Silent New Year

And now this is the first day of another year in Aberdeen. Happy New Year everyone. 

At the sounding of the midnight bells and the ringing-in of the new year with a toast to loved ones, down in time every year from when I was a young boy in Aberdeen, one of the things I first remember about Hogmanay in this town was my dad taking me out into the back garden and us listening together to the boats in the harbour sounding their horns. For fifteen minutes or half an hour they blared their airhorn hoots in paradoxically mournful salutation of the celebration. The droning tone of these horns blown for joy fitted the duality of the Hogmanay festival, which marks the funeral of one year and the birth of a new one. All the streets in the double-estuary-amphitheatre of our maritime town resonated to the different tones, and the people of the town listened in wonder - cocking an ear to this freighter and that anchor-tug, this supply-ship and that tanker. Which tone went with which sort of ship? Which was louder, and which shriller?

And every Hogmanay since, the ships' horns sounding out in the harbour at midnight at the turning of the year has been one of the things that has marked the season for me. An annual punctuation, something to expect, a tradition; personal and civic. And a few years ago, the tech embodied in the horns evolved - and the Hogmanay sound across town changed from being that saraband of pneumatically driven hoot to a more upbeat polka sequence of digitally-generated beeps and tones, not an unwelcome change. Rather than the mysterious mourn in slow-time darkness, the soundscape of our town on Hogmanay came to resemble more the climactic sequence of tone-communication depicted in Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, fascinating and other-worldly; a sensory impression reinforced by the recent fashion to use firework displays to help mark the turning of the new year.

But suddenly, oddly, this year, no boats in the harbour or ships in the bay horned their toots or beebed their blare for Hogmanay. No sound came from the basin to accompany our celebrations as 2011 turned into 2012. The harbinger of this new year was silent - foreshadowing shame? Boding infamy? Presaging an ill-starred fate? We don't know why this traditional aspect of Hogmanay was absent from our town this year. Maybe there's a good reason, maybe just a trivial one. Maybe it's trivial of us to complain. But one thing is for sure, it's another one of the little erosions which bit by bit leave us with fewer and fewer reasons for remaining here. It signifies one of the many many Zeno corrosions which little by little threaten to burn away this town's soul. What other little denudations have passed us all unnoticed?

March Stones 56 & 57 ABD. K is for Kittybrewster.

In a wide-ranging exploration of just what psychogeography means in Britain today, Tina Richardson - Psychogeographer of Leeds - wrote in her blog-post "The Psychogeographical Franchise" about a strain of 'radical nostalgia' (per Bonnet - pdf) within British psychogeography. This approach whereby "loss and redemption are explored and negotiated" is said to be typified by author Iain Sinclair.

And yes, sometimes when we read the online psychogeographical output of others, we find ourselves reading what in fact turns out to be but a whimsical commentary referencing lost buildings or now-obscured geographical features. A sort of mildly-indignant melancholic short-range travelogue - very often beautifully-written - with a loose historical context. Histobunk. For our part, we psychogeographers of OtherAberdeen are aware that nostalgia has the potential to be a pitfall and have guarded a handful of times against the ease of falling into its attractive trap. But that's not to say we don't do it too - sometimes it simply can't be avoided. Often we find in Aberdeen so egregious are the harms done to once thriving neighbourhoods by planning blight and spectacularly ill-conceived development decisions that the"radical nostalgic" theory and praxis is the best searchlight to turn upon the situation.

And so, while tracing the ancient boundaries of Aberdeen - the "March Stones" we came upon the once-thriving former suburb of Kittybrewster. Here, two of our semi-regular strands ("March Stones" and "The A to Z of Aberdeen") coincide. "K for Kittybrewster": location of march stones 56 and 57 ABD.

Celtic Place-Names in Aberdeenshire
John Milne, 1912
>>>>
KlTTYBREWSTER, KlTTYBROUSTER WELL, KlTTYTHIRST WELL. In these names the first part represents Cuitan Briste, broken fold. Cuitan, dim. of cuit, fold; briste, broken. Usually, folds for cattle had water near them. Kittybrewster was in the den now called Berryden, which means watery den. Kittybrouster was on the boundary between St Nicholas and Spital parishes, on the west side of Monthooly. It is mentioned in a charter defining the bounds of the Spital lands, in the possession of the Town Council. Kittythirst is in Keig, and in this name, from association with a well, briste had become thirst. Broken- fold in Forglen is a translation of Cuitan Briste. These folds had been made by planting trunks of trees upright in the ground. When these decayed the folds had become ruinous.

Speaking to my old mum and dad, they tell of a mid-20th century heyday for Kittybrewster:

The Great Northern Road. Town meets county. A railway junction and locomotive engineering works with 20-track turntable and engine shed. A split-the-wind fork in the road, a luxury hotel, a livestock market. A huge - huge! - rail-head freight terminal at the former ancient borough boundary which follows the watercourse route of the Powis Burn. Dozens upon dozens upon dozens of cattle-trucks in the acres upon acres of marshalling yards - as far as the eye can see. Tweed-clad flat-bunneted livestock owners and wranglers smoking pipes and cheroots and 'ticklers'. Impenetrable dialects. The cattle-pens all the way to Berryden. The smell! The auctioneer's cant, his clipboard, his gavel, his white coat.  Agricultural machinery vendors and motor-sales garages. Open outcry roups of second-hand harvesters and motorcars on the cinder football pitches in the suburb's Central Park. Vertically integrated agricultural business, horizontally diverse service enterprises. Cafes, pubs, restaurants. Barbers, florists, grocers. Bakers, stationers, newsagents. A diverse confluence of transport, commerce and industry at the edgeland. Integrated transport - road, tram, rail freight, passenger rail - diversified businesses. A coming together at the crossroads, money and goods changing hands, people changing trains. Aberdeen's largest ever granite built cinema, velour and polished-brass luxury next door to the deco achievement of the Northern Hotel.
A grand day, a good price - silver service, malt and cotton sheets at the best hotel in town, then first class carriage home in the morning. Prices not so good? A dormitory bunk at the Temperance Hotel and third class home to Formartine. Cattle driven from market the short downhill drove to the captured bolts and razor-sharp long knives of the slaughter men at George Street with their "Butcher's Arms".

Pre WW2 - Astoria Cinema, Central Park and Livestock Mart
with tenements behind on Great Northern Road.

