Day 2 Monday 2025 06 30: Off to Edinburgh

 Why is it, exactly, that the pronunciation of Edinburgh leaves out quite a few vowels and then adds in some syllables? This is one of those mysterious things about the Old Country. Even if this is hardly MY old country, it's somebody's, so it's reserved the right to be stubborn, idiosyncratic, and blithely mysterious. Something about wandering a city that has seen both the Bubonic Plague and Eurovision 2023 seems to make a place where anything is possible.

 

 But I'm getting ahead of myself. Monday is the day we finally leave the unreasonably warm city of London to a city that absolutely no one outside of a 19th century returning exhibition of the Canadian Arctic, would consider warm, Edinburgh. 

 

It's down the sauna like stairs, to avoid the sauna (without saftey controls) like elevator, finally out into the clear air of morning London. Which, actually, yeah, this isn't Sherlock Holme's London, nobody is dying from consumption of miners lung here, it is pretty clear and nice.  Into the King Cross station, which, as I'm informed by my son, who is only slightly excited (he's well past being ACTUALLY excited about this sort of news), there is a Harry Potter tie in. The 9 and 3/4 Platform. 

 

 We first have a bite at Pret A Porter, which seems to
be on every street corner. Some corporate branding officer who is also a history buff or anyone who has kept the mildest interest in the last 1000 years of European history must wake up every day just tickled pink that the most frequent establishment in London for casual fare has the Frenchest name ever. That and it's the  most English and straightforward translation. Ready to carry, if high school french has not failed me (it has almost no opportunity to do so, so I'd be shocked if it took this chance to do so).

 

 So after we take a bite, my wife and my son go try and check out this 9 and 3/4 platform. They are promptly (and I'm sure, politely) informed that no pictures are allowed. It's not 'open'. This is literally a  sign, on a brick wall. 

 

 We pass by later and see there is a whole line up for it, with a real photographer, and someone who tosses a Hogwarts branded scarf in the air as if the person posing is really rushing through an imaginary portal under... again, a sign, on a brick wall. That the line up THEN follows into a Harry Potter store, with no other way out is genius/sinister/what are you gonna do, it's capitalism!

 

 I get both me and boy a Cornish Pasty because somehow I've heard all about these but every culture has 'meat and things wrapped in flour product', but these ones look like they were made to fuel a coal miner during a snow storm afer a famine. And maybe not a middle aged man strolling through his vacation from his real job of.. sitting in a chair typing on a computer. 

 

 ONTO THE TRAIN. We had hoped to see many beautiful sights, and we did. But it's a very long train ride. And much of the track is between embankments, I'm sure to reduce noise and other..engineering things that I wouldn't understand. But what this means is occasionally we get breathtaking/quaint/lovely views then just many more kms of hedges, embankments, levies? 

 

 The main take away was holy cow alot of England is just brick. They got brick and stone and more stone with a bit of brick. Certainly gave all the towns and villages we zoomed past a feeling of permanence. Also of places that were tempered in the flames of the industrial revolution. 

 We finally get to Edinburgh. The train station is packed and we make our way outside. Our AirBnB is up a flight of stairs (in almost all our travel, our place is always up a flight of stairs. Or maybe that's just what I remember, hauling our luggage up those stairs.) The smell is musty as one would expect from a concrete stairwell that was made around the time when transatlantic steamship crossings were a pretty nifty idea. The stairs each had a bit of a worn divot in it. I don't know the regular wear and tear of industrial concrete stairs, but made me think these stairs are much older that I would think? Or maybe everyone in this city wears hobnailed boots, I dunno.

 

 Overall impression of Edinburgh so far. Old. Stone. Quaint? I put the question mark there because everything that the movie "Braveheart" has told me about Scottish folks, I'm not sure if they'd appreciate being called quaint. Probably would REALLY not appreciate that I use "Braveheart" in any of my cultural benchmarking. But my only other referent would be Trainspotting, and, if I remember correctly that happens in Glasgow, so wildly historically inaccurate action movie it is.

  

Our apartment overlooks a lawn bowling green established in the late 1800's. I'm just going to go with quaint as all get out, here. 

