Aberdeen

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On a handful of days a year in Aberdeen when the sun comes out after the rain and ten billion crystals of wet quartz and mica in the clean fraction of the granite are allowed to shine you sit there in an ocean of light way brighter than the sea. You squint (you don’t own sunglasses) - you can’t really drive. A giant mirror, shrouded all year, alight. As if a year’s worth in one day - enough to make you think it makes up for the rest of the time, as if you’re even. You are not. ae chiel wi the key wins at the door in coorse, an apens’t, an in they gaed, jist like the jaws o the sea, cairryin minaisters like as muckle wrack alang wi em. I tint sicht o Gushets in a minit, an hed muckle adee to haud o my fit ava. An fan I’m jist at the door cheek, fa sud be dirdit into the neuk fair afore me but Geordie Wobster Change places: Iceland and EEC shocks to fish. Iceland nearly withdrew from NATO in the Cod Wars. Then Aberdeen fishing halved after the EEC quota in 1983. But both of those were ca

Mica glittered from the white stone. Town of the pure crystal, I learnt Latin in your sparkling cage, I loved your brilliant streets. Places that have been good to us we love. The rest we are resigned to. The fishermen hung shining in their yellow among university bells. ― Iain Crichton Smith Once, in Jerusalem, I struck up acquaintance with an intelligent and interesting Syrian... I told him that I was born in Aberdeenshire in Scotland. He was amused and pitiful, though a little hazy. "Aberdeen - it is the pariah place, is it not?" ― Lewis Grassic Gibbon On a handful of days a year in Aberdee

Aberdeen

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