There's not much to see at Kittybrewster today, other than derelict and vacant industrial and retail premises and, amid the devastation, the great-survivor that is the grade-A listed Northern Hotel. But, of course, the past is the past, and Kittybrewster is neither transport hub nor commercial nexus today. No-one could credibly suggest that the area (which is no longer suburban, rather it is very much inner-city) would be a suitable area for cattle-trading and meat-packing, nor indeed for a rail-freight terminal. No, indeed, in Aberdeen, no-one should be surprised to learn that the sites formerly occupied by rail marshalling yards, by cattle-pens and by agricultural machinery showrooms are to be swept away in favour of a radial urban expressway which is designed to deliver high volumes of high-speed motor traffic into the town centre in ever larger numbers. This radial expressway scheme is known to our urban planners as the "Berryden Corridor Improvement" [sic]. When it is opened, the destruction of Kittybrewster will be complete, and far from being the literally crucial destination that it once was, Kittybrewster will be separated even from itself by the new motor-highway.

March Stone 56 ABD.
Just to the north of the site formerly occupied by the Astoria Cinema

So the formerly economically vital business, trade and transport and community hub that was centred in the community of Kittybrewster was a diverse nexus pinning Aberdeenshire to the edge of our town like a brooch but is today a disquietingly quiet place. The already devastated area appears to be holding its breath and steeling itself for the greater devastation to come, planning blight. Kittybrewster - the "broken cattle-fold". Nominative Determinism? 

March Stone 57 ABD. Close to the railway bridge at the
southern end of Great Northern Road. By the bins.

Having walked through and thought about Kittybrewster, we return now to the analysis of nostalgia itself, and its use in and affect upon psychogeographical theory and praxis. For during our dérive through Kittybrewster an alternative analysis concerning the real effect of nostalgia upon urban liveability came to mind. Rather than sit here in our atelier, typing up this report, luxuriating in the indignant bemoaning of Kittybrewster's current situation: "oooh, it's not like the old days" and willingly revelling in wistful nostalgia, we can see that Kittybrewster is, in fact the real victim of a very different kind of nostalgia. In those urban-expressway plans which are on the cusp of being implemented we discern the realisation of a strain of nostalgia which, rather than being the harmless plaything of us dilettante psychogeographers, is actually a genuinely harmful influence on the actual situation of the forthcoming urban environment. For in their grandiloquent road transport plans we can detect in our local urban planners a longing for the kind of retro-future, the sort of spectacular 'motopia', which was first dreamt up in the centre of the car-crazy 20th century. That now, as we approach the main run of the 21st century, the planners of Aberdeen begin to implement these embarrassingly old-fashioned motorcentric plans is nothing other than the lazy indulging of a nostalgia for a stillborn future which never arrived, and which we today know very well will make for urban places and spaces which are unpleasant in the extreme.

Development corridor

Fill it with motors! 

The A to Z of Aberdeen - I is for Insecurity

I is for Insecurity.

As we first set out in our page-top banner all those months ago: "Something is wrong with Aberdeen." We're not sure what the full extent or true nature of the pathology afflicting our town is, but we believe that life here is worth fighting for, so we try to find out and in doing so perhaps find out whether anything can be done to palliate the symptoms or - who knows? - maybe we'll find a cure!

Multi Million Pound!

We use the tools of psychogeography as both diagnostic method and potential antidote for this as yet unidentified Aberdonian syndrome. And so, by putting our feet on the ground and moving through the land- and city- and mind-scape quietly but determinedly minded to the task, we fathom truths in depths which might not otherwise be plumbed. Conter-intuitive facts build up behind and cascade over the now-crumbling dam of received-wisdom conditioning as we choose not to ignore the man behind the curtain. Thus we've defamiliarised ourselves with the town which we’ve lived in for so many years and, coming through a critical examination of our urban landscape from this defamiliarised high angle of attack - with the new eyes we have chosen to look through, we see things that we’ve simply dismissed or ignored before. We begin to see things as they really are, and we gain the key to decrypt the events and messages encoded within the fabric of the town itself and within its people themselves. And then we write up our findings. These essays sometimes in turn generate comment responses which we then re-use as psychogeographical feedback feedstock, hurling them back into the hopper for further explorations of both the physical landscape of our town and its psychological mindscape. By the geometry of this iterative strange-loop strange-attractor exploration praxis we shine our revealing fractal spotlight into the urbanism of Aberdeen.

Recently, when we complained about all the existing and forthcoming martial statuary in Aberdeen, we called for suggestions for alternatives; for more, em, conducive subjects for commemorative statuary. We were delighted by the responses we received. One contributer (coincidental with one of our private correspondents) suggested that we look at the life and work of Alfred Adler: a groundbreaker amongst the early 20th century Austrian psychological trailblazers; contemporary of (and rival to) Freud; and pioneer of 'individual psychology' which includes certain important psychological concepts which remain coin current (though sometimes subverted, as we shall see... ) to this day.

Adler toured extensively in the UK during the 1930's and was particularly well-recieved in Aberdeen during a lecture course he gave in 1937. (He died tragically of a heart attack on Aberdeen's Union Street the morning after the climax of his lecture course.) Tragedy aside, so well received was he in our town and such was his influence that it led directly to an appropriate Aberdonian legacy: the founding of a Chair of Psychiatry at Aberdeen University and the establishment of an endowment for the psychiatric treatment of disturbed children. But Adler's legacy is much wider than that, as primary amongst his theoretical achievements was the development of his most famous concept: the 'inferiority complex'. Broadly (forgive the short summary of complex concepts) Adler contended that children, because they are smaller than adults and wholly dependent upon them for their survival, experience a sense of inferiority which in turn can lead to harmful attempts to strive for superiority through a damaging and over-compensating desire to dominate.

Well - we thought as we read and learned about this - that's dynamite in an Aberdonian context. We thought of the essays we'd written about the hubristic PR-driven business-friendly churnalism and the self-serving boosterism which is very often evident in local discourse. We thought about the credulous gullibility evident in the cupidity of some of our local politicians and we considered the grandiose and overblown approach which now characterises property development schemes in our modestly-sized city. Aberdeen as Citizen Kane.

Adler also developed the concept of the 'style of life' - 'lifestyle'. This concept has since been subverted by the marketing/advertising/PR industry in support of consumerist aims, but Adler originally intended the term to describe the dynamics of a personality in a social context - an individual's uniquely adopted approach to the challenges of life: love, hope, work, disappointment, mortality etc. Adler identified several pathological 'styles' including what he called the ruling type: aggressive, dominating, not much social interest or cultural perception; the getting type: dependent, taking rather than giving; and the avoiding type: characterised by escapism, screened from reality, not much socially constructive activity. Again, all of this resonated in an Aberdonian context. Aberdeen as Citizen Kane.