 So we settle in, and it's time for a walk about. 

 It is alot of cobble streets. Double checking then getting it wrong when crossing  the street. There is something about where adn how they place their traffic lights that makes jay walking even more dangerous than it otherwise would be. I have no natural sense of where to look and check anymore. That, compounding with the fact that locals jaywalk all the time, (walk signals being more of an after-the-fact suggestion than an actual command), and the whole 'oh yeah they drive on the LEFT side of the street', then dolloped on top with the fact that for some reason, the timing of the walking signs just takes FOREVER. Well, al this adds up to a feeling like you are walking with two left feet all over the city. 

 

 We find the GreyFriars, which is a cemetery, famous for a rather loyal dog. It's also the site of the signing of the National Covenant, a decree in which supporters of the Scottish Church (presbyterian) opposed reformations of its doctrines by the English King Charles. There is proof of the bloody rebelliona nd suppression of this all over Edinburgh. Perhaps not talked about since most of Western Europe and North America, very broadly, do not spark civil war and unrest over biblical doctrine. At least anymore. 

Victoria Street

 We went to some of the classic tourists spots in our quick walk about town. The sort where everyoen is busy taking selfies. I attempt to find some pubs with tradintional Scottish folk music. They are all comically packed. I lack the extroversion or confidence to hang out that close to my fellow man, and my partner is not a bar person at all. So we wrap up the day, getting ready for a full day of Edinburgh, and all it's hidden syllables

Day 1 Part 2 Sunday 2025 06 29

We took a train from the air port to London. If there is one m lasting idea thatI came away with about the English countryside. They used a whole lot of brick. Brick houses, brick stations, brick post offices. Everything was made to stand the test of time or a resurgence of Viking raiders. 

Gotta get the iconic "double  decker bus, brick, and just a bunch of fellas working the Doordash gig" shot in there.

We have never gone on this thing. But with the weather, it'd be subjecting ourselves to a very slow, very hot greenhouse

Nelson's column, or, as I explained to my son, he was like their version of Admiral Thrawn.

We get to King's Cross to try and drop off our bags. Now to a North American, every single station in London sounds like a place alive with tea parties and cheekily misunderstood double entendres. Perhaps a bit of a comedy of errors here and there and an overly polite cop in a high vis vest going about his business in an environment where you can be pretty sure there is not a single random person better armed than your entire district SWAT team. Every single station. Maybe, except for Cockfosters but that has the double entendres going for it.

That is to say, I don't usually consider we might be wandering into a dodgy area. More on that in a bit.

We get to the hotel. One of the few hotels that falls within our budget, which forever be known as The Box. While not geometrically accurate it is accurate if you draw the reference to movies where prisons are prominently featured and the box is some kind of quasi-torture device where the occupants are beset by heat/isolation/etc. More on that in a bit.

We drop off our bags. It's morning, we cant' checkin and collapse in a jetlagged daze for a good 4 hours. We are fast approaching 24 hours being awake. 

Our best option, as there is no real air conditioned place within walking distance, is to hang out at  park. The first clue that maybe this area is a touch dodgy is the fellow still sleeping on his mattress near some small, mystery brick buidling in the park. The second was the general seediness around bits of the park. Like this area used to be a bit dodgy, bt the relentless march of gentrification has proceeded, undaunted, trying to stamp to any and all trace of where it once came from. 

We sit. Now my son is really taken up drawing, and he has a good time sketching things out, listening to young people's music, which, in the fullness of time, is retro music, which means old people's music for certain values of old. We hang out there until the lunch place opens. Plan is to eat then nap a little, then walk. This seems to be our unofficial itinerary everywhere we go but it also feels like this is a unique set of actives we arrive at every time we travel. 

Why did we choose a pub? Closest, had pretty good reviews, fell within budget, and not obviously a massive multinational with no local cultural redeeming qualities. Again, always the same decision sieve we apply when we are trying to find places to eat.

It's lovely pub. very family centric, looks like it's run by the owners who I imaagine, in my rose coloured glasses of London, live right above the pub. The air-conditioning is, as i expected, ice in our water and some doors open. 

