Book Talk
In Countdown to Scotland’s Independence Vote, Exploring the Country Behind the Clichés
A journalist sets off on a quest for a better understanding of his native land.
No sunscreen is needed at this pool beside the Clyde estuary, near Glasgow.
Photograph by Kieran Dodds, Panos
Published September 14, 2014
Say the word "Scotland" and most of us think of heather-covered Highlands, tartan, and whiskey. Peter Ross, a columnist for Scotland on Sunday, takes us behind the clichés to reveal a country full of singular characters and hidden communities outsiders rarely glimpse.
Here he introduces us to an aria-singing fish-and-chip shop
owner in Glasgow, takes us inside communities of Benedictine monks and
long-distance truck drivers, and explains why next week's referendum on
independence is so important.
Daunderlust is not a familiar word to most non-Scots. Why did you choose it as the title of your book?
[Laughs] I'm not sure if it was the most cunning decision I
ever made to make up a word that I'd have to explain to readers. It's a
compound word—and also a pun. It's a pun on wanderlust, the German word
to have a great desire to wander about in the world, combined with a
Scots word, daunder, or donner as it's sometime
pronounced, which means saunter around in a leisurely way. Because these
are journeys within Scotland, and I have a sort of compulsive desire to
make them, it's a daunderlust.
Photograph courtesy of Sandstone Press
Most of us associate Scotland with kilts and heather-covered Highlands. You intentionally avoid the picturesque.
We do have lots of kilts and heather-covered glens, but I
think those aspects of the country are covered within the mainstream,
like in tourist brochures. And while it does have a truth to it, I
wanted to dig a little deeper and try to portray the country as it
really is.
Scotland is a very beautiful place, but it's also quite a
dark place. It's a very small country, with a tremendous range of
different landscapes, environments, and social groups. There's a very
underpopulated rural and mountainous part. There's also an industrial
and postindustrial Scotland. And there are massive extremes of wealth
and poverty. A few people own a great deal of land. Others barely own
the clothes on their backs. I felt it was important to show Scotland in
its infinite variety.
Why did you choose to write about the anatomy rooms?
Around the time I was writing the book, John Landis's film of Burke and Hare
came out: two guys in Victorian Edinburgh who stole corpses from
graveyards to sell to student doctors so they could learn how to
dissect. The Body Snatchers, as they became known. Subsequently they
started murdering people to provide a greater supply of bodies. It's one
of the great Scottish stories.
So I decided to try and find out what happens these
days—how student doctors get bodies to learn their craft on. So I got in
touch with the Edinburgh University medical school, which is a
tremendously grand 19th-century building. And I was able to follow the
whole process through. I spoke to people who were planning to donate
their bodies to medical science. I even spent time within the anatomy
rooms themselves and saw the process of embalming and dissection.
The book is full of wonderful characters. Tell us about Luigi Corvi.
He's an extraordinary guy. He's the owner of the Val-D'Oro
chip shop in Glasgow. It's in a part of Glasgow which is between the
sophisticated, merchant city and the more rough-and-ready east end. In
Glasgow, and Scotland more widely, there has always been a tradition of
Italian immigrants opening fish-and-chip shops or ice-cream parlors.
Luigi Corvi, as his name suggests, is of Italian descent.
At the time I was writing, he was 25 stone [350 pounds] and a
tremendously garrulous gentleman. His greatest quirk is that he's a
phenomenally good opera singer. He will sing you "Nessun Dorma," or
various other arias while serving your smoked sausage supper or
deep-fried pizza, or all these other really unhealthy things that
Glasgow specializes in serving to people. Scotland in general, and
Glasgow in particular, is full of people like this: ordinary people, who
are in actual fact extraordinary.
What's your own Scottish story?
I was born in Sterling, but I moved around quite a lot
through my dad's work. He was an accountant, but he also spent quite
long periods of time unemployed. So although my background's
theoretically middle class, there were long stretches where we didn't
have much money. I spent the whole of my teenage years living on a
council estate. That background has been helpful in terms of being able
to identify with different sorts of social groups in the stories.
Which clan do you come from?
Ross is a clan. But it doesn't really mean too much to me. I
think that's often more meaningful to people whose families move away
from Scotland. I did this story a few years ago about something called
the Homecoming. It was a great gathering of the clans, in Edinburgh. But
hardly anyone there was Scottish. They were all Americans or Canadians,
walking around covered in tartan with eagle feathers in their bonnets.
[Laughs] The few Scots there were just complaining about the price of
the drinks.
You say there is an elegiac tone to many of the stories. Why so?
In Scotland, and I think it's the same elsewhere, we're
increasingly becoming a homogenous, bland society, a kind of
commerce-driven, money-driven society. We're losing some of the things
that make us distinct as a people. So I wanted to document the remnants
of those things before they pass from the cultural landscape.
Which is why you have a lot of things in the book about
Scottish traditions like shipbuilding on the Clyde, which is the river
that runs through Glasgow. At one time it built the majority of the
world's ships. Now, that's very far from being the case. These things
are all the time passing away from the culture. So I think it's
important to write about them, almost for posterity.