A few weeks ago, we wrote in our ongoing "A to Z of Aberdeen" series, that we had identified a condition of hyperreality in the built environment and polity of Aberdeen, and we pondered "... what is the 'real' reality which this Aberdonian hyperreality is screening us from? Why is it that we seek the comfort of a surface simulation of past glories...?" Now we think that the answer to this question is that Aberdeen and the Aberdonian condition is characterised by an deep seated insecurity - an inferiority complex - and it is from this feeling of insecurity we flee to nibble on the simulacrum crumbs of hyperreal comfort - in the hyperreal avoiding type 'style of life' - 'lifestyle'. This is the Aberdonian inferiority complex. This is indicative of our insecurity.

How secure do you want it to be?

Moreover we've recently documented a gnawing insecure paranoia amongst security people - both among self-empowered private security CCTV jockeys and among actual real police who are empowered by the state with investigatory powers and the power of arrest. We've had increasingly frequent encounters with these security (or rather in-security) people, each time for the innocuous and innocent reason that we were taking photographs of buildings. Risible rationalisations for the self-importantly self-empowered and querulous (sometimes insultingly presumptuous) questioning we've been subjected to have been proffered. All of them to do with the 'terrorist threat'. What nonsense! For even in the nation's capital we can wander about taking photos of the Secret Security Service building, the ruling political party offices and the military headquarters with impunity. But in Aberdeen, it requires a police follow up if one is espied by CCTV taking photos which happen to include a building which is (for example) partially occupied by some accountants who are sub-contracted on a temporary basis to some here-today-gone-tomorrow multinational oil company. We can now understand that the 'terrorist threat' excuse is but a fig-leaf for a deep-seated insecurity. Rather like those A-list celebs who ban their underlings from eye-contact, the proprietors of these buildings do not want us to look at them; for shame of themselves they dislike people examining them - for fear of criticism they dislike a record being made of their very existence. That they hide this motivation even from themselves and rationalise their insecure paranoia as being a self-important response to an incredible 'terrorist threat' is the self-deception which is symptomatic of their insecure need not to reveal this devastating self-knowledge.

Additionally, we can see a cliff's edge insecurity in the economy of Aberdeen "City and Shire". In this part of the world the extractive industry of oil and gas production is predominant, and the usual epiphytic ecosystem of accountants, lawyers, bankers and real-estate agents has grown up to service the capital which that industry has brought. Some time ago, we wrote of the 'Dutch Disease' and 'Resource Curse' which afflict the business sphere here. This pathology of an over-reliance on one business sector is, again, something which is characterised by self-deception. We recently attended a film screening where, in part of a live debate which followed the screening, Q&A panel member Lewis Macdonald MSP asserted that 'high oil prices are good for Aberdeen'. Yes, we can see why people might think that; our stock in trade is oil and gas; high prices must therefore ipso facto bring more money into the local economy. But money is not value, and affluence is not wealth -  an understanding of the distinctions is subtle but those distinctions are, nonetheless, fundamental.

One of the effects high oil prices will have is to hasten the day when there is no oil and gas left to extract, for in the short term producers maximise production to exploit the high price available for the commodity. In the meantime, capital is largely concentrated on this one extractive sector and is diverted away from other sectors which may be more sustainable in the medium and longer terms. An overbalancing in the economy results, with the attendant distortions of excessively high pay rates for certain skills, real-estate bubbles, social dislocation, conspicuous displays of affluence and a self deluding belief that these riches have been brought here by the skill of the people who are reaping the harvest, not by the blind hand of ante-deluvian providence which laid the hydrocarbon-bearing rock strata beneath the seabed those many millions of years ago. Again we see the willing self-deception which is symptomatic of the insecure need not to reveal this devastating self-knowledge.

The rush to exploit the jamboree business environment brought into being by high oil prices will, to be sure, continue to flood our little city with an abundance of money in the hands of but a proportionally tiny few. But very little of long-term value will be created by that money as long as capital is directed towards oil and gas to the exclusion of other sectors.

However, the business community in Aberdeen is not wholly future-blind. Key figures and corporations and industry bodies know well that oil and gas is not forever, but their visions for the future of the business sector in Aberdeen are at times characterised by over-blown schemes completely out of scale with what is affordable, achievable or desirable. It can seem that the business community (and some parts of the civic sphere) in Aberdeen is insecurely concerned only with how the city is perceived outwith its borders and outwith the country. And so we see projects and schemes which are designed not for the people who are already here, but for people who might come to live and work here, or people who just might visit for a conference or something, maybe ... if we build something 'iconic'. This is not only a cargo cult, but is also a clear display of over-compensation. There is much in the local economy which is good, praiseworthy and could form the basis of a sustainable economic future for our area - for instance, there is a great deal of technological crossover between oil and gas extraction and the burgeoning marine energy exploitation sector. But, when we read the minutes (MS Word direct download link) of the business association body which has taken responsibility for shepherding this burgeoning sector, we are reminded of that bit in Monty Python's Life of Brian when the People's Front of Judea are planning their rebellion:



Other coastal centres around the UK (Plymouth, Cardiff, Orkney, Dundee, Belfast, Hull, Yarmouth, Bristol) are already investing and creating capital in establishing and servicing this sector which actually now exists. It is not something to plan for it is already something which is "actually happening" - it is very much now something to be getting on with. Yet our high-tech industry in Aberdeen, swimming in highly liquid capital, drags its insecure feet in fear of risking a little bit of that capital on a pretty good medium to long term punt. Oh no, capital in Aberdeen much prefers the short-term near-certainty of the high rate of return afforded by the high oil price. Hiding behind the oh-so-certain sounding soundbite: "high oil prices are good for Aberdeen", we hide this insecurity from even ourselves. And we get paid for it too! Or so we think! The author of "Oil!" (recently filmed as "There Will Be Blood"), American novelist, investigative journalist, philosopher, trickster, politician and self publicist Upton Sinclair famously said:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

[Coincidence scoops us. Speaking at the All-Energy conference yesterday, a look of: 'O My God is that the actual time!' in his panicked eye, local oil tycoon and rich-list denizen Sir Ian Wood echoed our sentiments on the STV local news just last night.]

