Icelandair marketing 1, James 0

Message to Icelandair management: give someone in your marketing department a pay rise.

You don’t need an expensive advertising agency or a degree in marketing to know that simplicity sells. And when you’re selling a country as breathtakingly beautiful as Iceland as a holiday destination, you don’t need any waffle for advertising copy. Put a picture of Iceland in the newspaper (albeit with some suspect pony-photoshopping, which I am willing to overlook) and a few lines about direct flights from Glasgow and a three night citybreak for £239, and I’m sold. As an American might say “what’s not to like?”

This week: The YelloWing in Glasgow

I’ve a confession to make: I’ve been moonlighting as a roadie. If you provide the Ford Transit, I’ll provide the chirpiness and concentration required for late night driving. Last weekend Glasgow-based writer performer Julia Taudevin and director and dramaturg Amanda Monfrooe (full disclosure: my partner) took their new production of The YelloWing to Edinburgh and Inverness. This highly physical sixty minute solo performance is a contemporary response to turn of the century feminist short story The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and interrogates our pervasive culture of prescription.

Jane is far from home and husband, spending her nights locked in a hotel room with incomprehensible wallpaper. It is as if dry pigment has been pumping through her veins and now she is alone again she remembers how to see. Walls and furniture take back the life they lived when she was a child and she is ready to work again; she wants to work again. But Jane can’t remember how to walk. Or how to talk. Like her mother she only remembers how to sit, and sip tea and taker her pills and wait. Wait to see if it will always be this way.

**** “Astonishing” – The Scotsman
**** “Blazing Life” – The Herald

If you missed the show at the Netherbow in Edinburgh or Eden Court in Inverness, then you have a few more chances to catch the show this week at the Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA). Tickets cost £6.50 (£5.50 concessions) and group ticket discounts are available.

Tuesday 13 – Friday 16, 7.30pm, and Friday 16 at 1.30pm.
Thursday 15 for post show discussion
CCA, 350 Sauchiehall Street , Glasgow
Box Office: 0141 352 4900
http://cca-glasgow.com/home
http://www.mhfestival.com/

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Wondering why the blog has gone silent? It’s because I’ve started a PhD, and I’m a bit busier with that now. A slower rate of activity will resume here at some point.

Ninety-two-hundred-four-hundred

Most British city dwellers will probably recognise the engine note of a black cab. The older ones have a fruity burble, and the more recent blobby looking models have an equally gruff but distinct engine that can also be heard under the bonnet of some commercial trucks and vans.

The sound – the noise of a black cab approaching – is one filed under ‘comfort’ in my aural memory bank. No matter what time of day or night (usually the latter) the sound of a black cab indicates security and warmth. It’s even better when you’re on the inside, burbling away from a cold and wet night on the town. In Sheffield the comforting effect is particularly noticeable, since the engines have to work just that bit harder to get you up the hills that would have certainly taken forty-five minutes had you chosen to walk home instead.

In Belfast, however, it’s different. The black cab drivers there still operate with multiple occupancy on some routes, and unwritten rules about where to hail a cab or who to share with have always eluded me. When I lived there – almost four years ago now – I was much more clued into the surfeit of mini cabs that serve the city.

The two largest cab firms were – I was once reliably informed – the only ones who chose to make payments to those groups who might disrupt their business on both sides of the community lines in the city. Whether or not that is still true, I do not know. I lived in a lively and young neighbourhood that was a balanced mixed of transient protestants, catholics and non-Northern Irish folk who couldn’t understand the difference. Being surrounded by student houses, we were well connected by bus to the city and it was never hard to find a cab into or from town.

One cab firm lodged itself in my memory and my mobile phone. I’ve changed cellphone several times since leaving Belfast but I seem to have successfully transferred my phonebook each time. In Belfast this week for the first of many regular visits, I needed a cab home on just the kind of dark, cold and rainy night for which cabs were invented. I didn’t need to remember the number but it surprised me to scroll down and find it there: saved in a phone that was bought long after I moved from Northern Ireland.

The advantage of this (and many other small firms) over the two dominant companies is that although they have fewer drivers, fewer people call them first. Approaching midnight I had to wait less the five minutes for a cab to arrive outside the busy Cathedral Quarter bar I had been invited along to by a man who recognised me after four years away.

