Today was daylight saving, which seems a little harsh, since I had to do two of them in one year. 

After our mandatory trip to the pier, Camilla and I went shopping today, browsing through the many charity shops and fingering garments with the warning: do not hold near flame, as well as strange Scottish coin purses and costume jewelry and knick-knacks. She got two plaid shirts which she will embroider, and I got hungry. 

So we went to a salad bar, where we were plied with garbanzo beans, mint feta cheese chunks, capers, arugula, chorizo, and other items which admittedly could be found in a salad on the other side of the Atlantic, but not like that, no, not like that. It was good, though.

Then we sat in the sun in the park while Camilla climbed a tree, as one does while telephoning. I worked on another illuminated manuscript-y thing, and we were both quite content. 

A trip to the end of the beach, which, since this is the weekend, was crowded with pink clad little girls and rock throwing little boys and Aberdeen terriers and burly men with sticks and fat women in mini skirts and skinny stooped old men with multi-pocketed vests and binoculars, and, of course, us.

Tomorrow at 7 in the morning we depart via bus for Leeds, whence we will take a plane to Venice.

I still wake up in the middle of the night. This time, it was a good thing, because drunken students were carousing just outside the window, singing "Midnight Special," and a number of Carter Family tunes which I dearly love. With an accordion. I read a few more chapters of Iain M. Banks' "Matter" and am not sure if I like it a lot or only enough to while away the wee hours of the morning. He is good at plot and invention but not so good at human psychology. Sort of like Asimov.

I peeled myself out of bed at the last moment and went off with Camilla to a remarkably boring lecture on how "Frankenstein" has been interpreted in plays and film. The professor read rather desperately from his notes and said a few things that I positively disagreed with. For example, he dismissed as fanciful the idea that Shelley deliberately left some aspects of her novel open to interpretation (that's why the various theater and film interpretations are so different).

Scott McCloud, in his discussion of the graphic novel, points out that characters like Tintin and Charlie Brown, who are represented with almost no distinguishing features, become Everyman. You can project yourself into their character in a way that you can't with a clearly defined character such as The Hulk or Wonder Woman. Shelley may not have known this explicitly, but the power of her novel surely is partly due to her use of the technique.

Luckily, our time was not entirely wasted. I worked on understanding how to make Celtic knots, the girl in front of me played Solitaire, and, according to Camilla, other students were shopping online.

I had a caloric but delicious pasta al forgo at an Italian cafe, a nap, and then went to the harbor to sit in the wind and meet Camilla. We strolled through a park, collected pussy willows, and climbed through Medieval alleyways to get back to the University part of town.

We shopped for dinner for Sara, my host. There is a teeny cheese shop, smelling like dairy and old socks and nuts and time. We got something gooey, something hard, and something silky. At a greengrocer's that smelled like rotten apples, we got apples and pears, and at a bakery, got seed bread and two teeny chocolate balls filled with whiskey truffle that cost as much as the bread. Then we went to Sara's and sliced and spread and had a very pleasant meal.


We talked about time from an anthropological point of view. Our Japanese friends say it is cyclical. Scientists say it is a one-way arrow. Some indigenous tribes see it as the eternal present. Our conclusion? That it depends on the scale you're talking about. We are in the third generation of stars, and are made of stardust that could not have existed 10 billion years ago. So, on the cosmic scale, time moves inexorably in one direction. On a human scale, it depends. In a pre-industrial culture, you could experience it as cyclical. If you had 20 pregnancies in your lifespan, and if your oldest children were beginning to have babies by the time you had your last few, and if you planted the same crops every year in the same season, you might indeed see it as a grand cycle, endlessly repeating. If you were more technological and prosperous, and had only one or two children, and your education and career followed a trajectory that changed according to your age, you might see time as I do, as a directional thing. In a rural economy, goats gestate for five months and chickens for one month, and cows are milked twice daily. In an urban environment, you cross the street at the green light and go to work at 8:30 and have lunch at 12. The perception of time is different; one is naturally driven, the other is arbitrary but useful. 


After washing dishes, I settled down to take this Celtic knot study of mine to another level.

Breakfast at Taste, lectures with Camilla. I could get used to this! 

There's some road resurfacing at Greyfriar's, and they found gravesite(s) there! I stared at some brown lumps and a group of people with paintbrushes squatting around them. Cool.