Yet, as we consider historical dimensions and perspectives, we see that this willful and potentially self-defeating conservatism is nothing new for Aberdeen. Regular readers will be aware of our series of articles tracing Aberdeens ancient boundary stones - the 'March Stones'.  The obsolescence yet survival of these items fascinates us. There is no functional reason for the March Stones to have survived, yet this ancient method of denoting land boundaries survived functionally in our town well into the Victorian Era, by which time the system of land surveys and title deeds lodged with central authorities had rendered all such physical markers redundant. Yet they survived, and were replaced if necessary because of damage, flood, landslide or whatever. We cannot help but wonder if there's something very Aberdonian about this. Sure, other towns have boundary stones, but as far as we can find out not even Washington DC (a far newer and completely planned city) has managed to retain all boundary markers in situ. It is as if the new-fangled survey technology of theodolite and trigonometry was distrusted by the city fathers and land-owners of Victorian Aberdeen, it is as if deeds lodged with a notary or in a city hall meant nothing - all that mattered was the good earth, marked out by stone pillars that you could go and see. There was probably some merit in this attitude - it's certainly resilient. However, just because conservative attitudes may have served us well in the past it does not follow that the similar attitudes will help in the future. For instance: while some areas of Aberdeenshire languish with only dial-up internet; and while Aberdeen itself failed miserably when the opportunity came to have a next-generation fibre-optic communication system sutable for the 21st century installed, still we see local authority and public calls for pointless and bizarrely out-of-scale urban dual carriageway and motorway ring-road systems which were cooked up in the middle of the car-crazy 20th century.

While insecurity is a common state of mind, state of business and state of civic finance in these chewy economic times, we cannot help but fear that the specific circumstances of our town amplify these insecurities, and militate against us finding our way to the sunlit uplands of truly justified self-confidence; for finally, we discern a disquiet in the heart of the arts community in Aberdeen. Perhaps this disquiet reflects the pathologies we've identified above. But perhaps we also discern something a little more disturbing. As we've seen, large parts of the business sector in Aberdeen are at present superabundant in liquid capital, but they're insecure in that affluence. By contrast the creative arts - by definition a self-confident source of challenging discourse, a context creating discipline, is nearly always and nearly everywhere characterised by an ongoing need for funding. At a surface level, this might seem like an ideal marriage, but unfortunately the reality of the outcome is that in this town the creative arts are under constant threat of co-option by the demands of capital.

Describing an exhibition of new art by Aberdeen students,  Gray's School of Art's Gordon Burnett said recently:

The aim of this project is for the students to engage with the range of professional issues involved in responding to a client-lead brief.

(Our emphaisis) Which is fine. But to place the yolk of business and the concomitant profit motive on art at this early state in an art-student's experience might, we fear prove counter-productive to that artist's long-term development. Elsewhere, we see other attempts at the co-option of the arts by business interests, for instance in the forthcoming "Aberdeen Arts Award" at the "Arts and Business Scotland Awards" to be held in Aberdeen later this year.

The Arts and Business Scotland Awards celebrate successful arts and business partnerships and bring together many influential people in the business and cultural worlds from the high level judges to those who attend the awards ceremony itself.

This shotgun marriage of buisness and art troubles us. From the earliest rock art and clay fetishes, through the anatomically super-perfect and beautiful statuary of Ancient Greece, we discern, understand and participate in our world in the way we do because of the filters and guidelines which the artists of those artifacts have created for our cognition to follow. The arts is the branch of human striving which provides the context for our society and civilisation to then fill with content. That we think the way we do; that we say the things we say; that we behave the way we behave is all the product of the artists who have provided us with the collective cognitive tools to interpret and interact with the world around us since the beginning of human civilisation.

But now we see attempts by business bodies to define what art is, and to put it in a box which they control. It appears that the "ruling type" and "getting type" of "styles of life" identified by Adler as part of the inferiority complex are intent on subsuming the activities of arts and delivering the subverted content thus created into the ravening maw of capital for exploitation for profit. As business seeks to control the context, it denudes artistic content of meaning, gelding the message, and anodynising the very fabric of societal progress. It robs art of art itself.

We now voice our own insecurity when we say: 

"Beware the coming of the years without art."

reference:


Pam Hirsch
Apostle of freedom: Alfred Adler and his British disciples.

The Allure of Strange White Powder and "On the Hash"

Often, as we walk with purpose, or as we walk with no purpose at all other than than that which is evident, we are pulled off our intended path by something we've seen, something we've thought about and so want to investigate more closely, something interesting - something mysterious, something intriguing, something we've not yet learned about. These concentrated distractions might take us to places we might not otherwise go, to see things we might not otherwise see, to do things we might not otherwise do and meet people we might not otherwise meet. Allowing a route to be determined by this form of willfully unwilled non-determinism is the kung-fu of pathfinding which can take us well off the beaten track - over, under and through - at right-angles to more usual lines of communication.

The other day, walking from Other Aberdeen's prestigious atelier in the upscale heart of downtown Pitmuxton to a bike shop near Holburn Junction, I was pulled off my route by the psychogeographical gravity-field generated by a series of anomalous ad-hoc (and curiously transient in intent) artifacts. A mysterious white powder had been deposited in little piles in strategic locations. These extemporised powdery piles led me on, intrigued - Broomhill Road, Nellfield Place, Great Western Road. On corners, by existing street-furniture artifacts, on kerbstones and in the edge between pavement and wall; these chalky deposits were spaced at around 70 pace intervals - generally visible by line-of-sight one to the next.


I couldn't help myself - I had to follow...

Powder-led across Great Western Road and down Cuparstone Row (Cuparstone, not 'cooper...'; nothing to do with barrels - this is where they used to make cups), I began to feel a bit, well, freaked out. One of the effects which picking an implement from the psychogeographical toolbox is intended to have on your experience of the urban environment is to defamiliarise you from the surroundings which you might otherwise regard as mundane and everyday. To give you 'new eyes' with which you might discern new truths. On that day, I was already in no small way pre-disconnected from the everyday, having earlier been traced and questioned by police for the completely innocent and innocuous act of taking some photographs of an office building some weeks earlier.

So, as I followed the white-powdered road, I already felt as if I didn't belong in this town; I already felt as if I was a stranger in a strange land, as if I wasn't wanted here and as if my 'sideways' walking (and thinking) was regarded as transgressive by the rest of the people and power and capital in Aberdeen. The sun was shining, the air was warm, and so defamiliarised and disconnected was I from this local area I know so well that I felt almost as if I was abroad on holiday somewhere deeply foreign. The sort of package-holiday people take to cheap destinations with questionable regimes and a repressed polity. It felt as if following the powder trail was transgressive. And, what's more, I felt like transgressing! The crumb-trail fantasy would lead me to the resistance movement! To like minded individuals! We could help each other! I was not alone!