This time, the engine note of the car was not the aural comfort that subconsciously told me I was going home. If the engine of a black cab is the sign of a safe journey home in Sheffield, the illuminated geographical name on the roof of a cab is my Friday night comforter in Belfast. Waiting that short while for my cab to arrive on a bustling street corner, I filtered out the cabs belonging to other companies. I imagine I could have hopped in any one of them, but for some strange reason I stuck to my obscure loyalties. Perhaps because I wanted to know whether they still comforted me. And they do. Along the length of a narrow cobbled street I spotted a nondescript Japanese sedan approaching, its illuminated boards bearing the name of my old neighbourhood that is legible to me even before the letters come into focus.

I chatted to the driver as he pulled me away from the cold night; his car warm in temperature and temperament. I recounted my discovery of the number in my phone, and he established my credentials as an outsider, yet one who might be considered a regular. As visitors often do when in Belfast cabs, we talked about the city, about the nightlife and about the changing scene of the province. My driver referred to recent events, bemoaning the fact that much of the province’s trouble is now being caused by those too young ‘to remember when we didn’t have Tesco, when we didn’t have all this investment’.

Assuredly avoiding the Friday night traffic hot spots, we chatted in very brief syllables about the past, present and future. At some point – far before my destination – he turned off the meter and rounded it down to a very generous fare. As I stepped out of the cab, wishing him a safe night, I considered that not only were cabs much cheaper here than back home; they were also driven by much friendlier people. Not once in five years of living in Sheffield did I talk with a taxi driver.

Passing Places

One of the lasting memories I have of the Isle of Skye is the ubiquity of the English accent. I spoke to more English people on this island in six days than I have in Glasgow in six months. My guidebook warned of a peninsula that was sometimes referred to as ‘Little England’ by native locals, being so full of those southerners who chosen to relocate here in the last twenty years.

I considered this early one morning during our five night stay on the island. A vaguely circular itinerary was taking us around the northern part of Skye, and that morning an hour long ride on a school bus was our only possible form of public transport to make the journey without a longer backtrack through landscapes we had already seen. I had found the bus listed in the island’s timetable, and had checked and re-checked the footnotes to make sure that it was actually running that morning. It was still a relief to see a bus pull up, though. Departing from Dunvegan, in the north-west of Skye, it follows a very leisurely route down the west coast of the island, pulling off the main road on several occasions to follow narrow winding lanes closer to the sea to pick up dejected looking school kids from junctions and driveways. After leaving us at the junction for Carbost (and a fruitless wait for another bus in torrential rain) the schoolbus would head inland and then turn back north towards the High School in Portree. I heard some English accents among the schoolboys and schoolgirls on that bus. I wondered whether their parents had chosen to ‘downshift’ to Skye to escape tedious commutes to and from England’s larger cities, only to commit their offspring to daily journeys of equal length just to get to school.

But what a bus ride. I know that those schoolchildren might disagree, but it’s worth getting up at six-thirty to see (although maybe not every day).

Visiting Skye in late March, we took a big chance on the weather. But then a trip to Skye at any time of the year seems to take a big chance on the weather: the Atlantic is right there; the Western Isles are too small and too tiny to offer any protection. Layer upon layer of clothing beneath a rigourous waterproof outer coat is the only way to maintain your body heat and sanity beneath skies that shift in a matter of minutes.

But when the sun shines, it shines on spectacular scenery. The day before that bus journey we had struck out from Dunvegan towards the relatively remote community on and around the Orbost estate. Not being well experienced or well equipped walkers, we stuck to roads and tracks, rarely being passed by other cars but always receiving a friendly wave when we were. One (a bus driver who had a few days earlier driven us from Sleat to Portree) even offered a lift, presuming that anyone walking at this time of year would appreciate a ride.

Only one day of our visit to Skye was completely lost to rainstorms. But it was also the day we visited the aforementioned Talisker Distillery and found one of the best pubs on the island. Skye supports a year-round tourist industry thanks to its fixed bridge connection to mainland Scotland and busy through traffic for the ferries to the Western Isles. We witnessed several tour buses, including the dreadful looking mini-coaches offering chaperoned backpacker tours of Scotland in 3, 5 or 7 days. But in March we were there on the shoulder between winter and spring, long before the real crowds arrived. During six nights in hostels, only one was in a room with someone else. In Dunvegan a local even professed that we were ‘the first tourists’ of the year and that the lambing season therefore couldn’t be far off.

It was not difficult to escape the English, therefore. We walked miles and breathed deeper than we might normally in Glasgow, and thanks to low off-season prices spent very little for the best part of a week. As a full-stop on a seven month period of unemployment, it was a fitting pause before work begins. More photos here.