Mark Steel's In Town by Mark Steel

Author:Mark Steel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2011-09-20T04:00:00+00:00

Dumfries

On the face of it the Scottish have cause for complaint against the English. It can be summed up in the verse of the national anthem that goes: ‘May He sedition hush, And in a torrent rush, Rebellious Scots to crush, God save the King.’ Apart from anything else this is clearly out of date, and should be amended to: ‘Each World Cup you’re dreamier, But your odds couldn’t be teenier, You always lose to Armenia, Or somewhere with a population of nine.’

But the relationship between England and Scotland is complicated, because Scotland wasn’t just a victim of the British Empire, it helped to run that empire, sometimes against other Scots. These complexities are embodied in the hero figure of poet Robbie Burns.

In Dumfries, for example, where Burns spent the last five years of his life, they seem to have agreed on one issue of how to remember him, which is to stick him up everywhere. So there’s a huge statue and a smaller statue and a mausoleum and a statue of his wife and a Burns memorial and a picture of him on every road sign and a Burns Street and in every pub they say ‘Robert Burns drank here’ even though it was built in 1969 and you daren’t ask for the public toilet because it’s probably called the Robert Burns Dumpery and I bet in Dixons they go ‘Robert Burns spent many hours here, he wrote “Ode to an iPod” – “O ye wee doonloadin’ beastie”.’

If a shrink was to analyse Dumfries, he’d say, ‘I think it’s time you let him go.’

All this is because Burns spent the last part of his life there, until a local doctor advised him to deal with his fever by walking into a freezing river and he died soon after.

Dumfries is called a ‘Borders town’, because it’s only a few miles inside Scotland, west of Carlisle. It’s part of a region called Dumfries and Galloway, and it’s not always sure what it’s meant to be. Outside the town you can ramble in any direction to a stately home or a castle, and the solid, magisterial tourist book of the area has a grand mansion on the cover, so you get the impression you’re not allowed inside the parish boundary unless you’re at least ninth in line to the throne; but the town itself is grey, mostly working-class and properly Scottish.

There are thousands of grey stone houses either side of a fast-flowing river, and dozens of pubs with a yellow light telling you they sell Tennent’s beer, and hills in the distance and a shop that sells fishing rods, and unlike outside Waverley station in Edinburgh, no one plays the bagpipes.

This combination of urban and rural heritage was illustrated in a story told by the writer Frank Cottrell Boyce, who said: ‘I discovered this stately home – Drumlanrig Castle – which has a Da Vinci, a Brueghel, a Rembrandt. The opening hours were a little eccentric, but you could walk right up to the paintings.

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