On and down Cuparstone Row, deep into the valley of the Justice Mill Burn (or Ferryhill Burn, or Holburn, or Howburn - suit yourself) where Union Glen dives beneath the vaults of the valley-vaulting Holburn Viaduct at the true ground level of the Malt Mill, I stopped to more closely examine a white powder deposit, in this case placed up upon a granite-rubble and lime-mortar wall (and so differentiated from the fallen blossom on the ground below). I reached out and pinched some of the soft talcum-texture particles, rubbed them between finger and thumb. I thought better of doing the cop-movie thing of putting a little on the tip of my tongue. I'm not that stupid!

Fast-thumping footfalls rushing down the steepening slope behind me, running towards me, louder - closer - quicker and quicker. I whirl round on my heels, heart thumping, to see a slightly dumpy woman, early middle aged, red-faced sweaty and puffing. Her elbows tight-in to her side, fist-prim thumbs pointing skyward - jog pumping up-and-down for groupthink jog-joy. Her fringe moist-plastered to her pinky-blotched forehead, "Don't worry, it's the hash!" she half-gasped half-shouted to me as she woobled past, knees buckling, eyes wide.

But clearly, this white powder was not hash.

Then another - much the same type of pear-shaped plum-velour-swathed sweaty woman jogster who really shouldn't: "It's just flour! We're the Aberdeen Hash House Harriers!"
"Aaaaaah! I see... but..." I started.
"Can't stop - I'll be last in the pub!" she grinned over her shoulder as she disappeared into the high-contrast darkness under the granite arch of the viaduct and away. I was left alone blinking and thinking in the spring sunshine, in the quiet, beside a flour-smirched wall as her footfalls diminished to nothing, echoing distorted on the dank-vault roof of the viaduct arch.

I felt like such an idiot. The Hash House Harriers! We understand the Hash House Harriers to be an international non-competitive jogging and heavy-drinking movement. When they organise a run - 'a Hash' - the route taken is marked with chalk or other temporary marking - in this case the baking flour I was still ruminatively rubbing between thumb and fingers. Largely consisting of ex-pats and transient workers parachuted into positions in unfamiliar towns, 'the Hash' is a way for people in these positions to bond both with each other and with their location. And then they get pissed. But there is psychogeographical and communitarian value in their activities, which sometimes border on street-theatre and performance art. It's fascinating that they too, like we, regard the urban space as their playground, seeking out layers and routes which are off the beaten track. By their routes they express and entertain themselves, and contribute to the community on their own terms.

To hell with the idea of jogging, though.

Fractal Dimension of Delight or Despair

It never ceases to amaze us how many times we see patterns repeat and laws of nature apply at various scales.

Economic growth progresses in cycles and epicycles, history repeats, social phenomena come and go and come again, normal distribution applies and self-similarity at all levels is exhibited in all phenomena; natural and artificial, historical and cosmic; all manifestations of reality are subject to the same forces which act upon them, whatever their location, whatever their scale, whatever we believe to be their wider subjective importance or otherwise.

As we engage in our psychogeographical praxis in and for Aberdeen, we find that the fractal dimension also extends to the urban realm (of course it does!), it being necessary only for us to slow down for the resolution of our senses to increase. In this way we seek and find the delight which forms the texture of our lives in the urban context. We connect forward and back the small to the large, the past to the future, the specific to the general and vice versa; this helps to lead us towards an independent and autonomous understanding of the world which we walk through; that being our ultimate aim both for ourselves and for all our fellow townspeople.

However, there is a negative corollary: Where by finding the connection between the specific to the general across orders of magnitude of scale we find delight, we might also find a warning for and from Aberdeen's urbanism. We saw this photo of a gardening contractor's van on the "Writing From Scotland" blog:

The wider significance of the fact that the garden contractor who's van this is believes that their Aberdonian clients would regard the removal of practically all greenery from their gardens and its replacement with blockwork and gravel as being a desirable outcome should be obvious to regular readers.



With thanks to Christine Laennec at Writing From Scotland for permission to reproduce the photo.

Second-Generation Psychogeography, Six Senses, Stuff and Subjectivity

An old friend contacted us and delighted us when he let us know he’d syndicated a feed of the Other Aberdeen blog onto the website of Edinburgh-based band Tramplord, along with this précis of our work:

Other Aberdeen is second generation psychogeography. It is a subjective encounter with the urban environment; but it is also an encounter that acts for solutions.  The experiments aren't those of the old fashioned flaneur who is playing with the rules, but are done with the urgency - not of artistic madness or vanity - but of people working for a better city.  This is not wine glasses and maps, no boy. In fact, wine glasses and maps are childrens' toys; and this is a mature psychogeography.

If you think of psychogeography as the anarchic and playful stuff of the 50s, 60s and beyond, this is OK.  But all the early psychogeographers learned from their drunken experiments was this: Experimenting in a subjective mode enlightens the individual psychogeographer no end yes! but it won't change Jack Shit in Babylon.

Other Aberdeen is also blessed with a brilliant subject.  Aberdeen is an unusual place, sometimes at variance with the UK in terms of all sorts of ideas and trends.  Things are always happening there. Worlds collide.  And all that.  It's a funny old corner of the world.

"Worlds collide ... funny old corner of the world..." So true. We very much appreciated the appreciation, and we revel in the tag: “second generation psychogeography”.

Notwithstanding the fact that if you study something too closely it can lose meaning through lack of context, we’ve been pondering just what this “second generation” is, what is it (what are we) for, and how does it do what it does? That is to say: what are our tools, how do we use them, and what do we hope to achieve?

It should be clear to regular readers that what we hope to achieve at Other Aberdeen is a subjective improvement in the livability of our town. Our aims are no more complex nor less ambitious than that. We aver that by picking certain psychogeographical implements from the toolbox anyone can cross the boundary between merely inhabiting an urban space and actually living in it. By actually making the conscious choice to live in (rather than merely occupy) our urban spaces we can re-root ourselves as human beings and re-boot urbanism within an often alienating urban environment. That process will, in its own turn, reduce the alienating overburden which is the legacy of the decades-long misunderstanding of urbanism which so often characterises urban realm spaces in the UK.

Desire line interchange. Hub?

