruin, and in this case more justly so as the Bishop who served there last had a follower of John Knox burned at the stake for heresy. But on that basis all religions are heresy by definition. It is just a matter of who is claiming the heresy, who wins the war, and nothing more. The place was cold and starting to drizzle and I put my hood up on my yellow windbreaker and kept my umbrella under my arm.

Here is a Short History of Religion in Scotland by Mason Kelsey

In the beginning all was peaceful in Scotland because there were no humans.Humans came. They brought their favorite religious nonsense worshipping the rocks, the woods, the streams, their penises and vaginas, anything they could poke a stick at.Different family tribes had different names for their favorite things to worship and they fought over what was the right name to use or the right thing to worship or the right ritual.The Druids developed to try to keep people from killing each other over differences in names. They distracted the people with new rituals and a moral code: "Be nice to your victims before you kill them. And wear blue paint when you fight."The Romans tried to conquer Scotland and failed, probably because they didn't use the right brand of deodorant or use yet another bunch of names for their Gods and they didn’t understand the blue paint stuff. “Why are they wearing blue paint?”Saint Columba came to the Isle of Iona around 600AD and spread Catholic Christianity saying, "Be nice to your victims and don't kill them but enslave them and make them work for you." That seemed to be a nifty idea to the Scots who had had problems keeping house servants because of they didn’t use deodorants. He also told them to "use under arm deodorants". So they became Catholic Christians and the fact that they were the slaves of some fat jerk in Rome was not very important to them as fat jerks in Rome pretty much stayed in Rome and who cares what deodorant they used.By the late 1500s the Catholic Church had accumulated a lot of wealth and power and the people had become pretty much run out of blue paint and deodorant and were starting to look pale and smell. For some reason it never occurred to them to tax the rich churches. (It is amazing how much more advanced we are today.) Their servants found better paying jobs with the clerics and the clerics could afford deodorants so they smelled better. This made the smelly common people mad. About that time someone translated the Bible (the magic book of curses and secret metaphysical conspiracy theories) into English and all hell broke out. Suddenly the priests were not needed and their jobs were outsourced by John Knox to India. This made the Catholic Church mad and they burned a few people as a warning.John called his new religion Presbyterianism because he didn't know how to spell Allotoyah. But he wanted pretty much the same thing, complete control of everything. A friggin' control freak. So he encouraged his followers to go around burning cathedrals and killing Catholics, in the name of God of course which made it OK.A lot of his followers got killed and they killed a lot of Catholics until James I (of England, James VI of Scotland) decided that his cousin, Elizabeth I of England had done a pretty good job of keeping people happy by killing the Catholics and protecting the Protestants and continued that happy program.And that is pretty much the way things are today, except that the Scots found that instead of killing the Catholics that, with the proper deodorants, they made pretty good house servants and generously let them live.However, there are some rumblings by a few discontents, who don't use deodorants, that think we should return to the "old ways" and start worshipping the rocks, the woods, the streams, their penises and vaginas, anything they could poke a stick at again. And they think blue paint is cool.

My sister and I left the group and walked down Market Street looking for a place to have lunch, stopping to pet a cat with most unusual markings on its fur, finally finding a place upstairs near the end of the shops. Had a bowl of mushroom soup with a beer and we split a tuna sandwich. Looking outside we could see over a stonewall into a private garden across the street. It began to rain heavily.

Walking back, umbrellas up, we ducked into a woolen store. Edwina bought a nice shirt and vest for herself. While checking over the cashmere clothing on sale I talked with a woman, also looking at the cashmeres. “I understand that ‘cashmere’ is just short for ‘catshmere’, you know”, I said to her, a perfect stranger. “What?”, she asked. “Catshmere”, I said, “it used to be called catshmere.” “Why?”, she implored. “The term originated here in St. Andrews”, I explained. “At first it was a pâté made from cat livers that was eaten with ale to celebrate the end of the sheering of the sheep. Later, the locals, after they had finished sheering the sheep for the New Wool would sheer the cats, instead of just eating them. Probably had to practice on the lambs first but definitely sheered the cats, getting the short hairs of the toms, not unlike New Wool, and making catshmere from it. Later the “t” was dropped, they didn’t want to let people know the real origin of the cat’s wool, and now people call it cashmere.” “My goodness”, she said, dropping the sweater in her hands. “Yes, and it really makes more sense since it does take more cash to buy cashmere”, I said confidently raising my voice, pointing to the high costs of the clothing, as she turned to escape out the door. I was glad to have been able to help her not be taken advantage by over priced goods.

We paid and left, stopping by a café to get a coffee. Met a philosophy student working on his Masters in philosophy, metaphysics, at St. Andrews University as we were ordering our drinks. “What are you writing your dissertation on”, I asked. “On the identity of the self”, he said. “Brilliant topic”, I replied but was unable to explore the topic with him as he had to leave. I wanted to ask him why do that within the framework of metaphysics since it is not a metaphysical problem. Perhaps he could have shown me in what chair at what table in the café he could find a metaphysical self. Might as well as be searching for a soul in anatomy class. Ah, the waste. There is no such thing as a self. A self is not an object; it is a process.

The rain was getting heavy by now. We chased down the streets looking for the bus. I almost took a wrong turn. Finally made it back to the bus and we were off towards Fife on A917.

By the time we got to Crail, it had stopped raining and we were ready to explore this lovely small fishing village. We stopped at the Market Cross, a little statue in each town’s center that was a medieval sign that they had a town license to market goods there. The Market Crosses did not have a cross but rather had a unicorn on top of the short column.

We walked down to the harbor where a fishing boat, “ Bonnie”, was being lifted into the waters to test its sea worthiness. I climbed up on a high thick stone wall to watch them run it out into the sea and back a few minutes later. Climbing down, I fell into talking with a seaman standing round. “Do you believe in mermaids?”, he asked. I thought about what a strange sort of question that was, and curious why he would ask me, I replied, “Hadn’t thought about it much. Why?” He launched into a story about the Mermaid of Crail. “It seems that once a dying mermaid was found on the rocks below the seawall. Anxious to help the fishermen gathered around here and asked what they could do to comfort her. She replied that she did not seek comfort like a human but only balance. (It is always amazing how such strange creatures can always speak flawless English.) That pleasure or life was not to be sought nor pain or death to be avoided as they were simply opposite sides of the same hard grain of sand. Not between good and evil should we select but between the human choices and the choiceless fish. The fishermen did not understand. She continued, telling them to cut her in half when she died, giving her human half to the hag fish to eat, and her fish half to be sold in the fish market to humans, giving the profit to the poor. And when she died they did as she asked. That is why to this day, the fishermen of Crail feed the fish and fish the sea. And why there are no poor in Crail, yet always fish in the sea.”

I thanked him for the story wondering what he meant by “feed the fishes” and found my sister. We walked back up to the shops passing by a melodious-to-the-nose flower bush. A native passerby called it an orange, but I said, “I’m from Florida so I know it is definitely not an orange.” My sister from behind called out, “It’s a mock orange”. That settled, as we walked along the guy told me he was retired from the Isle of Ire, a small island on the west side of Scotland, and had moved to Crail to retire. He had worked as in a distillery that was renounce for its peppery tasting whiskey. Seems the secret to the taste was that the distillery bought all of its barley from one farmer. Not only was it a single malt whiskey, it was also a single farmer whiskey, very rare.

I asked him, “why would a single farmer’s barley make the unique taste”. He replied, “Well, it was a mystery for a long time although it must have been known to the original owner of the distillery as he was a cousin of the farmer’s father. And it might have remained a mystery if it had not been for a noisy newspaper reporter who hounded the farmer for the secret for his unique barley. Finally the farmer gave in and told the reporter to come by the next morning and he would tell him the secret.

“He arrived bright an’ early and helped the farmer load huge vats of liquid fertilizer onto a cart pulled by his tractor. The reporter was told by the farmer to help spray the fertilizer on the barley in exchange for the secret, which the reporter greedily agreed to. He climbed on the cart and started spraying as the tractor began moving through the barley. As he sprayed, he gagged at the smell. “This stuff smells like week old piss!”, he exclaimed. “Ai”, said the farmer, “that be the secret.”

He continued his way up the street as Edwina and I went into the Royal Mail office to buy some stamps. Inside not only was it a post office but also a used book store, an art store, a gift shop, and post cards were sold too. I bought a small framed drawing of the harbor while Edwina got some airmail stamps. I left my umbrella there and had to run back and get it later.

We found an art shop with some whimsical prints in primary colors of the town of Crail but didn’t buy anything when we found the artist would not ship back to the States.

The ride back to Edinburgh was boring. We did stop by the outer gate to Holyrood Palace but didn’t go in before going back to our hotel, and the guide pointed out Queen Mary’s Bath House, which stands outside of the Palace gate.

That evening we went to “Jamie’s Scottish Evening” downtown at a hotel on Leith Street. Outside a Scottish Piper welcomed us with several tunes. Upstairs was served a salmon dinner with all the Italian acetone (or was it turpentine?) we could drink. After the dinner a dinner show of old jokes about what is worn under the kilt (“Answer: nothing, everything is in working order”), Scottish sword dance by a Japanese biochemistry graduate student at Edinburgh University, and a songs by a lovely lady with a vibrato that needed to be tightened up with a garrote. This was all followed by the ceremony of the Haggis, where the haggis was piped into the banquet hall with deer antlers surrounding it, including a fairly well done, expressive, dramatic recitation of Rabbie Burns’ poem to the haggis. Well done too. Then haggis with neeps and tatties was served to all who were brave enough to eat it. Frankly, I was surprised; it was delicious!

June 19, 2004, Saturday, Stirling to the Lake District

Bags by the door for delivery downstairs while I shave and shower. Down for breakfast. Stand around talking with a guy who had retired from being a guard in a prison in Virginia. He started telling a racist joke, throwing a few “niggers” around in the process. I didn’t want to be around. “Excuse me.” I left. I don’t like these people. They are not the salt but the scum of the earth.

After he had gotten on the bus I returned. Packed up and luggage loaded on the bus, we headed up to Stirling to explore the castle. Yeah, the same religious service, as essential for them as any addictive drug. Once we got to Stirling we stopped below the cliff the castle was on and jumped out of the bus to take some photos. Then drove up the narrow, winding streets to the parking lot out of the castle gate. In front on the right was an idealistic statue of Robert the Bruce, looking like a just returned crusader, larger than life. I doubted if it looked like he actually appeared in life. I did learn later that he was reputed to be six feet two inches tall, (my height), which might have been true as his bones, exposed and measured in 1821 at the Melrose Abbey, were estimated to be those of a man over six feet in height.

Then through the outer wall to meet the short red headed castle guide, Ross, whose voice was twice as large as he was. He led us around explaining the stages and changes the castle went through in building, tearing down, rebuilding, changes, and even archeological work that showed by the lay of the line of stones in the court yard where the foundations were for St. Michael’s chapel, the site that Queen Mary of Scots would have recognized.

After we inspected the great hall, and the chapel that James VI (aka James I of England) built, after tearing down the chapel his mother knew, we went looking for the tapestry room. We had seen a tapestry copy of the unicorn resting in a pen (the original was in New York City) and wanted to see the progress being made on the three-year project of weaving the second tapestry. After taking a side trip through the Great Kitchen, filled with wax figures of cooks, bakers, butchers, and assorted help, we found our way, way in the back, to where the tapestry was being woven.

The three weavers had only begun on the scene of hunting and killing two unicorns. Now we know why the unicorn is extinct. Or can something that never existed become extinct? It does sort of imply it actually did exist at one time. Such a failed human tendency to not see through that illusion. Just naming something seems to give it existence. And such a profound effect that gives rise to all of metaphysics, enriching on one hand our imaginations, and on the other leading us to worship of things that exist only as words, human words.

Religion is, in part, the worship of human words, unable to understand they are a human attribute and not some gift from gods, attaching an importance to words that we have difficulty not seeing to be a false web of connotations and denotations. This is a primitive worldview that many people in all societies never seem to move beyond. My father was one such person, who treated words as if they were something beyond human nature and given to humanity by God as a gift. He never said that but that was simply because he was not a verbal man and he could not conceive of it being any other way. Like the many in our modern society with that primitive mind, they cannot see what humanity is as a natural development and require a supernatural cause to explain what is otherwise too complex for them to understand. The brilliantly divisive division of religious thought into different religions, all claiming to be the one true way, certainly leaves mankind vulnerable to all sorts of fanatics. When nothing can be proven, and people are blind to religions being a human creation, anything can be believed. Even unicorns.

Running out of time, Edwina went to buy some postcards, while I photographed the garden in its vibrant colors and orderly line of hues and tones between gray stone walls and a close cut lawn. Then back to the bus and we were on our way west to Loch Lomand, the largest lake, loch, in Scotland.

The guide recited the song “You take the High Road”, and explained the significance of the words as the expected death of a Jacobite captured and held at Carlisle Castle, just south of the Scottish Border. Strangely it seems the best Scottish songs are all about the terrible things that happened to the Jacobites. Another song I’ve liked is the “Skye Boat Song”, about secreting Bonnie Prince Charles out of the country after his decisive defeat at Cullodin Moor, near Inverness. By the way, the Battle of Cullodin was a really stupid battle where the Highland Catholic Scots using only broadswords went up against the English and Scottish Protestant Muskets. They didn’t even get close to hack with their broadswords, and that was the last battle, ever, in which one side had nothing but swords.

We arrived at a tourist trap built on the south end of the lake. A tower of seven floors allowed a view at least to the early islands that blocked any view further north. It is a lovely lake but there are many just as nice in North Caroline in the mountains. Just not as long.

Down below we could see swans and their young in the water. Edwina and I dropped back to the sixth floor where we bought a soup and sandwich for lunch. After the lunch we determined to find what haggis sold for in the shop below. It was not that much, but we could not carry it with us, as it would have spoiled and could not send it to my son and daughter because of USA customs bans to prevent Mad Haggis disease.

There is some speculation now that American Independence was due to King George III contracting the earliest know case of Mad Cow’s Disease. He did some pretty silly things and made some poor decisions, before dying in a distressful way. But since his madness went on for 32 years, I doubt it was BSE. Just Mad King Disease, which the USA also decided was a good idea not to import. Neither his grandfather, father, nor his sons seemed to develop the disease. Perhaps there have been other times that sheep scrapies disease has jumped the species barrier to cows and from there to cats, clowns, and crowns.

Once back on the bus we headed south to Gretna Green, another tourist trap with a really ugly orange statue of an amorous couple and a huge gift shop filled with cheap trinkets. This town was important for the singular difference in age limits for marriage without the permission of parents. In England, in those times, one had to be 21 before one could marry without the permission of one’s parents. In Scotland it was a much-relaxed 16. (This compares favorably with some southern states of that time which allowed marriage at 14.) Any couple in the throws of their hormones and swollen genitals could get a legal alternative to their parent’s better judgment by taking a quick trip north across the border. Not only could a pastor or priest in Scotland with two witnesses allowed a marriage but a fisherman, a joiner, or a blacksmith could do the same job for two guineas or a dram of whiskey. And apparently there was no shortage of drunken blacksmiths in Gretna.

There was a hideous orange statue of a young boy and his girl holding each other in a tight embrace out in front of the parking lot and gift shop.

After an absolutely wretched re-enactment of a quick marriage we had a group picture, I was pressed into being included against my better judgment.

Finally we were back on the bus, quickly across the border and now in England, the first time for me since 1997. We continued south into the Lake District. Finally into the twisty turning roads that all go everywhere. There were scads of towns with strange names, one called “Ghere” and one, which we didn’t go through, called “Thered”, the two having the strange attribute that there are no roads from Ghere to Thered. Gertrude Stein would have had a field day in Thered.

Our guide, Liz, described the most important candy of the region as being “Kendal Mint Cake”. This candy is nothing but pressed granules of sugar with corn starch and a mint flavor added. Sir Hillary, claimed to have lived on Kendal Mint Cake when he climbed Mt. Everest for the first time. And there is a brand that has his picture or the word “Everest” on its package as a result. I bought a bar of Kendal Mint Cake for our oldest son, Ben, the mountain climber in the family and sent it to him when I returned home. She also mentioned that Grasmere was famous for its gingerbread. I’m surprised that it is not also know for its Chamomile Tea, considering that Beatrice Potter lived near by.

As we saw our first lake, one that provides the water for the City of Manchester, we saw along its shores a flock of the rare and little known Toy Spoonbill Dinosaur of the Lake District, the only known dinosaur, besides birds, that survived the extinction 65 million years ago. This tiny, only about one foot long, birdlike dinosaur is under protection by the Bird Society of the United Kingdom, also known as BS of UK. Fortunately, this is a plant-eating dinosaur and is not a threat to any human. In fact, it was almost slaughtered to extinction in the early 1800s when its spotted pin feathered skin was popular for making shoe tops for the wealthy women of London and Glasgow. Wordsworth and Shelley both wrote poems about the dinosaur; although in their time it was not know exactly what it was. Shelley’s “To a Skylark” is said to have really been about it due to the opening line, “Hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wort!” So, at least he knew it wasn’t a bird.

Some skeptical paleontologists have questioned how a dinosaur could have actually survived the mass extinction until it was pointed out that romantic poets, like Wordsworth, survived quite well in the same environment, and they were quite a bit larger. The counter argument that romantic poetry is all but extinct seems to have fallen on deaf ears. After the tongue lashing by Captain Horatio Hornblower, it is surprising that anyone enjoys Wordsworth’s poetry.

On we drove through the now heavily forested lake district, past lumpy mountains, mountains are called fells, meadows called dells, waterfalls, purple Rhododendrons in bloom, the town of Grasmere on Grasmere Lake and into the town of Windermere, beside Lake Windermere, the largest lake in England. Shortly south of Windermere we found our hotel for the next two nights, Windermere Hydro Hotel. Hydro means they pretend they are a spa and usually have a swimming pool.

Our rooms were assigned and after a brief rest we came down for supper. At the table I learned that one of our members, a grossly over weight man who had been feeling badly all day long on the bus, had been taken to the hospital with an oxygen mask on from the hotel. I got to tell the story about my two angioplasties, in exacting detail over the dinner table to those that sat with me, hopefully encouraging them to sit elsewhere tomorrow night.

June 20th, 2004, Sunday Grasmere in the Lake District

Turning on the Telly when I woke up, I found an interview of a writer who was anxious to connect “empire” and “USA” in as many sentences as he was able, extrapolating the British experience of running (or ruining, depending on your point of view) the world, without his experience of having much power at all. It is amazing the number of Brits that think their empire experience is applicable, useful information, or current.

I switched channels to a Kim Possible show about saving their pet Mole Rat from the clutches of the Ninja Monkeys, the Mad Scotsman, and several other villains. Then a weird show on a Big Fat Chicken and how to draw the Mona Lisa by grouping a bunch of colored pencils with a rubber band and repeatedly hitting the paper with the bunch. I turned on the water and soaked in the tub after shaving.

The Reverend Letusgather Bytheriver, who was the tour leader, had arranged for the group to attend service that morning at the Grasmere Methodist Church. After breakfast we got back on the bus, went through the ritual of songs and devotional, retraced a few miles of the road we had traveled the day before, and arrived shortly in Grasmere. I took the opportunity to strike out on my own and see the town. Church was the last place I wanted to go to. Most of the shops were open. Being a tourist trap of a more subtle kind, I found several shops just for the fells walkers.

Apparently there is an overwhelming urge among the healthy of the Lake District to go “Fell Bagging”, hiking to the tops of the mountains. They have contests to see what is the maximum number of Fells that can be reached in 24 hours. One fellow ran 70 miles in 24 hours, bagging 51 peaks. Another did 77 peaks. Impressive!

The names of the peaks or fells are delightful, reflecting their Viking origins. In the 24 hours race, starting at Kiswick, one might check off fells with names such as (read these out loud, rolling your tongue over the syllables) Hobcarton Pike, Sandhill, Grassmoor, Whiteless Pike, Sail, Ard Crags (“Ard” is Gaelic for “high” or “loud”), Hindscarth, Grey Knotts, Brandreth, Green Galde, Scoat Fell, Yewbarrow, Great End, Lingmell, Red Pike, Cold Pike, Little Stand, High Raise, Dollywagon, Helvellyn Low Man, Catstycam, Great Dodd, Blencathra, Coombe, Little Calva, Skiddaur, Little Man, Lowscale Fell, and back to Keswick. I left out over half of the names.

I then worked my way down to St. Oswald’s Church, where William Wordsworth and his wife, Mary, and other family members were buried. The church is built by a small stream, which winds through Grasmere, a suitable and lovely place for such an influential Romantic poet. I talked with a gentleman down from Inverness on the trail to the grave behind the church. He informed me that the name of the stream was the Rothay River and not a Beck. He said that you have to be able to jump over it for it to be a Beck. And that another word for a Beck is Ghyll.

The area is called the Lake District but there are not that many lakes there. I counted eleven Lake District lakes: Bassenthwaite Lake, Derwent Water, Loweswater, Ennerdale Water, Wast Water, Thirlmere, Ullswater, Haweswater Reservoir, Grasmere, Coniston Water, and, the largest, Windermere. There far more lakes in Central Florida, with 57 in the city limits of Orlando alone. And the fells reminded me of the mountains in North Carolina and Virginia, which are also just as beautiful.

The local bawdy humor was evident in the postcards. One read “A Quiet Night in a sheep farmer’s house with Flossie, the farmer’s inflatable friend”, showing an English farmer blowing up a rubber ewe for his sexual entertainment.

By this time the church was letting out and I met up with my sister. We headed over to the Garden Center, which had a nice restaurant with home cooked meals. Carrot and Lima Bean Soup with a Quiche, half a piece for each of us of two types of gingerbread (a specialty of the area started by Sarah Nelson), one almost crystalline like a cookie and the other, soft like a bread, and a soda. Then out into the garden shop to see the flowers arranged in alphabetical order by Latin names to sell. Very British and actually quite sensible.