Via an internal logic that is still baffling to me, my wife and I opt for the Sunday roast, and my son ops for the BBQ chicken, which feels more summery, you think, but what if I told you that it consisted of a chicken breast, drenched in gravy and melted cheese and served with fries? 

Clearly, the heatwave didn't stop us from having a piping hot batch of fish & chips. There is ice in those water glasses, though.

Or a rich, thick, "I think I  just cut my lifespan by 3  months" serving of sticky toffee  pudding.

I can only assume the sleep deprivation and general hunger resulted in this snap, but then to finish it all off we ordered Sticky Toffee Puddings, which sounds about as heat friendly as you'd think. This is the sort of dessert you serve  when your family has just survived weeks of low grade hypothermia and you've realized the autumn storage of grain will last through the winter.

So we finally finish dinner, staggering under the weight of gravy and British hospitality and attempt to take the edge off this fully developed case of jetlag. Into The Box we go.

As predicted there is the one brave fan ready to go, and the room has that This Place Could Double as a Amazon Rainforest Exhibit air quality to it. We open a window, set that fan at full blast, take showers, and attempt to get some sleep in. The ensuing fever dream of being too tired to get up and function yet being way too hot and uncomfortable to really get any sleep was a loop of self-inflicted discomfort that we voluntarily paid for. The room was at the top of three flights of stairs, so we had the added benefit of all the hot air from the building rising through it all and being tapped exactly on our floor. 

Somehow we got enough sleep to be cogent and didn't suffer enough heat exhaustion to make us comatose so it was time to get moving and go for a walk about.

We get to Trafalgar Square and are pleasantly surprised to see most of it is taken up with some large celebration planned for Canada Day. I'm not sure if there is always a large Canada Day celebration in the heart of London, but given the current state of some sabre rattling, it did my heart good to see support for Canadian sovereignty. 

Odd, when you think about it, that this support comes from a country that, historically, maybe not the best friend to sovereignty on foreign lands, but all things change, even, maybe especially, geopolitical strategy and sentiment of countries, given enough time.

We see the usual sights, they are as amazing as usual, Nelson's Column, London Eye, etc etc. We take a break in the strange London warmth to retreat to a garden. Specifically, the Victoria Embankment Gardens: Whitehall. It's a wonderful green space with families relaxing on benches or on the grass and a series of quite prominent statues all along the park. 

The first on has an excellent plaque for William Tyndale, who apparently was the first translate the Greek of the New Testament to English. Depending on how one views Christianity and its impact on the world, community, comfort for the sick and dying, justifications for imperialism and genocide, etc etc, this statue is at least not entirely and completely problematic. More than 50%? Maybe. 

The rest of the statues were not so lucky.

Wandering about those statues I couldn't help but notice that none of them had any plaques at all. This is hardly unusual for London, which seems to have so many statues and notable buildings that plaques either get worn away by the entropy of the city or someone though, at the time, that of course nobody would ever forget who Lord William Bentick was and the mere idea that one needed anything more than his name stated in embossed brass is an outrage.

The Least Problematic of the statues in the 
Victoria Embankment Gardens

But these statues were placed in a garden, quite large statues, with at least one statue that did have a plaque. Which lead me to believe that maybe there is a reason there is no plaque. One of them looked like a military commander and around the base had two shields (the internet tells me it's an escutcheon?), one said India, the the other Africa. Oh dear. Looking up this fellow looks like he was responsible for kicking off the whole Boer War. Oh dear.

 Another statues, some googling, a general who fought in the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Oh, that's not too bad. Wait, he fought against the rebellion. 

The park was like an memorial to the military might and oppression of the British Empire. This shouldn't have been surprising. But the fact that there was no other information on these statues outside of their names indicates maybe some institutional embarrassment. The whole complicated idea of "We absolutely respect nation's sovereignty now".

  

It really is a lovely garden, though. Quaint benches. Statues of war criminals, It has everything

I have all sorts of questions. Does this tree need literal iron supports in the wild as well? How does this work?

We continue our wandering, see more sights. Big Ben, back up Whitehall where all the buildings of power reside. We end up the day at Covent Gardens, watch an amazingly talented busker sing, then return back to The Box, for one least breathless night fighting heat exhaustion and jetlag in equal measure. 

