During our time in Scotland, the next big outside-of-Edinburgh adventure we had planned was (as you guessed from the title) Dundee! Getting to Dundee is much like getting to Perth, except you stay on the train slightly longer, so once again I got to experience the engineering magic of going over the Forth Bridge! Amazing.

We had so thoroughly enjoyed going to the V&A Museum in London that we figured it would also be a lot of fun to go to the V&A branch office in Dundee, and so that was our first destination. We arrived in town about 20 minutes before the museum opened so we admired the Dundee waterfront. They have a big ole’ sculpture of a whale, and of course the River Tay was gorgeous. You could imagine rather large fish coming out of this part. Given my enthusiasm for the Forth Bridge it was interesting looking across to (and having just crossed) the location of the Tay Bridge Disaster.

Eventually the V&A Dundee opened and so we head back toward the entrance. The building is very pretty, with no straight lines outside and it is covered in these pre-form concrete blocks (we learned they were pre-form on the inside, I’m not a concrete expert). The RRS Discovery (I’ll get to that) is right next to it, so you can hardly miss the ship connection. The V&A also has these shallow water pools beside it and the wind was whipping them up while we were there, and as you looked out from inside you could almost get the sense you were at sea. Meanwhile, the Discovery was in a dry dock, so an interesting contrast in building-like-a-ship and ship-like-a-building.

Inside the V&A we went up the stairs into the first gallery on Palestinian embroidery. That stuff was gorgeous. Here is the link to the exhibition Thread Memory: Embroidery from Palestine and another link to a longer related article. What the exhibition was displaying is tatreez, a type of embroidery and “a rural women’s craft, embedded in village life,” with different styles from each village. Dundee, turns out, is “twinned” with the Palestinian city of Nablus, hence the connection, and as such the exhibition did not shy away from current events. The signs noted that “for the past 45 years, the Palestinian flag has been displayed at the City Chambers in Dundee, even during periods when the flag was outlawed within Palestine.” One of the art pieces were plastic bags, embroidered with the things refugees carried in them as they fled.

Even without the weight of history, the garments on display were gorgeous. They were all so intricate, and the signs pointed out some of the symbology. The colors and geometric designs really spoke to the care that went into these garments that meant so much. And speaking of not-so-current events, one interesting detail on a particular taqsireh jacket from Bethlehem was that it was lined with tartan, which had been imported during the British mandate.

Departing the exhibit on tatreez, we bopped across to another gallery on Scottish designers, which had a hodgepodge of a lot of different Scottish stuff. They had fashion and they had paisley and they had ships and ships and ships. A great museum, what with all the ships. One sign said that in the early 20^th century, fully 1 in 5 of the world’s ships were built in Scotland.

Our tour of Scottish design history done, we went outside to Heather Street Food to pick up some lunch. Between my super amazing wife and I, we got one “New York” and one “Philly” bagel, creations that were pretty good even if I am sure they would be disowned by their namesake cities. We also got two donuts. As we were eating a seagull was stalking us, which my super amazing wife referred to as a “Scottish monkey,” referencing the more traditional types of monkeys of Tarangire which stalked unawares tourists. We managed to finish our lunch and then made our way to Verdant Works.

Verdant Works is a really nice museum. It has a small courtyard, so you wouldn’t think it was so big, but behind that small courtyard is a large facility. Having bought tickets, our tour began with an intro by a nice gentleman by the name of John. John was a fairly charming, slightly older gentleman with a very thorough Dundee accent. Two Scottish ladies (who I think hailed from Aberdeen based on a later joke) joined us, and this caused John to go down a variety of tangents. It was very nice.

Interesting notes from John’s intro included that the mill owners hired women because they thought the women were less likely to unionize (and also got paid less), and Dundee was represented by Churchill at some point. I didn’t understand all the political history he was trying to explain but I was enthralled nonetheless. Though speaking of women, Dundee was apparently a very women-forward town, with so many being the breadwinners of their families from working in the jute plants (I haven’t mentioned it yet, but Verdant Works is a museum made out of a jute processing plant and telling the history of Dundee and jute).

