Aberdeen and its myriad delights...a tie in an unexpected location...the end of an era for cyclists...and the truth about the Patio Hotel

Here I am back in grey, misty, cold, wet, blustery and on the
whole rather dreich Shetland, and yesterday saw me driving almost 200 miles in the service of the junior members of the clan.
Saturday morning music club in Lerwick as soon as I got in, then the shopping, then lunch, then back home, then Magnus to the boat so he can attend the glorious institution that is Glasgow University, then home for a couple of glasses of special Chilean anti-oxidant wine, which...as it comes from Chile, is especially good at killing off free radicals (sorry, tasteless medico/political joke).
Anyway, back from Aberdeen (ANOTHER force eight, bow-on-to-the-weather nasty, only an hour late this time), and can you spot the school tie (actually, two tied together) high in this tree in one of Aberdeen's rather nice west-end gardens? What does it signify? Who knows?
I did a lot of walking this trip, and it must be said that Castle Greyskull is a fine city for perambulation: The hills are long and gradual (which makes them bad for cycling) and the compact-and-bijou nature of Aberdeen makes it easy to get from one side to the other; or around it if you prefer. Plus, Aberdeen has rivers, a proper beach (the only real Jersey-boardwalk Atlantic-City-type City in Scotland, not necessarily a good thing) great cafes (try the Baker's Pantry at the bus station or the legendary Inversnecky) and some splendid pubs: my choice would be Under the Hammer, the Prince of Wales, Campbell's out on the edge of Torry if you're feeling adventurous, the Blue Lamp and, much improved since my last visit a couple of years ago, the Moorings down by the docks. The Moorings doesn't look that inviting at first, but it's been thoroughly spruced up, there's some great (and genuine) rock'n'roll memorabilia lurking behind the bar, they do live music, some interesting record nights, have Blaven beer from Skye, and the clientele cheerfully encompasses goths, students, well-heeled businesspersons, sailors and hydrocarbonites of all varieties. It also has the best, most comprehensive juke box I have ever seen. And on a cold winter's Thursday night, it was warm.
I was staying (for the second time) at the Patio Hotel, down at the beach. Aberdeen has disgracefully and controversially foulled its glorious public linksland with monstrosities like Codona's "theme" park (glorified fairground), the adjoining, and truly hideous, Queen's Links leisure complex, and for that matter the Patio itself, which in architectural terms, is of the early Travelodge style. It is not, however, in that price bracket. Oh no. It's an AA 4-star (which refers, basically, to facilities on offer, not quality of service) and even for oiliness-inflated Aberdeen, it's pricy. I was paying a special Beeb rate of £80 a night b&b, for an "ordinary" room; you can pay a lot more for the same thing, and zillions more for an "executive" version. Anyway, the reason people stay there, and the reason it's nearly always full, is the leisure club, Breakers. There's a pool, sauna, steam room, gym..all excellent.
Service is good too, and the rooms - although of odd design in my case, with peculiar windows too high to see out of - comfortable. Good telly provision. Bad points? It beggars belief that anyone in this day and age is charging £15 per 24-hour period for wi-fi access. That's just taking the piss. Hotels of this standard should be providing it free. And the food I had ranged from the overpriced to the horrendous: soup, steak and chips at night in the restaurant was passable, though the house wine was awesomely expensive. But the breakfasts! Boil-in-the-bag kippers (only grilled to superhardness) WITHIN SIGHT of some of the best smokehouses in Scotland! And fish merchants! Stale croissants! Cheese hard through and through (this in a room-service breakfast at a £3.75 surcharge). Cold toast...disgusting.
Best thing about the Patio, better even than the swimming pool, is the presence next door of a giant Tesco. Yes, another besmirchment of the links, but it means you can buy proper food and eat it in your room. And a bottle of very good wine for the price of a glass of house plonk downstairs. It's Holiday Inn Express for me next time. And the public swiming pool.
Finally, I was sad to see that Anderson's, an old-style cycle shop just short of its 70th birthday, has closed to make way for a "bakery and coffee shop". I bought loads of bits there, and (cheaply and second-hand) the old Dutch hub-gear bike I keep in Aberdeen, mainly because there was none of that lycra-clad patronising you get in other, groovier establishments. It was cheaper too.
I'm on holiday this week, and am determined to take up running. Or at the very least, stumbling. Or dog walking at a fast, if you will, lick. This is called djogging. This is thanks to the incredibly helpful attitude of the staff at The Running Shop, who spent half-an-hour assessing my feet, and then supplying some of their sale shoes at a very reasonable price. and with Mellis cheesemongers just up the road, it's not such a bad old place, Aberdeen.

