Aberdeen

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.

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?"

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.

• It’s hard north: a bit further up than Moscow. Provincial among provinces; the end of the world. (“We are the last people on earth. There are no lands beyond us.”)
  • I’m from even further north, so the greyness and cold didn’t shock me. But be ready for 3pm dusk in December. I was constantly slightly cold as a lad; I got a lot better at saxophone when I moved south because my fingers got enough blood.
  • Average temperature is 8°C. That’s not that cold! But between the rain, wind, fog, and greyness it feels colder than say Inverness. (It supposedly rains less here than in the rest of Scotland, but 1) it’s still 1/3 of all days, 2) it’s freezing.)
    • In the past, 33°C was a once-per-century event.
  • The entire month of December gets ~45 “sunshine hours”. i.e. one hour of weak direct sunlight a day, or more often clustered, with days on end without any at all.
  • Like San Francisco, the sea fog (the “haar”) is thick, motile, and common. There’s also occasionally huge amounts of sea foam blowing along the streets. Luckily I love fog. About 1/3 of days have some.
  • You’re stunned by colourlessness. The sky is bright grey, the buildings are dark grey, the people are pink-grey (97% white). In the weak light the polluted granite resembles breezeblocks more than crystal. Meades thinks that this stark monochrome outlook explains why Aberdeen has an unusual density of tattoo parlours even for a port. I was so used to the sky being flat white-grey that blue skies still thrill me a little.
  • “75% of those in Primary 6 and 7 didn’t show evidence of low mood”
  • As a romantic teen I wanted to think that the hostile environment fostered fellow-feeling. Everyone here has a shared enemy (the weather), and everyone’s inside. Trapped.
  • Proverb of stern mothers dragging children out into the sleet: “Yir nae gantae melt”
    
    

• North means remote, irrelevant, unstrategic. And so populated by unstrategic people, since strategic ones leave.
  • So no one finds themselves here by accident. I’m from just along the road, Elgin, and fell into the lowest-energy-basin cos they gave me a scholarship on top of the bursary.
  • 5 years here; 4 at uni and 1 in a bookshop. I arrived as a cliche self-built rural intellectual: extreme and eristic, grown into an odd shape for want of sun and live conversation.
  • “the largest village in the world”
  • We’re late to things. Whaling 1800 (vs 1700), art gallery 1880 (Glasgow 1807), electric light 1894 (London 1878), Uber 2024 (London 2012)
  • There are of course nice things about unstrategic people. You don’t have to strain and strive. Watch out for the people who wish they were elsewhere and got stuck, though; they’re worse than the climbers in the south.
    
    

Bleakness, not meanness... is the keynote to Aberdonian character... It is comparable to passing one's existence in a refrigerator... like jail... the uneasy sense that you may not rest here, you may not lounge.

• You get the sense that humans weren’t supposed to live like this. But it’s not a pervasive sense. In happy moments the Scots mindset is proud of itself, of the fraternity offered by being low and irrelevant. As if: “Aye wir shite - but it’s brilliant bein shite.”

• It’s grim but not poor. Per capita GDP is £52k, about the same as Glasgow or Anchorage or Miami; a third higher than UK average.
  • AB15 is the postcode with the most millionaires outside London.
  • During the 2009 financial crisis, Aberdeen was the only UK city beside London to completely avoid recession. It arrived in 2015 instead, when the American shale taps and the OPEC taps opened. Having half of all jobs in one sector (“energy”) means it’s absurdly cyclical, in lagged concert with global oil prices. Population is down 7% in the last ten years.
• • Yes: just after the Scottish independence referendum, the oil price halved. Would have been carnage.
  • Fracking in America was bad news for Aberdeen. The Ukraine war was, selfishly, good news. Global warming is locally good news; the net-zero carbon commitment is bad news, though they’re trying to get on that wagon.

languages have different strengths: Arabic is good for dealing with sand, Eskimo with snow and ice. Scots is good for crushing people.