I checked out the Lakeland Antiques, Ltd., art gallery, talking with the manager, David Baxter about some oils by Simon Whitfield, a local artist in his twenties. I was struck by the texture, detail, and colors of his oil, “St. Johns in the Vale”, a scene up in the fells, which reminded me of hikes I had had in the High Sierras. He wanted ₤125 for it. Sold, and had it shipped home (it now hangs in my bedroom) and my sister bought four more of his works, another mountain scene and three miniatures of boats and houses.

After our adventure into the local art we made it back to the bus and traveled to William Wordsworth’s home, “Dove Cottage”. The place is small and cramped and the tour guide made it sound like twenty people lived there at a time. I picked up a book from their bookstore next door, “Romanticism” by Duncan Heath and Judy Boreham, to read, although I was intimately familiar with Wordsworth, as any school student is. What is lacking in our schools is the why.

William Wordsworth was faced with the three revolutions of his time: the American and French Revolutions as well as the Industrial Revolution. Most people don’t know of his involvement in the French Revolution, probably because he had the good fortune of returning to England before it got nasty and Maximilien-François-Marie-Isidore de Robespierre got on his roll.

Today we are faced with the aftermath of the de-colonization of the many empires, especially the British, French, and Russian empires, in which the parliamentarian nations with colonies left much of the world without decent civil governments after plundering their resources, and democracies were rarely left, India and the Union of South Africa, being among the rare exceptions. Because of that experience we have writers, like the one I saw on TV that morning, eager to categorize America as the new colonizer, perhaps thinking that Britain might feed off of the table scraps. They will be disappointed as America is determined not to create a new empire.

If any plundering is being done it is of the American people with the outsourcing of jobs to foreign workers in foreign lands, combined with using the American people as the consumers of goods created by those foreign workers who eliminated American jobs. Pretty stupid Americans. Somewhat like the destruction of the cottage industries of Wordsworth’s time by the textile mills, jobs are being destroyed. We are as much in a revolution of our times as Wordsworth was in his. This will force major changes to our political environment that are still invisible to most people.

The promise of the Industrial revolution was to raise the average standard of living. But it did that only by the leveling of society using a taxation system that redistributed wealth from those that tended to centralize wealth and increase the spread between the rich and the poor. If there had not been any redistribution of wealth volunteer or otherwise, the standard of living would not have been raised a whit.

We are in a similar dilemma as political confusion is being created by those that are trying to apologize for the very wealthy making far more than a million in earned income a year by treating them as if they were making less than a few hundred thousand a year. The gullible and ignorant, who make less than one hundred thousand dollars a year, don’t realize how important that distinction is, or how profoundly it can burden them.

An aggressive advocacy of democratization of the autocratic and authoritarian countries, especially in the Middle East, coupled with a reform of the taxation system is the key to the leveling of the playing field in our time. Yet we seem to lack the Shelleys and Byrons, who championed democratic ideals among the liberals. Is democracy no longer an ideal? As long as there are governments that allow workers to work in slave like conditions or deprive the workers of the benefits of their labor, American workers will never again see the standard of living that existed from the 1950s to 2000. And as long as the Democrat Party refuses to return to its roots as the party of the worker and continues its obscene obsession with the ethos of death, there will be no champion to redirect our ideals. The liberal forces of American need some thorough self-criticism and house cleaning.

Back at the hotel I slept for three hours until 7pm and then endured eating dinner with some women who were worried about having time tomorrow for their daily bath and having the proper hair spray. As they were well past their 70th birthday and could do little to improve their looks, I suggested they should shave their heads to solve that problem, which, however truthful, was not appreciated.

Tomorrow we head for Stratford on Avon after visiting the Waterford Pottery Plant.

The pot of Typhoo tea is no longer warm, my cup is empty, and it is time for me to go to bed.

June 21st, 2004, Monday (First Day of Summer) Stratford on Avon

Breakfast was a disaster. One of the fundamentalist talked about his trip to Mt. Ararat in Turkey and how he saw Noah’s Ark on the mountain, even touched it. I burst out laughing at this obvious nonsense and told him I doubted that he had seen any boat since there is no way that any flood happened that would leave a large boat on that mountain side. He said it was only a matter a belief what truth is. It was clear that the man did not understand reason or what it means to validate truth. A woman Methodist preacher sitting out our table supported the man asking me if I believed I was created by God or came from monkeys. I have learned that one cannot leave these challenges in a passive manner as these people are aggressive in spreading their fundamentalist agenda, in the same manner as the fundamentalist in any religion attempt to spread their nonsense. But I’ve also learned that getting into a debate with these people in a private conversation is a waste of time as they only see it as an opportunity to demonstrating their loyalty to a jealous God that is watching their every move. Their religion is more closed and demanding than the horrible reality for the anti-hero of “1984”. I told her that evolution is an obvious and easy choice and that modern biology would not be possible without it. She also supported the idea that belief is all that one needs to determine truth. I told her that she was an ignorant person and left, having finished my breakfast.

The usual religious routine after our luggage was loaded on the bus, we proceeded down the motorway passed the town of Woodstock, where Blenheim Palace was, the home of the 11th Duke of Marlborough. The 8th Duke was Winston Churchill’s uncle and Blenheim was the place where Winston was born. Winston wrote a multi-volume book on the “Life and Times of the Duke of Marlborough”, which I thought would be an excellent gift for my daughter. We could see the palace in the distance as we whizzed by. We did stop at the Wedgwood Pottery Factory. That was a treat. We spent looking at the early works and then moving through the stages in the creation of the china and other fired ceramic objects. It was really neat that we got to talk with the workers as they worked at each step. My sister and I talked with a potter at a wheel towards the end as I was curious about the labor protections and occupational diseases they had. He was pretty open and honest, as I already knew the answers.

We didn’t have enough time to really do any shopping at the regular or the seconds shops and just enough time to grab a sandwich at the Bistro at the factory. Then we were on the road again.

Next stop was in Coventry where we went to the new Coventry Cathedral to St Michael, built after Coventry was carpet bombed by the Germans in World War II, the first English city to be so destroyed. Hanging on the outside wall is a sculpture of St Michael with his foot on a bound and defeated Satan. The city of Coventry was not a military target and only bombed to terrify all British citizens. Five hundred and sixty eight of its citizens, men, women, and children, died in that raid. In symbolic defiance, the rebuilding of the cathedral began the next day.

A very old lady in her 80s, Alma Sanders, was our docent, taking us through the different points of interest in both the bombed out shell of the old cathedral as well as the modern new cathedral. Edwina and I, walking on her sides, through the chapels, telling her that our grandmother’s name was “Alma”. Alma talked about her memories of the bombing of the Coventry Cathedral and how her home, although it lost its windows, was not destroyed. She was one of the lucky ones.

As we left a side chapel I stood at the top of four steps, looking at the front window of transparent and white crystalline angels, when I heard what sounded like and out of the corner of my eye what looked like a person turning quickly and then bouncing down and then rolling on the level floor below. I turned and saw Edwina rolling across the marble floor and then stopping. I was stunned. Several people nearer her jumped to her aid. I stood still waiting to see if she had broken any bones. She was more embarrassed than hurt although later that night she complained about her side being bruised. Once up in a pew chair, I sat by her while the rest of the crowd moved to the next station. This was the first incident that indicated to me that she had little or no peripheral vision. After a while, when it was clear she was OK, I left her to go buy some stamps outside to mail a postcard, each, to Nina and Sky, telling her I would be right back.

When I returned she had caught up with the group and was moving without a limp. Thank goodness she has a hefty amount of padding on her to absorb the fall. Later Edwina and I explored the basement of the Cathedral and found a café there, as well as the restrooms we were looking for.

After Coventry we headed for Stratford on Avon, to have a quick supper at 5:30pm and then go to the Swan Theatre for a performance of “King Lear”. After the guide ran through the timing logistics, I was asked to give a synopsis of the play. The play, written by Shakespeare in 1607, combined two stories. One, the legend of King Lear came from ancient pre-Christian Britain, and provided the main story. In 1590 a story about the Earl of Gloucester was published, which Shakespeare plagiarized to weave into the play and parallel as a second theme. Both involve betrayal of a parent by a child. For King Lear, it was his oldest two daughters and one of the daughter’s husband, the Duke of Cornwall. For the Earl of Gloucester it was his second bastard son, Edmund.

Both parents had a good child, Lear had his youngest daughter, Cordelia, and the Earl had his oldest legitimate son, Edgar.

I didn’t go into all the details of the play on the bus, although I whispered them to Edwina as the play progressed that evening so she would not be lost. It is a play you really need to read before you go see. But I did try to get across what errors King Lear and Gloucester made that made the tragedy possible. King Lear’s error was dividing his kingdom among his daughters. He was over 80 years old and probably feeling that his ability to make good judgments was fading fast. That was probably true, as he divided it on the basis of how much the daughter’s expressed their love for him. It would have been immediately obvious to a person in Elizabeth I’s time that to divide a kingdom had two important disasters build into that action. First, it would create small warring kingdoms, and that is what the play’s direction clearly indicated when the two sisters started fighting over the same lover. Second, it would weaken Britain to an outside invasion from France, which also happened in the play; although France was defeated (I’m sure the audience in Shakespeare’s day gave a sigh of relief).

The errors of the Earl of Gloucester were those of believing the illegitimate son over the legitimate son, an error that any person in Shakespeare’s day would have not made. Being a bastard was worse than being left handed. And heaven help the left handed bastard.

I then said rather than give all the secrets of the play away; we should go and watch them hack each other to death.

Soon after that we were in Stratford, at the Falcon Hotel on Chapel Street, eating supper, and, one block away attending the play at the Swan Theatre, a modern stage. The costumes were twentieth century clothes with a little upper armor in the final battle scenes. The performance was pretty good with only a few moments of hesitation to recover the tempo of the play. Cast of twenty. I would give it an “A-”. At ₤20 a person, I expected no less.

Back at the hotel, I loaded Edwina’s photos for the last few days on my laptop and my daily collection. Wrote this and went to bed.

June 22, 2004, Tuesday Mopping Up Shakespeare and on to London

Another day with a tight schedule. Up at 6:30am, bags out at 7:20, breakfast at 7:30, and bus left at 8:30. We only went two blocks before our first stop at William Shakespeare’s home. Took the tour that included seeing a copy of the first folio and other books of the early 1600s. Then we moved through his home room by room. A larger and more comfortable home than the small cottage of William Wordsworth we saw yesterday. But they were not all that much difference in creature comforts. Outside, the garden was a delight. Herbs, spices, and flowers. Much lavender and poppies in bloom.

After Shakespeare’s home we drove a few miles out into the country to the home that Anne Baker Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife, grew up in. Also a nice home that was occupied by a descendant of the Bakers until 1890. Even had a mechanical device to turn a spit in the open fireplace.

The guide in the kitchen was an elderly man, John, who had retired from Bosch in Watford. He had worked with an early computer developed by the University of Cambridge. We got onto that topic when he made jokes about everything being digital now days in comparison to the mechanical spit that was used in Anne Hathaway’s family home. I mentioned that I wanted to go to the place where the first computer was developed with the help of Alan Turning as part of the World War II project to support the German Enigma decryption project. He said, “Oh, you mean Bletchley Park?” “Exactly.” “That is just south of the town of Milton Keynes. You will need to take the train out of the Euston Station to get there. Takes about an hour.” “Yes”, I replied, “I had forgotten to print that info out before I left the states. Much thanks.” And I wrote it down.

It was clear that John knew much more than what he was comfortable saying. This is just not common knowledge, although there is a very nice website that Bletchley Park now has on the Internet, which I had read before I left. People of his generation still are trying to avoid sinking ships. “I’ll go there before I leave”, I said. I wanted to pick up a book on the Enigma effort at Bletchley Park for my son who is interested in cryptography and is working on a project on that topic for his senior college project.

The Enigma machine was an encrypting/decrypting electronic device developed in Germany soon after World War I. It was picked up by the government and became a secret project and adopted by the Nazi Party when it came to power. The Polish government had successfully broken the code before WWII, when the key was only changed once a month. But after war broke out and Poland was invaded the key was changed every day. The Polish government in exile turned over their knowledge of the device to the British government and Bletchley Park was a secret project that was given the important project of determining how best to break the code when the key changed daily.

Alan Turning and several others contributed enormously to that project and soon a method was developed to break the code even with a daily change of key.

But Alan Turing is best known to mathematicians who study in the field of computability and unsolvability, that branch of mathematics that allows one to prove that some things cannot be proven, the best known (and simplest) example is the Halting Problem. It can be proven that a general computer program cannot be written that can be used to determine if any other program will ever finish. It is usually the first proof that one learns if you take a course on this topic.

Alan is known to programmers, as he was the first person to lay out the theory for how a computer would work. His mathematical model is called the Turing Machine and is a fairly simple device with a tape to store information, a read/write head, and a list of commands. And Alan is known to people in the field of artificial intelligence because of his “Turing Test”, a method of objectively determine if a communication source is “intelligent”.

This is still an open issue in artificial intelligence as Church’s thesis (which is still not a testable hypothesis) states that computers can only solve problems that are recursive functions. If that hypothesis is correct, the implication is that digital computers can never reproduce all of the mental capabilities of humans, or any creature of intelligence, for that matter. I’m assuming that the set of non-recursive functions is not a null set. It would be curious if mathematics has mistakenly crossed over into some strange form of metaphysics by assuming that a null set is not empty.

On the road again we passed through the Coxwald area, known for its limestone geology. Many buildings in the area are built out of the pale yellow limestone that is quarried in the area. It looks a bit like Italian travertine out of which the Coliseum was built. Liz, our tour guide, talked about the endings of town names having meanings and indicating origins. For example with the town of Chipping, the “Chip” means “Market” and “ing” means Town”. That reminded me of Vacaville in California, which means, in Spanish, Cow Town. And she mentioned that the churches were called Wool Churches as it was from the sale of wool that the churches were built.

As an agriculture area, she mentioned the fields of yellow canola oil plants. Canola is a name used in USA for an important cooking oil, but in Britain it is called Rape Seed Oil and used only in margarine, woman’s makeup, and light industrial oil. There were also many fields of barley and wheat.

The sides of the roads were fairly clean and I learned that it was due to the Magpies, a local bird that is attracted to bright shiny objects. The government has instituted an imaginative program of training the Magpies, emphasizing their natural tendencies, to effectively police the roadsides and remove all trash. The government still does have the curious problem of what to do with the Beck beer cans and plastic bottles now up in the nests in trees, though.

Large numbers of trained and neutered Magpies will be let to foreign governments to help them control the careless behavior of their own citizens. The state of North Carolina has paid for research to determine if they can be trained to pick up cigarette butts, while Disney World in Orlando is interested in whether they can be trained to pick up the litter left behind by all the spoiled children drop their trash as they run from ride to ride.

We continued to the town of Windsor, where Windsor Castle was a prominent attraction. The Queen was not there the day we visited, so we were able to visit the State Department in addition to the chapel where many kings were buried and the Order of the Garter meets. Would you believe that the Emperor of Japan is a member? The State Department contains the famous Queen Mary’s Doll House. And it has an almost unending collection of portraits of famous persons.

Then another hour to London and soon we were at the Hilton Olympia in Kensington on High Street in the rain, now a predictable afternoon repeat performance.

My sister and I tried to phone British Airways to get a fax of our electronic ticket to Glasgow the day after tomorrow and back, and found that British Airways has a serious problem. They had cut their staff way back after 9/11 when tourist travel plunged. They removed any 24 hour toll free phone service and often don’t pick up the phone during normal work hours. We were stuck, having forgotten to bring the e-ticket printout with us from the Internet web site we used while in the States. We will just have to go to the counter and plead our case on Thursday.

Tomorrow I want to go to Bletchley Park and pick up some books on cryptography for my son. And also I wanted to pick up a copy of Winston Churchill’s book on the Duke of Marlborough for my daughter.

Enough, I’m tired. It is after midnight. And I am sleepy. To bed.

June 23, 2004, Wednesday Bletchley Park

Skipping to the chase, I slept late and got up around 9am, pissed in the California urinal, shaved, took a shower, phone rang while I was in the shower, missed the call, finished shower, dried off, phone rang again, my sister, “Are you coming on the tour of the Tower of London?” “Naw, heading up to Bletchley Park today. See you tonight.”

Out of the Hilton Olympia Hotel and headed towards the Kensington Olympic station. ₤4.30 for an all day ticket on the Tube. Soon on the train to Earl’s Court station; transferred to the District Line going east to Victoria Station; transferred to the Victoria Line and traveled north to Euston station, up the escalators, twittering like English sparrows, to the train station. Stood in line to purchase a round trip ticket to Bletchley, ₤14.20. Train left at 10:54, less than ten minutes after I bought the ticket and headed out to gate 9. Timing was perfect.

I’m off! Should arrive around 11:48am. The train builds up speed. An inbound train sucks by with a slam about ten minutes out and is gone. Another one, this time on the right a few minutes later.

England

A face so old that roses have dementia
and forget they are wandering. Rain,
which waters all the fords, hangs in the air,
so solid and permanent, liquid confetti
which I breathe and swim and sniff and sneeze
all in one race to incompletion,
all complete with British toast racks.

Then the train stops, forgetting it
had a destination. And nothing
happens for a long time. So time
becomes a substance to be eaten,
both a food and a sacrificial poison,
a timeless relaxation and a timed stress,
a yellow hope, an oak stump hopelessness,
a wonder to children and a curse to the old,
songs to the dead, litany for the living
looking back at their shining lives,
turning back to the future, gazing
into the blinding void that each
year yawns wider like the mow
of a bored and indifferent god.

Oh, England! Filled with trinkets
of feeble toddlers and the terror of the old,
may you, might you, must you travel without
a valid ticket, rushing pass the rape seed fields,
yellow, as the barley is green, and the falling
blue on a black train through an everlasting rain.

Passed several stations but stopped at Watford Junction, Hemel Hempstead at 11:22, Berkhamsted at 11:33 and Leighton Buzzard at 11:46. Finally Bletchley, got off, and asked directions to Bletchley Park. “Cross the street, and find the path to the right of the Enterprise Car Let, and then walk ten miles”, she said with a cackle. I already knew it was not far so was in on the joke. Found the path, plainly marked, and walked a few hundred feet to a street, turned right and faced a gate with a guard station on the left. As I walked through the gate I was stopped by the guard as if I were someone who should not be there. When I asked about visitors to Bletchley Park, he told me to go to the gift shop to purchase my ticket but go nowhere without a guide. A bit of an overplay to create a feeling that I had just stumbled upon the best kept secret of World War II perhaps, but that sort of thing is a bit silly. I asked if any government work was still done at Bletchley Park and he said, “No, not any more.”

Heading over to the Gift shop I paid ₤8.00 as a senior (60 and over) and looked at a few of the books. And I found there were two tours each day. One at 11:30, which I had just missed by 30 minutes, and one at 14:00. I could go look at the military vehicles next door or go to the cafeteria but was again told not to go anywhere else. “My goodness”, I thought, “after 60 years they are still playing secrecy games.” I spent about 30 minutes in the gift shop looking at the books, trying to decide which ones I would get for me and my son’s reading. Then I walked towards the cafeteria, pausing to look at a 1/5th scale model of a German U-Boat.

In the cafeteria I ordered a bowl of pepper and mustard soup and a cup of mocha coffee. The large steaming bowl of soup was brought out a few minutes later and it was very tasty. But the name was misleading as it was more of a cream of onion soup with some small smooth pepper corns floating around in the cream. I brought out an orange and a small packet of Walker’s shortbread to complete the lunch and enjoyed watching the visitors as they arrived. Next to me were some boys talking about Fibonacci and irrational numbers. My mind wandered off trying to remember if Cantor had determined whether the number of rational numbers was the same as the number of irrational numbers. Oh, yes, א0 was the order of rational numbers, which can be counted, and א1 was the order of real numbers that include irrationals, which are not countable. One of the non-intuitive discoveries Cantor made is that the cardinality of integers is the same as for all fractions because a one-to-one relationship can be made between all fractions and all integers.

Is there any relationship of orders of infinity or cardinality to chaos? Are there levels or phases of chaos? I suspect so. Chaos seems to be a concept that mathematics must deal with indirectly, in somewhat the same way it does with infinity. Can chaos be tied to not being countable as the real numbers are and order to the countable numbers as rational numbers are? If chaos is due to atomic phenomena being perceived at a macro level, does that perception involve some uncertainty or indeterminacy? That would place chaos as a sort of order (excuse my pun) of infinity above order, or like a phase change such as from a solid to a liquid. I suspect that these categories are not good models of reality but that order and chaos do differ in yet not well-understood ways. But what? If one can show that there is equivalence between numbers that have an infinite number of digits in random order that is without order and numbers that have total order, is there some parallel in the difference between order and disorder and Cantor’s orders of cardinality?

Finally, I move up to the level of functionality. Is there a cardinality that can be associated with functions like you can with numbers? I suspect there is. And that would imply there is some sort of cardinality to chaos, to degrees of freedom.

Months later I ran across a tribute to Mandelbrot in Nature Magazine and thought of fractals, Mandelbrot’s contribution to fractal (chaos) theory. Early on he had studied prices of commodities in the commodities markets. At that time most economists thought that such price changes followed a bell-shaped curve called a gaussian distribution. “Yet when Mandelbrot looked at charts of cotton prices, he noticed an odd phenomenon. If the label was removed from the time axis, it was impossible to tell whether the charts covered one week or one year; the pattern of peaks and troughs looked the same at each scale. Mandelbrot, then at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, knew that such 'self-similar' systems follow a different distribution, known as a power law. Crucially, big jumps in value are far more common in these distributions. Mandelbrot showed that the same was true for cotton prices — and in doing so he helped to change the way that stock market firms manage risk.” (Nature Magazine, Vol 432 No 7015 pp266-267)

This gave me a clue that phase changes could be expressed as a breakdown in the phenomenon that Mandelbrot noticed, where one could see a change in patterns of peaks and troughs when one passed over a phase change, that phase changes do not follow a continuous power law distribution across phase boundaries, an order of cardinality, or a change in the order of order.