Belle and Sebastian: yours, bewildered of Shetland...

So, Stuart Murdoch from Belle and Sebastian came into the Aberdeen studio yesterday for a wee chat, and I must say I was a bit concerned, as B&S are one of those bands I’ve never quite managed to get a handle on. The fact that they come from Glasgow, that Stuart’s lyrics are by turns phenomenally witty and movingly melancholic, indeed the overt Christian faith of their leader…all those things should have made me, if not a convert to the B&S cause, at least interested enough for some committed immersion in the works.
And yet, no. I’ve dipped into the albums from Fold Your Hands…on, and we’ve gone big on the show with Dear Catastrophe Waitress and indeed the new single, Funny Little Frog. Yet there’s always been something slippery and elusive about the band for me. Something which stopped me, well, getting it. I once mused on air that I found B&S “admirable, but hard to love”. And yet for an increasing number of people worldwide, they’re lovable to an extreme, even cultish degree.
I gave myself a crash course in B&S’s early stuff for the occasion of the interview, and pored over the excellent, revelatory Sunday Herald feature by Peter Ross. Stuart, who for years gave no interviews at all, turned out to be dressed in dapper sub-Chaplin fashion, and was open, thoughtful and friendly in a reserved kind of way, if that made sense. He was happy, for instance, to talk about his problems with ME and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. You can hear the interview for a week or so from now via Radio Scotland’s Listen Again facility.
We played the excellent I’m a Cuckoo from DC Waitress, and I confirmed the Thin Lizzy references. Funny Little Frog sounded great, too, and I was looking forward to the sold-out gig that night at Aberdeen’s Music Hall.
Support act was King Creosote, aka Kenny Anderson of Fence Records fame, and he was a revelation: a superb, soaring, sweet voice, and accordion-washed songs that caught at the heart. Very impressive. And then on to the main attraction, the hall absolutely rammed (studenty to late 30s, mostly, but with a surprising number of 40-55 year olds), top class sound system, major league light show…and me not knowing what to expect. A stranger at the ball.
It was…odd. I can imagine no other major (they can sell out Hammersmith and the Royal Albert Hall) act stopping a song half way through, having a good-humoured argument about whose fault it was, and then starting it all over again. Or, in a moment which was pure youth club, bringing onstage five err…over excited audience members to clap along during Funny Little Frog. That was almost 10 minutes, in fact, of cringe-inducing miscalculation, and yet immediately afterwards, for almost the first time, the band locked into something approaching a groove and turned into the “Saturday night band” Stuart claimed in the S Herald he wanted them to be.
It all looked very peculiar too. At time there were 12 people on stage, including a string section, with lots of instrument swapping going on, something I’ve always distrusted in a band. The bewildering array of styles and pop culture references made it sometimes feel as if the music was a kind of effect, there to illustrate the lyrics rather than combine with them. And what B&S, perhaps deliberately, do not have on their side is theatre. There is no visceral drama about their performance. It’s enigmatic, weird, adolescent. They hop and grin with daft enthusiasm, where I remember the deadly serious, furious, but still gladioli-ridden humour of the Smiths in their youthful pomp. Yet Stuart Murdoch is 37.
B&S were appealling, yes, and at times transcendent. But more if you knew the songs, if the works were dear to you from the records, and you had the thrill of simply being in the same place as performers you’ve learned to love. As an event in itself, this was not successful evangelism. It was an inclusive act of worship that left me feeling like an outsider. And, oddly, thinking of Franz Ferdinand, of whom I thoroughly disapprove for their magpie tendencies, and how much more satisfying they are as an in-concert proposition, even if you’re not a fan. They have the focus, the stagecraft, and they lack the winning, fey self-consciousness that makes B&S so beloved of those who love them, and so confusing for me.