Our story continues next week, woven together like jute…

Reading this week:

• The Elements of Power by Nicolas Niarchos

I went to Perth, Australia one time via submarine. What a strange time that was. I hadn’t expected to go to Australia, I barely knew where we were, the drinking started right away, I hugged a koala, had fries with mayonnaise for the first time, and on the way back home they served us kangaroo steaks with every meal. The trip to Perth, Scotland was not like that at all.

During out stay in Edinburgh we wanted to take a few day trips to other places. So on this day we woke up early and got on the train, carrying pastries along to fortify us. These came in handy when we were stopped in Ladybank (a very funny name for a town) but before that we had to do the most exciting bit, which was cross the Forth Bridge! Big Forth Bridge fan here. I think I first read about it in The Way Things Work, perhaps my life’s seminal text. Unfortunately I don’t have a copy handy to fact-check myself here, though don’t bother doing it for me. But wherever I learned about it here I was finally crossing it on train, and that was amazing. I felt so safe. I tried to take some pictures and they all turned out bad but I did discover the existence of North Queensferry which I’ll have to visit someday. As the train rolled on hugging the Firth we enjoyed the views across to Edinburgh and on the other side all of the sheep and horses in yellow fields.

I enjoyed all the Victorian engineering in the train station that was our portal to Perth, though it was a long hike up and down to get to and from Platform 6. Our destination once in town was of course The Scottish Yarn Festival. As good an excuse to go to Perth as any. The whole yarn thing is of course my super amazing wife’s thing and not so much mine, but there was some interesting stuff and I learned about Latvian mittens which have very pretty designs. We also attended a talk by Donna Gillies all about her efforts to start up Highland Wool, a nascent wool processing company.

From that talk, a few takeaways: I hadn’t thought about how big an issue water was, as they have a limited supply and are trying to recycle. From what I could tell they wash all the wool by hand which just sounds like so much work. The power at their farm also goes out for days at a time as well, so they are set up with a system that can handle those outages. It sounded like their only big piece of equipment was a giant carder they had recently got going. They had purchased a lot of old equipment for £5k which was nice because they had originally been budgeting for a Belfast Mini Mill setup for £100k. To get themselves started, they only (at the time at least) go to batting instead of making yarn. She also said that every bit of wool gets used, even if it is just stabilizing roads, which is not a thing I knew you could use wool for.

She also said that on their farm they have Hebridean sheep, which are very protective of their young and therefore good for a farm like theirs, which gets surrounded by predators. For a while all the animals and predators had moved away because the grass got too tall for ground nesters and therefore the predators had no food. Donna also said that the hardest part of the operation was tracking one client’s wool all the way through, which yeah, I can see how that is tricky, and reportedly requires a lot of paperwork. As a guy who had pondered setting up a yarn mill when I thought I was going to get let go, these were interesting lessons to hear.

After the talk my super amazing wife made her final yarn purchases and then off we went, after a spot of lunch, to learn about Perth. The biggest thing to know about Perth I think, based off of our visit, is that it is very fish-themed. Our first destination was the Perth Art Gallery. They had some really interesting stuff. They had a glass exhibition going on which featured some really gorgeous stuff, including some silly gooses and even examples of the Blaschka invertebrate models (it’s a different museum but here are some details). Having seen that we then had a wander into the Millais exhibition. The art was very nice but prominently displayed is a 44lbs salmon caught in 1884 by Millais himself on the River Tay itself. “Wow,” I thought, “what a unique thing to have on display in a museum gallery.” It certainly complimented the salmon rug sculpture thing on the floor which was visually beguiling in-person.

Next up was the Perth Museum, which we (I) wanted to go to explicitly to see the STONE of DESTINY. And maybe, you know, crown ourselves King of Scotland. Alas, we were unable to see it as a man had broken the display and so the exhibit was closed. It was a very cool museum and it traced the history of Perth from the neolithic until modern day. They had a 3000-year-old log canoe and Celtic and Roman artifacts. But upstairs was the real gem of the museum, a 64lbs salmon. The largest, apparently, ever taken from the River Tay. On the way between the Art Gallery and the Museum we had stopped by the River Tay itself and I am stunned that such salmon could have come out of it. In another spot of the museum was even yet another salmon, though this one at a waspish 19lbs. And then, as I inspected the Pictish stones on the first floor again there was a carving of salmon, swimming to us from across the ages. Truly bragging about the fish we caught is what ties all of humanity together.