• North means unmerged: allopatric. Doric is one of the strongest dialects in Britain. My Estonian girlfriend was here for four years and never got to understanding what the bus drivers were saying.
  • The name means ‘primitive’: “Since the Dorians were regarded as uncivilised by the Athenians, “Doric” came to mean “rustic” in English, and was applied particularly to the language of Northumbria and the Lowlands of Scotland and also to the simplest of the three orders in architecture.”
  • The Spartans were Dorians, and so too Victorian England had an interesting way of forgiving Scotland for the ‘45, by racialising Highlanders: “the [Jacobite] rebellions were increasingly understood, not as an act of betrayal, but natural coming from a martial race. In this context, war was the only way Scots knew how to demonstrate their grievances.”
  • It’s dangerous to use any contemporary thing (uncontacted tribes, anemones, remote languages) as evidence of the ancient past but hey Doric is more similar to Middle Scots and so Middle English than any extant dialect (besides Frisian).
  • The words for sex are terrible. “Cowp” “tip” “dip” “rummle” “pummel” “hole” “chug” “ride” “pump”
  • It’s in decline under the usual tv-internet Americanisation. I only ever met one man who spoke like Johnny Gibb in my life: my granda’s brother A’thur

  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

• What’s Aberdeen like? Charitably, Boston (freezing, granite, demotic, hard folk, but wealth). But really Calgary and Stavanger (isolated, no high culture).

Then

Whenever I have occasion to classify the persons I meet into three classes, "good, medium, bad," I use a needle mounted as a pricker, wherewith to prick holes, unseen, in a piece of paper... classifying the girls I passed in streets or elsewhere as attractive, indifferent, or repellent. Of course this was a purely individual estimate, but it was consistent, judging from the conformity of different attempts in the same population. I found London to rank highest for beauty; Aberdeen lowest.

There were many classes of persons whom former generations of fishermen tried to avoid when going to their boats. In some places, cripples were feared. Anybody with red hair or flat feet might bring bad luck if encountered, but this could always be averted if the fisherman spoke first. Why certain proper names should be capable of doing harm is a mystery, but such was the firm conviction of many a Moray Firth fisherman in the past. ‘Ross’ was a name particularly feared... The Cullen fishermen believed that ‘Anderson’ and ‘Duffus’ were dangerous words to mention at sea.

• Because it is north, we don’t know much about the past. The Beakies and Picts and Taexali left no words and not much cargo. What we know we read off the blood they left.
  
  Short version: we presume paleolithic Hamburgians lived among the glaciers and that their traces were ground into nothing by glacial motion. The mesolithic calendar people then presumably smashed the Hamburgians. “Western Hunter-Gatherers” (from Ukraine-Kazakh-Scythia) came and maybe smashed the calendar people. Then the EEFs (farmers from Anatolia via Spain) came and smashed them. The Beakies (steppe herders) came and smashed the EEFs. The Picts (Irish) came and smashed the Beakies. The Romans smashed them and left. Some non-Pict Britons came and smashed them. The Vikings smashed the Britons and left. The Christians (Gaels) smashed them and merged. The Normans (Vikings) smashed them and merged. The lowlanders smashed them and merged. And then the Texans arrived.

[Romans] call robbery... "empire"; they make a wasteland and call it "peace".

• Unlike for Glasgow, I don’t have a unified multi-century theory of Aberdeen. There’s not as much to explain and no single variable to advocate.
  • “Small north-European port” (insular, mercantile, post-post-industrial, grim) maybe captures most of it, plus “oil town” (corporate, young men with more money than sense).
  • There are three thousand places of this size or more on Earth. Could you write a theory for each? Yes.
• You want to explain a place, so you reach for their climate and economy.
  • Everyone-everywhere farmed so it can’t explain anything distinctive, so factor out that industry unless there’s some interesting variations on crops or animals or communal resource management.
  • Like everywhere, the place was ten times smaller 250 years ago. Most of it is less than 100 years old. Can anything before then explain much now? (More than 10% of what it is now?) Maybe, but I despair of weak evidence like historical evidence being in charge of this.

lots of interpolation here, but I have put in the plague of 1646 and WWI

• • The distinctive industries are fish, wool, paper, granite, whaling, shipbuilding, oil. Some whisky tourism. These don’t seem very unique, besides the granite, whisky, and oil. But does anywhere on earth have this exact set or a superset? (Obviously jobs is the wrong measure for economics, but I claim it’s the main thing for culture.)

• The Harbour is the oldest business in Britain. But nothing happens for 250 years after it’s founded in 1136: zero population growth. Then it slowly triples to 10,000 people over 300 years to 1700 and like everywhere then things go nuts.
• Change places. In 1696 they started a bunch of paper mills. Maybe this explains something? Linear development along the rivers rather than concentric. 300 years later Bryson noticed the resulting feeling:

  In vain I sought a single place where I could stand with hands on hips and say 'Aha, so this is Aberdeen'.