At this point, my thoughts disintegrate into chaos, if not before.

My son is working on a true random number generator as his senior college project and I am busy trying to make it fail with counter arguments, not just to make things harder, but more to make them more interesting. I’m starting to think it can be shown that there is no such thing as a true random number that it is a flawed concept, and, interestingly enough, that seems to be a cryptographic issue. In the future, secrets might not be possible.

Finally 14:00 rolled around and I moved to the starting point of the tour. Stewart Fris was the guide. He started with the incident of Dunkirk in May 1940 when British soldiers were desperate to get back to England. The Royal Air Force was able to intercept the German Air Force because of having coded commands being intercepted and decoded using the Bombe machine, a programmable electronic device developed by the Poles. In fact, the Poles had been reliably decoding the German messages since 1932. And the French too. Only the British and Americans had been out in the cold about German codes, depending on exhaustive methods that rarely provided timely information. Interesting that American intelligence has always been bad and is not a recent development. At least they are consistent, in a rigid sort of way.

The Germans were only changing their keys, setting sheets, once a month for the army and once every three months for their navy. They use a device called the Enigma Machine, originally developed for use by the German railway in 1920. Stewart spent some time describing how it worked.

In September of 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland, the Bomba machine was secreted out of Poland through several countries until it reached Britain. There it was slightly modified to make it more flexible and renamed the “Bombe”, pronounced “Bomb”. That is how the RAF was able to intercept and decode the messages when the retreat at Dunkirk occurred.

But the serious attempt at decoding German commands had begun at Bletchley Park in 1938, before the war started. Stewart went into the history of the property, which had started out as a deer hunting preserve.

With that we moved out of the building where an Enigma Machine was on display to the front of a somewhat ugly mansion where Stewart continued his talk. The wind began to blow strongly with a light rain. My umbrella was turned inside out. Then the rain started coming down in earnest and, still, Stewart continued his talk as if everyone was supposed to stand out in the rain. He could have taken us into the mansion, but didn’t. Finally, only when he finished what was prepared for him to repeat in front of the mansion did he move the group to the shelter of a vehicle archway. There he continued his talk until there was a break in the weather and then we moved to the building where a replica of the Bombe was on display.

MI6, the British spy service, had spies in Europe, typically working as passport officers. Stewart quickly mentioned that was no longer true. On July 24, 1938, suddenly the Polish and French were unable to translate the messages coded with the Enigma Machine. The Germans were suddenly changing their key settings daily. The Poles turned to the British in hopes that they might still be able to decode the messages. The Poles and French were disappointed to learn that the British were further behind them in decoding efforts. But it was a wake-up call to the allies that the Germans were up to something. And in September, 1939, they learned that it was the invasion of Poland that was the reason for the stepped up security by the Germans.

We walked through the display into another room where the Colossus was on display. The Colossus was the first computer ever created or used. It used relays, the same way that vacuum tubes were later used, and still later, by the mid 1960s, transistors. It had been assembled at Cambridge University following the mathematical designs of Alan Turing. This mathematical model was also the beginnings of the mathematical field of Computability and Unsolvability.

The buildings, or Huts, were numbered and each had a part of the puzzle to work out. Only a few knew the entire process.

While going through the last building I met Roy Cromack, who was also down from Oxford, having been there the same time I was the day before. I asked him about the security officers at Oxford. I had noticed that they wore black coats and black bowler hats. “Yes”, he said, “they are called Scouts. One gave me a personal tour of the dining hall at Christ Church College where the Harry Potter movie was filmed.” He mentioned the Turf Tavern as a favorite pub for the students to go to after their exams. We went off on a tangent and were talking about recent British and Scottish authors that we appreciated. I mentioned Dorothy Dunnett, whom he was familiar with. He mentioned to me Colin Dexter’s mystery stories featuring the detective, Inspector Morse. One book that he recommended was “The Dead of Jericho”. All of the stories take place on the Oxford University campus, as Colin had been a classics professor there and later took the position on the Examination Board for Oxford.

He and his wife and I walked back to the bookstore when the tour ended. There were swans and unusual shore and water birds along the small lake.

In the bookstore, I bought several books on Bletchley Park and cryptography, which I would pass on to my son as soon as I was able. There was also a video tape of the whole Enigma Project at Bletchley Park for ₤20, but I knew it is in the British format and would not play on American VCR units. I recommended to the clerk that they provide an American format for Americans.

I finally left around 16:30 catching a train within minutes of getting back to the station. On the train I pulled out a book on Alan Turing and turned to the back where it covered his suicide. His body was found in bed with froth around his mouth, a symptom of cyanide poisoning. An apple with several bites from it near by. There was some speculation later that he had laced the apple with cyanide. There was cyanide in his apartment that he had used to electroplate gold a week before. The reason? Speculation pointed to a possible blackmail by Soviet Agents, who knew he was homosexual. He was by that time a ruined man with no where to turn.

Turing

Turing bit the apple
As Adam’s appetite also,
One seeking knowledge
And the other flies.
For each, sex lulled
By the raw, though
At the precipices’ edge
The incompleteness of lies.

All are alabaster absolutes
The Children of the reach but
not the grasp, soon crippled
into scripture and the music of silent
fruit gathering at the beach to watch
the always sun and never moon
end their dance we think so sure.

When I completed the poem on the train I noticed a man, Chris Ferguson, across the aisle working on what appeared to be flow charts for a computer system. “Yes, they are. I’m using JavaScript, HTML, and a few other languages to build a web site for booking reservation for vacation property.”

We exchanged stories about our experiences in the computer field, to amuse ourselves, some of the really nasty bastards we had had to deal with. Most non-programmers hate programmers. They call programmers arrogant. Don’t understand what they do and don’t want to. And especially don’t want to have to impose the degree of difficult and critical thinking and extensive thoroughness that is necessary to design a good system. Combining that with the pay differential that used to exist and the ensuing jealousy it was a wonder that programmers were not burned at the stake. But because of their hostile attitudes the business partner often can be a good member of any quality control effort, simply because it gives them a chance to “get even” with the programmer.

Chris gave me his card and I promised to send him a copy of this log when I finished it. I told him about my desire to expand it and turn it into a sort of autobiography of my 35 years working as a computer programmer.

The train was delayed for over an hour because of a freight train that had gotten on the wrong track and that cascaded into more delays. Getting back to London took me three hours where it only took one hour to get out.

When I finally got back to the hotel, my sister and I went to a Chinese restaurant to eat and plan for tomorrow.

June 24, 2004, Thursday Back to Glasgow and then Ayr

One last time we loaded the bus up with the fundamentalists, this time not for sightseeing but for a trip to Gatwick Airport. It took an hour and a half because of bumper to bumper traffic for much of the 30 some odd mile. The song leader and his wife had flown to Dublin early that morning for a day trip so we didn’t have to listen to stupid songs. At the airport Edwina and I said our fond farewells (and good riddance) and headed for the opposite terminal via monorail, a design like that at Orlando’s Airport.

Event though we had left our electronic ticket information in the USA, British Airways was quickly and easily able to issue us our boarding passes. Security is more lax in the UK as I didn’t have to take my laptop out of its carrying case. But we did see a soldier in the terminal carrying a single shot rifle (unlike the French, who carry submachine guns).

The flight was uneventful and even though the weather forecast was for heavy rains in all of Scotland, Glasgow only had an intermittent light drizzle. We got an upgrade to a Land Rover from our Mercedes and were soon on the confusing roads. The last time I had driven in Britain was in 1987 so I took it easy. Even then I missed a few turns and ended up circling through the airport twice. We got lost and had to ask directions three times before we could locate a Fed Ex near the airport (the Scots have obscure meanings for words like “near”, or “across” and other vague words that mean whatever you want them to mean, much like the word “organic” in the USA). Even after we had found the Fed Ex and Edwina had spent ₤60 to ship ₤30 worth of trinkets back to Virginia, we got lost in Glasgow, looking for the M77 turn off of M8. Again we had to double back and try again, this time going further than we were told to go and finding it, but not being able to get to it because of a road barrier, and having to drive over the River Clyde into the city and back again until we could take the M77 turnoff.

M77 merged with A77 south of Glasgow, the road to Ayr, and soon we were there having the enjoyment of following internet directions to the “Crescent”, our place to sleep that night. One problem. The plugs were too low to the floor to use our transformer/adapters with. We were able to borrow an extension cord to resolve the problem.

Packing our needs up to our room, we walked to “The Old Racecourse Hotel” on Racecourse Road for a fish dinner and a peppery bowl of mushroom soup. Coming back we walked down to the beach, only a block from the restaurant, and walked towards the city center. It was 21:30 and the sun was still up and continued to hang above the horizon well past 22:00. Even when we got back to our room at 23:00 the sky was still light. The wind off the ocean was cold and we were glad we’d brought our heavy jackets. A youth was using a kite and a skateboard to ride his board from one end of a long grassy field to the other and back in the strong wind.

We stopped in a pub and watch a crowd of local guys cheer the Portugal team beat the British in the World Soccer Cup, a bittersweet defeat for them, as Scotland had lost out earlier. But this was Scotland and they were vehemently against England winning. Well, maybe next year.

Ayr

There is more in the air in Ayr
Than air. The cold rain
And the memories that
Cannot be forgotten
And the royalty that says,
“You are the subjects
and We are the objects.”
Fine Elgin stones from
An ancient age, white,
Impeccably white. On Iona
The little red hen said, “I’ll
Bake it.” And the sharing
Was over and the Kelsos extinct.

June 26th, 2004, Friday Largs to Dunoon

Up and down for breakfast at 8:30. Drove into town and bought an extension with extra plugs just in case we were booked at another place where the plugs were too low and they didn’t have an extension cord. And that is exactly what happened in the very next place we stayed.

We drove up to Largs and went to the public library where we found tons of papers on our family and related families. But my family and the Brisbanes, a related family, were extinct in the Scottish town of their origins. They either moved to other parts of Scotland or England, or Australia, or the other colonies, including the American Colonies. Brisbane, Australia, is named after the Brisbanes, our cousins. The city of Brisbane even has the front door of the Brisbane Manor House, which had originally been the front door of my family’s home before it was sold to the Brisbanes.

The old Brisbane House had a bit of unusual history attached to its end. In preparation for D-Day, soldiers practiced their assault techniques in the Ayrshire area, especially near Largs. By that time the Brisbane House was abandoned, so it was given to the armed forces to use in demolition practices. It was utterly destroyed by gun fire, mortar shells, and other assault tools and methods. So in a minor way it helped towards the defeat of the Nazis.

The librarian recommended “The George” restaurant in Largs for lunch, only a few blocks away. We walked down and sat at a table. The guy next to us had what looked like a delicious meal so I asked him what it was. “Oh, this is chicken”, he replied, “with haggis, black pudding, neeps and tatties. It’s really good.” All with a strong but enjoyable Scottish brogue. So we ordered the same dish for lunch.

When it came it was almost too much and we didn’t finish it. But it was rich and delicious! I never thought I would like haggis and black pudding but they were absolutely fantastic. And the neeps (turnips) and tatties (potatoes) were delicious too.

I told our neighbor at the next table we had been to the library doing family research, and he told me that the Largs Historical Museum was just around the corner. While we waited for the food to be delivered I walked out and went into the museum and briefly talked with the woman at the desk. After we finished our food we both came back and spent a good bit of time in the museum. An elderly lady, who had been helping someone do research, when she found out I was from Longwood, Florida, told me that she spent the winters in Sanford, Florida, only 15 miles north of where I lived. We engaged into a witty repartee over the differences between Largs and Sanford. Returning to the topic of our ancestral home, Kelsoland, which became Brisbane after the property was sold to our Brisbane cousins, she recommended that we drive on the Old Largs Highway to Greenoch. When we continued we took that one lane country road and went through some very pleasant country side. No trace of the Kelsos was there and the only traces of the Brisbanes were a few names of places, such as Brisbane Hotel, Brisbane B&B, and Brisbane Main.

Soon we were in Greenock, taking a steep road down into the city, headed east to the MacMillan ancestral home at Finlaystone Castle, the ancestral home of the MacMillan Chieftain. We arrived at 17:30 only to find that they closed at 17:00. We met the security officer who encouraged us to walk around the beautiful gardens and grounds, which we did.

While wandering through the wonderful garden at Finlaystone, decked out with about every type of camping tent you could think of for an OEM wholesale display, we were delighted at the amazing variety of flowers and their brilliant colors. I also saw several butterflies: the Painted Lady (Vanessa cardui), and Red Admiral (Vanessa atalanta), both early for the season, and the Green Veined Whites (Artogeia napi), Tortoiseshell (Aglais urticae), and the wonderful Peacock (Inachis io) Butterfly. Quite a collection of Scottish life that brings joy.

That reminded me of two different species of butterflies I have in my living room at home. Both from Peru, Siproeta stelene and Philanthria dido. As they are not known to the English world, I don’t know what their common names might be. The amazing thing about these two butterflies is how close alike they look. It is said that one is a mimic of the other. But mimicry does not explain how the similarity came about. Some evolutionists might cite parallel evolution, or a mimicry that would fool some birds in avoiding eating both, which to me is begging the point. If such a form of evolution existed then one would expect many variations on that mimicry. But there is always only one form whenever mimicry occurs. So the classical explanation must not be correct. There must be a simple mechanism that would allow the sharing of the DNA segments that are responsible for the colors and patterns that allowed that mimicry.

Then it occurred to me what the answer was: non-lethal viruses. Viruses that would pick up the segments of DNA from one host to the virus’ DNA (or RNA) that was responsible for the color and pattern and pass that segment on to the eggs or sperm of the second host so that the segment would be added to the second host’s DNA and passed to the fertilized eggs.

The more I thought about it the more appealing the idea was and I realized that this mechanism could explain much so called parallel evolution in most species, not just butterflies, and, even more interesting, across species. This could be the major mechanism for evolution beyond the gross sexual selection that is currently taught. Sexual selection would only effect those attributes that are visible and do not explain most evolutionary changes. And simplistic phrases such as “survival of the fittest” are not good at explaining minor changes that do not effect fitness.

The implication was that when some new structural or sensory advantage developed in one species that viruses could be the mechanism to transport that evolutionary advantage to other species. Non-lethal viruses could very well be the main means by which the engine of evolution runs! In fact, evolution, as we know by its results, could be impossible without viruses! This implied that the major spurts in evolution could be explained by the rapid spreading of new viruses that would be agents for critical DNA sharing.

I started thinking how a testable hypothesis could be created. First, if the strand of DNA in one butterfly could be located that was responsible for its colors and pattern, then we would expect to find the same or similar stand in the other butterfly that mimicked the first’s colors. It may not be on the same chromosome. So that search would not be a trivial matter. That match would indicate, but not prove, we were on the right track.

The second step is a more complex set of studies. If I could find or create non-lethal viruses that infect butterflies, such as those two in Peru that, for starters, would be a help in indicating I would be on the right track. The identification of non-lethal viruses would be of benefits to other research being conducted for entirely different reasons. But would I be chasing after some virus that had long gone? Long ago mutated into something else? I would need to demonstrate that clips of DNA code could be picked up by viruses, becoming part of the virus’ DNA. I think that has already been done. In the second host, a different species, I would need to demonstrate cross species infections are possible. That has definitely been done already with studies on HIV and influenza viruses. I would need to show that the clips of DNA picked up from the first host could be inserted into the code of the new host. That has been done and is the basis for on going attempts at cures to genetic diseases. I would need to be able to show the complete process occurring in butterflies under controlled conditions using a single virus type, a virus so structured as to be a simple carrier and transferor of genetic information and do little else. The probabilities might be low for each event in the sequence but all it would take is one successful transfer to create the parallel evolution and/or mimicry. Things seemed to be falling into place in my theory.

Criticism of my theory that immediately comes to mind follows this general line, suggested by my daughter and a friend with a degree in medicine. Some genetic attributes depend upon several cooperative sets of genes working together. A simple transfer of a relatively small snippet of DNA is unlikely to pass that sort of complex genetic direction. That would just be too improbable. So, my theory has to recognize a limitation of any transference to what a virus could accomplish. This limits the viral theory to primitive genetic attributes that are due to only one strand of DNA.

I don’t see this as a serious limitation, as evolution by viral infections would be responsible for the transference in the early stages of new mutation, while the new mutation was restricted to one strand of DNA, without the later refinements, within a species, due to additional complimentary genetic modifications on other chromosomes.

Because of their importance in medicine, viruses have been thought of as little else but a disease-causing agent. Something to be treated and avoided, to develop immunities to, to protect ourselves from. So only those that caused diseases have been noticed. A new world opened up to me of viruses that were not lethal or even disease creating that could be far more common in this world than those that kill or cause disease. And far more important. The implication is that viruses must have been around soon after, if not before, the first single cell life was formed.

I was so happy about my ideas on evolution that I did a little Scottish jig in the Finlaystone garden!

Leaving there we headed west again on M8 (A8) to Gourock to take the Cal Mac Ferry to Dunoon. That late in the afternoon (it was after 18:30), we had to wait for the next ferry at 18:30. It was soon there and we were loaded with another 12 cars onto the back of the boat. The cars loaded onto the back of the ferry in Gourock but exited on the middle sides at Dunoon. Soon we were at Abbot’s Brae Hotel a mile south of town and up a steep and narrow drive, several hundred feet above the road. We checked in and asked about supper, but only wanted a light supper of soup and salad. They only had a three course dinner available, which was much more than we wanted. So we headed into town for supper.

After parking the Land Rover, we asked a man on the street the way to a restaurant. He stuttered a bit as he talked. Instead of learning where the restaurant was we found out he was a street sweeper who swept the streets starting at 5:00. He pointed out with glee there was an Internet Cam in the window above pointed at the Victoria Street Lamp near us that we could access by going to http://www.dunoon.tv/. I told him to stand by the lamp on July 15th and wave, and I would wave back in America. The cam, like most, takes a picture every five minutes for the display. We introduced ourselves. He was Dixon and I was Mason and he said we were the Mason – Dixon Line. My sister took a picture of the two of us.

We found a small upstairs restaurant, “51st State”, an American style restaurant above the Sinbad Pub. Had an eggplant and cheese burger, a bowl of carrot soup and a glass of wine. But even that was more than I could eat. The waitress was bored with Dunoon. “Nothing ever happens here”, she said with clear disappointment. She was from London. “How are the guys here?” I asked. She screwed up her lips and it was clear they were not her favorite things.

Returning to the Abbot’s Brae, I set up the laptop to work on this log and the cursor would not move. I had to shut it down twice before I realized I was using my laser mouse on the glass on the top of the table. Grabbing a piece of opaque paper and putting it under the mouse, suddenly the problem disappeared.

June 26th, 2004, Saturday On to Oban

Full Scottish Breakfast includes eggs any style with fried potatoes made to look like a dense pancake, black pudding, what Americans call Canadian bacon, sausage, toast, orange juice (from Florida!), and coffee or tea. More than enough.

On the A815 road we stopped in town to see if we could get a better detail map as all the free ones do not show all of the roads. For example, the old Largs road we were on yesterday is not on any of the maps we had. We found a bookstore that had the detail we wanted in maps for the western isles. It began raining. While my sister selected postcards I ran down the street to another bookstore, a used one that I had seen driving down. Yes! They had a copy of Colin Dexter’s “The Dead of Jericho”. “Please hold it, I’ll be right back.” They wanted ₤2 for the book, erk, I had only 50 pence. Ran back the three blocks to my sister and got two pounds. Ran back and another person was at the counter. Gave her the two pounds and she gave me one pound back, saying that they charged too much. I didn’t argue with one of the most pleasant of Scottish traditions.

Then on to the Benmore Botanic Gardens, only seven miles northwest from Dunoon. By then the rain was heavy. We pulled into the entrance and went into the café to get some warm tea. The entrance was lined by 140 year old redwood trees, quite tall, large, and majestic for being so young. I continued to find redwood trees all over Scotland to my surprise.

With the heavy rain we were discouraged to buy tickets and go through the gardens, so we left and continued to Inveraray. There we found the ancestral home of the Campbells, the home of the Duke and Duchess of Argyle. It was still raining but at least we were inside. A gentleman stood at the door and directed people into the dinning room first and the tapestry room next and the rest of the castle next.

The Duke, in the time of the 1745 uprising by the Jacobites, a Catholic religious driven attempt to return the British thrown to a Stuart, was a Presbyterian Covenanters. At the Battle of Culloden, the Duke supplied British support with his men from Argyle. It was no mistake that his castle survived the destruction of Jacobite castles after the Jacobite’s decisive defeat.

This of course did not stop some personal excesses by the Duke. When two of his servants died, they were so dear to him, he had them stuffed, where they now still serve, although it is only to stand and wait in the drawing room.

In the Tapestry Drawing Room, on the opposite side of the entrance way, are the Beauvais Tapestries. Yet, oddly enough, the room is not named for the heavy, old, and murky tapestries but rather for the tapas that are now served to visitors of state. Another queer thing about the room is the Louis XVI Harp which had the strings replaced with twine and cotton string as one of the earlier duchesses apparently did not care for its sound.

In the Armory Hall, Rob Roy’s belt, sporran, and dirk handle (but not the dirk, which I found later in Sir Walter Scott’s library) taken from Rob Roy MacGregor are displayed. A magnificent broach is displayed containing a very large, yellow semiprecious gem, a cairngorm, found locally. The Drum Room has a very nice display of snare drums on the walls. There are also countless, priceless portraits by well known and important painters of Britain over several hundred years of the Campbell family members.
Down in the basement in the café, we ate lunch, a lentil and ham soup with a salad and a blondie, a caramel brownie. One of the waiting ladies was a MacDonald and the woman next to her was a Campbell, but they seemed to be good friends. The rivalry between the clans today, for the most part, is only for show.

