once and future kings

“Well, that’s not an Inverness accent,” remarks the man pouring coffee.

I am walking from campus in towards the city. I’ve stumbled into some sort of children’s fair, lured by bright bunting triangles strung about a park and a food truck emblazoned with a Coffee Roasters banner. I am staying in student residence for the week, and there is no coffee maker.

My smile is one of genuine recognition, not deflection. The man is speaking the language of my childhood. His words could be wielded to exclude or to acknowledge, depending on whether I am being spoken about or to. But his gaze is direct and friendly: it seeks to place me, not Other me. He is also holding coffee. So I hold forth: a little blurb on where I am from, what I am doing here. In its own way this is a script of hospitality. I’ve had the same conversations in small towns in Turkey, in Ireland, in North Carolina.

To say “you’re not from here” can carry entirely different power dynamics, true. The sensibilities of my childhood do not carry in the modern cosmopolitan everywhere/nowhere, in which to mark another as an outsider can carry a kernel of threat or ignorance…or at the very least a whiff of commerce, a prelude to somebody selling something.

It turns out the coffee man is not even selling coffee: it’s free, for people at the children’s fair.

I have no children in tow, but he will not let me pay.
***

On my first night in Inverness, my host drove me from the train station to my digs on campus, past road signs incongruously plastered with mythical place names. Culloden. Cawdor. Quite a one-two punch on a single roundabout.

We shall be kings hereafter, I whispered under my breath. And then I laughed at myself.

I know these are actually just roads, not Narnia-like gateways to destiny and tragedy and the misty distant past. But they sound like that to me.

This mythic territory is, most recently, the newly-reinvented landscape of Outlander, with twenty tourist tours available to map a Netflix-altered history and hunger for romantic kilts and castles.

I have avoided the Outlander/Sir Walter Scott version of Highland romanticism and lost cause tourism thus far. I am not out here in a Royal Mile kilt buying Stewart keychains and tea towels. But the idea of a Narnia-like gateway to the old order of the Gaels still thumps something deep in my imagination. Or my gut. I have tried very hard to keep it in check all week.

I know it’s a weird thing to live in a place that other people experience as mythical. I spent my teenage years in puffed sleeves, part of PEI’s Anne of Green Gables tourism-industrial complex. I took pleasure in denuding innocent tourists of their belief that Anne was an historical figure.

One summer, at the main Parks Canada Green Gables house in Cavendish, I played all the characters except Anne on the nightly walks on the red dirt laneways of the Haunted Wood. Marilla’s long skirt and apron as a top layer, Diana Barry’s swiss dot dress underneath, Gilbert’s knickers hiding under the pantaloons. A tour guide would escort throngs of visitors through the woods, with Anne & I popping up to enact vignettes from the story at various points. Scene concluded, we’d race onward, me discarding layers of clothing as I ran. Once I failed to strip down fully and did an entire scene as Gilbert, Anne’s erstwhile boyfriend, with my bright blue Diana bow stuck on the top of my head. Oopsie.

And yet. I may have cut my teeth on disillusioning tourists, but I am an English major for whom Cawdor conjures up all the magic of the Scottish play. And I am a Stewart, a descendent of the Jacobite Stewarts of Appin, defeated at the last battle on British soil. I grew up on Brigadoon.

***

The thing about Scotland is that – as a country – it’s three raccoons in a trench coat, passing as a single coherent entity. Go to the Culloden museum if you have any doubt.

Everybody outside Scotland loves Scotland, foreign and quaint but not too foreign, great collection of accents, progressive, bit of a witchy vibe. Of course, there’s also Trainspotting. And I am in the territory of the Gàidhealtachd, perhaps one of the first cultures to experience the dubious ‘first oppress, then appropriate’ nature of colonial empire: bagpipes, anyone? They were outlawed for forty years, as instruments of war. A piper was put to death. But a hundred years later, Queen Victoria decided she was into them, and now you’d think that the British military and royals – piped in and out of their official events – had fought on the other side of Culloden.

Long united with its more dominant partner in the project of Empire, Scotland left behind its Declaration of Arbroath for Union and – like Canada to the US – gets to be the little sister who shrugs and says “it wasn’t me!”

(I say this all with love, Scotland. Please don’t send me home. They’re very nice raccoons. And a charming tartan trenchcoat.)

Sometimes mundanity is a strange gift, in that it breaks the spell of myth and makes it easier to get your feet under you. I have had a good healthy dose of mundanity this week, living in student halls for the first time in thirty odd years. I have done my shopping, found my favourite puddings at the local TESCO: the rhubarb crumble and the chocolate ganache, both improved with clotted cream. Screw cholesterol. I dealt with a broken heater, and a COVID diagnosis that interrupted some of my travels and interviews with absolutely lovely UHI staff…though we went online so not too much work was lost. I learned many of the staff are less Highlanders than I, by heritage…but they are of this place. The myth of the place is not the work of this school. The work of this school is an antidote to the romanticism that render the Highlands a largely empty tragic past, a place of once and future kings.

It is tempting, as an outsider, to imagine you understand a place. I don’t.

But I understood enough to accept the coffee man’s free coffee, his hospitality, last weekend at the park. Here’s to whatever’s next.