• Change places. In 1741 they started working the granite quarries at scale.
  • Granite is the hardest thing humans currently build out of (besides a little decorative quartzite). There was nothing softer around. The city couldn’t exist without spiral rope sawing and later water sawing.
  • About half of the city center is built from the yield of Rubislaw quarry. We made a 140m hole in the ground to make ourselves out of.

• Change places. In 1760 they started building ships at scale (10x fewer than Glasgow and probably 50x less by tonnage).
• James Robertson, an innocent gentleman, accidentally kicked off the continental-scale graverobbing craze by being the first to use bone meal for phosphate fertiliser.
• Change places. Building Union Street for a deluxe political celebration literally bankrupted the city in 1817. The Herring Boom immediately propped them up for the next 50 years, a silver rush.

• 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 caused by overfishing which would have got us anyway.

• Change places. The first north sea oilfield was discovered in 1969; the last granite quarry went to zero in 1971. The last Aberdeen ship was launched in 1990. Paper went to ~zero in 2022. My uncle was one of the last out.

• It seems incredibly lucky that all of these things lined up and didn’t completely destroy the place. The oil was discovered just in time! But maybe I’m just conditioning post-treatment; maybe all successful places have such a “lucky” streak of economic resilience by definition.

• A series of tragic industries. Shipwrecks, power mill accidents, trawler cables, quarry explosions, and more recently gas explosions and helicopter crashes. But I guess that’s also normal.

• After 1745 there weren’t many obvious Catholics in the north east to victimise or get triggered by (<2%). Instead it was piskies vs presbies vs Masons, none of whom figure at all for ordinary Aberdonians.
  • “Dozing quietly is the traditional refuge from Scotch presbyterian eloquence, or to escape to the piskies.”

• I haven’t bothered with the standard idea of Aberdeen as home of misers. I like the idea that this was intentional self-misrepresentation, “most of the material for those tales and fantasies of so-called humour are exported from Aberdeen itself”

• Well? Do we understand Aberdeen now?

Now

…comparable to a country bumpkin who had won the lottery, minus the dopey grin and colossal sense of incredulous gratitude. The prevalent local delusion wasn’t that the town had merely been in the right place at the right time, but that it had somehow done something to deserve this massive good fortune, and not before time, either… Living in Aberdeen had also taught him that as you only got one shot at life, it was way too precious to waste living in Aberdeen.

The fish have largely gone. The oil will not last forever… but they’ll need something. They’ll need something.

• I lived in the cheapest possible places. The old Hector Boece halls had single glazing. The 30W oven would take more than an hour to heat up to 200°. In Tillydrone I was attacked 3 times in 2 years, punched in the face for smiling - in fairness I was wearing a stupid hat - and bottled; it shattered right next to my head - and two teenage girls on something clawed at my glasses and dragged my friend to the ground by her hair.

• On a long walk you’ll see a procession of discarded umbrellas destroyed by the wind. Every year a new set of Chinese students arrive with them, not realising that Aberdeen has a different rule. I actually didn’t use an umbrella until I was 25 years old; there wasn’t any point. (This was also heavily gendered though.)

• The new library is a great addition to the cityscape and also completely unusable: in my time it had a central shaft which echoed coffee grinding noise from the ground floor to the top floor. Also very few books on shelf.

• The seagulls, gigantic and fearless, give the place some anarchy and jeopardy. They’ve been known to stick their heads 20cm inside a just-cracked window to steal food. In May they divebomb you, ‘protecting’ their nests.

• Surprisingly good surfing.

I’ve been harsh and bloodless and reductive about the place, to warn you (what I assume about you). I’ve repeated warnings by professional sneerers (Bryson, Theroux) who did a two-day drive-by and fled after extracting anecdotes for pay, like mosquitoes. But the city was enough for me: anything is a shining city if you’re from the sticks.