Made it to Oban around 16:30 but it was too late to take the tour of the distillery as their last tour is at 16:00. Just as well. We headed for our B&B. Moved some luggage into our adjoining rooms and left for some grocery shopping for supper on the Isle of Iona the following two days. Then we went and bought car ferry tickets for Oban to Mull, Mull to Iona and back, and Fishnish to the mainland. We were scheduled for the 10:00 ferry Sunday. That would take care of our ferry needs for the next three days. We went to Ee’usk, a restaurant on the waterfront, for a Cod and Haddock supper with chips. Ee’usk is the Scottish Gaelic for “fish”, which sounds a bit like the word “fish” when it is pronounced.

Back to the room we watched a bit of a show on the Elgin Marbles and the financial disaster it brought to Lord Elgin, not to mention the melanoma that caused him to lose his nose.

June 27th, 2004, Sunday Oban to Mull to Iona

We over slept. Edwina must have set the alarm for 19:00 instead of 7:00, confusing pm for am. Rush through my shower and go eat my breakfast while Edwina takes her shower.

While eating breakfast, I noticed the symbols of the very most secret Scottish Society were displayed on the walls of Feorlin B&B, where we stayed. If you visit Scotland, be on the look out for any pictures or statues of Laurel and Hardy, the American comedians, who are the icons of the Lowland and Haggis Society (LHS). This society, like the Masons, is a quasi-religious men’s group, very secretive. Very few people have ever heard of them. They have a parallel woman’s groups called the Knotless Thread Society.

While my sister ate breakfast I finished packing. Put our bags in the car. She pays for the room and soon we are on our way down to the ferry where a few cars are already there before us at 9:15. I could see the ferry coming into the Oban harbor and at 9:45 we were loading and at 10:00 heading out to sea.

Edwina went down below to get out of the wind. I sat up top, next to a young girl from the Cologne area of Germany, who was traveling with her parents. She asked if I would mind if she smoked, and I replied that I would appreciate it if she didn’t. I appreciated her asking, as Europeans are excessive smokers. She had just graduated from the Gymnasium. She complained that here parents controlled everything, where they went and how long they stayed. I told her my son and I went to Berlin in 1999 to attend the “Love Parade” on July 10th. While there my son also went to see Fat Boy Slim, a famous DJ, perform. She lamented that her parents had never let her go to Berlin because “there was too much drugs”. Perhaps, but there was plenty of beer. Too much beer. My son and I took the train from Berlin to Paris that evening and there were drunken kids getting off of the train and collapsing in the stations all the way to the Belgium border. Blowing their police whistles endlessly as if they breathed through them making a general nuisance of themselves as we tried to get to sleep in our beds.

The trip was 45 minutes, passing by Duart Castle perched on black rocks on our left, and Lady’s Rocks, submerged at high tide, barely sticking up out of the water, and we were soon driving out of Craignure going south, on the Isle of Mull. The road soon became a one lane road with passing areas every so often. And we had to use them frequently to accommodate on coming traffic. Tall black (or gray) and white striped poles were used to locate the passing areas from a distance.

Soon we came to the turn off to Torosay Castle. I had not planned on going there but it turned out to be a good idea. The castle was also a home, decorated with many paintings, maps, and drawings that illustrated the adventures family members had been through in their lives. Enormous scrapbooks were open to significant events and sailing adventures reported in the news. I was more deeply impress by the well stocked library containing many early editions of well known books, few first editions but many complete collections of works, such as the complete Waverly Novels, printed soon after an author’s death.

It was sprinkling rain and we left to take a short drive to the next castle, Duart Castle, which we had seen from the ferry. Duart in Gaelic means “Black Rock”, and the seaweed below and the lichen above on the rocks at the foot of the cliff does give the rocks a black look. Duart was very different from Toloquey. Whereas Toloquey was a home, Duart was fortress, and must have been a very cold, damp, harsh, and uncomfortable place to live. We took a few photos of the “dungeon”, where Spanish men from the wrecks of the Spanish Armada were kept in the late 1580s. A good part of Duart was rebuilt in 1911 from ruins.

Duart Castle is the focus of one of the more hideous customs of ancient Scotland, the murder of a wife that did not give birth to a male child. Lachlan Cattanach, the 11th Chief, is remembered as the Chief who left his wife, Margaret, on the Lady's Rock, hence the name, hoping she would drown, as she had failed to produce an heir. She was rescued by a fisherman and returned to her brother, the Duke of Argyll. There are many, many Lady’s Rocks in Scotland’s chilly waters.

After Duart Castle we headed for Fiorphort at the southern tip of Mull. Along the way I saw a standing stone on the other side of a stonewall and stopped to take a few photos of it. When we arrived in Fiorphort, we parked our car in the free parking lot and carried our stuff to the ferry terminal. There we waited about 30 minutes for the 17:00 ferry. My watch had slipped to another time zone so I thought it was only 16:00 when the ferry started to leave. There is no 16:00 ferry on Sunday, so I was confused until I realized my error.

The trip was short and we were soon on Iona. We dragged our luggage up through the town turning right and walking two kilometers to the Youth Hostel at the west end of the island. We were shown our room and I relaxed in the kitchen/dining room while my sister headed for the beach to collect colored rocks. Later I followed outside and enjoyed myself watching the many rabbits running around and finding their rabbit holes. I also found two rabbit skulls. I brought one home with me and left in my daughter’s bedroom. And down on the beach I found many limpet shells. Limpets are called poverty food, as the taste is not agreeable and only eaten as a last resort. By counting limpet shells, while excavating kitchen middens, Scottish scientists can determine when there were famines.

Before returning to the Hostel I walked out to the road that leads back into town. There I heard a bird in the grass that sounded like a fingernail being teased across the teeth of a comb, only much louder. I waited while it was answered from across the road, but it never flew up into the air. I learned later that it is a Corncrake, a bird that used to be found all over Great Britain, but it now limited to the isles and very northern tip of Scotland. It needs uncut grass meadows to hide in, which is the reason why it is seldom seen. But its voice is unmistakable and distinct.

Edwina was back from the beach and taking a shower, she thinks she smells if she sweats any. She doesn’t but cannot be convinced otherwise. So while she was busy I fixed supper, a spaghetti dinner. When she came into the kitchen we had supper. Would have been nice to have remembered to bring some French bread and a bottle of Chianti. But I was hungry and stewed cardboard and limpets would have tasted good.

After supper I loaded pictures onto my laptop and Stuart, a student staying at the Hostel, volunteered to let me down load his photos of the standing stones in Fort Dunadd and other locations near Kilmartin, about 30 miles south of Oban. Dunadd Fort was the location of the Scottish kings in the 6th and 7th centuries. He also had photos of Ballymeanoch in the Kilmartin Glen, along with TempleWood, and Kintraw Standing Stones. When he reached Mull he also took photos that Nina had visited in a boggy area on Mull called Lochbuie last year. Some of these stones were placed there as early as 4,000 BC.

At 30 minutes after midnight it is finally dark. There had been light in the sky even at midnight. The quarter moon, which I can see out of the kitchen window, is occasionally covered by clouds.

June 28th, 2004 Monday A Restful Day on Iona

The day started out clear. We walked the two kilometers into town, listening to the Corncrakes along the way, and Edwina stayed checking out the shops while I headed for the western beach. We agreed to meet at one in the afternoon at Martyr’s Restaurant near the wharf.

The road was along the rocky land edge for a while and then took a 90 degree turn west, up a gentle hill, and past an honor shop selling honey and a construction crew building a new house. Passed a group of kids being escorted to town and to the end of the road where there was a gate with three brown calves on the other side. Went through the gate and shooed the calves away. Proceeding up a slight hill I reached the crest and found the tee for hole one of a golf course. A small white concrete box had “330 Yrds” on its side.

As the box said 990 feet down the slope I found the green, a small triangular area with a standard hole. In the hole was a broken golf club used as the flag. Someone takes their game a wee bit serious. Beyond it was the west beach of large pebbles and round stones ground smooth and almost polished. A bench chair was on the grass right above the beach and I sat there for a short time before beginning my walk back. I noticed several homes have signs that said, “Tigh an …..”, which I found later means “Home of ….” In Gaelic. The rain began as a light sprinkle and stayed that was all the way back where I met Edwina at the restaurant. She was sitting down having lunch, saving a sandwich for me and half of a lemon meringue pie. I added a bowl of soup.

When we finished we went looking for Mhairl Killin, the silver smith in town, who was the sister of a woman we met on the ferry coming over. We found her at work in her shop along the water front. Excellent work. I bought my daughter a bracelet with a beautiful intricate Gaelic design that she had made. Her web site is http://www.celticiona.com/.

The rain was getting progressively stiffer. We looked for the taxi service to get a ride back to the ferry so we could catch the 7:00 ferry tomorrow morning. I could not locate the taxi service but we were able to get the head of the hostel to make a call and arrange transportation for us when we got back. Iona Taxi: 0781 032 5990 ₤2.50 per person.

We stopped along the way at the Iona Heritage Center and had a cup of tea. Then we continued in the rain to an antiquarian and rare bookstore with a front door that was very low. There were plenty of very old books that were fascinating and interesting but nothing of immediate use or need. On down the road we stopped at a gallery and pottery shop. It had on display two paintings by a Robert Kelsey but the asking price for the cheapest one was ₤1350, outside of our budget. I asked the potter there if that was the correct price and he gave me a dirty look.

The rest of the way there were no shops to stop at and get out of the rain. So by the time we got to the hostel the legs of our jeans were wet and so were our shoes.

I dozed on the sofa in the dinning room, dimly aware of the conversations going on around me. A man from Glasgow was talking to Edwina and others in the room. Through the fog of my slumbers, I could understand about 2/3rd of what he said, the Glasgow accent being the most difficult Scottish accent to understand. He was telling typical Glasgow jokes; e.g., “I’ve never been abroad. I’ve always been a man.” And “How do you confuse someone?” “Purple.”

Walking outside I met John MacLean, the owner of the Hostel and the croft it was on. The manager of the Hostel had mentioned that John was recovering from surgery. I had stooped to pet one of his friendly cats, a large striped tom. John was originally from Inverness and Edinburgh and had an accent that was easy for me to understand. He asked about what our trip included and I told him where we had been and where we are going.

And we talked about his sheep. He told me the number of sheep he had, an interesting contrast to my own cousin, who has a cattle ranch near Sebring, Florida. My cousin would not say how many cattle he had, which makes me a bit suspicious about his operation. I saw a gray sheep among the black ones and John told me that it was a “silver back. Black rams after a few years become gray just like aging humans.” “How old is that one?” “Only four. They can live to 10 to 12 years.”

Back inside, Edwina had fixed supper. Spaghetti again. It tasted fine. I washed the dishes.

Later that evening, when the rain had let up, Edwina and I went to the service in the Iona Abbey. It was an ecumenical service and the abbey was completely filled. It was a pleasure to listen to the echoes inside of that rebuilt stolid stone abbey. Afterwards, the public was invited to a ceilidh, (Gaelic for “party” and pronounced “kaily”), at the community center where Scottish Country Dancing would be done but we decided to not add the extra long walk to our already tired legs. I had danced many Scottish Country Dances and knew that they could be strenuous in spite of their looking easy.

Back at the hostel Edwina found her C-Pap breathing machine would not work that she needed to help with her sleep apnea. I tried to resuscitate it but with no success. Probably the electrical cord was broken. (As it turned out, she found out it was the machine and not the cord when she got back to Virginia.)

Tomorrow would be a long day, so I wrote this quickly and went to bed.

June 29th, 2004, Tuesday Iona to Fishnish to Dunvegan and Uig on the Isle of Skye

Up at 5:45, shaved and showered, and while Edwina showered, I fixed myself breakfast. At 6:40 the taxi showed up at the end of the road and we loaded our bags and made it to the ferry building. Soon the ferry was there and we were in Fionphort, walking up the ramp to our parked car, and down the long road back. About half of the trip was on roads we had traveled on two days ago and about half was on new roads after turning west and north and passing along a steep cliff side and across the Isle of Mull to the port of Fishnish. We got there with 20 minutes to spare at 9:00 and I had a cup of coffee while Edwina had a cup of tea.

Soon we were back on the mainland of Scotland heading east to Mallaig. Up A884 to A861, along the north shores of Loch Sunart. We drove past the turn to the right in Salem and had to double back and ask directions. “Through the second arch.” “What arch?” It turned out to be an archway of a building that we had to drive through. Didn’t look like a road at all. Then we continued north past the tiny Loch Moldart, then at Glenuig along the south shore of Loch Ailort we turned right to Inverailort (Inver- means “mouth of”; e.g., Inverness means “mouth of the Ness River”), switching to A830, a wider road, past Arisaig and finally to Mallaig. A lot of place names end in “aig”, which in Gaelic means “at”. At Mallaig we arrived with only fifteen minutes to spare as we could see the ferry heading our way. Edwina bought Hopscotch #11 ferry tickets to the Isle of Skye and the Outer Hebrides and back. I wandered down to the docks where I found a fisherman who had just come in and was singing a ditty, “Ickle, Ockle, Blue Bockle fishes in the Sea. If you’re looking for a lover, please choose me.” He would sing this over and over in a most unusual series of chords that he somehow produced as he sang. I wrote it down, and it was a good thing that I did as I couldn’t remember the song later and the fascinating and bizarre chords escape my memory.

On the third ferry in one day we drove off onto the Isle of Skye, a return after seven years. The pub near the dock in Armadale, where Nina and I had shared a plate of chips in 1997, had been torn down and replaced with a parking lot. Up the one lane road that wanders through the thick forests of Armadale to the road that took us up through the center of the island and connected south of Portree to the road that came up from the bridge. The rains returned as we drove. Continuing we took a left turn off to Dunvegan. We could just barely see the beautiful but austere Cuillin Mountain Ridge with their peaks and much of their flanks and all of their tops were hidden in the clouds. As we arrived in Dunvegan I spied the mobile bank in front of the convenience store just like it was when Nina and I were there. I pulled over exchanging $250 to pounds. Edwina changed $400 to pounds. That should take care of our needs for a while.

Then on to Dunvegan Castle, the ancestral home of 20 generations of the MacLeods. It had been raining most of the time on Skye and it was still overcast and drizzling. Inside of the castle we roamed the rooms as Nina and I had toured seven years before. I didn’t remember the dungeon. Every silly castle has to have a dungeon. Tons of family portraits. The library was off limits but one could peer in, and think there must be many interesting books and collections to read but not be able to read the titles or authors. Sad, as that was the room that I was most interested in. And the famous Fairy Flag was still on display, brown from age, tattered, cut, and torn piece of silk, moth eaten and abused by humans and time that dates back to the 6th to 9th century. Ancient. Almost the oldest thing you can see in Scotland not made of stone. But not to touch, as it hung attached to a stable fabric and enclosed in a simple glass frame.

Looking through the window of the next room we saw a seal swimming in the ocean but no puffins. It was too wet for the bunny rabbits to scamper through the Rhododendron forest that surrounds the castle on the north side or the gardens on the south.

In that room were the waistcoat of Bonnie Prince Charles and a lock of his hair (a DNA sample), a huge tusk of an elephant, as well as other weird objects collected over the centuries.

Down in the basement, we watched a VCR tape by the Laird of the Castle, which I fell asleep listening to. And left my umbrella on the floor behind my chair. Then we checked out the gift shop in the next door. I had bought a small porcelain rabbit for my mother in 1997 and sent it to her. It now sits on my fireplace mantle, since her death. But they were out of rabbits today. Just as well. Most of the stuff was utter junk. Edwina bought a few postcards and we left. As we reached the front door I realized that I had forgotten my umbrella and went back looking for it. Back in the gift shop I saw a nice dark blue baseball cap that my son would like with the words, “Isle of Skye”, nicely stitched on it. I slipped back into the movie room. Fortunately the tape was almost over and when people left I saw the umbrella on the floor in the dark. Retrieved it and was out the door to join my sister at the restaurant across the road for a cup of tea.

Then back in the Land Rover for the final drive to Uig. Took the road to Portree but just before that town, turned north and headed to Uig. Passed the Prichards B&B, where Nina and I had stopped looking for a place to stay before finding out they had no vacancies. The Uig Youth Hostel was just down the road. We stopped and registered, getting our sheets and towel. The Uig Hostel was a very typical Youth Hostel with dormitory rooms. I was not sure how Edwina would take it but it was worth the risk of exposing her to an environment that she would have never had selected herself.

We were hungry so we asked for directions for a restaurant that served fish. The manager recommended the Uig Hotel and also the Ferry Inn, both less than a mile down the road towards the town center.

We decided to go to the Ferry Inn. There their menu included Creamy Salmon and Prawns served on a bed of Tangle seaweed, Chicken Breast of Barbie Doll, Monkfish with Nuns, Marmalade of Scottish Salmon Steak, and Isle of Skye Langoustine served with lime, chittlings, with a coriander sauce and freshly bled and baked black pudding. All sounded delicious but I had the Creamy Salmon and was not disappointed.

You might ask why is the Isle of Skye called that. It comes from the Gaelic “Eilean Sgiathannach”. “Eilean” means “island” and sounds like island when pronounced. And Skye is just the first syllable of the “Sgiathannach”, which means wings. I later found a reference to the name in a book by Otta F. Swire, Skye: The Island and its Legends, 1961, pp. 72-3, from which I quote, “Many people believe that it is from her wings* and her Gaelic name, Eilean Sgiathanach (Winged Isle), that the name Skye comes. Ptolemy of Alexandria (A.D. 200) refers to the island as Sketis, while the ancient Celtic name 'Skeitos' has become Sgiath in modern Gaelic. Adamnan knew it as Scia. This 'wing derivation certainly sounds very probable, more probable than the other version which claims that 'Skye' is Scandinavian, derived from a Norse word Ski (cloud). This school of thought takes its stand on the fact that cloud or mist is what would first and most forcibly attract the notice of any stranger visiting the isle, whereas to notice the 'wings' requires a well-drawn map. Obviously this school has never tried (as the early Scandinavian settlers most certainly did) to sail around the despised wings. Of course, many place-names in Skye undoubtedly are Scandinavian, but they date from a later time than Ptolemy - four or five centuries later. A third suggestion, once seriously put forward by certain Celtic antiquaries, was that in Skye stood the temple, known to Greek fable, of Apollo among the Hyperboreans, and that the Gaelic name of the island refers to the wings of the Greek god! The name may, in fact, belong to some old forgotten pre-Celtic tongue."

But the Isle of Skye has second less well-known name. Skye is also known as Eilean a' Cheò, which mean "The Misty Isle". And there is a legend associated with that name that each evening the Isle raises into the mist and clouds and floats in the sky during the whole night only to return to earth with the dawn. If it rises, it is difficult to say as it is so very misty and it moves, like the earth, so gracefully. But it is a beautiful legend; however treacherous beauty is to truth.

June 30th, 2004, Wednesday North Uist to Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis

The days are starting to blur. I guess most vacations should be about two weeks long. I am amazed that I had the energy to travel for 45 days with my son in 1999. Even then I remember being dazed during the last week in Spain. But day came at the Uig Youth Hostel and I shaved and took a shower, put on my clothes (same for the last three days – when you travel there is no such thing as dirty clothes), my sister was not far behind. And Skye had returned to rest on the sea.

Turning in our room key and driving down to the town, I found the restaurant on the quayside that Nina and I had eaten breakfast at in 1997 was no longer open for breakfast. New management. We drove back to where we had supper and walked into the dining room, fixed ourselves a bowl of cereal, orange juice (tasted like Tang), and the young boy doing the serving brought a pot of coffee and took our order. As we finished our cereal, the cook came in and explained that they only served breakfast to people who stayed overnight at the hotel. The nearest restaurant that served breakfast was in Portree, quite a few miles away. But the cook backed down and agreed to serve our eggs and toast. At the end the bill was ₤10 for the both of us, a very reasonable bill.

On down to the Uig port we arrived and queued up for the boat. It pulled in and we left at about 9:40, twenty minutes later than the schedule. The one hour and 45 minutes trip was pleasant out to North Uist. We popped off the boat and headed south.

First stop was to take photos of the peat fields along A86 with the cuts lying in the field to dry and bag up for use during winter to burn in the stoves. The peat was incredibly deep and apparently a good bit of it developed over the last 5,000 years. Much later, when the Vikings raided the area they burned the forests to denude the land and eliminate places for people to hide from them. This speeded up the process of peat accumulation. A rough estimate is that peat increases in depth at the rate of about 3 inches every 100 years.

The standing stones, which are virtually everywhere on the Isle of Lewis, were becoming almost in-gulped by peat since their erections five or six thousand years ago.

Our next stop was the Langais Stone Circle. It was at the end of a side road. You find the Langais Hotel there and have to park by a ruined black house and walk through two gates, the first with a stern warning that a fine will be charged against anyone leaving it open. The trail heads towards the water front but before you get that far you veer off to the left up a trail with wooden steps and walkways over part of the boggy land. The circle of small stones is on a natural rise not far above.

Back on the road we raced to meet the ferry at the north end of the island at Berneray (or Beàrnaraigh in Gaelic), a port that is just north of a causeway. We breezed through several small hamlets along the west side of North Uist and view from a distance many beautiful beaches. The ferry takes 50 minutes to get to Leverburgh on the Isle of Harris. The reason why it takes so long to travel the 10 miles is that it has to twist and turn through a careful path to avoid the rocks, many just below the low water level.

On Harris we headed northwest and then northeast on A859 going to Talbert, where Harris and Lewis intersect, the only road to Lewis.

On Lewis we continued up A859 until we could take a shortcut over to A858, heading for Gearraidh na h-Aibhne. The English name is Gerrynahine. Yes, we were in the middle of the Scottish Gaelic speaking area. By the way, the correct way to pronounce Scottish “Gaelic” is to rhyme the “Gael” with “gal” as in “My Gaelic gal, Gallen, is my best pal”. Irish Gaelic is pronounced “Gaylick”. Besides the difference in the way you say the name, Scottish Gaelic is much heavily influenced by the Vikings and had absorbed many more Viking words than Irish Gaelic.

