October 17, 2003

So at last I write C-File #95, subtitled "Not My 201 Paper." I don't know about the rest of humanity, but I often do my best work when I really ought to be doing something else, such as giving CPR to a heart attack victim. There's something about knowing I'm not doing what I'm supposed to that just makes it all okay. I suppose that's not cool for the heart attack guy, but for the C-File aficionados, it may turn out to be a good thing, so I suppose it all balances out in the end.

Anyway, I will not tell you where we went next on our initial 10-day expedition across the British Isles, plus Ireland Which is in No Way British. I will say, however, that we headed north of England, across the England-Scotland border, to a place where they eat Scotch food where the Scots live. By this point, you have probably guessed where we went. Northumberland, of course, to see Hadrian's Completely Useless Wall and Ancient Roman Toilet Facilities. Then to Scotland.

I should probably give you some background about Scotland before we go on. Roughly 90% of the kingdom of Scotland consists of a giant tourist store called "The Edinburgh Woollen Mill," judging from the amount of time we spent there as opposed to other places. Located just on the other side of the England-Scotland border, which the author had the extreme pleasure of sleeping right through, the Edinburgh Woollen Mill is trying very hard to eradicate the ignorant tourists' stereotype of Scotland by selling nothing but plaid blankets, golf supplies, and stuffed animals shaped like "The Loch Ness Monster." We were all very happy to oblige, and bought many plaid blankets for our relatives, meaning ourselves.

After we had all bought many plaid blankets at the Edinburgh Woollen Mill and spent more pounds than we had planned to spend in the first three weeks of the trip, we all skipped merrily out to the bus, whereupon we discovered that the bus was locked, and so skipped merrily back into the Edinburgh Woollen Mill. We sat around until Jim, the unusually irritated bus driver, had had enough time to finish his café food, and also to watch "Lawrence of Arabia" several times over on the bus's TV screens.

Finally, we were on the bus. It was a long way to Stirling, Jim informed us, and he didn't want to lose our patience. But he did want us to lose our hearing, so he promptly put in "Mission Impossible 2, or How Many Face Masks Can Tom Cruise Plausibly Be Wearing At Any Given Time?" and set the volume to a level marked "Too High." We yelled at Jim to turn the volume down. This irritated him.

So we just had to wait it out, and in case you haven't figured it out, "MI-2" is not exactly a soft, deep movie with tinkling piano music and gentle conversation. It is an unnaturally loud movie, with explosions and tap-dancing Spanish women and very beautifully shot unlikely action sequences involving motorcycles and random shots of the ocean spray in between body blows. We waited until it was over, and then breathed a huge sigh of relief, and then the video played "The Making of MI-2" followed by "The Making of the Making of MI-2," in which Tom Cruise kept talking about what an awesome movie this was, and how great the characterizations were, and all the time I was contemplating pouring hydrofluoric acid down my ears to end it all, except that I didn't have any hydrofluoric acid, only Vanilla Coke, and it wasn't quite the same.

Finally, the movie went off and he took the DVD out of the player. We all breathed a sigh of relief. Then Dr. Howard put in "Mamma Mia" by ABBA and we all screamed and he turned it down.

After that we arrived at Stirling, a beautiful Scottish city famous for many wonderful historical thingamadoohickies that I was supposed to remember for later. These included a castle (I'm pretty sure there was a castle), a large field where an ancient battle may have taken place, several Burger Kings, and, most important of all, the William Wallace Memorial.

Evidently, before William Wallace died, after securing Scottish freedom until at least the following Thursday, he told his comrade that he wanted a giant memorial to him located somewhere around Stirling, and it had BETTER have at least 80 million stairs in it. So, in accordance with his wishes, the 19th century Scots built the Wallace Memorial, a huge tower composed of nothing but stairs. In order to reach the tower, you must climb a giant hill. The Scots have kindly provided some stairs for you to climb the hill.

Not that I have anything against stairs on an individual basis. I'm just not too fond of them in large groups. Especially when, at the top of said stairs, there is only a lot of wind. The top of the Wallace Memorial had some strong wind. It almost blew several of our less weighty females to their deaths. It was very cool, and the view was nice, but I'm not sure what any of this had to do with William Wallace.

It is now time for some cynical editorialising from Chris Guin on the phenomenon referred to as "Scottish Nationalism." At the bottom of the Wallace Memorial there is possibly the saddest sculpture I have ever in my life seen. It is a sculpture of Wallace, except that it is actually a sculpture of Mel Gibson, who portrayed a character named William Wallace in the American movie "Braveheart." A nearby plaque explained that the sculptor had been depressed by physical ailments, but had been inspired by the movie to live life again, and to sculpt Mel Gibson. It was supposed to be inspiring. I'm pretty sure I wasn't inspired.

I don't know why, but every mention of Scottish Nationalism I encountered was invariably tied up with the movie "Braveheart," as if it never occurred to anybody to care about Scottish Nationalism except for the efforts of an Australian actor starring in an American film. I'm not even sure what it is about being a part of the UK the Scottish don't like. Our tour guide in Edinburgh didn't exactly go into specifics. In fact, everything he mentioned pretty much made it sound like a bad idea. "Yes, we Scots want independence," he said. "True, we have financial freedom, and religious autonomy, and independence in a variety of legal respects including education, and after we joined the United Kingdom we suddenly experienced the Scottish Enlightenment which gave the world Smith's economics and Hume's scepticism, and also our Scottish Parliament is the most laughable excuse for a political power since France's Third, Fourth, and possibly Fifth Republics, and the Parliament building is now approximately 100 million pounds over budget (I am not making this up), and also recently they found cocaine in the Parliament's loo." But hey, the Scots don't want to be part of the only country in Europe left that matters on the world scene. They want to have all the benefits that. uh. Ireland gets. This concludes Chris Guin's cynical editorialising on Scottish Nationalism.

Speaking of Scottish Nationalism, I really owe Amanda Brown an apology. In the last C-File, I implied that she did not do any research on her Holyhead report. I meant to imply, of course, that there is nothing of interest to say about Holyhead, and I did not mean to imply that Amanda Brown is anything but the most awesome, sweet, and generous person in the world, a person who might, as a random example, knit Chris a Welsh scarf soon because she is so sweet and generous and awesome. Did I mention generous?

Anyway, there's still a lot more to go on Scotland, as opposed to the bus ride into Scotland, so these C-Files are going to take a lot longer than I thought. But since I've got literally 27 full hours of biology lectures to listen to over the next few weeks, I'll probably be writing a lot of C-Files. Thanks for reading.