Foremost amongst the methods we use is walking. Simple as that; and from that we bootstrap a whole range of subsidiary strategies - tools, if you will - which we use to explore and assimilate the urban environment within the context of getting on with all the other content of our lives. For instance, a relative of mine had a hospital stay recently (he’s fine now). Arranging and co-ordinating hospital visits between myself and friends and family members became a bizarre exercise in mostly telling people that I really really didn’t need a lift to travel the 2 kilometers between my home in Pitmuxton and Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. Regrettable though it is to have a relative in hospital, over the two weeks he was there, I took the opportunity to walk the streets, lanes, foot-paths and desire-lines of Queen’s Cross, Rubislaw, Mile-end, Raeden, Mid-stocket, Westholm, Foresterhill, Woodend, Summerhill, Mannofield and Rosemount in large, looping routes which descended into valleys of all-but-forgotten watercourses, traversed redundant farmyards now hemmed-in by Victorian terraces and ascended in the footsteps of historical quarry workers on their privileged rights-of-way to the high granite-bearing ridge along which the Anderson Drive trunk-road now runs. If time was short, and a direct route was necessary, my motor-centric car-dependent fellow hospital visitors were just amazed to find that I could walk the route from my front door to hospital bedside in only 10 minutes more than it had taken them in a car.

And this leads us to the secondary (but no less important) tool: time. To be alive in the 21st century urban environment is to be a privileged denizen of the most amazing labour-saving device yet conceived and realised by civilisation; the city itself. The urban construct is entirely for our convenience - we should use and exploit it as such, rather than allow it to oppress and use and exploit us. For instance, it amazes us that anyone submits themselves to the inhuman ordeal of physically going to the supermarket these days, when a month’s grocery shopping can be achieved in ten minutes and a couple-of-dozen clicks online. Of course, we’d much rather have human-scale independent-trader local shops or market-stalls for our unhurried grocery shopping - such a set-up creates community and a sense of place, encourages interpersonal discourse, provides diversity and bestows opportunities for the spontaneous generation and discovery of delight. We’d like to have all that; but in this town, in this era, we don’t. Maybe one day independent traders will return to the urban environment of Aberdeen. We wish.

Anyhow, the point is, with time on our hands, when we go outside to take part in the life of the town, we can take our time. We try to organise our lives so that we have time to take the time to think. The time to feel. The time to think about how we feel.

And, when we walk the town with time on our hands, something else happens. We find a centre within ourselves. We find that we re-discover our senses. We see the urban environment; we hear both the roar of the traffic and the songs of the birds; we touch walls ancient and modern, and the branches of trees brush our heads; we smell cut grass and Sunday gravy, sometimes Torry fish and Kingswells sharn; and yes we even taste - we taste the car-farted sulphurous particulate, wafted along major city roads and pooling in hollows.

The topography tells tales.
It says: "Take a closer look!"

And then, when we notice that our senses are alive in the urban environment; that we have all-stimulating surroundings - if we only choose and allow ourselves to be stimulated by them - something else again happens. Something very human and delightful and surprising indeed. We’ve seen travelogue and anthropological histobunk programmes on the telly discussing the Austrailian Aborigines or Masai or Bedouin or First Nation Americans maybe, and marveling at their sense of direction, their navigational abilities. Wow - no maps; wow - no satnav. We begin, in our own small way, to feel a little bit of that sense - that ability. The ability to orientate within a topography, the ability to estimate an incline, the recognition of three-dimensional landscape features. Is it too much to call this a sixth sense? Certainly we have in the inner ear an organ of orientation which is an inclinometer and gravimeter, and we have proprioception - the ability to intuitively know the relation of the various parts of our bodies to each other (this is the sense that allows you to touch the tip of your nose in the dark). We believe that when we take these three additional para-senses (orientation, gravity-awareness, body-self-sense) together in toto as we move through the urban landscape it allows us access to a mindscape in which there is an enhanced possibility of just noticing stuff. Stuff that you wouldn’t notice if you were preoccupied with something else, stuff you wouldn’t notice if you were in a rush, stuff you wouldn’t see if you weren’t looking and stuff you mightn’t expect to notice unless your mind was open to the possibility. Delightful stuff. You might discover a town that appears in parallel to the reality that others think they know - the town that is at right angles to, over, under and through the impositions of map-planned thoroughfares which disrespect the human-scale desire lines.

Water is wealth. Or, at least, it used to be.
Probably will be again one day

The stuff you notice might be geographical, topological or architectural. The stuff you notice might be historical; our heritage is all around us in a dynamic and continuous process. Or the stuff you notice might be contemporary or anthropological - modes of behaviour. But, notice stuff you will. You might begin to decipher the events and intentions, the hopes and disappointments, the stories of capital and community which are encoded within the built environment and its relationships. By thinking about this stuff, these things, we define them - and we lay down guidelines for how we (and others) might think about them in the future. There is no such thing as objective truth - all artifacts and concepts are subject to the excise tax extracted from their universal meaning by their entry through our personal gates of subjective perception. The most we can ever really define with personal certainty and the most we can therefore reasonably ask is: how do we feel?

What we do at Other Aberdeen is record how we feel about things in the urban environment - what these things do to us (collectively) by what we (collectively) do to them. This psychogeographical process is reflexive, and it is the very reflexivity of this process which furnishes the opportunity for iterative improvement in the urban environment. We seek a new understanding and practice of urbanism for Aberdeen based upon a desire to improve its livability. That would make us feel much better about remaining in this fascinating town with all its little and big stories; all its little and big artifacts; all the places and all the people - woven together where the past meets the present and gathers its forces to generate the future, however uncertain.

We are all part of that process, part of the story of the town - that participatory process is what Other Aberdeen's for. Today, many people seem to think that a town is merely the sum of all the business activity within it. Other Aberdeen's mission is to demonstrate that this is wrong-headed.

This town is so much more than that.

Fear the Kraken

The taste of living in Aberdeen got a little more bitter yesterday with the launch of Grampian Police's "Project Kraken". The Kraken is a mythical sea-monster from Norse tradition - big as an island. Look it up if you want.

The announcement of Grampian Police's implementation of Operation Kraken was, in our opinion, fittingly monstrous. Appearing on North Tonight STV News, Assistant Chief Constable Bill Gordon of Grampian Police called on members of the public to report "suspicious activity". This "suspicious activity" taking the form of individuals snapping photographs or making notes regarding (amongst other things) "significant buildings", "locations" or "bridges". This is supposed to protect us from terrorism. The police are actually encouraging people who live or work on the coast to register with them as "members" of Project Kraken. We can't remember the name of the society to which the child informants belonged in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, but we'll assume that being a member of Project Kraken is something like that. There'll be a quarterly newsletter. Really, there will. O how we wish we were joking.