At Gearraidh we saw a sign to the Black Houses Exhibit and turned left onto B8011. After only one mile we saw a stone circle on a hilltop on our right. We pulled over and hiked through a cattle gate and up the hill to the stone circle. Another circle of stones put there by people we only dimly understand. They were not Gaelic as they were in the area just south of Oban around 4,000 BC, possibly earlier, and probably at least as early as 3,000 BC here, before much of the buildup of the peat. The Gaelic peoples only moved into the area around 300 AD. They were even there before the Picts in Scotland. Who were they? No one really knows. But they were spending most of their time surviving, eating, shitting, sleeping, fucking, doing pretty basic stuff. They started out as Stone Age people and progressed only as far as their bronze age. Probably picking up what had been learned from others by a slow and reluctant osmosis of methods and knowledge very strange and very suspect. Traditions are hard to break out of, especially when you have no idea what advantages potentially exist. The same is just as true today. We are the stone age of some far distant age that wonders why we put up with so much suffering in our world. As I turn to the future and face them, I am speechless and can only smile.

I have to imagine that the standing stones might have started out as a single or just a few standing stones. Perhaps they marked boundaries for clans or men bragging about their phalluses, advertising to the women of another tribe who might see their erect stones from a distance and connive to get nearer until they are found and taken. Or it might be a way of warning the men of other wandering tribes to stay away. Their women traveling with them would not be theirs for long because there were more men who put up the stones than those that traveled by and were more sexually prepared and capable that those that went by would be.

Then, and this is an important then, as they had settled and taken up agriculture and the men would lie out in their grassy fields and watch the shadow of the stone move from one side to another as the day progressed and the women worked. And they would notice the change as the seasons progressed. And thus the astrological purpose of the stone would be born; having a new purpose and use, created by the idle time spent just watching. From that would be tied in the identification that now it was time to plant the crops because the sun was starting to stay up longer and, a very important “and”, if they planted before the shadows of the stones moved to the right position they ran the risk of disaster from the last frosts. Perhaps they set a stone to make where the shadow of a larger more central stone was on the last frost. If another frost happened they would move the lesser stone until no more frosts occurred. The circles of stones and later the avenues of parallel stones were final refinements on identifying the proper times for crops to be planted. Some keyed to the moon and some to the sun, some to the shadow on a frost, a few rare ones to star settings.

I remember seeing, during my hikes in the 1970s in the High Sierras, mortar holes on the granite rocks, left there by the Indians hundreds of years ago as they ground acorns to leach the tannins out to make bread. It reminded me of the holes in the rocks at Dunadd Fort, in the photos taken by the student, Stuart, we met at the Iona Youth Hostel. The difference was that the holes at Dunadd Fort had concentric circles around the holes, obviously not just a utilitarian function but also one with aesthetic and religious meaning. I remember a popular poster in the 1970s of a spring gushing up out of the center top of a hemispherical stone in the middle of a meadow of spring time flowers with the water running off in four grooves in the four directions of the compass, not unlike the designs of spiritual directions found in the drawings of the stone age, plains Indians in America. Then I remembered how the hot spring water ran out of the top of a hemispherical stone near the top of Fishing Creek Canyon in the High Sierras, southeast of Yosemite Park, running down into a pool lined with stones so one could soak in the relaxing hot waters. I took my children on a hike there once to share the pleasure of that place and getting there with them and back. A two days hike in. These memories, tied together, made me think of the hole in the stone, obviously manmade at Dunadd Fort, that looked like the compass stone without the water gushing out of it, only filled by a few inches by the rainwater, and it occurred to me that a primitive person would think of a stone like an egg or womb that things come out of, water, magic, life, health, sex, good things, perhaps bad things too. And that adds another way of looking at the stones and gives us another picture of how our ancestors thought and how some people even think today.

Thinking this out made me realize that the real dynamic energy of Christianity comes from the primitive religions it has absorbed, like a language, and on which it rides like a gaily decorated float in a historical parade of passion. And that the secret and forgotten ceremonies, however secreted and symbolized in Christianity, press up from below until the table cloth is saturated with blood of those innocent of rituals and guilty of thought.

Certain ceremonies that must have remained from the times before Christianity continued in the Outer Hebrides well into the mid-1800s, such as the ceremony of the spreading of the embers on the clay floor before sleep, dividing the embers into thirds around a center, edges covered by three blocks of peat, laid down to the God of Life, the God of Peace, and the God of Grace. Then the whole arrangement covered with ashes to reduce but not extinguish the fire, in the name of the Three of Light. When that is done, a woman, who performed the ritual, closes her eyes, holds out her arms and chants a secret ritual song. The nature of the ceremony strongly suggests an ancient matriarch ritual that takes one back to the end of the Ice Age and even before.

Thus these circles reflect and remind in a pure form the nature of how discovery and invention often rises out of the most common and primitive, ancient, even sexual nature of humanity. And it also illustrates how we can take that utterly common aspects of ourselves and move to something useful beyond our original biological behavior. Most people only imagine themselves as being like everyone else of the group they are members of, fearful of being different, fearful of the other family, tribe, religion, nation, the unknown. It is the exceptional person who extrapolates and explores beyond any know limits of being. But, sadly, it is more the profound stupidity of the human species than anything else that we find and have to transverse; all because to most belief is all there is to truth.

Thus we were prepared for the Standing Stones of Calanais or Callanish. Talking with two men who had preceded us to the standing stones on the hilltop, we found out that it was another 15 miles to the Black House Exhibit and they were closed already. So we back tracked to A858 and continued to the small town of Calanais. Soon we were at the Visitor’s Center, having a cup of tea, and then walking up a hillock on a half helical path until we came to that majestic circle of stones. None larger in the UK except for Stonehenge.

Something this old that I can touch, and silence, just the wind, and standing stones, rough, as if they had been brought there in my life time, my life expands to stretch ten thousand years before, before the stones were there, and before the ice was gone and there is nothing but the ice and it is inhumanly cold, then rushing forward to the great melt, and then the grass came, the animals, and then the humans, and when the humans came the stones were brought that say “We lived”, “We are unique”, “We were here!”, “Remember us forever!” Yes, I will not forget you. Thank you for thinking of me. I look down at my hands, having touched the stones, and wish that I could be remembered too. My stones are small words and they neither advertise my sexuality, the seasons, a boundary, or the frost. But they could be said to mark the stars and an indistinct shadow of destiny of which I can only guess its meaning or direction.

I learned that the stones had been brought to that site from a natural quarry on a hillside about 1.5 miles away to the east. They had not been dressed other than from the rough ride they must have had in that 1.5 mile trip. The gneiss is very old rock, around 2 billion years old, comparable to the rocks of the Canadian Shield, among the oldest rocks of this earth. This is an ancient place!

At the gift shop we picked up a Gaelic Dictionary to try and figure out some of the place names and the structure of Gaelic grammar. From a simple scan of another book on the language, it was clear that it had major differences from English and the two languages did not share a lot in common. Gaelic is a melodic language, highly sexed language, as any language tends to be when it stops its growth and settles into a romantic backward niche by location, religion, or ideology and where fecundity is more important than felicity.

Driving into Stornoway, we found the Tower B&B House. And we learned that we had been moved to an overflow house, the Hal O’ the Wynd Guest House on Newton Street, which is right on the water front. I had tried to book at the overflow house in April but had never received a reply from them. We learned that their computer system was down and they had lost a lot of business because of that misfortune.

We took room number one on the second floor with a nice view of the bay. I watched the Cal-Mac Ferry leave for the evening three-hour trip to Ullapool, the trip we would take the next day at noon. We thought. And I had a desk where I could type this log.

July 1st, 2004, Thursday Ullapool to Kilravock Castle near Inverness

After breakfast the first thing we learned when we went down to book a place on the noon ferry was that the boat only left at noon on Mondays and Wednesdays. As it was Thursday, the ferry left at 14:00. Well more time to see the town of Stornoway.

Ah ha! There is a bookstore, the one thing that makes the most banal village of idiots tolerable in Britain, they all have bookstores. Glorious bookstores! How nice to be in a country where an illiterate is defined as one who cannot read Latin. I thought about when I lived in Vallejo, California, with a population over 100,000 and not a single new bookstore. We were suddenly inside that candy store delighting in the flavors and smells of bindings and the flash of slipcovers. I found a book that I could not do without, “Sea Room” by Adam Nicolson, the story of “one man, three islands, and half a million puffins”. I could not think of anything more important in life than to read that book. On the back cover it read, “Twenty years ago it happened to Adam Nicolson. Aged 21, he inherited the Shiants, 3 lonely islands set in a dangerous sea 5 miles off Lewis, only a stone bothy for accommodation – and one of the most beautiful places on the planet. A world of hermits and stories, of birds and boats, of fishermen and sheep, Sea Room is these islands’ story, written with passion and poetry – a celebration for all of us of an island life.”

When I returned to Florida and read Adam’s book, I was very impressed. He has the vocabulary of Dorothy Dunnett, the scientific detail of John McPhee, the love of nature of John Muir, the sense of history of James Michener, and the adventuresomeness of Norman Clyde. A great new author! I have not enjoyed a book in the last ten years as much as I relished “Sea Room”.

We walked across the street to the public library where they had Internet access. They provided one hour of free access while Edwina headed to the adjoining café to write some postcards. I had not had time or inclination to check my emails since the trip began. There were over 700 waiting for me in my inbox. I carelessly eliminated most as spam in a spasm of haste but found one email from Kilravock Castle asking me to be there no later than 17:00 or else give a call. I still had 360 emails to go through when my hour expired and we left.

We walked back to the B&B rental where we had left the car and asked if we could use their phone to call ahead to Kilravock Castle, explaining our predicament. “Sure, use the phone in the kitchen.” They refused any payment. I got through to Kilravock Castle although their ringing sounds like a busy signal to an American ear. The answering machine picked up the phone and I left a message that we wouldn’t be able to arrive until around 19:00 because of the delay in the ferry schedule, and hung up.

Just moments later the phone rang and it was handed to me, a call from Kilravock Castle. I explained the impossibility of getting there by 17:00 and Ken, the manager, said it was all right, he would wait.

We had seen the two children of our host playing next door on their scooters, swinging them around in the air. The son was born on December 19th and would be in the third grade next year of primary school. He was proud of the tricks he could do on his scooter and challenged me to come see them outside. I followed him out and he did something, although I was not quite sure what. He was imitating the combination of a stunt bike and a skateboard rider on his scooter.

Back inside we said our goodbyes and we headed for the car. Over to the ferry boarding lanes and parked the car in line. As we had a wait of about an hour we had two scones, a bowl of soup, and a cup of tea at the café in the ticket building.

Soon the boat was there, the bow of the boat lifted up so cars could unload, and then all the several lines of traffic were loaded on board. We got what we would need for the 2 hours and forty minutes trip and made it up stairs to the cafeteria. We shared a table with an elderly couple from an English town just above Wales. They left to get a meal from the cafeteria but returned in about an hour to have a conversation with us. They were fairly pleasant to talk with. I got up to take photos and found my batteries in the camera were dead (I had recharged the batteries the prior night but they apparently were not able to hold their charge). I went back in to borrow Edwina’s camera and took more photos, especially as we approached Ullapool.

On the high bridge I met one of the crew. I asked him what does a person need for the work on the ferry. He went through a list of the sort of skills you would expect and ended with “and have a good voice”. “Yes”, I said, “I guess to be heard over the wind?” “Oh, no, not that sort of voice”, he said, “You need a voice for singing.” “Singing? Why is that?” “Oh, to calm the Sruth na Fear Gorm. To calm the stream of the blue-green men.” I felt that he had touched upon an old and primitive belief. “These Blue-Green Men are strange, dripping, semi-human creatures who come aboard and sit alongside you in the sternpost, sing a verse or two of a complex song and, if you are unable to continue in the same meter and with the same rhyme, sink your boat and drown your crew.”

I was intrigued. “Have they ever forced you to sing?”, I asked. “No. But Donald Mackenzie, my grandfather, preserved a fragment of verse dialogue between a skipper and Blue Man tossing beside him in the Billows.”

“It went like this:
Blue Chief: Man of the black cap, what do you say
As your proud ship cleaves the brine?
Skipper: My speedy ship takes the shortest way
And I’ll follow line by line.
Blue Chief: My men are eager, my men are ready
To drag you below the waves.
Skipper: My ship is speedy, my ship is steady.
If it sank it would wreck your caves.”

“Never before,” Mackenzie wrote, “had the chief of the blue men been answered so aptly, so unanswerably. And so he and his kelpie brethren retired to their caverns beneath the waves of the Minch.” “And that is the reason why we all must have a good voice”, he said, and turned to continue with his work as we maneuvered up to Ullapool’s quayside.

Ullapool is a fascinating town, the place where the modern swimming pool was invented in the mid 1800s, only then it was called the “Ullapool”. They changed the name later to “swimming pool” as a marketing method after someone commented that “Ulla” is Gaelic for “cess” or “septic”. Heated pools were, I’m sure, invented by the Russians, although there were heated pools in ancient Rome.

We drove off the ferry into Ullapool and headed east to locate the first station we could find. We soon found a Shell station where the price of diesel was the same as in Stornoway, high at 89.9 pence a liter. In Glasgow the price was around 81.9 pence per liter. As we learned in another two hours the price in Inverness was 78.9 pence per liter. In general the British prices were not quite three times the price of diesel or gasoline in the USA.

Going eastward, we traveled along Loch Broom for its length and then were in the broad expanses of the far broader than you can imagine Scottish highland glacial valleys and their gentle giant rounded mountains, shaped more like enormous ripples in the sand, tugs on the heart that make your mind oscillate between despair and joy. There were dammed lakes along the road, A835. The road was a busy one but we were approaching Inverness via the cutoff through Muir of Ord on A832. Soon we were on the south side of the Beauly Firth, then going through Inverness, then, turning inland, on B9006 on our way pass Culloden Moor, where the Stuarts lost their last chance at being the top dogs all because they thought being Catholic was so cool. The field was visible from the road with its four corners staked with flags.

Kilravock Castle (pronounced: “Kilrock” Castle, the ancestral home of the Rose family) was a little to the east of Croy and less than a thousand feet west of Clephanton, nothing more than where two roads intersect and several signs are posted to confuse any foreign driver.

We turned off B9006 into the private road into Kilravock Castle; a long paved one lane road through rows of ancient trees, Yews, Redwoods, and Monkey Puzzle Trees. Everywhere we went we kept finding old and massive Redwood Trees. We impertinently pulled up in front of the small Castle and parked. There were no other cars.

Ringing the door bell on beside a dark and massive wooden entrance door, Ken, the manager appeared. He signed us in and told us that we were the only ones at the castle for the next two nights. We had the entire place to ourselves!

He showed us our rooms, for some strange reason giving us upstairs rooms even though ones on the first floor (ground floor in British terms) were available. “Where could we eat supper?” “A Taste of Morays”, he replied, “go down to Clephanton and take a left. It is where the road meets A96. Breakfast at 8:30?” “Yes.” And he was gone. Like a curtain at the end of a Shakespeare play quietly descending we were left to ourselves and the applause of the void.

We headed down to the restaurant, upstairs above a gift shop, and the food was excellent. On the way back to Castle, after we turned off onto the one lane private road, a deer, not quite a yearling but without spots, bolted and fled into the open woods.

When we parked, I took my camera and walked the ground around the castle past the Monkey Puzzle Tree (from Chile), looking just like one I had known growing next to the museum in Petaluma, CA, and a Wellington Redwood (Sequoiadendron giganteum from California), both trees were well over 100 years old, and on down to the greenhouses at the end of the tree garden. There were a few intensely blue flowers, but mainly trees and lawns down to the stone wall where a meadow with a stream flowing on the other side.

From http://www.icr.org/goodsci/bot-9706.htm I quote: ‘The December 1996 Good Science [A fundamentalist Christian publication that pretends to find scientific evidence for Noah’s Flood and creationist myths.] Botany Column examined the process of assigning botanical names to various plants. In the case of the Redwood trees, this process has taken some interesting turns! In 1769 a Franciscan missionary accompanied a Spaniard expedition and mentioned "red wood" trees in his journal. In the next 100 years, these trees were examined and named by Scottish, English, Austrian, American and French botanists. Each discoverer tried to name the trees in such a way to convey their characteristics and awesome greatness: Taxodium sempervirens (an "ever living" member of the cypress family); Wellington gigantea (after the Duke of Wellington); Washingtonia californica (after President George Washington). In 1776, Pedro Font, awed by the trees, named one palo alto ("tall tree"). A town founded on this site still bears the name of that tree. John Muir called the trees "Kings of Their Race."

‘The Austrian Stephen Endlicher was the first to assign the tree to a new genus— Sequoia. Some say this was due to his great admiration for Sequoyah, the Indian [whose name by birth was ‘George Guess’]. The genus name Sequoia was finally adopted (instead of Taxodium) and in 1938 John Buchholz did a thorough study of the two types of redwoods and noted the differences between them. He named the redwoods that grow on the foggy northern coasts of California and southern Oregon Sequoia sempervirens (sempervirens means "ever living). He named the giants of the Sierra Nevada Mountain groves Sequoiadendron giganteum. For general purposes, the trees of the coast are referred to as Redwoods, while the trees that grow in the Sierra Nevada groves are called Sequoias.’

The web page goes on to attempt to use the redwood as a method of dating Noah’s Flood and as a counter to the ideas of evolution. It accomplishes neither. It pretends to be scientific but is not. They count on the ignorant people reading it not knowing the difference. But for the scientifically educated, reading them allows a classic and critical examination of the pseudo-scientific methods of these frauds.

I walked back up the slope to the rear of the castle to a dovecot that had not been cleaned of droppings for decades. I could hear owls hooting in the late evening air and doves cooing in the dance of distances. I was for a moment a child again. Wandering and wondering with all time and all space to explore.

Climbing back to the front I joined my sister, who had walked in the opposite direction and found, she said, a “croquet court”. We walked up to what turned out to be an overgrown tennis court, and continued past an abandoned house with no roof but chicken wire on the rafters to keep birds out. We walked along a long estate road lined with old beech trees. We walked down to the meadow at its end and startled a doe grazing there.

By then we were both tired, too tired to complete today’s log on July 1st, and had to finish writing it the next day. Sleep was all too welcomed.

July 2nd, 2004, Friday Loch Ness and Cawdor Castle

Yikes! I couldn’t adjust the shower to provide anything but scalding hot water. Cut the shower to the essentials.

A week from today we would fly back, my sister mentioned to me as we ate breakfast. Muselix, then porridge (oatmeal), then poached eggs on toast, stewed tomatoes and sausage. Coffee and toast with jams. The walls of the room where we were served were populated with the portraits of the former Barons and Baronesses of Kilravock.

When we finished breakfast I changed clothes I had been wearing for four days. I wasn’t really raunchy yet but it was nice to get some fresh clothes on.

Ken then proceeded to give us a guided tour of the castle. We started in the drawing room where Ken provided a history of the origins castle and its family. The lands had been confirmed by King Baliol (the puppet king put on the throne by King Edward I of England) upon Hugh Rose. Robert the Bruce knighted William of Kilravock for fighting on his side against the English at Bannockburn in 1314. The building of the castle we were in began soon after February 1460. Nearby Cawdor Castle (the home of the Macbeth family) was begun a few years before, both having the same architect, a servant of James III called Cochran. Both castles have identical mason’s marks in the doorway stonework.

We took the spiral staircase into the tower and saw the room where Mary, Queen of the Scots, stayed for a while. Not a pleasant room with a vaulted stone ceiling and walls of stone. Old boxy leather suitcases that must have been used to tote stuff back from colonial India were stacked against the walls. Above we were outside on the ramparts and it began to sprinkle. In a tree to the left of the front of the castle (left from our perspective behind the castle roof’s parapet) was a black bird singing like a Mocking Bird with a varied and loud territorial song. Ken said that black bird was on the same branch every evening.

The castle suffered abuse and burnings from raids by the Mackintosh family, who I assume were not friends. The castle was rebuilt and additions were made as time went by. Many famous persons stayed at the castle besides Queen Mary of the Scots, including Bonnie Prince Charlie, Robert Burns, Charles Dickens (they even had a bookcase willed by Dickens to the castle), and others down through history. Bonnie Prince Charlie stayed at the castle the night before the battle of Cullodin Moor, a few miles away.

At the same time the Duke of Cumberland, the British adversary of Charlie, was being given hospitality in the Roses’ town house in Nairn. After the battle, the Duke remarked, “So I understand you had my cousin Charles here yesterday.” Kilravock, sensing the gibe, replied that without an armed force he could not prevent the visit. Fortunately the Duke thought this amusing and said to him, “You did perfectly right.” This is a good example of the delicate balancing act that some families went through to survive. My family was not so fortunate as they made the error of choosing the losing side in the Covenanters issue at the wrong time in history. They were ruinously fined and lost their title, and eventually their land and home.

The last Baroness never married and neither did her sister. The family had a tendency to produce girls, gradually narrowing the inheritance down to the present day with the last of their line now in a retirement home in Nairn, on the coast. She had turned the castle and its grounds over to the non-denomination “Christian Trust”, who now ran the castle, trying to turn it into a tourist B&B.

Returning to our rooms, we decided to go see the Urquhart Castle ruins on Loch Ness and then Cawdor Castle. We drove back through Inverness to Loch Ness and the ruins that my daughter and I had visited in 1997. I found many changes. A very nice visitor’s center had been built, from 1999 to 2001, in the hillside below the road looking down on the castle ruins. We watched a short 8 minute film on the castle’s history from early days of a Pictish warrior’s home, visited by St. Columba, to its being blown up to prevent it falling into Jacobite control around 250 years ago. When the film ended, the screen rolled up into the ceiling and the curtains parted revealing the castle ruins. Very nice effect!

I bought two Scottish flags for my son, the St. Andrews cross (white “X” on a blue field) and the yellow and red rampant flag of the royalty. Also a small book explaining the history of the Scottish flag. And bought a book on mountain climbing in Scotland to send to Ben, Bonnie’s oldest son whom I helped raise, for a Christmas present. Ben has climbed mountains in most of the continents.