The big event of the day was meeting up with an old college friend for dinner. I had the idea that I might paint a picture of the boats in the harbor as a house gift, but what with being sick and taking a too-long nap, the hasty sketch I came up with was fit only for fire starter. At least I now understand what a lobster boat looks like. And a swan. To my regret, the puffins that bob around on the other side of the pier are too shy to pose.

While waiting for Camilla, I peeked in at choir practice. It was lovely hearing the small student orchestra and choir work on something Renaissance. I kept getting carried away by the intricate harmonies, when the conductor would stop them in mid-phrase and say, "All right, let's move to Bar 42!" He'd play a chord on the piano and they'd start somewhere else. Dizzying.

Keith is an astronomer and lives just around the corner from choir practice. He and his wife Anne have a cosy stone house with an Aga stove, a sick cat, and (despite the cat) a sense of peace. We sat at their kitchen table, eating burritos and reminiscing about our not-very-wild college days. There was a sense that, if there had been more time, we could have renewed and deepened a worthy friendship. 

I awoke at 5, 6, 7, and 10:00, and found myself scurrying to meet Camilla 10 minutes in the past.

We breakfasted at Taste and sat in the sun outside another cafe, where a potato shaped woman required us to buy something or leave. Fair enough, except that she had no customers. In her place, I might have considered giving us a free latte and asking us to remain longer. We would have been conscientious shills, I know we would have.

Camilla's morning class was again on Frankenstein, this time on the concept of Gothic. In the Augustan Age, "Gothic" meant archaic, primitive, crude, & irrational; and "classic" meant civilized, perfectly balanced, harmonious. Then the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke wrote that fear is a more powerful emotion than affection (he was never a mother, I deduce), and thus the sublime is greater than the beautiful. The idea of Gothic became a political one, with the Northern Races seen as democratic and the Romans as despotic. The Gothic novel, whose height was reached in 1790, 28 years before Frankenstein, was about power and tyranny, about the foreign and excessive, about deviance and incest. The intricacy of Frankenstein mirrors the intricacy of Gothic architecture, the labyrinthine journey to the interior.

We started the day at Taste, a cosy cafe with the best croissants in town. Camilla took me to a riveting lecture on Mary Shelley and her novel Frankenstein. Shelley's mother, Mary Wollenstonecraft, died in childbirth and her father, William Godwin, was a forbidding man, a philosopher who was said to believe, "if you cannot write an epic poem which will knock all others on its head then you are despicable." Mary read at her mother's grave and, when she was 16, was swept off her feet at that very grave by the married poet Percy Shelley. Their philosophical affair led them to a life abroad, and to the death of Shelley's wife Harriet and her unborn child. All these intense events fed into the novel. You may take the intensely glamorous path of following your convictions, but it can also be narcissistic and destructive. In the book, the female characters all come to a bad end because of the ideals of their menfolk.

I wandered about while Camilla went to more classes. St Andrews is a dual town, one part for students, and the other for the usual sort of person. There's a ruined castle, stones of which were used to rebuild the quay at the tiny little harbor. There's a ruined cathedral with an enormous graveyard that's still used. A street full of lobster pots, a pair of swans, a handful of second hand shops and bookshops, and many little eateries. I am saying nothing about golf because it is an invisible world to me. (Speaking of which, please read China Mieville's The City and the City. Thank you.)

Camilla collected me from the windswept prospect and we went to a lecture relating the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Arabian Nights, and Jorge Luis Borges. It was a little hard for me to make the connections (it had to do with book as artifact vs. storytelling), but each individual chunk was fascinating. The lecture style around here is somewhat old fashioned, with the teacher standing in a corner with a microphone and a remote for their slides, and no interaction with the audience. I suppose it has to be that way, but as an elementary school teacher, I protest! Nevertheless, there were some genuine gems in her talk: In the British museum, cuneiform tablets were laid out on trays "like a jigsaw that some naughty giants threw in the air." George Smith, an engraver, was recruited to assemble them. When he did so, and found extra-Biblical evidence of a flood and of Noah, he tore off his clothes and ran about shouting. He was restrained, and afterwards  presented a paper to the Society of Biblical Archaeology. 

There was also a slide of a talismanic piece of clothing, written all over with magical texts.

Afterwards, Camilla went to the dorm for dinner and I tested a kebab place to have my first 100% terrible meal in Scotland.