Day 1 Part 1 Sunday 2025 06 29: London, Weather Suckerpunch

 In an unusually travel filled year, my family also went to Scotland, via London, to go to a friend's wedding. These plans were agreed to months and months in advance, before work went a little squirrelly, before we realized that our eldest would NOT be at home to look after the youngest. 

The travel itinerary for my wife and I, while still the domain of the pretty damn fortunate could, if one squinted and held onto the ideal of class solidarity, still think of it as "oh that's not that bad", and "it's like if you took another camping trip, but added transatlantic flights and almost dodgy hotels to the mix". 

The beauty of horror of British classism as  personified by the many different levels of check in at British Airways.

Do I like wine? Meh I could take it or leave it. MUST I get it because it's like the fanciest thing to do (and it's free?) Yes.

What bumped up the price enough for us to think the 'not entirely family budget responsible' was our eldest ended up getting into a month long study abroad. And try as we might, we couldn't quite reconcile letting our youngest stay at home for a week with only a somewhat disapproving dog as his chaperone. Did we watch too much Ferris Buellers day off? Maybe. Larger concern being the 'what is the worst that could happen', then realizing we'd be thousands of miles and 8 timezones away filled us with the sort of dread that is always at best, a low level radiation ever present in parenting. This scenario cranked it to somewhere near Chernobyl in our minds.

So, budget might take a beating, along with a feeling of class solidarity but at least we aren't frantically messaging our youngest at home making sure he hasn't set our place on fire or caught under a fridge or was mauled by a bear (we live in Canada and the last isn't entirely a hyperbole).

So that's a long preamble to say we went to the UK. London first. The same feelings and thoughts spin through my head as the other times we've been through here. Remnants of a dying empire, history at every turn, etc etc. But further observations are cut a little short by the fact that London is experiencing a bit of a heatwave.

Now, yes, it's not the sort of heatwave that ignites spontaneous brush fires or knocks birds literally out of the sky, but it's one of those weather phenomenons (happening all too frequently these days), that I call a Weather Sucker Punch.

Let me explain.

Different parts of the world are used to and geared towards a particular set of climates and weathers, and plan their infrastructrue accordingly, There are only so many weather continginencies a place can plan for, and most importantly, budget for. A weather event, that in any place else prepared for it would hardly warrant a blip; but in an place where it becomes a Sucker Punch, the impact ranges from 'a spot of trouble' to 'and now we don't have any municipal budget for kid's lunches.. or hospitals.'.

See also: snow in Vancouver, rain in Los Angeles. A city known for rain, more rain, a massive financial infrastructure that powers some of the most powerful and mundane forces on the geopolitical landscape, fog, a weird possessiveness for a very specific subset of 'curry', and rain. This is a city who's idea of air conditioning is maybe a small fan operating at maximum speed, reluctantly oscillating across the room. Where you see moss growing on any side of the building that sees the smallest suggestion of shade.

So we arrive in London and immediately experience the joys of a Heat Sucker Punch.

29 degrees Celsius here is 29 + everywhere. There is no escape. Pubs? You can get ice cubes in your drink, and would like a Sunday roast with some hot, rich gravy? Hotels? Well, not at the prices we are willing to pay. 

Clearly, the heatwave didn't stop us from having a piping hot batch of fish & chips. There is ice inthose water glasses, though.

Or a rich, thick, "I think I  just cut my lifespan by 3  months" serving of sticky toffee  pudding.

As is my response to any and all heat I go full tank top and shorts like the middle aged gym goer I am. Minus the awkward stretches and odd interaction asking "how many sets do you have left". 

But nobody in London, outside maybe some other tourists (and even then) seem to adjust their clothing for the unrelenting heat. Maybe London offices are kitted out with proper air conditioning and perhaps this is an indication of the sorts of places we can visit on our budget that simply relies on that single, overworked fan, but everyone is just going about their business not worried about 29 degree indoors. I assume this is just the classic British stiff upper lip and everyone is going through severe heat exhaustion in a quiet, understated way. 

The youngest is handling it like a champ, however, and thankfully, has not yet been eaten by a bear.