We did a tour of the ruins, as I noticed that the safety railings in the high places and towers were better constructed than in 1997. Scotland had obviously been investing more into their better-known tourist attractions. And then 9/11 occurred and the tourist trade has suffered a financial blow just when they had expected a return on their investments.

Back on the road, heading back east, through Inverness again (I was getting familiar with the round-abouts there), we headed east on A96, turning off towards Clephanton and past that intersection to Cawdor Castle another two miles down the road.

Cawdor Castle is pretty impressive from the outside and inside. It is surrounded by one of the most extensive gardens on both sides of the castle of any we had seen on our trip. Four full time gardeners, I talked with two, keep the gardens beautiful and well cared for. Inside the entrance, a lady provides us with plastic bags to put our wet umbrellas in (it had drizzled most of the time since we were at Urquhart and afterwards). Cawdor, the ancestral home of the Macbeth family has one of the most extensive tapestry collections in Britain. Room after room of tapestries and pictures. I found this castle to be one of the most impressive that I had seen. Even the little details of having a bird feeder outside of one of the windows with many sparrows, blue tits, and other small birds frequenting it as people moved through the room.

There is far too much to write about this castle and its history, especially its tie to Macbeth, or the pretty much fictional play by Shakespeare of his tragedy, to do justice in this simple journal. I will have to advise you to visit the castle for yourself.

Down in the ubiquitous gift shop, I bought a broach of the Cawdor swan in gold plate for my daughter and a small sterling silver Celtic knot on a necklace.

We drove to Nairn to see the nearby sea town but had difficulty getting near the water front as the roads were designed to keep you away unlike Ayr or other west coast towns.
And we couldn’t find a place to eat in the town, so we headed back and ate at “A Taste of Moray” again. I almost fell asleep after the meal of salmon.

Back at the Rose Castle, Kilravock, I wrote my log and planned our trip tomorrow. Because of the heavy rains today, we did not drive down to the MacPherson Museum in Newtonmore. The rainy weather conspired against us. Tomorrow we would head south to Forfar, visiting some castles along the way.

July 3rd, 2004, Saturday Balmoral Castle and Forfar

Woke up at 7:00 and laid in bed thinking about missing the MacPherson museum near Kinguesse. Not much I could do about it. Just too much rain. I got up at 7:30, shaved, took a shower (I finally figured out how to adjust the hot water – press the low power instead of the high power button). Down for breakfast, same as yesterday.

I mentioned to Ken that we had not been able to visit Newtonmore to go to the MacPherson Museum. He replied that was too bad as you didn’t get to hear the story about the woman of Kingussie. “No”, I said, “ What would that be about?” He replied, “There was a woman of Kingussie who lost her self. She died soon after. Some said suicide, others said it was an accident. No one was sure. What was important, though, was what she said as she was dying. She said, ‘I see!’ And it was as if she were riding a wave of energy that had suddenly been released.”

He continued, “The pastor of her kirk said that she was having a religious experience and it indicated her spiritual nature. The mayor quickly added that it must have been her loyalty to the political position that common in that town. A doctor said it must be the basal metabolism shutting down as she died. A merchant thought it might be her social consciousness and the understanding of the economics at that moment. None could agree, or all saw something different until a child listening asked the question, ‘Didn’t she say that she saw?’ And then they all realized that that was exactly what she meant. The act of seeing is not the same thing as what is seen.”

We paid and left, heading past Cawdor Castle and south. Down two laned A939, thank goodness. Over the Cairngorm Mountains, part of the Munros Mountains, the highest mountains in Scotland. As we approached Balmoral Castle, we diverted to a small town, called Ballater, which Edwina had read about on the internet as being a pleasant place to have lunch. We found the Station Restaurant in town. While Edwina went to get a table, I stopped at the local news stand and picked up a copy of the Herald Time (British copy of the New York Times). An article on the front page about the trail of Saddam and what he said in court.

When I walked across the street I learned that Edwina was told we would have to wait for a table. OK. We walked down the street looking for another restaurant. We found one but it didn’t open until noon and it was 11:45. So we walked back to the Station Restaurant and waited for a table. One was available within five minutes. We were given the breakfast menu. “Could we have a lunch menu?” “No. It is not noon yet. We don’t give out the lunch menus until noon!” OK. So we ordered a pot of tea for “breakfast” and waited another ten minutes to get the lunch menu.

Finally we got one menu and I had to get the waitresses attention to get a second one. She brought me one. I ordered the puree of carrot and parsnip soup, so did Edwina. Paid and left. Dingbats!

Headed west to Balmoral to see the ballroom of the castle. That is the only room the public is allowed in. Nice display of paintings and photos of favorite dogs and prime ministers of the queen’s.

Off to the gift shop. I showed my sister a necklace with a wren farthing coin with cloisonné, dated 1939, the year she was born. She was pleased and bought it.

We headed over to the distillery next door. Took the tour. I suspect they make more money from the tours than from the whiskey they make. The whiskey was so so. I wished we had had time to visit the Talisker distillery while we were on the Isle of Skye. They had a barrel of cut pieces of peat. I took one small piece to send to Sky.

Back on the road we passed over the southern range of the Cairngorm Mountains. Ski slopes galore on the treeless slopes. Down past Devil’s Elbow, lower gear, quite a drop off. Pass a very small town with the inspired name of Spittal of Glenshee. Took the turn off on B951. Saw a really curious castle, more like a watch tower, rectangular shaped and at least four stories tall near the almost invisible town of Forter but we didn’t stop.

Through Kerriemuir and drove into Forfar. Found the Abbot B&B on Wiley Street easy enough, just off of High Street, the main street through town. Check in got the key to the room and headed off again to see the Aberlemno sculptured stone. After going the wrong way we finally found that B9134 was just High Street going east. Soon we were out in the country and quickly in Aberlemno and also in a heavy rain storm, even with thunder and lightening. Edwina sat in the car while I put up my umbrella. Told her, tell my kids I love them if I get struck by lightening and hopped out of the car, through the iron gate into the church yard and its tombstones. The rain was intense. There was the massive stone, a Celtic cross carved on a stone slab. Sandstone? Took photos on both sides. Ran back to the car. “Let’s go.”

Back in town we went to the Turkish Restaurant recommended to us and found they had a wait of an hour. We walked down the street and found a Chinese restaurant. They couldn’t screw up sweet and sour chicken. What? They really did screw it up. Too damn sour, the pineapple was without any taste, and the rice was not gummy (American style grains that don’t clump making it hard to use chop sticks). Bummer.

We had an ice cream for desert, Peach Melba, and left.

July 4th, 2004, Sunday Glamis, Dumferline Abbey, and Edinburgh

The next morning we had breakfast with a Scottish butcher and his wife. My sister broached the topic of Mad Cow’s Disease (Bovine Spongieform Encephalitis, or BSE). The butcher’s response was to talk about increased cleanliness standards enforced, which is always good, but has nothing to do with BSE or its prevention. That showed me that he really didn’t understand the nature of the disease. If he didn’t understand it, it is a good guess that most Scottish and British butchers still do not understand the disease. It is sad but the number of people who would die from that disease had not yet peaked in Britain.

We paid, headed out and down the A94 road to Glamis, then Perth, then transferred to M90 to get to Dumferline, then Edinburgh, planning on taking A720 to swing around the underbelly of the city to get over to the east side quickly. All roads were very good, especially M90 and A720.

Our first stop was Glamis Castle. I had vacillated as to whether we had the time to go there and Scone Palace, and if only one, which one. The car was low on diesel as the last fill up was in Ullapool, and that was only about a 3/4th fill-up. We did have enough to get to Angus or even Perth, so I was not worried.

I was worried when we did get lost and continued on a side road for a good distance before we realized that the castle grounds’ stonewall was no longer on our right. I turned around (it was my day to drive) and drove back. The reason we had missed the gate was that they opened at 10:00 and we had driven by at about 9:50 while it was still closed.

Past the ticket booth and into the parking lot (or “car parking”, as is said here). Into the entrance and up some stairs to be greeted by the tour guide, a gentleman who was well educated and quite proper. After all this was the home that the recently late Queen Mother had been raised in. Of all the castles we saw, I would have to rank this one among the top three in Scotland that the public can take tours through.

As if the rooms were striving to out do each other, the next room was always a striking and interesting contrast to the one we had just left. The first room was the banquet hall, frequently and recently used for stately dinners. Twenty Coats Of Arms embossed against the middle portion of the oak wainscot. Filled with opulence and splendor, it was designed to overwhelm and impress. The next room was just the opposite, referred to as the “Crypt” in a book sold in the gift shop. It was like a medieval castle room of stone and boars and deer heads, weapons, and a tender bird, head folded against a wing, “My First Woodcock, 5-1-54” with initials, as though the murderer had meant to eliminate one by one all of the Woodcocks in the area.

The next room was the Drawing Room. The painting I found most interesting there was one of Queen Elizabeth I that I had never seen before, as it showed her with brown hair. The painting of a red head next to her was of Lady Arabella Stuart, who ended up in the Tower of London, like her cousin, Queen Mary of the Scots.

A door in the corner of the Drawing Room led to the Chapel, where services had just been held by the staff, since it was Sunday. It was filled with paintings by a single artist who painted on wood planks. Jacob de Wet, the Dutch artist plagiarized most of the works from other artists of his time, except for one painting of Jesus wearing a Dutch gardener’s hat. A nice touch.

The Billiard Room also served as a game room and library. A chess set was set up improperly by someone who did not know how to play chess, (white on the right, folks), but it was consistent with much of the other rooms as it was for show and bravado to impress and not for substance. The library was filled with books both obscure and fascinating, rarely heard of outside of Rare Book Dealers’ collections. The castle does have a copy of the first book printed in Scotland but it is kept elsewhere in a secured area.

By this time the rooms started to blur: King Malcolm’s Room, Queen Mother’s Sitting Room, Duncan’s Hall (King Duncan was killed by Macbeth, according to Shakespeare’s play, is a complete fabrication by Shakespeare, as Duncan was killed in a battle accident and his death occurred long before the castle was built). The castle is so massive in its centuries of accumulations that it also collected ghosts and those that could sense them.

“I must own”, wrote Sir Walter Scott when he stayed a night at Glamis, “that when I heard door after door shut, after my conductor had retired, I began to consider myself as too far from the living, and somewhat too near the dead.”

Edwina had bought a discount ticket that would allow us to go to Blair Castle, Scone Palace, Glamis Castle, and Dewar’s World of Whiskey tours. We ended up only using it for Glamis Castle.

We did stop in Angus, just down the road, to refill the tank before continuing. There was no sense in testing the fates.

We didn’t stop in Scone to go to the Scone Palace. Perhaps another trip.

At Perth we got onto M90 and headed toward Dunfermline at a much faster pace. Soon there we took the exit and headed into town. The Abbey was in the center of town as we suspected so we just followed the signs that pointed towards the town center.

Parking in a disabled parking space, (tourists are disabled, right?), we walked towards the east side of the church, the new part that was built in the early 1800s. Service was taking place so we could not go into that part of the chapel. However we could go into the old part of the church, which is fairly empty yet has beautiful stain glass windows, depicting scenes from Jesus’ life.

At 14:00 the service was over and we were able to go into the chapel where Robert the Bruce’s body was. It was under rich red granite stone and polished bronze metal with a beautiful but modern depiction of an ancient medieval king in armor. The stone was placed under the pastor’s pulpit where the sermons were delivered. I took many photos, which were allowed. My sister mentioned to the guide that I had said that Robert the Bruce had died of leprosy. He strongly disagreed and presented several good arguments why that couldn’t be, mainly based on Roberts reputation for being a womanizer. He insisted that Robert had a skin disease but it was not leprosy. I was not totally convinced but didn’t think it worth arguing. But the important thing was that we had visited the grave of our ancestor of so many years ago and gave him homage.

Back on M90 we crossed the misty Firth of Forth and found A720 around Edinburgh. Getting into downtown Edinburgh from the east side, we drove south across the North Bridge from Princes Street and headed towards Edinburgh First, the University of Edinburgh. There we were given keys to our individual rooms in Pollock Halls, Holland “A”, Room 102 for my sister and 105 for me.

We then walked down the street to a Moroccan restaurant, Red Marrakesh, 51 Clerk Street, Edinburgh, and had a good meal with Moroccan music. The waitress, who was from Poland, didn’t understand our order and ended up delivering only one supper, which my sister and I split. Afterwards we walked further and found the “Royal Oaks Pub” where music was played every evening. Tonight we had two Australian women singers. As I wanted Scottish music by local talent, we walked over to Grayfrier’s Bobby, saw the statue to that faithful little dog and his master’s grave, and walked a little up the street to smoky Sandy Bell’s Bar, a place I visit every time I’m in Edinburgh. This was my third visit. Had a half pint of bitters and played two 5 minute blitz games of chess. Was beaten both games, but I’ve never been that good at blitz chess, and both players were pretty good. We left after a while and I made it back to write my log.

I was about to get in bed, when I decided to return to the Royal Oaks Pub. I quickly walked to it, only a few blocks from the campus, and soon found myself with a half pint and a conversation with a bloke sitting next to me. He was telling me of all the unusual things about Edinburgh and he mentioned the Zombies of Edinburgh. “Zombies?” I asked. “Yes, and I’ll introduce you to one. Just a minute.” he said, and hopped down from the stool and made a phone call at the pay phone. When he returned he said, “We better go sit at a table for this. You’ll never believe it.” A few minutes later a man came in and came over to the table where we were and shook hands with my new friend. My friend introduced the man as an Edinburgh Zombie, and we all sat down. I started off saying, “You don’t look like any Zombie I have ever seen. You don’t lurch and bump into things.” “The Zombie made a face and replied, “A common stereotype. But then how many Zombies have you ever met?” “None, that I recall,” I replied. “As I thought, and I do think as you do. I just don’t have a consciousness, it came apart, I lost it, or actually never had it” he said, “that’s what makes me a Zombie.” I looked at him very hard looking for a crack of a smile. It sounded like a joke. Can any one think, or not think, that this is real?

I felt a little like I was back at Florida State University, in Tallahassee, Florida, having a conversation with a student who was convinced he was God, or at least he said he was. One of those sophomoric conversations college students have to bug each other. The ones that you almost resolve by punching the guy in the face, until you realize he would simply say that he willed that to happen too. Never waste a good fist on a God.

“How would a person with no consciousness be different from on that had a consciousness,” I asked him. “How would I know,” he replied, “I’ve never had one.” “Wait,” I said, “if you had no consciousness you shouldn’t be using the word ‘I’, or perhaps it should be in lower case or something different.”

“True,” he said, “you are right there in a funny sort of way. But the way our language is makes it almost impossible to talk without using an ‘I’ to talk. My using the ‘I’ doesn’t mean I have a consciousness, it just means I’m talking and using the same language as you are. Anyway, what is your ‘I’,” he replied. “What is my ‘I’?” I mused out loud. My ‘I’ is my personality, which you seem to have also, and it is my awareness of my surroundings and of my internal thoughts that I may or may not share, which I cannot prove you have, although you act like you have them.” “I don’t,” he replied, “you will have to take my word for it.”

“I think I see the problem,” I said. “The real problem is not that you don’t have a consciousness but that I am assuming I have one. I mean I know that the personality is an illusion, it is an accumulation of ways the brain protects the body that it starts learning from an early age and the personality, the ‘I’, grows as new ways are developed to aggrandize the well being of the body, to increase its happiness. Sometimes it is self defeating as it seeks pleasure in things that can harm it, thinking that pleasure is always a good thing, just as pain is an indication of dangerous situations to be avoided. It does the best job it knows how to do. So if that is true then a Zombie would not be particularly concerned about their safety or health or anything else that would a conscious person would be doing.” My friend who had called the Zombie nodded in agreement and looked at the Zombie for a rebuttal.

“So you are saying,” the Zombie said, “my behavior should indicate internal mental states called consciousness?” “Yes.” “So my not bumping into people and chairs on my way over here should indicate a consciousness?” “Yes.” “So a machine that can thread itself through an obstacle course should have consciousness?” “Stop right there,” I said, “I see where you are going and admit defeat. A machine as skillful as any human is no proof of consciousness.”

“But my problem still remains that I cannot tell any difference between you and a normal person who says they are not a Zombie. In fact, so far you seem far less a Zombie than the mindless fundamentalists that I endured over a week with. You seem to have far more thought than they do with all the soul they think they have.” “Did I mention that I don’t have a soul either,” he said.

I laughed. “Touché,” I said.

“So the streets of Edinburgh are filled with consciousless and soulless Zombies?” I asked. “I have no idea,” he said, “I don’t often ask. And how would one tell?” That made me a bit uneasy, and he pushed me further by saying, “How would I know if you have a consciousness? How would you prove you have a consciousness? If it is something that is happening in your brain, it is bound to be transitory and temporary, always changing and metamorphosing it would be like a process or even a collection of processes, instead of a thing, always changing its appearances.” “With some sort of reflective ability…” “Really?” he interrupted, “and what is that supposed to mean? Consciousness is like bouncing light off of a mirror?” he jeered.

I conceded, “I realize that our language is so utterly corrupted by primitive assumptions about reality that it is very hard to talk about the way things really are. I agree that the way our language is so hung up on the ‘I’, like dead meat on a meat hook, that we have great difficulty in making any sense at all about our selves or our consciousness. There are so many things about our language that are just plain wrong that it feels like I am cutting truth out of lies with a rusty knife. The ‘I’ gets in the way so many times as if it were making sure it were not forgotten or abandoned. The ‘I’ is constantly insisting on its primary importance, even when it is of little importance. It protects us and it does that job so well that it constantly hovers, our own personal guardian demon and ends up making an utter pest of itself with its demands for eternal life and other such nonsense. But is consciousness the same as the personality, the ‘I’? Is it the same as awareness?”

“Must not be,” said the Zombie, “I am aware although there is no ‘I’ that is aware, like an observer with no judgements. I think you understand.”

“Yes, I do. But do you have an ‘I’ that protects you? Do you have second thoughts about walking off of tall buildings or into the path of speeding trucks?”

“Don’t know,” said the Zombie, “haven’t done that yet. Do you actually think about harming yourself? I would think that is some sort of malfunction. Things that have no consciousness don’t have to be clumsy, self destructive, or stupid. If there is nothing to protect, what is the point of having behavior that protects? How clumsy is a cloud?”

By this time I was getting tired and bid my friend and his Zombie goodnight. Walking through the Edinburgh fog on the dim streets, I wondered was I the real Zombie, shuffling through life only half aware, and the Zombie actually more aware than I was, almost enlightened. With that thought I made it back to my dorm room and a dreamless sleep of the dead. Tomorrow the Abbey Tour south of Edinburgh and our last night in Scotland.

July 5th, 2004, Monday Day for the Abbey Tour: Kelso, Jedburgh, and Melrose

The Edinburgh University has an interesting cafeteria system. You just walk in and help yourself. No ticket, no cashier, no proof of residency, no key to show, just eat. Many people there from all over the world. Quite a few young people from Spain, Japan, and USA taking summer courses at the University of Edinburgh were having breakfast.

We drove south to Kelso. The Kelso Abbey is not obvious and the signs to it are missing, but eventually we found it, park, and start walking towards the Abbey. On the way there we fell into talking with a local who told us about the new web site for the town of Kelso, http://www.kelso.bornernet.co.uk/. I took his card and I promised I would leave a message on his web site when I got home.

No charge to go in but not much left of the Abbey. Took many photos of the Kelso Abbey and its graves and headed back to the car. Drove to Jedburgh to see the Jedburgh Abbey. The abbey was easy to find. We parked in a lot where a carnival was parking its huge trucks in. Walking up the road to the abbey I looked down into the Jeb River and noticed how polluted it looked. This abbey was larger and had more to its ruins. It also cost £2.50 for each senior. The entrance is through the visitor’s center – gift shop. (Every where we went had a “gift” shop.)

There was a short movie that I slept through. Dim the lights and I’m out. When it ended Edwina woke me up and we walked up the stairs to a series of display panels that provided an adequate short history of the abbey. Abbey choral chants filled the air like the odor of mint. Then we were out in the ruins to wander around and stare at what a roaring fire can do to a Romanesque style sandstone building with a wooden roof set by nasty, fundamentalist Protestant neighbors. Aren’t fundamentalist wonderful!?

Actually, I don’t mean to take sides in that stupid religious civil strife. As far as I am concerned it was a conflict over an over self-indulgent fundamentalist Roman Catholic clergy and an over self-important, ignorant fundamentalist Protestant clergy. The common guy in the middle neither had the mind, will, or reason to resist being used by both sides in that power struggle. A battle between masters is a conflict that a slave never benefits from.

Walking into the center of town, we ate lunch in Jedburgh at “The Cookie Jar”, which sold no cookies, but had a good tomato soup and cheese quiche for a very reasonable price. Edwina had a potato with topping. It was a popular place for the locals.

From Jedburgh we headed back the way we had come until we hit A96 and then headed west towards Melrose. Along the way I saw a sign to Smailholm, a tall thin four-story fortress castle, a place my daughter had gone to on her travels last summer. It looked like the tall fortress castle we drove past near Forter, northwest of Forfar. On impulse we turned off to go there. The advantage was that it also led, along the way, to Scott’s View, a high overview of the valley with the Tweed River below us and Eildon Hills to the south. We stopped and took a pleasant but short look. As a busload of other tourists arrived we left and attempted to reach Smailholm Tower. That was unsuccessful as the one lane road was blocked. A road crew was resurfacing the road and no traffic was allowed through. We could see its roof in the distance on the other side of the hill in front of us. And that was the closest we were able to get to it.

Instead we turned back and headed for Abbotsford, Sir Walter Scott’s home in the last 20 years of his life, just outside of Melrose. And quite a home it was! Almost a castle! A strong contrast to Dove Cottage of Wordsworth. Filled with an incredible book collection that took several rooms to display. It was clear that Sir Walter Scott did not live the last years of his life in financial difficulties in spite of what has been written. Unfortunately his son did not seem to be much of a reader and didn’t add that much to the collection. He was interested in military adventures instead as was his son in turn, who became a Major General in the British Army.