I keep telling myself: the arctic convoys were a lot worse than this...

I struggled off the Hrossey at 9.55 this morning, groggy and swaying, almost three hours late in arriving at Aberdeen.
As nights on the boat go, this was among the worst I've experienced, and easily the roughest aboard a NorthLink ship. Though I shudder to think what it would have been like aboard the St Sunniva or the St Clair, with their old-tech stabilisers. When the captain of the Hrossey switched off her(rather efficient) stabilisers so we could finally enter Aberdeen harbour, the boat rolled with a vengeance. Battering our way south through a force eight south westerly, we had slammed, crunched and nose-dived, but the sideways motion remained bearable. Just.
No seasickness, just an initial quickening of the heartbeat once we were out of Bressay Sound and into the first of the big breakers. Reading HMS Ulysses had probably been a mistake, but at least I was able to tell myself, over and over again: the arctic convoys were worse than this...
Phenergan saved me. Well, Phenergan (freely available at your chemists, but normally prescribed for hay fever) and a small dram of supermarket (I think Sainsbury) Islay Pure Malt. Carried about my person in the hip flask my pal Stewart gave me as a birthday present. Well, that plus one of the Hrossey's excellent steak pies, with tatties, carrots and peas. And an ice cream. Never travel on an empty stomach.
I knew from the forecast it would be a bad trip, but the Captain's announcement on leaving the berth (" we are expecting VERY ROUGH SEAS") and the fact that I had been handed an "Adverse Weather Conditions" leaflet before boarding, sent me to the cafeteria while we were still tied up, and to my cabin the moment we started moving.
And there I stayed, with occasional journeys to the toilet and for bottled water (Phenergan really dehydrates you) for the next 14 and a bit hours. I was thrown sideways into the bedside table a few times, but never completely out of my bunk. Though lying on my side was impossibly rocky.
Normally, the ferry gets into Aberdeen around 7.00 am (a 12-hour trip, unless it's going via Orkney) but Aberdeen Harbour is notoriously impenetrable in certain wind directions, depending on the state of the tide. When you think about it, there's no shelter - it's just a tight river mouth. Diversions to (the much more navigable) Invergordon or Rosyth are a last resort, but things at Aberdeen are getting worse and worse as the river silts up, and it seems very likely that Rosyth will be the mainland jumping-off point for the Northern Isles in the future.
Anyway, today we had to stoat about off Aberdeen for almost three hours, which didn't bother me that much. I just stayed in bed. When I finally reached dry land, I breakfasted at the excellent Baker's Pantry, in the bus station: £3.40 for bacon and egg roll, pot of tea and a fruit scone. That's the other thing about Phenergan - it makes you really hungry.

Dog, beard and peculiar hat

This picture was taken by my dad during his visit to Shetland at New Year - I think this was 2nd January. We were out for a walk on the glorious Ness of Hillswick, looking over to the red cliffs of Eshaness (not the black vocanic ones near the Lighthouse). Good grief, am I really that fat? All right, there's no need for that...dear old Quoyle the labrador is 11 years old and still sprightly. I am a lot older than that and...oh, my aching back. 

Collapse of stout party...

Phew, wind's getting up again...these gales are getting a bit wearisome.
Amazed to hear about the Stornoway lorry driver who saw a sheep flying past his windscreen...I've never seen that, but it's possible that the native Shetland breed is less aerodynamic than the Hebridean equivalent...I have seen one apparently levitating over a fence.
Funniest thing from the Ananova news website I've seen in years was this, which almost sent me into complete hysterical collapse on air this afternoon:
"A Croatian widow has submitted a pickled cucumber for a place as the world's oldest in the Guinness Book of Records.
Vera Dudas, 73, from Duga Resa, says the cucumber was pickled by her mother-in-law when her late husband was born in 1930.
She has now had the cucumber insured. She says it's her only reminder of her husband Pavao who would have turned 76 this year.
Vera said: "Unfortunately, the cucumber has survived longer than Pavao.
"I remember my entire married life when I look at that cucumber, it was with us everywhere we ever lived and through all our experiences - good and bad."

Well. Quite.