We [Grampian Police] are also asking users and residents of the Grampian Coastline to register with Project Kraken free of charge. As a registered member of Project Kraken you will receive timely information updates by email, and a quarterly newsletter providing a summary of local and national incidents and activity that might be of interest.

In addition, you will be added to an email distribution list which will be used, when appropriate, to circulate urgent information and intelligence updates. There may also be times that we contact you with a request that you assist us in ‘observing and reporting’ particular individuals, groups or vessels.

Well, we photograph a lot of this sort of stuff a lot of the time. We also sometimes take text or audio notes. For instance, the photo at the top of our pages has Aberdeen's North Pier, Breakwater, Guiding Light and Harbourmaster's Tower photographed at the exact moment of the turning of a very high tide at the mouth of the Dee. We exhibit this photograph because it is both photogenic and metophorical. It's apparent aesthetic appeal or esoteric message can be appreciated by the viewer as they wish. Also apparent in the photo is the old, now redundant, Harbourmaster's tower, this too is significant to our aims at Other Aberdeen.

We photograph and discuss infrastructure because our human world is made of infrastructure. Part of the human condition is the story of our interaction with the infrastructure which we have summoned into being, this is one aspect of the human adventure which most fascinates us. Without infrastructure, we are like any other mammal; individual or tribal, our daily concerns are those of feeding, family and shelter. When the individuals and tribes of humanity are connected and serviced by infrastructure we transcend this baseline animal condition and become a collective society, a wider culture: a civilisation. When Other Aberdeen chooses an aspect of infrastructure as a suitable subject for psychogeographical exploration, we are looking at nothing less than the atoms of civilisation. It fascinates to see infrastructre planned and built, it satisfies to see infrastructure humming with vitality, used to full capacity. Then, at the end it similarly delights to see older, redundant infrastructure obsolesce and decay back to a trans-natural post-industrial state.

One Source of the Ferryhill Burn

One of our very first posts last year: Somewhere in Aberdeen coyly alludes to this idea. The photograph is of a pond at Hazlehead which, at one time, was one of the headers to the Holburn/Ferryhill Burn. The dammed pond was used along with a sequence of others to control the volume and speed of the water flowing into the water course. That water, in turn, turning the wheels of industry at the Justice Mills, Ferryhill Mill and Dee Village Mills. This was a water course which worked hard before it was allowed to drain into the Dee Estuary. It powered one of the means by which our nascent city nurtured itself with an industrialised food source.

It's industrial vitality (and vital industriality) now gone, the pond enjoys a photogenic retirement as an ad-hoc nature reserve. Man-made though it was, nature is taking it back, and the process is quite beautiful. Literally and metaphorically.

We usually try our very best to avoid using cliché, but clichés come into existence because they are true. Therefore, today we have no compunction in saying that we can't make up our minds whether a police initiative which might stop us taking nice photos is Ballardian, Kafkan, Orwellian or (Ray) Bradbury-esque (per Farenheiht 451).

That the police are asking members of the public to inform on photographers and others with an interest in this sort of stuff promotes a culture of secret denunciation like that of pre-Napoleonic Venice. Moreover, as pointed out by these people, the collective visual history of our country is extinguished by anti-terrorist initiatives designed to protect the heritage it prevents us recording. The irony is not lost on us. It further troubles us that these exhortations from the police will empower those who have an unhealthy interest in exercising arbitrary power over others. We have famously posted about this before.

Whatever it is, it's disturbing, it's unsettling, it's an affront to our freedom and a constraint upon our ability to go about our lives at our own liberty as free agents. To offer another cliché:

People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both.  

(As Benjamin Franklin is purported to have said.)

The fact remains: in the west we are by far more likely to be struck by lightning, or killed by our family doctors than we are to be killed in a terrorist outrage.

Here's a photo of a bridge (co-incidentally, at the turning of the tide):

(With our thanks to reader spottiewattie17 for the heads-up.)

Deep Topography.

Sometimes we're really happy that BBC Scotland opts out of the often inconsequential bit at the end of Newsnight and brings us Newsnight Scotland ("Hootsnight"). We usually use that often jarring moment as the signifier that it's time for bed.

At other times, we're quite furious that BBC Scotland opts out in order to bring us what is essentially repetitive and parochial news about our pocket talking shop at Holyrood.

Especially when we're caused to miss fantastic content like this including interviews with Iain Sinclair, Will Self, Russell Brand and Richard Mabey:

Brought to us and you by the website of the Deep Topographer in question. With our thanks.

Building Societies to Pawnbrokers. Doughnuts to Donuts.

Timely and perceptive article in today's Financial Times (registration required):
The changing face of Britain’s high streets

Today’s high street is very different to a snapshot of the average one in October 2008, a month after the Lehman collapse.

Building societies, recruitment agencies, estate agents and pubs have vanished from neighbourhood shopping streets, according to data compiled by the Ordnance Survey, the national mapping agency.

However, not everybody is shutting up shop. High street bookmakers were the only category to see significant growth, with their numbers up 5 per cent over the two-year period.

Demand from pound shops, pawnbrokers and bakers is also in evidence, demonstrating the increasing social stratification of the high street as wealthier shoppers drive to out-of-town retail parks and malls.

And saucy FT comment here:
Lombard: Bookies inherit the high street

The meek will inherit the earth, but the bookies are inheriting the high street.

Building societies, temples of prudence staffed by priestesses in polycotton, are closing branches by the thousand. Betting shops are springing up instead, luring the populace with the cash-gulping idols that are fixed-odds gambling machines.

We've certainly noticed this happening in Aberdeen. Pawnbrokers, pay-day-advance moneylenders, pound shops and plush-looking bookies (bookasinos) all join the dots with vacancy, dilapidation and blight to plot a psychogeographical picture of our transvolving town.

From The Economist:

The British doughnut, a lump of indifferent carbohydrate with jam in the middle, describes rich inner-city development surrounded by acres of gloom.

Easy credit money flows into city-centre apartment and commercial development in the 1990's and early 2000's. The near-centre residential and light-industrial zone which surrounds the centre is abandoned. That was then, but now...

The “doughnut effect" ... confusingly describes the opposite phenomenon to the “donut effect” that American planners talk of. The American donut, a sugary ring with an empty centre, is a fine metaphor for the rich suburbs around a collapsed inner city.

