Edinburgh
Day 25. 169 miles.
We have arrived in Edinburgh-the capital city of Scotland-in our virtual journey through Britain. My American neighbours sometimes get confused by the geography of Britain so I’ll do a really quick rundown.
Britain is a country that includes England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. While Britain is a unified country, in most ways Scotland is also a country. For instance, in many sporting competitions like the World Cup and Six Nations Rugby contest Scotland competes as a country. In other events like the Commonwealth Games and Olympics Britain competes as a country so Scottish athletes compete for Britain.
Confused?
Welcome to the schizophrenia that was created by the Acts of Union that joined Scotland and England. The best part is-when the union was finalized nobody wrote down the rules so we have been kind of making them up through precedence over the last 300 odd years.
Now you are all up to speed on the geography of Britain (ignoring the strange quirks like Wales not being a country, but a principality) we should prepare to potentially throw it out of the window. More of that later. At the moment, though, Scottish people have a lot of choice. They get to vote for their Member of Scottish Parliment, Member of Parliment for Britain and their European Member of Parliment for the EC (European Community). No doubt if humans find intelligent life in space, the Scots will help elect the Supreme Leader of of the Universe. I suggest we don’t vote for the Romulan candidate because those guys are just plain evil.
Sticking with this theme our first stop in Edinburgh is the Scottish Parliment building in the region of Edinburgh called Holyrood. Since 1978 Scotland has enjoyed a limited devolution through its own parliment that can enact and enforce laws where the power to do so is not explicitly reserved for the British parliment. For instance, the Scottish parliment can’t raise an army and march south to occupy Newcastle and drink all of their beer. Yet.
Strangely enough, one of the powers the Scottish parliment does have is to hold a referendum to ask the Scots whether they want to fully devolve and become their own independent country. So once Alex Salmon of the Scottish National Party was voted into office in 2011, he promptly ordered just such a referendum. The British parliment agreed to make this binding, so if a majority of people living in Scotland vote “yes” to the question “should Scotland be an independent country?”, negotiations will start to make that happen.
We don’t get to vote, of course, unless you are a resident of Scotland in which case make sure you do – on 18 September, 2014. Since I emigrated to the USA in 1997, that leaves me without a voice in whether I’ll need to convert my UK passport to a Scottish one in a nice blue colour. Since I don’t get to vote I’ll keep my opinion of which way I’d go to myself. I am interested in how you would vote though. Just drop a comment in this post.
There is a lot more to Edinburgh than this little dabble through local politics, of course, and -in fact- we could spend all day virtually wandering through the parliment building marvelling at the huge overspend in building it. It opened 3 years late and cost £414,000,000 – a staggering sum for a building to represent less than 6,000,000 people.
In the 8,500 years since people started to settle on this patch of land, Edinburgh has been growing in population but not always in size. Because the city was constrained by geography. It was bound by sea on one side and swampland, hills, lochs (like the Nor Loch which is now Princes Street Gardens) and other barriers all around. As such, the inhabitants built upwards – the 11 story buildings constructed in the 1600’s were the world’ first skyscrapers. Let’s pause and think about that. 11 stories in the 1600’s. That must have seemed like one of the modern wonders of the world.
The townsfolk built downwards too and created an underground city for those folks who were unfortunate enough not to be able to afford penthouse suites. And think about the other effects of this overpopulation. Trust me, if you lived in Edinburgh a few hundred years ago, you wanted to be in the sky above the muck and mire generated by so many people and their animals, not living in the squalid streets or – even worse – below them. In fact at this time the stench was so appalling the city was nicknamed Auld Reekie. The name comes not just from the smell of so many unwashed humans and their waste. the atmosphere was also tainted by thousands of lums (a Scottish word for chimneys) pouring smoke as fast as they could. Some of these chimneys belonged to the city’s many whisky distilleries so we will forgive them.
Looking around at the beautiful architecture and breathing Edinburgh’s clean air today, we can see that those days are far in the past. The more modern nickname for Edinburgh (because of its many fine examples of new-classical architecture) is the ‘Athens of the North’. These days the city is a fantastically modern and cosmopolitan city where I lived for 7 happy years. And in that time I just scratched the surface of the variety the city has to offer. Many of the buildings, though, are still stained black from those sooty days of yore.
There is no way we can do justice to Edinburgh just staying here one day to describe it so we decide to spend a few days here as a rest on our virtual journey. We’ll explore more of Edinburgh tomorrow. How does that sound?
Walking Virtual Britain 