ASHES TO ASHES

AN ENGLISHMAN IN SCOTLAND will always possess the tingling, slightly exciting, feeling of having travelled back in time some thirty or forty years, and nowhere is this more in evidence than in the stunning city of Edinburgh. The politeness of waiters and shop assistants, the old-fashioned fiduciary issue, the tatty comfort of the pubs, the Jacobethan pronunciation, the grimy tenement buildings and the fact that many gentlemen have not yet started wearing trousers – all of this softly speaks of, rather than screams of, the past. Even the elections results of last Thursday, as well as their circumstances, smack of the nineteen-seventies.

OVER THE LAST FEW DAYS I have come to realise that travelling into the past, as defended by the lunatic Labour candidate Manish Sood (see previous post), may not have to be particularly irksome. Yet in both Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes, the BBC TV series, the protagonists long to return to the present time. Indeed I myself need to return to the reality of my existence, but once again am caught under the shadow of ashes spewing out of an Icelandic volcano. The last dump of ashes successfully swamped my flight; tomorrow will tell us how the next batch fares.

EDINBURGH, HOWEVER, HAS A SECRET: it is among the few places in the United Kingdom where police call boxes still exist, apparently eighty or so of them in the greater Edinburgh area. These are often referred to as a “Tardis”, the vehicle used by Dr Who to travel through time and space willy-nilly. My picture above shows one of these vehicles, parked almost directly beneath the window at which I am now writing. If all else goes wrong tomorrow I will attempt to enter the Tardis and fiddle about with the commands to see if I can get back to Lisbon and the nineteen-fifties.