Threads

I'm still picking up the threads after the long weekend of poetry readings in Scotland. Visiting Scotland always stirs up memories for me, taking me back to what sometimes feels like an alternative, "Scottish" past - a reality I might have stayed in if in my late 20s I hadn't begun to travel and then ended up being based outside the country I belong to. One thing that struck me this time was how different Scotland is from England - genuinely another country which, even though it no longer really has a language of its own, possesses an identity and ways of seeing and interpreting the world that are mostly foreign to the English. Perhaps some of the sharpness of the contrast came from the fact that I arrived in Edinburgh by plane from London - something I hadn't done since the 1960s - and was duly surprised by the sprawling extent of Edinburgh Airport, which now bears a much closer resemblance to Kastrup or Oslo than it does to the windswept Turnhouse Aerodrome of my youth. Strange, somehow, also when the taxi-driver taking you to the reading knows the street where you lived fifty years ago, has relatives in the same village, and describes the local smithy so vividly that you remember it in all its details, from childhood. And the reinforcement of all this caused by listening to poetry in Scots dialect - which, though it may not be widely spoken nowadays, is still very much alive as a literary language. Practitioners like Liz Niven extend the range of literary Scots so that it reaches out across the world again, much as it did until the 1920s and 30s.