With that lesson about the human race under our belt, we eventually turned our feet back to the train station and Edinburgh for more gorgeous views on the train and another evening of Lidl-based dinner. Who could ask for more?

Reading this week:

• The African Revolution by Richard Reid (this could have been shorter)

Time for another vacation! This one we actually took last year, on the cusp of fall and while we were still in Sierra Leone. For their 40^th wedding anniversary my parents had decided to book the whole family on a cruise through Europe. The timing of the cruise though meant my super amazing wife and I had a few days to spend somewhere in the vicinity of Europe before rendezvousing with the fam. We searched high and low for reasonable and interesting places to go in Europe before deciding, eventually, why not just go to the best bit? So off we were to Scotland!

Being, at this point, seasoned in Caledonian travel, our aim was a slightly more relaxed time of it. We had mixed success at this. Upon arrival where we were staying we were very quickly out the door again with one of our more important destinations in mind, a triumphant return to Aldi to recreate fond memories we had of a cozy night in Fort Williams. But hey, while we were out, why not hike into town, get some hot pot, admire the castle, pick up some tea at a tea shop, check out Waterstones, get some bubble bath at Boots only to discover our bathtub had no plug, and generally soak in all the things that Sir Walter Scott wrote about. We crashed hard but were well prepped for the next full day in Edinburgh.

Our first big set-piece destination were the National Galleries of Scotland. In our last romp around the Athens of the North (it was one Athens to another for us) we clearly didn’t see enough art so it was top priority to squeeze some in. There was some fantastic stuff there. The first piece that really caught my eye, maybe because it was in the entrance of the first gallery we went to and had lots of gold, was “The Hunt” by Robert Burns (giving a kid big shoes to fill if you name him that in 1869). All the gold makes it hard to do it justice in a photo, and also easily lost are the small indentations in the paint that made it interesting to inspect up close.

There were many such works that rewarded close inspection. I espied from across the room a gorgeous tetraptych of paintings only to get near and discover they were in fact gigantic embroideries. The series is by Phoebe Anna Traquair and is bonkers good and intricate. The photos I’ve included here are of the third piece, “The Progress of a Soul: Despair.” It is crazy how she pulls that off, literal years of work going into it. I tried embroidery exactly once and it nearly drove me to despair.

Speaking of embroidery, one other loose end to mention is that in this gallery they had, in addition to the regular notes on the paintings, various captions done by young students which were invariably insightful and delightful. One identified a brown splotch in an impressionist painting as equally likely to be a barn or a wooly mammoth. Reeling from the power of the mouths of babes, we also had to hit up the real star of the National Galleries: “Callum.” My super amazing wife was absolutely delighted with this pupper and with good reason. The museum’s gift shop is also filled with Callum merch (less full after we were done with it), again quite reasonably, though the one thing I noticed is that in some of the cartoony versions in the gift shop the rat is portrayed as alive which I thought somewhat undercut Callum’s triumph. But oh well.

Emerging from the galleries we proceeded on a good wander. We picked up lunch from a chippy and enjoyed it at the foot of Castle Rock and paid tribute to Wojtek with a visit to his memorial. We reviewed New Town and did some shopping and then with a good chunk more walking eventually made a return to Dovecot. We arrived late enough that we only had exactly one minute to admire the weaving of the tapestries, but what we came especially to see this time was their exhibit on the textiles of Ikea. Very interesting! Their work was reminiscent of African fabrics and if there isn’t a Nordic connection I do wonder if there is a North Sea one.

Our art itch sated, we could finally turn our way towards home. We wandered through Armchair books and then on down to the canal which would take us back to our place. The canal was exciting since Ruth Aisling had just been there, so it was like seeing a celebrity! Along the canal there were flowers and it felt cloistered and the weather was still beautiful. We were getting passed by food delivery bikes constantly, and my super amazing wife pointed out that the canal existed for delivery, so historically, that was perfect. An Aldi dinner of sweet potato fries and mussels rounded out a phenomenal day.