There were odds and ends that Scott was given over the years, including Rob Roy’s dirk and the ubiquitous “lock of Prince Charlie’s hair”. That boob, Charlie, must have been almost bald by the time he finally escaped Scotland.

Scott’s grand daughter added a Catholic Chapel to the home and it was later turned into a place for tourists, like us, to visit.

Finally, we rushed down to Melrose, only a few miles away, and went to Melrose Abbey, another £2.50 for each senior. Supposedly the place where Robert the Bruce’s heart is kept, we didn’t see any indication of it with a marker. We spent 30 minutes running around taking pictures and, as it started to sprinkle again, we left and headed to Innerleithen where we had reservations at the Caddon View Small Hotel and supper at 18:45. The meal was excellent, the wine was weak, but the salad was absolutely superb!

After supper while I wrote this log, Edwina struggled with repacking for our flight out of Glasgow tomorrow to London. She had been accumulating tons of small bags of stuff bought at almost every gift shop along the way and now was confronted with the logistics of getting it back to Virginia. I didn’t buy that much stuff so I didn’t have the same problem. I brought up her large heavy suitcase so she could sort through her stuff and repack.

The problem she is confronted with is that she will end up paying £50 to ship £100 worth of things to the states, which she could have bought on the Internet at less than the £100 because of no VAT tax on the Internet. Added to that the pain of lugging stuff around on your trip, makes buying tourist stuff somewhat questionable.

July 6th, 2004, Tuesday Fly back to London

Bags back in the Land Rover and my day to drive. A short ride to downtown Innerleithen to the Royal Post Office. Edwina spent about an hour getting much of her gift shop purchases into three boxes (2.000 kilograms or less each no matter what the size of the box). It was a struggle as some of the booklets would not fit and had to be put in her suitcases, which were already about to burst with clothes purchased during the trip. Total cost for mailing three boxes was a little over £21.

Back in the car, on through Peebles, north of Biggar (Biggar is Better), bypassing the little town with the big name on A721, through Carluke, turning off onto B7011 to go through Law down to A73 going up towards Glasgow, transferred to M74 and then made the error of transferring to A725, thinking it would skirt around the south end of Glasgow and over towards Paisley where the airport was. Big mistake!

After we went through East Kilbride we became hopelessly lost in road construction, repeatedly being turned towards Busby and other points south. Never made it to Paisley that way. Finally backed up and drove through small streets in Glasgow for an hour until we finally connected to M8 (after stopping and asking for directions three times, or was it four?).

Our flight was at 14:15. We drove our car into the Hertz rental return lot at 13:40 in the rain, which had started at 13:00 on schedule. Car rental cost £901 for 1,999 miles. The shuttle took us over to the check in desk, which went quickly without a hitch. Through security (major differences from USA security: Laptops do not have to be taken out of case, shoes do not have to be taken off, coins can be left in pockets, and the guards are not surly or fat). Arriving at the gate just before the plane started loading.

Got into an interesting conversation with the woman next to me. She asked us if we had seen the Stone of Scone. We said, “Yes”. “It’s a copy”, she said, watching the expression on my face. “And further more it is a copy of a copy, assuming the stone that Edward I stole from the Scots was the real Stone of Destiny to start with. Some say it is not.”

She mentioned that she was from Biggar (Biggar is better) and then went into a bizarre story about her uncle, Ted, a master sculptor who had been involved in the theft of the Stone of Destiny from London a few years ago. His job in the plot was to create an exact replica of the stone and allow the copy to be “found” and returned to London. Then when the stone was finally returned to Scotland, he was again commissioned to create a copy of what was thought to be the real stone. He made another copy from the copy, which was still in his possession in a warehouse in Coldstream, near Glasgow. The stone on display beside Robert the Bruce’s crown in the Edinburgh Castle was that copy. And the copy of the original is also in Coldstream.

Apparently this was not the first time he had pulled off stunts like this. Earlier he had created a copy of Rodin’s Thinker, when it was on tour in Scotland for himself.

Getting on the plane, seat 2G, I sat by a Scot who worked for the Norwegian Oil Firm, Statoil. He was being sent to Angola to help drill for oil off the coast. From London he would fly to Paris and change planes for Angola tonight. We had an interesting conversation about the enormous oil deposits that were only now starting to be tapped and that the myth of oil soon running out was just that, a myth. Not in our children’s lifetime. He mentioned that the company he is working for is also getting ready to drill off the coast from Havana, Cuba. He is anxious to get that assignment as he collects old cars, and Cuba is a virtual junkyard of 1950 cars still in running condition, many with more than a million miles on their odometers. And Fidel Castro has recently returned the prostitute business to Havana. Later I learned that Exxon Mobil was also in competition in Angola using some new technology to locate oil developed by Dr. Srnka, called R3M. Consumption of oil, or at least its demand, is expected to increase by 50% by 2030 with a corresponding increase in the cost of fuel. The demand for exploration will become an overriding concern and environmental concerns will be shouted down.

My sister had picked up a local newspaper. On the back I learned that Greece had won the Euro 2004 Soccer Title. On the front there was an article how the Homeopathic hospital staff was about to loose their government funding in a cost cutting measure in Glasgow. Quackery is always a luxury that can be ill afforded by society even in good times.

Soon we were in Gatwick Airport, south of London. Edwina got a cash advance of £200 on her credit card; she didn’t bring an ATM card with her. We got the express train from Gatwick to London, £12 each. At Victoria station, we got a taxi to the Penn Club at 21-23 Bedford Place, near the British Museum in the Bloomsbury District. The taxi had to take a round about way to the club due to there being some Grand Prix blocking a long stretch of road in London.

Checked in, got our room, went out over on Southampton Row to the Verdi Trattoria for supper. Chicken in a white wine cream sauce with mushrooms. A salad. And a glass of white house wine. My sister fell into a conversation with two women sitting next to us who had come to London for the Flower Show at Hampton Court. Tomorrow was the opening day and they had special tickets. The show would not be open to the general public until the second day. My sister, whose great love is gardening, was tempted to go.

Stopped by a bookstore on the way back and picked up three books to whet my appetite for book shopping tomorrow.

Stopped at the TV lounge at the Penn Club and saw that Kerry had announced Edwards as his running mate. The BBC mentioned that Dick Cheney had called Edwards welcoming him to the campaign. Back to my room to write and read and sleep late tomorrow morning. Finally I don’t have to be concerned about the schedule for the next day.

July 7th, 2004, Wednesday Perusing the Rare Book Stores of London

A late breakfast. Talked with Bruce, a retired English (his favorite poet was Alexander Pope) school master (what teachers are called in England), who enjoyed rummaging through London’s rare and used bookstores. He suggested several in the Mayfair District: G. Heywood Hill at 10 Curzon St., Maggs Brothers at 50 Berkeley Square, Bernard Quaritch at 5-8 Lower John St. off of the Golden Square, and others. The walk over on Oxford Street to Regent Street and then south to Piccadilly was not the most direct way, but, filled with London scenes, it was the most amusing.

Out of the Penn Club and down to the main street nearby I found a typical newsstand. Here is an incomplete list of the newspapers carried there, in no particular order: de Volkrant, Neue Zurcher Zeitung, De Telegraaf, Al-Quds Al-Arabi, Al-Hayat, Le Soir, Süddentsche Zeitung, Die Welt, Die Zeit, Helsingin Sanomat, Berlingske, three Israeli Newspapers totally in Hebrew, El Paris, El Mundo, Corriere Della Seva, Le Figaro, Fanatik, Hürriyet, Milliyet, Le Monde, L’Equipe, 24Ore, USA Today, Herald Tribune, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal Europe, two Japanese Newspapers, la Repubblica, Financial Times, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph. That list, alone, told me that I was in London! But there were other things.

First I was about to cross a street when toward me came a man almost nude riding an adult size tricycle with a box of wood built around it advertising some web site. I took his picture as he raised his arm in bare salute.

On down the street I passed De Beers, displaying a magnificent necklace of cascading diamonds in front and back. A middle aged woman had also stopped to look at it. “Magnificent”, I said. “The only way, it could be worn, is naked!” she stammered. “I guess if one could afford it they could afford to wear it naked”, sez I. She said, “Sadly, those who can afford it rarely have the figure, and those that cannot afford it cannot figure”, and left. A pity, I thought, most neither have the figure nor can figure.

I had to stop at a Wedgwood Factory outlet on the other side of the street, admiring the seconds and 50% reduced priced items they had on sale. They had some stunning items.

Walking is waking and it gives one the chance to play with random thought as sleep gives us the chance to play with dreams. Assumptions & Ambiguities: The less you make of either, the less. The apology: The coward’s way out and the thief’s way in.

I had read in Karen Armstrong’s book about her talking with Hyam Maccoby about Rabbi Hillel’s Golden Rule. “Some pagans came to Hillel and told him that they would covert to his faith if he could recite the whole of Jewish teaching while he stood on one leg. So Hillel obligingly stood on one leg like a stork and said: ‘Do not do unto others as you would not have done unto you. That is the Torah. The rest is commentary. Go and learn it.’”

Karen said, “Jesus said ‘Do unto others as you would have done unto you,” didn’t he?

Hyam replied, “Same difference.” Paraphrasing what Hyam said, Jesus could well have belonged to the school of Rabbi Hillel, who lived a little around the time of Jesus, one of the leading Pharisees, the most liberal of Jews of that time. Jesus was probably himself a Pharisee, an idea that Christian fundamentalist would gag on. But Hyam emphasized that Judaism was an orthopraxy and not an orthodoxy. Right practice rather than right belief, the essence of what Jesus taught, when you strip all the orthodoxy layers off of Christianity.

But Karen was beginning to grapple with the idea of how could one live a faith without its beliefs. How could one be a Christian “without accepting the official doctrines about Jesus?” or at least “unless you were convinced that God existed?” That is a real scary thought for some. To me, it is the only possible direction Christianity can move towards.

I finally reached the corner of Regent Street and turned south, asked in at a McDonalds as to how many there were in London. “At least 50 in just the West End and probably more than 150 city wide.” Followed Regent Street even to its sharp curve to the east at its end, and had to double back on Piccadilly from Piccadilly Square to Mayfair, where the book dealers were. Found Curzon Street and soon Heywood Hill Rare and Antiquarian Books, Ltd.

I asked for a copy of Winston Churchill’s “The Life of the Duke of Marlborough”. “Sorry, we do not have a copy, but here is a copy of John Keegan’s book ‘The Mask of Command’.” I looked it over and determined that its short study of leadership would be something my daughter would enjoy.

Next I went to Maggs Brothers, http://www.maggs.com/, near Berkeley Park. I met a host of people there with their own specialties. Elizabeth Irvin in Military History, Joe McCann in English Literature, Julian Wilson in Natural History or Science. Again, no Churchill on the Duke of Marlborough. Their selection of T.E. Lawrence was not that interesting. My daughter had a better collection already. However, I found a copy of a book concerning T.E. Lawrence I knew that was not in my daughter’s Lawrence collection and bought it in spite of its water damage. “Is this £15?” (£15 at Maggs is like giving it away) The very business like woman at the front desk looked at its mark and said it appeared so. “Then I would like to buy it.” She checked her computer and said, “Yes, that is what the computer says.” “Then it is sold.”

I spent the most time with a friendly Julian Wilson, although everyone was friendly. Julian showed me with pride his collection of Charles Darwin’s books. I found an early copy of the “Origin of Species” that was marked £900 and also $750. Since the prices had been written the exchange rate had obviously changed. I brought it to Julian’s attention and he said that he was flexible and we could “work something out”. I honestly was tempted by my pride but my wallet brought me to my senses, as it is not pride that goes before the fall but money. Having been raised as a Southerner I am all too painfully aware that pride is the only thing left after a fall. I also saw a two volume set by Thomas Henry Huxley, one of my high school heroes, as well as several of his grandson’s, Julius Huxley, books, the few that were not turned over to Rice University in Texas per his will. I reminisced about a high school paper I wrote comparing the philosophies of Thomas Huxley and his other grandson, Aldous Leonard Huxley, the well know author of “Brave New World”.

From there it was a short walk across to the east side of Regent Street to Bernard Quaritch, Rare and Antiquarian Book Dealers since 1835. They also had many friendly and knowledgeable sales people.

There was a hilarious issue of Mind magazine, December 1901, for £100, which was a brilliantly funny parody of philosophy at that time. And the original volumes by Gödel, Ramsey, Malthus, Hume, Marx, Quine, Bertrand Russell, Whitehead, Sartre (I didn’t realize how valuable some of the volumes in my own collection were). Ian Smith and Graham Fallowes handled the philosophy and mathematics sections.

Georg Kastl, from Germany, handled the science section and showed me a wonderful book, “Disquisitiones Arithmeticae” by Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) that had been owned by Christian Doppler, known for the Doppler Effect. He only wanted £38,000 for it. I admitted it was out of my price range. “Disquisitiones Arithmeticae”, along with the number theory of Adrien-Marie Legendre, was the basis of Georg Cantor’s doctorate dissertation, "De aequationibus secundi gradus indeterminatis". Cantor must have had a copy of Gauss’ book also.
As a consolation prize he gave me a free mouse pad with the rare book search engine they use, http://www.bibliopoly.com/. They also provided me with a copy of their most recent catalog for science and philosophy, and then, like a dodo, I left it there by mistake!

They also didn’t have a copy of the book I had been looking for by Winston Churchill.

London’s Book Stores

From the crest of the Unicorn
To that of the Rampart Lion
And the city of false alarms
“Mind the Gap” reads the sign.

With that wisdom and three
Truncated Fates on green copper
Curves from the flask
Of antiquity, a fresh stopper.

From my bed’s room I rose
A dark flower, watered and washed,
And broke the terror of Pope,
Poached on toast and hushed.

I’ll take the high road as long
As circuses may last, looking
For Marlborough, as in Lord,
Churchill wrote, admiring.

So headed out to Mayfair,
Nothing there, and Heywood Hill,
Nothing there, Maggs Brothers,
Still nothing, in the rare book mill.

A desert in the middle of.
A dessert on the vanilla out.
Although I did not find it there,
London is not a horse without.

I took a diagonal route back to the Penn Club, arriving back just before a rainstorm. I took a load of laundry down to the basement and started that. Then I lay down on the bed, watching the rain outside when my sister returned after a frustrating search for a replacement to her C-Pap breathing machine. She had told me that she was going to relax today but instead she had been trying to solve her problem by buying a new $900 machine she could only use for another two days. She had been without a working machine almost since our Scottish trip by car had begun. I convinced her that she could wait for two more days before solving that problem, especially since it was probable that the only thing wrong was a defective wire in the machine power cord. She accused me of not being compassionate and was not in a very good mood.

Because her sleep apnea was not being compensated for by the non-working C-Pap machine she was not getting enough oxygen at night, her sleep was deteriorating, and she was becoming increasingly irritable and short tempered. She does compensate with her kindness. It was still a stultifying strain for both of us.

After patching up our spat, we went to an Indian vegetarian restaurant. The food was not spicy and tasted fine. The little metal cups the food was served in puzzled Edwina. “They have different curries in them”, I said, “and some have cucumber yogurt and one has a hushpuppy soaked in honey.” That evening I started a book on Buddhism that I had picked up two days ago and finished it the next morning after breakfast. The book claims that Buddhism is immune to fundamentalism. Boy, do I have news for them.

July 8th, 2004, Thursday British Museum and Library

As we were only a block away from the British Museum it would have been a waste not to have visited. So we did. And the main thing we visited was the Elgin Marbles, the finest or at least the most controversial thing the museum had to offer. But there were many other things worth seeing, too many in fact.

We found a woman in a corner with a display of ancient coins you could hold. I was interested in the silver tetra drachma that was used in Athens in the time of Socrates and Plato. She had an example and it was interesting. On one side was the head of Athena, although it lacked the helmet crest, which often determines the value of such a coin and on the other side was the owl with the three Greek letters ΑΘΕ, for Athens. An average quality tetra drachma sells for around $1,200 in the states and for around £675 in London. Years ago I had been tempted to buy one, mold it, and make copies for jewelry but it is too heavy for jewelry and abandoned the idea. Perhaps if it were hollowed out?

Of course we had to visit the gift shop at the British Museum. I found a small metal cast of the Athena Owl and bought one for Nina, Sky, and myself. Also some other odds and ends to send the kids.

We ate a snack and headed out to the street, going into two coin dealers across the street from the main entrance of the British Museum. Their tetra drachmas were no better than what we had seen in the Museum and they had no coins from the reign of Robert the Bruce.

At 12 Bloomsbury Street we found the other bookstore, Unsworths Booksellers, http://www.unsworths.com/, I had been given an address for as carrying books on philosophy at Maggs. Their selection on display was poor and I didn’t have the time to question the over worked single clerk they had. I hoped I could check their web site when I got home. So we left, walking back to Southampton Row, caught a bus to Euston Station, got off and walked to the British Library, a beautiful new building that had been dedicated in 1998.

After we had breakfast I had been in the reading lounge, talking with an English professor, Evelyn Haller, from Doane College, Nebraska, who was over doing research on Ezra Pound. She talked about Ezra’s infatuation for Mussolini and I mentioned Beethoven’s similar infatuation with Napoleon, until he crowned himself Emperor, thus perpetuating a cycle of stupidity, ultimately crushing the romantic ideals of those times for 100 years when the victors of Waterloo returned the monarchies in a vain attempt to turn back the minds which think. The time of monarchies ended at the end of the 1700s but it took two hundred more years before it was understood to be an irreversible change. Now, three hundred years later, only in the starkly lit but cunningly dark corners of the world, like Saudi Arabia, is that impractical master-slave system of government continued.

I’ve seen the same intellectual error made in the twentieth century with the insane infatuation with communism. There appears to be a fatal flaw in the intellectual mind that is attracted to the self-centered man of action, the ideology of progress, or the religion of the sword. The submissiveness to such mad absolutes is sickening and the ultimate betrayal of the mind, yet so unbearably and tragically common.

From Ezra Pound we talked about his sloppy translations of the Chinese poets she mentions the beautiful poem about the lonely soldier at the far western front and how it is relevant to the soldiers on extended duty in Iraq. Nods. And I mentioned the best translations, both in literal and imaginative content, I had ever seen of Li Bai (Li Po) and Du Fu (Tu Fu), Tang Dynasty poets, were by a Canadian poet by the name of Whinecup. (When I returned to the USA, I attempted to locate Whinecup, but could find no trace of him on the Internet.) I had lent my copy of his translations and lost it years ago. Perhaps my spelling of his name is off. It is always the best books that are lent and my best library comprises the empty places where they used to be. It was the best translation I had ever read of the two Chinese poets, far better than what Ezra did or any of the early 20th Century translators. I mention that I had translated some of Li Bai’s poetry and was acquainted with how difficult it is, almost impossible to do well.

I recently revisited one poem that I had translated and modified it into a modern mode. It goes like this:

Chinese Wine

Beside my bed with sloshing jugs of saline,
sucrose, feet upon the steady floor,
holding metal pole, that is holding me,
I raise the blinds and, looking out, the moon
turns gravel roofs to flower beds,
befriending with light and compassion.
I would offer my silent friend a sip
from my bulging bags of salt and sugar.
The sober moon doesn’t know how to drink,
but plays a joke by giving me a tipsy shadow
who mimics all my funny clumsiness.
I laugh. I try to sing. My throat is dry.
My eyes are wet from all the happiness.
My new friends, we will dance together
silently and then depart, promising
to travel on great adventures and share
our stories in the distant Milky Way.

She mentioned that at the British Library there was an exhibit of the “Silk Road” culture and that we should visit it. About then, my sister came into the room and we decided to go after visiting the British Museum.

So after visiting the British Museum, we took the bus to Euston Train Station and walked east on Euston Road to the British Library and into its enormous courtyard with a statue of an android seated and bending over with a compass to a diagram at his feet, titled “Newton”, and looking more like a modern mechanical Archimedes. Into the building we turned left into the exhibit, free, and spent almost an hour reading the labels on the items and listening to audios available. I listened to a complete Zoroastrian song with delight. And most of the Diamond Sutra, identical to what I had recited at meditations in Berkeley, California, including the bells. The Buddhist influence on the people of the Silk Road was more profound in the eastern end but even there it was subtle. The exhibit did include a recreation of the interior of a Buddhist cave with carvings and frescos.

We walked back to the Penn Club and rested for an hour. I got up and watched the news. When Edwina woke up and joined me, we called the airport to confirm our flight the next morning at 10:30 and stepped out for supper at a French restaurant on Southampton Row. Outside was a badly overweight man I struck up a conversation with, while waiting for my sister to come out of the toilet. He had worked as a salesman for IBM and had had the Princeton, NJ, computer account for a time many years ago. We waxed nostalgically and sadly about our computer careers.

Edwina and I took an indirect route back and stopped at the home that Charles Dickens had lived in on Doughty Street before going back to the club and settling the account.

Tomorrow would be stressful. We would get up at 5:30, get a cab to take us to Victoria Station at 6:30, take the express train to Gatwick at 7:30 arriving at 8:00. Flight to Charlotte, NC, was at 10:30. We would split up in Charlotte. Edwina would fly to Greensboro, NC, and I would head to Orlando, FL.

July 9th, 2004, Friday Travel, Travail, and Trouble

Stressful was both wrong and right. We got up at 5:30. I shaved and showered while Edwina slept a few more minutes. While she showered I dressed and got a cup of coffee in the breakfast room (no breakfast as it was not served until 7:00). As the luggage was zippered close I moved them to the front door through the typical six fire doors. Watched the TV briefly until Edwina was ready. She hailed a cab at 6:30 and we were loading our stuff onto the cab heading for Victoria station to catch the express train to Gatwick Airport.

A porter carried my sister’s heavy luggage and my one suitcase to the train. The 30 minutes ride to Gatwick went quickly and we were there by 7:30. Checked in and seat assignments went quickly. After that we went to a restaurant for breakfast. Talked with a couple on their way to St. Lucia in the Caribbean to set up a business conference.

