Pure Dead Brilliant

Last Saturday I attended a symposium on "Textual Cultures" in Stirling, Scotland. I had been to Stirling Castle before, but only for a very brief visit while attending a conference at Glasgow. This was my first time both to see "the Uni" and to walk about the old town.

I tried to travel cheaply; the Scots would approve. So I booked a flight on Ryanair from Stansted to Glasgow. The website said the fare would be only one pence each way! But when I actually booked the flight it came to about sixty pounds with taxes and fees. The train through London would have taken eight hours with two connections and cost over a hundred pounds. My main mistake was flying to "Glasgow" which was really "Prestwick" which is really "MacTarmac" in the middle of County Nowhere by the Sea. So I still had to make two train connections, and the trip took about seven hours–mostly just waiting in the airport.
The conference itself was both fun and informative. The papers were all over the place from codicology to literacy, from legal restrictions on the sale of Satanic Verses in South Africa to. . .well my paper about a fifteenth-century poem by King James I of Scotland. . .which I gave in Scotland. . . and, ai, I do know the Scottish slang for "chutzpah," but it’s far too filthy to write in a blog that my mother may read.

Stirling itself is right on a fault line that marks the start of the Highlands. Controlling this pass across the Forth is "the key to the kingdom." The old rock itself is quite intoxicating to watch on a crisp bright day such as we had. The colors on the hills and the cloud shadows are hypnotic. OK, maybe it was the whisky too. Above us was the Wallace monument, below us the bridge and town. The campus buildings are all 60's-70's–love it/hate it–surrounding a small loch. Almost all the sites are connected by one long hallway, a pre-global warming design. The people are all very friendly albeit in a brusque and easily amused way. I’m embarrassed to say that I did find "Lallands" very difficult to understand sometimes. For example, I’m pretty sure that the homily given at St. Aloysius in Glasgow on Sunday was about "repentance" and not about "rape and tuppence."