...the British  "Doughnut Effect" of the 1990's and 2000's turns out to be a chimera, a bubble blown by easy finance and collapses into the American "Donut Effect" after all. Confusing.

However, in Aberdeen we are optimistic that not all is lost. We have noticed some multiple grocery retailers (Tesco, Sainsbury, Co-op) beginning to re-occupy medium-sized and small town centre and local node sites. These car-park-less small scale need-responsive shops are designed not for customers to buy a month's worth of food, but rather just to pop in for something which is needed today. The large multiples are going back to the future and re-inventing the corner shop. Indeed, the Co-op's TV advertising campaign seeks to make capital of the fact that that, as a customer on foot - buying food fresh whenyou need it - you reject car culture and contribute to the pleasant livability of the town and your own well being and quality of life. But then, the Co-op are just a bunch of communists. 

As opposing forces both seek to hollow out and re-occupy the town simultaneously, we are thrilled by the dynamic of this unfolding urban narrative. We are particularly interested in the fact that Tesco, for one, seem to be playing on both sides.

We truly have no idea where to place our bets on how it will land.

Psychogeography for Edinburgh & Glasgow!

Edinburgh based psychogeographical best-practice from a guy called Ed.

He's got a couple of books coming out later in the year - one on Edinburgh and one on Glasgow, so we're looking forward to that. Meantime, check out the splendid website:

From Z to A

"knit one street, purl one city"

"creative, critical, playful city+hinterland journeys using psychogeography and urban topography"

March Stones 37 to 39 ABD

Regular readers will know that, over the weeks and months, we've been touring the ancient boundaries of Aberdeen, and the marker stones or "March Stones" which identify the extent of those boundaries.

There's all sorts of histobunk available online, and we recommend having a look at both this article in the Leopard Magazine, and this heritage trail leaflet from Aberdeen City Council. Both are excellent sources of information.

The March Stones we're cataloging today are all on Tulloch Road. This road runs round the north east face of Brimmond Hill and borders the now failed Craibstone Golf Centre which went into liquidation in the autumn with debts of half-a-million pounds. Our thoughts about golf are a matter of record, but we don't like to see businesses fail. Let's hope the employees will be OK.

Though perfectly visible and accessible, March Stone 37 is up against a wall in somebody's garden at the south east end of a renovated and converted former outbuilding of Ashtown farm.

37 ABD. Ashtown Farm.

East of Stone 37 towards Newhills, March Stones 38 and 39 are within 50 metres of each other on either side of the road, close to the Gough Burn and its source: the Moss of Brimmond; an area of boggy ground to the south and west of the road. Run-off fom the Moss is drained via a system of channels which empty into and form the Gough Burn. Stone 38 is on the south verge of Tulloch Road, Stone 39 on the north. Stone 39 is also thought to mark the boundaries of the lands of Craibstone.

38 ABD - a bit worn. On the bank of the Gough Burn.

39 ABD
You can just see the golf course in top left quadrant of the shot.

The detail route plan drawings for Aberdeen's proposed bypass - the Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route (AWPR) show the new "special category" road passing very close to the location of March Stones 38 and 39. Indeed, as drawn, the embankment for the Ashtown Overbridge will necessitate the re-siting of Stone 39.

AWPR - Special Category Road. Whatever that means.

If and when it is built, the AWPR will mark a new de-facto boundary for Aberdeen, one which at its westernmost extent tracks surprisingly close to the boundary set by Robert the Bruce in the middle ages.

Psychogeography is not primarily about history, fascinating though that can often be. We have journeyed to the various March Stones not only for their own sake, but also and more importantly as a semi-arbitrary construct upon which to hang the variety of many of our psychogeograpical adventures. We must take care not to get hung up on the historical aspects of Aberdeen's ancient boundaries, so in that context, it's enough for us to reiterate that the March Stones mark the extent of the "Freedom Lands" which were "gifted" to Aberdeen by Robert the Bruce in 1319. Bruce is to be commemorated in a new statue which is to be sited outside the redeveloped Marischal College.

And it is at this point, where history and deep topography and politics and urban placemaking combine to affect the lives of modern and future people that the subject of Robert the Bruce and his interaction with Aberdeen takes on a psychogeographical significance for us today.

We have qualms about this forthcoming statue. We cannot help but wonder whether Bruce is a suitable person to be commemorated in this way, in this town. Firstly we have (both municipally and nationally) plenty enough statues to Powerful White Men who's stock in trade was violence. Secondly, do we really want to commemorate the man who, in order to crush an enemy's power-base, conducted an ethnic cleansing genocide in Moray, Buchan and Aberdeenshire in 1308: the Harrying of Buchan?

The Harrying was a devastating event for this area, characterised by its (surprisingly modern) ruthlessly systematic nature. This was a policy, managed and executed with businesslike efficency; entire towns like Ellon were completely eradicated, livestock and crops were burned in the fields, infrastructure was dismantled and dissipated. Some historians say that so complete was the destruction that the innate and potential wealth of Buchan was damaged for centuries after. A terrible and exceptional act of vengeful spite, unparalleled in these islands before or since.

Small wonder the Aberdonians cowered and offered Bruce whatever he wanted. The  fearful and pusillanimous capitulation of Aberdeen's burghers (who had been loyal to the English crown until the pogrom in the hinterland) no doubt, in time, pricked Bruces' conscience and lead to his eventual largesse. According to the Aberdeen City and Shire website, the ordinary people of Aberdeen also "furnished" Bruce with "large supplies" of cash, food and other goods. We cannot help but wonder under what levels of terror and sword-edge compulsion this "furnishing" was obliged. In this context, the "gift" of the Freedom Lands more than a decade later might be seen as a form of belated conscience-stricken compensation from Bruce to Aberdeen's craven burghers.

Those craven burgers, the pattern of their behaviour - their contemptible gutlessness - reinforced and rewarded by their eventual payoff from Bruce, set the precedent for a peculiarity of Aberdeen's civic character which is evident to this day. It is telling that, even now, our local paper adopts a fawning tone when writing of the "heroic" Bruce.

In pointing out that, in order to win a little monetary gain, the Aberdonian is content to humiliate and debase himself grossly, Paul Theroux was no doubt tuning in to this mercenary venality. As he said in his psychogeographical masterpiece "The Kingdom by the Sea" :

The average Aberdonian [is] a person who would gladly pick a penny out of a dunghill with his teeth. 

O Paul, it's actually much, much worse than that.