It's also to do with my personality, I guess. There's
something about that mood of loss, the melancholy of it, that I find
quite attractive. But the Scottish sense of humor, which can be quite
dark and tough and resilient, is always a counterbalance to the sadness
that you sometimes get in the stories. That and the great warmth of the
people.
You intentionally quote people in Scots rather than standard English. Why?
That's a completely normal thing within Scottish
literature. If you were to pick up a Scottish novel, or short story
collection, it's quite commonplace to see Scots used. Trainspotting
is a famous example. But it's not common at all in journalism. If I'd
been writing for the news pages, I'd have written in standard English
for clarity and for that sense of objectivity. But to quote people in
standard English when they're talking to you in Scots is to translate
what they're saying. I want to express things as truthfully as I can.
I'm using all my senses: what I see and smell and taste and hear.
And what I hear is people speaking in these incredibly rich
local dialects. So I want to get that down on paper, because it
represents the way they speak. If you were to translate them into
standard English, you'd lose a tremendous amount of energy and humor and
individuality. I don't think the language is impenetrable. I'm quite
careful to give a flavor of the dialect, without making the stories
unreadable. But I want readers to be able to hear what I heard.
What does "thole" mean?
Thole is a good one, because it means to endure. And I
think one of the defining characteristics of the Scots is that we're a
resilient people. Scotland's gone through its fair share of difficult
times and hardship and poverty—like the Highland clearances, where
people were forcibly moved off their lands to make room for sheep. A lot
of them immigrated to America and Canada. But we're a very enduring
people. We're able to thole. It's a poetic and beautiful word that
expresses something key about the Scottish character.
A house with a view: Bla Behinn, on Skye, is one of Scotland's most dramatic ranges.
Photograph by Kieran Dodds, Panos
You describe a sunny day spent on Arthur's Seat, in
Edinburgh, as a "perfect expression of that rare phenomenon—Scottish
happiness." Is it really that bad?
[Laughs] It's a wee joke, really. Part of our self-image
and the way we laugh about ourselves is that we're a bit miserable.
There's a gem of truth in it. We like to complain, and we do have a
melancholy streak in us. Then there's the weather. People that don't
live here need to know that the weather is awful for a good part of the
year. And I think that contributes to the national mood. You spend a lot
of time being, to use another Scots word, scunnered. A bit annoyed
about things. A bit fed up.
The weather is also why we're all so pale. There's even a
theory that the weather explains why Scots drink so much alcohol. Those
ideas of misery and alcohol and bad weather are a sort of perfect storm
of Scottishness. [Laughs] The counter side to that is when the sun does
shine, it really does lift the mood of the country. I went and spent
the whole day on Arthur's Seat, from sunrise to sunset, just to
celebrate the fact that we'd had a week of unusually fine weather in
March. You could sense Scottish happiness rising up off the day like a
haze.
Another theme in the stories is community—people doing things that connect them and their past. Can you give us some examples?
I think there's an inherent community feeling in Scotland,
which possibly goes back to the ancient clan system, where people in the
Highlands would be arranged according to family loyalty and work and
fight together. It's a kind of lingering race memory.
There is, for example, a community of Benedictine monks I
write about who live and work in the last medieval monastery in Britain
still in use. Or you might find a different sort of community in the
Waterloo Bar, Scotland's oldest gay bar; or a community of nudists on a
small island in Loch Lomond; or a community of long-distance truck
drivers, who gather at a particular transport café.
I'm attracted to that idea of community because I myself am
quite an insular, introverted person. So I am drawn to seeing the way
that others interact. Scotland has also always been a more left wing and
socialist country than its English neighbor. And that's another
expression of community. We're having our independence referendum at the
moment, and I think that idea of Scotland as a country that values
others and wants to look out for the welfare of others is one that's
frequently talked about within the debate.
Scotland is only a few days away from the referendum. What's the atmosphere like?
I travel around quite a lot within the country, and I've
been talking to people about this, and there's a lot of excitement now
about the referendum. People feel tremendously engaged in politics in a
way that they haven't been for general elections, and I think there will
be a lot of people voting in the referendum who have perhaps not voted
for a long time, or have never voted, because they were too young to
vote or because they've always felt entirely disillusioned by politics
and that it wouldn't make any difference to their lives.
But because what's being offered here is such a radical
change, I think people are absolutely engaged. All the way through, the
polls have been showing a significant lead for the people who want
Scotland to stay part of the United Kingdom. But I think as you go out
on the streets and talk to people, most people feel it's actually going
to be quite close.
You say that the book offers no view or answer on
independence. Which side do you think most of your characters will come
down on?
I would find it very difficult to answer that question.
They're all very independent-spirited people. But that doesn't
necessarily mean that they'd want to seek independence. It would be a
mistake to think that people who don't want independence are any less
patriotic than Scots who do.
The idea of Scottish identity and your views on the
referendum are quite complex. You can feel very proud to be Scottish.
But many of us also feel a strong connection with England, either
through our work or our families. My wife is English. My favorite
writers, George Orwell and Charles Dickens, are English. A band I love,
the Smiths, epitomize a certain kind of Englishness. And I find the
William Blake anthem "Jerusalem" as moving as "Flower of Scotland." I
think a lot of people will feel the same way. The whole idea of Scottish
and British identity is like a Venn diagram. It's a complicated thing.
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