We had to sit around in the lounge area for a while until the gate assignment was made. Gates are not assigned in Britain until about an hour before the flight. Soon enough it was posted as Gate 19 and we headed out, through security, and then a second level of security at the gate, same questions asked three times, same answers three times, “Not by the hairs of my chinny chin chin”. “Security” is hard to take seriously when it is stupid. Looked around and didn’t see any obvious Muslims fundamentalist among the passengers, nor did I expect to see any. The current security is quite plainly fighting the last terrorist attack and not the next.

I was assigned 18A, a window seat next to a young punk. After he made it clear he was a libertarian, I told him I was a strong Bush supporter to trim the conversation. Libertarians are not capable of original thought. I reached for Karen Armstrong’s “Spiral Staircase”, which I had started at the beginning of the trip. Plodded through her gradual discovery of her illness, as being epilepsy and her growing realization that her religious order was nothing more than order. The ego is always terrified by any sense of being different from others, especially when it comes to health. Really takes a thorough retraining of the ego to let loose of those fears, since the creations of those fears is one of the most important things the ego does. Determining causal relationships in illness is usually a tremendous relief, even if the illness cannot be cured.

The flight was delightfully boring. Read, drank, thought, wrote, slept, read, wrote, ate, thought, slept, read, thought, wrote, and repeat as needed.

Karen’s conflicts with traditional Christianity, like those faced by reformers of any religion, are monumental. Christianity needs radical reform, for it is an empty shell of dogma, squalid beliefs, and the worship of ignorance. Karen is less radical than I but even we both agree that religion has nothing to do with belief.

The biggest problem Christianity faces is that it continually tries to define and limit reality to what it thinks reality should be instead of working within what is. Defining what reality is or should be is not the responsibility of any religion. Only science can define what reality is. And only a democratic state can define what it should be, as in what are societies goals. The responsibilities of religions are not belief but in what social balance we are capable of in caring for all others within the defined boundaries of what is impossible. Religion must always be on the outside of the limits of the possible seeking to expand what limits we have, whether scientific, ethical, economical, political, or religious.

It is always necessary for religions to press the boundaries of caring, always seeking how to expand that arena beyond the conventional, definitional, standards, beliefs, or dogmas.

The only valid religion is one in which the individual is totally responsible for his or her spiritual creation and growth and that concern is only directed to the caring of others and not towards some internal mental or spiritual state. That was the error that the hippies made, thinking that drugs could be a shortcut to some higher consciousness. There is NO higher consciousness than caring for others. And its validity is derived only from the fact that it is observable, measurable, testable, and, yes, taxable, which is necessary to make it responsible.

Religions that depend on literal scripture are like elevators that always come back down to the ground floor without ever letting anyone off at the higher floors. An eternal hell of Sunday Schools with no hope of graduation.

What are the problems of all religions? Gods, prophets, or great spiritual leaders provide ultimate revelations. This is complete rubbish. It eliminates the need for anyone to think for themselves – forcing them to be like sheep and not humans. It gives the false idea that religion provided is absolute, final, and cannot be improved upon. It creates the illusion that there is a super reality that supercedes reality. These flaws always lead to several fatal conclusions and results.

As our ordinary reality is viewed as inferior, normal reality is treated as unimportant, opening up the excuse for perverse self torture, extremes of sexual behaviors, deprivation, the torture of others, the rape of the land for exploitation, even genocide. This happens as any malevolent behavior can be justified in an unimportant or less important reality. Because belief is the source of this confusion, any belief is the source of all terror, and in our times, all terrorism.

The uses of religion in society have been to justify most every known behavior, both good and bad. But, by far, religion has been used in ways that show a complete lack of understanding what religion’s limits are. In fact religion typically denies it has any limits. And this has to be a deliberate grab for power or else an act of utter madness.

In America, by far, religion is little more than entertainment, listening to stories, having weird and unusual states of consciousness, relieving boredom by sometimes-fatal fantasies of eternal pleasure and eternal torture. If religions were honest and said, “Yes, this is nothing but entertainment”, people would realize it is just another magic act. But it pretends to be supplying or pointing to some super real reality. The result of this attempt to usurp reality is that religions, when taken literally, become anti-science. Such fundamentalism ignores the careful work of scientists, who have determined verifiable facts from testable hypotheses. Such fundamentalism is also anti-ethical as it reduces ethics to a set of absolute rules of behavior, promulgate by force, but completely overridden by “visions” as needed. It is anti-education as it insists on only its super reality as reality, valid by authority alone, requiring the elimination of any opposing views by force and reducing education to little more than rote memory of scriptures and approved, controlled, limited, and censored “knowledge”.

Religions do comfort the ill, the dying, the stupid, and desperate with empty promises of eternal life and pleasure without end. So in that regard it is somewhat like a pat on the head of your favorite pet just before it is euphemized to put it out of its misery. Whether that is a good thing to do depends how one ranks honesty among the virtues. But it does raise ethical issues as it is not unlike a doctor not telling the patient that they have a terminal illness, or a pharmacist who fills a prescription with a drug used to sedate and make a person forget when they need to be alert.

And it raises another ethical issue in that it teaches the young that lying is a valued and necessary ability that can and should be used on the gullible, ignorant, and vulnerable. This attitude corrupts businesses and our governments as well as other important institutions that contribute to the wealth and mental health of a country.

The religious culture is then an unethical one that stifles the development of people, institutions, businesses, governments, science, education, and virtually every positive aspect of society. Its criminal attitudes lead to religious justification of wars and other destructive social behavior because it accepts no truths other than its own authority, no verification process, and has no checks and balances.

This position is that of solipsism and the last remnant of the belief in absolute power. The belief (not the believer) becomes the only thing important. Other ideas are dismissed as heresies. Truth simply becomes a matter of consistency with the approved belief. And the enforcement of that truth becomes the responsibility of a closed society of authoritarians, a natural consequence of social solipsism. None of this is good.

Religions encourage a conspiratorial view of reality where good and evil are in an active war behind the scenes in some supposed super reality. Our conflicts, mistakes, and errors become a hierarchy of sins, attaching absolutes to the most inhumanly trivial event. This both dwarfs and magnifies each person, an impossible situation. Each person is both the potential pivot of the universe and at the same time insignificant to any final order of the super reality. People sucked into that game are attracted because it attaches a sense of meaning that balloons their ordinary lives into something of a far grander scale. It flatters their egos with false self-importance. It seems to uncover hidden meanings and purposes as suits the leaders selecting the scripture that are used to motivate the followers. As it requires no real effort on the of the followers’ part to think or be critical, in fact actually discourages thinking, doubt, and critical discourse, so even the most stupid or ignorant can play the game successfully. In fact it helps to be stupid or ignorant, at least as far as being a follower goes. Over a lifetime this degenerates into a Master – Slave relationship.

Religion obscures the differences between believing, wishing, assuming, knowing, thinking, and dreaming. Its dogmas are a reflection of the muddled mind of those incapable of clear thinking who, in denial of their inabilities, seek to turn their inabilities into something praiseworthy, their cold hard death grip on their beliefs as a sign of loyalty, beliefs that are not even theirs.

By supposing there are levels of meaning in religion, deeper or higher levels, we are being anti-democratic. We are dividing people into classes of understanding instead of saying, “that person has no understanding” or “understanding nonsense is not understanding anything”. We end up pronouncing that it is better to be silent about that which is beyond human understanding instead of saying that it is nonsense. Thus religions elevate nonsense to an importance above knowledge.

What is happening when someone says they “believe”? There doesn’t appear to be anything observable, nor any mental state the results of which is observable that can be verified to be directly caused by “believing”. Any act that is claimed to be the result of belief can easily be attributed to some other source cause with equal conviction by an objective observer.

What if someone said that “God knows what one believes”, an interesting mix of knowing and believing in that statement, which should set off serious red flags. Then they are relying on some super reality that God lives in, that allows him to observe and relate belief as a cause to some effect. Beside the question of why such a creature would be interested in such a totalitarian relationship with the people, punishing them if they don’t think good belief thoughts with eternal torture, one has to assume there is a super reality where all that can take place. Yet there is no way to verify the existence of that super reality. If such a super reality existed it would certainly violate all the know laws of mathematics, probability, physics, biology, or chemistry. To not notice those red flags means something is seriously wrong and lacking with mental perceptions of the believer. And for those few that do notice, to ignore those red flags and still believe is to be in serious denial.

There are several problems with any statement about a super reality. The first problem would be how does one separate the true statements about such a super reality from the false ones? There doesn’t appear to be a way for the same reason one can neither prove nor disprove the existence of that super reality or anything in it. Simply put, there is no testable hypothesis possible about things not testable. Consequently you can say anything about such a super reality with equal conviction. Moses, St. Paul, and Mohammad are equally right and equally wrong. Wittgenstein, who appears to be sympathetic about a super reality, fails to supply the answer to how you choose when there is no method of choosing. What is the method that allows us to determine if there are any rhinoceroses in the room, or Noah’s Ark on Mt. Ararat, when truth needs nothing but belief? There simply is no method.

The other problem with “God knows what one believes”, statement is that it is similar to a statement like “Someone knows what one believes”.

Is a belief something private or is it observable? Obviously there is an observable component in the phrase one might make, “I believe such and such.” But that is just a tautological proposition no matter what the belief is, because it points to a private or mental state that is beyond our complete observations even by the believer. It is this private component that any fundamentalist would insist is the true essence of belief, as people can lie, but only God knows what they believe. This leads to a mad maze of wondering if God assigns points to private, yet incomplete belief, as all beliefs must be incomplete, some better than others, and whether there is a threshold of points that determines whether there is an eternal reward or eternal torture, is an absurd progression.

Woops! You only got 3.14159299 points and you needed 3.141593 points to avoid eternal torture. Too bad. And who could trust a God who thought pi was 3.0 to make good judgments on beliefs?

Beyond any vocal declarations, internal mental states, as beliefs are, or knowledge of is not something we are privy to. We can say we know but that shows nothing other than our ability of fooling ourselves. There is something bothersome about even someone saying, “I know what I believe”, as if they have the ability of knowing at a conscious level their unconscious mind, which is private even to themselves. And, since knowledge is, by definition, demonstrable, using the word “know” also falsely implies that we can somehow show others our internal mental states we call our beliefs. To make sense if it, we usually interpret a statement like that to mean, “I am firm in my beliefs”, as if they also were privy to all the things that lead to their belief. But reasonable people don’t take such statements too seriously. Still, people can have as much difficulty in changing their beliefs as changing their sexual orientation, and it can be even more disturbing. This difficulty makes me think that belief is somewhat like sexual orientation, a biological bonding fixed and as unchangeable as the imprinted relationship of a parent bird and its chick. Once made, it cannot be unmade without a permanent sense of loss, adding to their belief that it should not be changed. Truly a serious limitation to humanity and so evolutionarily ancient.

I have a lot of problems with the word “belief” in a religious sense. Obviously the word has a non-religious use, as in “I believe he went to town”, meaning that I think there is a high probability that he went to town and might be willing to bet on it. There belief is also tied to an understanding that there is not complete information available to justify my saying “I know he went to town”. No verification process occurred although it is possible. Sort of a sloppy way of expressing oneself and nothing more. The use of the word “believe” is also used to be ambiguous about things, or to deliberately waffle on issues. For brevity, I’ll ignore that deliberately disingenuous use of the word, however valid their common uses might be.

In religion, belief is tied to ultimate destinies and choices between eternal pleasure and eternal torture, and siding with fundamental and absolute good or evil. Things that one would think one would want to be absolutely sure about. Yet there is no way to verify any religious belief other than an appeal to family, and cultural traditions, or the authority of the scripture. This is a pretty weak appeal as we know that such traditions and the authority of scripture also have asserted things we know are not true: that the sun goes around the earth, that the sun stood still in the sky, that the earth is flat, that pi is equal to 3.0, that the universe and everything in it was created in six days, that the world was completely flooded, and other easily disproven ideas. It is easy to show that if the literal Bible, Torah, or Koran are either or any the inspired words of God that we are dealing with an insane, cruel, or lying God. Certainly, not one worth worshiping. Thus all beliefs, as they are casually expressed, without exceptions, are unreliable.

So “belief” is not about verifiable knowledge or truth, in fact it is the opposite of verifiable knowledge, for when one says they believe they are saying that they cannot verify something and, thus, do not know something for sure and have thrown themselves upon faith alone. Belief is then an admission of total ignorance that one is willing to make, perhaps thinking it to be knowledge but only fooling themselves because they desire it so much, because the ultimate consequence is so very important. I don’t mean to imply that ultimate consequences are the only motivation for people’s beliefs. Many times it is only their desire to belong to a community or membership in a group, often for security and potential wealth, which would be denied them if they were not a member. Or it might be the fear of others in being ostracized.

The consequence of blind faith, fear of others, and desire appears to be, then, an intimate part of the belief. Yet the supposed results is without meaning for one cannot honestly say that they know that their beliefs and the supposed ultimate consequence have any causal relationship, other than the prevention of ostracism, being included in a closed community membership and the fear of that loss. Belief is supposed to be between God and man, not between man and man. It is clearly not. Believers just assume the relationship between God and man to be true with no way of verification. Non-believers suffer no loss in their non-belief beyond what is visible in their exclusion from the believers. At times that loss has been grotesque with the torture or killing of apostates by every imaginable and hideous method, and in more modern times, the loss is only more cleverly disguised in western countries, while those countries dominated by fundamentalist the horror continues unabated. The scale is heavily weighed towards “belief” being little more than the fear of others, as can be quickly verifiable by loss of membership in any closed community and worse. Like the non-religious sense we assumed someone was going to town but the difference being that we are betting our lives on it being true (or at least pretending to, which is usually the case). The believer is one who makes the highest bet with the least amount of probability of success, and to lessen the psychological loss must force all others to also believe. Gamblers have another name for the believer and players who draw to inside straights.

Existence appears to be the characteristic of things that allows us to validate things. When things are never around to be verified, if we are reasonable, we tend to be skeptical about their existence. Is a thought the same as a belief? If I think about a cat and I tell you I though about a cat perhaps you will say I’m thinking of a cat too. I can verify your thought by asking you to draw a picture of a cat or point to a picture of a cat as something like you are thinking. You can do the same with me. But if I say “I believe in God” and you say you believe in God too, how can you verify that? Does pointing to scripture show a belief? I don’t think so. What is being pointed to is little more than a set of rote behaviors that one has learned to exhibit like a loyalty oath that has no way of verifying the loyalty. You cannot point to a belief or God. Beliefs are not verifiable any more than God is verifiable. As they are not verifiable they have no real existence.

It is a common fantasy of children that the world unrolls and is created as they move toward their horizons. Pursuing that horizon is a fascination to the young, perhaps even the source of our spirit of adventure and exploration. As we grow older we learn how to validate things beyond our sight, still relying on sources that are not simply hearsay information or opinions. Trust is important. Is there really an Eiffel Tower in Paris? Yes, travel there and see for yourself. Is the World Trade Center in New York? Well, it was until 9/11 when a fundamentalist religion decided to destroy it. Did it ever exist now that it exists no more? Where is the past? How can we ever verify the past ever existed?

The thing we have to be careful of is to recognize the limits of any method of verification and to understand that each object has those methods that are best for its verification. It is difficult to get a believer to understand that their desires of what they want the world to be are not good methods of verification for anything. No predetermined conclusion ever makes a good method for verification. Wishes don't make it so.

Putting it another way, existence can be defined as the presence of the set of all verifiable attributes a thing has, which cannot be a null set. If the set of verifiable attributes is null the thing has no existence, it is not around to have attributes. Having verifiable attributes is what existence is. All things that exist must have at least one verifiable attribute. All knowledge of metaphysical things is hearsay information so we cannot validate metaphysical things. Metaphysical things have supposed attributes that are not verifiable. They may hint at unknown states of the human imagination, but tell us nothing about the world. We have to conclude that existence is not a property of metaphysical things, or at least highly suspect. If existence is not a characteristic of metaphysical things, we are being silly to pay any attention to them other than for amusement, aesthetics, seduction, and, yes, entertainment.

So we are back to entertainment. But if religion were nothing but entertainment then Saturday Night Live would be the best religion. Obviously there is something else going on. If we imagine that we are prisoners in a really brutal concentration camp and that there is utterly no hope of ever getting out alive, what would religion mean to us? It would be hope against hope of the most austere form. It would be an act of denial that there is only brutality that we endure in this world. A statement that there has to be something better in this world, something worth working for, some different way of building a society so that concentration camps are not necessary, and there is some possibility for every golden wish we might have. It is in the extrapolation of that desire for something better that religion often goes wrong: thinking that mere wishing it were so is enough, thinking that we have souls that will live forever, thinking that thinking is not needed, forgetting the simple idea of caring is the core of religion, its heart, and its limit. Humanity is like the prisoner of a camp, dreaming of a far better world, turning the simple act of caring for others into the highest act we are capable of.

That is the caring that I don’t see in most of modern religion, any religion. I see most everything but that. I see declaration of memberships, advocacy of beliefs, dogmas, and rote memory lessons that never finish, repetition of worn, hackneyed hymns, nodding back and forth in recitation like an autistic child. I see never ending frustration of any true religious spirit that simply wants to bypass all the self-contradictory beliefs to get to care for others. That is why, I imagine, that people like Mother Theresa must be an astonishment to many as she could care and care and care. It is her caring that makes her a saint, and not any other reason. What the world sees are the rituals that she was a part of, a mental exoskeleton of habit for support and nothing more, nothing of or by itself.

It was a long flight.

Finally exchanged seats with my sister, who had an aisle seat, 36B, near the back. Big mistake. When we landed in Charlotte, gate D11, 93 degrees Fahrenheit, the plane arrived late and I had about 20 minutes to get through customs, get my bag, check my bag in for the continuing flight, go back through security, and race to the gate to catch the next flight. After waiting for most of the plane to exit, I grabbed my backpack and laptop from the overhead bin above my seat 16A, but, in the heat, I forgot to take my blue zippered windbreaker/coat with my Olympus digital camera in the right coat pocket.

I raced through the process, spending most of my time in very slow lines, and being threatened and insulted by a bored security woman, whose only job was to look at my boarding pass, and nothing more, a redundant position as the very next person was required to do the same thing, and nothing more. When I arrived panting and sweating at gate B12 to board my connection, I was told the plane has already left, even though I was there at its scheduled time of departure.

Groan!

It is clear that US Airways had not adjusted their schedules to accommodate the increased time needed between connections from overseas flights because of customs and security. I was rescheduled on the next flight two hours from then, given a new boarding pass, and was told my baggage would be held for the next flight. As I was being processed, others heading for Orlando showed up and were also rescheduled. I walked back slowly towards the C terminus, where my next flight would originate from, and ran into my sister who had also lost her connecting flight and had also been rescheduled.

She and I decided to go get a late lunch and as we were sitting getting ready to eat I suddenly realized I had forgotten my coat and camera and had left them on the plane. I asked my sister to hold my bags while I raced back to the ticket counter. They called Nick Ackerman, the security officer for the London flight #95 and he had me come back to the D3 office where he asked for my passport and left to search the plane. I waited and when he came back he said that nothing had been found and handed back my passport. He said the cleaning crew had already been through the plane but nothing had been turned in. Since I was among the last to leave the plane it most likely was taken by the clean up crew. So much for “security”, an expensive joke, if we cannot even trust the cleaning crew not to steal. I told him I would file a lost or stolen item report, which I did when I got to Orlando that afternoon.

I trudged back to where my sister sat and ate my lunch in gloom. The good news was that I had faithfully transferred each day’s photos to the laptop so no photos were lost. But it was a nice camera which I would miss, and, while I would not need the coat until next winter, and it was not an expensive coat, it was a comfortable coat that I enjoyed wearing. Edwina went to a phone to call Walt about us missing our flights and asked him to relay the info to Candy, who was coming to pick me up.

Finally we parted company and went out separate destinations. When I boarded, I found I had been upgraded to 1st class on the flight to Orlando. So was a family of three who had been on the same flight from Gatwick. I spent the entire trip to Orlando telling the mother sitting beside me, at her insistence, about my adventures in Scotland.

When I landed, filed the lost/stolen report, and picked up my suitcase, Candy was waiting outside to pick me up. We drove back to Edwina’s place to have supper and pick up my two cats, who had been living on the back porch. They seemed to be a bit skeptical about my being there finally. So was I.

Called up to Virginia to let Edwina know I had gotten home safely. She was not home yet and I learned the next evening that her flight had been delayed another two hours after mine. I left a message on her answering machine. After collecting the cats in their boxes and all of their paraphernalia into Candy’s car we drove to my place.

July 10th, 2004, Saturday Back to Reality

I had let the cats sleep on my bed last night. When I got up I put them out side on the back porch and opened the screen door so they could go outside. Noticed an armadillo rooting for insects only a few feet away. They are the only animals besides humans that can carry and transmit the leprosy bacilli. Florida wild life is still active. The back yard grass was high. I’d have to tackle that soon.

Weighed myself. I had gained only five pounds, much less than I had feared. I lost the five pounds in the next two days. I felt upbeat and went for the usual 2.4 miles walk at 8 am. It was already getting warm at 80 degrees. It promised to be a hot day and a hot summer and the hurricane season was almost upon us.

Any trip has clean up and restarting of services. When I got back from my walk, I went to the Cable company and scheduled to reconnect the TV and computer service Wednesday. Could not get it sooner. Drove back over to my sister’s place, got onto the Internet and cleaned about 500 remaining emails off of my account. Drove to the grocery and bought some food. Drove home. Accumulated mail was delivered. Bills. Rested.

Epilog

The painting from Grasmere arrived a few weeks later and I hung it in my bedroom so I could see it at the beginning and end of each day. I packaged up the presents I had brought back for Ben, Nina, and Sky and mailed them off. Edwina reminded me that my travel insurance covered to cost of the stolen coat and camera and I began the paper work for reimbursement. Then I began the laborious task of combing through all of the photos to prepare them for CDs to send out with this log.

Trip to Scotland & England

Trip to Scotland and England, 2004