Mothership

Being in Edinburgh feels a bit like hanging out in Toronto’s mothership — the place where all the names we see everyday came from (but with much less civilized plumbing). Those early Scotch Scottish settlers in our city probably wanted to be reminded of home, but it’s working in reverse for me. Wandering around the city, there are all these signs that remind me of Toronto — but as you can see, the buildings at right don’t much look like Palmerston or Eglinton — though they are a bit like those townhouses just under Casa Loma at the top of Spadina Road. I’m here working on a [murmur] project — we’re going to set it up in Leith, the waterfront section of town, the place where Trainspotting took place (in fact they do Trainspotting tours of the neighbourhood — so Toronto isn’t the only place to get excited about places were films were made). Tomorrow I’m meeting a fellow who runs a local history site by the Queen Victoria statue. He just recently posted a nice little story about his brief emmigration to Toronto in 1956, where he got homesick and returned to Scotland. In order to make finding him easy tomorrow, he said he’d be wearing “a Canadian fleece jacket with Toronto motif” — it’s interesting how these ties to the mother country go both ways, and figuring what “Toronto” means in other places.

I’ve seen “Stop Climate Chaos” messages everywhere — Al Gore must be having quite an effect over here. This one was on some construction hoarding at the University of Edinburgh. There isn’t much graffiti in the city-centre, as everything is ultra-historic and fairy tale looking — either people have too much respect, or there are stiff penalties for such activity. There are closed circut TV cameras everywhere, perhaps that is the reason there isn’t more. Still, this neat stencil was on some hoarding opposite the climate chaos scrawl. Down in Leith, a somewhat rougher part of town (though experiencing rapid gentrification — it reminds me of Parkdale, but more…Scottish) there is more marking up of stuff, but nothing to compare with the amount of tags around Toronto. A few days later the climate chaos picture had been changed by somebody else. I have never been able to read illegible bubble fonts like this, but if anybody can translate please, do so. Is it a comment on the chaos? An anti-global-warming believer? Some Scottish thing? Until corrected, I’ll assume it’s just dumbass.