For the first time in my life I had people who’d read poetry with me. For the first time in my life I had an actual challenge (understand Debreu, understand Levinas, understand Frege, understand yourself). Aberdeen wasn’t much but it was a scene, a node. I saw Gil Scott-Heron at the Warehouse two months before he died. I saw the Wave Pictures, still the best guitarist I’ve ever seen, at Drummond’s and The Lemon Tree and Drummond’s. I gave them a madeira cake. I saw Jesse Michaels and Mike Park at Drummond’s in an audience of twelve. Chris Clavin played my mate Lori’s living room. I played the Tunnels in an awful band with great lyrics. I heckled Will Self in the senate. The old QM Library had books you’ve never heard of, books GPT wasn’t trained on, that Abebooks has no stock of, that I am probably the only person in 20 years to read. I felt exactly what Crichton Smith (above) felt, coming from the islands. Anything lights tinder this dry.

The best of Aberdeen

As well as producing no political figures of distinction, Aberdeen produced no architect of note in the 20th century, no painters (James McBey talks of the philistinism of Aberdeen and of having to leave the city to get work), and no writers of other than local distinction. Geography made the city a provincial one; its economic development reinforced this isolation, rather than overcoming it.

• Writer: Jenny Turner
  • Aberdeen has form in dominating London writing, as with James Perry’s Morning Chronicle, the brainiest newspaper ever (Ricardo, Dickens, Hazlitt, Mill).
  • So Aberdeen’s best writing is maybe not in books but newspapers. You can look at the full run of the Free Press (1855-1894) here. I’ll get Claude to filter it someday.
  • See also Eric Temple Bell.
    
    
• Poet: Lachlan Mackinnon.
  • There’s a huge black hole between Barbour in 1500 and… ig Charles Murray in 1900. Ossian is fake but good. Annand Taylor is real but bad.
  • Byron hated his time in Aberdeen (no disqualification in an Aberdonian) but that was partly because he was being actively molested at the time.

• Novelist: Grassic Gibbon or William Alexander. Ali Smith passed through.

• Novel: 69 Things to do with a Dead Princess.

• Memoir: The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd
  • but also Somewhere there are people like me. Momus isn’t otherwise mentioned in this post because he really belongs to Edinburgh or Tokyo.

• Blog: not much. There’s Aberdeen Voice

• Art: Joan Eardley spent her last few years here.

• Art music: Bob “Portland Vows” Plant. Polar Bear.

• Popular music: Lockah or Toxik Ephex.

• Philosopher: Alexander Bain made modern philosophy of mind out of severe mess.

• Scientist: Patrick Manson investigated one of the most important questions in all of medicine: how to stop mosquitoes from ruining everything? And thereby founded the field of tropical medicine.

• Living scientist: J. Michael Kosterlitz

• Modernist: Patrick Geddes

• Cosmopolitan: John Boyd Orr

• Radical: Joseph Hume

• Socialist: William M’Combie.

• Eccentric: Alexander Cruden

• Daredevil: Charles Ludwig

• Evildoer: An Aberdeen city baillie, William Fordyce, sold 600 children into American slavery. One of them, “Indian” Peter, managed to make it back and wrote a book accusing him and the magistrates of complicity in the scheme. They had it burned in the mercat and forced him to recant.

• Comedian: Lord Aberdeen

• Director: not really.

• Film: not really. Local Hero was partly filmed at Pennan.

• Screenwriter: Lorna Moon

• Play: not really.

• TV: Off-Kilter

• Videogame: not really. Leslie Benzies made GTA III-V and RDR.

• Actor: William Devlin? Peter Mullan?

• Entrepreneur: Thomas Blake Glover, arms dealer and ancestral founder of Mitsubishi and Kirin.

• Archaeologist: Nora Griffith

• Restaurant: Rishi’s. Best Indian place in the country imho.

• Delicacy: mealie, skirlie, stovies, butteries (dense pastry, half-fat - but only when warm, and not the JG Ross ones).

• Building: 85 Crown Street. The one it’s easy to visit is “Spoons” (The Archibald Simpson)

• Street: Belmont St. Fittie - what’s left of it - is a cause celebre memento of the ‘fash.

• Church: St Machar. Tiny nave, ancient, wooden rafters, filled with song, passed by two thousand heathen students every day, eyes on the ground or each other.

• Architect: Ninian Comper

• Walk: Duthie is ok, or the Brig. Maryculter and Dunottar.

• Library: all bad besides the Central one, which is still small and uncosy.

• Shop: Matthew’s

• Bookshop: Books and Beans

• Venue: The Tunnels are tiny, which gets you right in with the band, which makes e.g. jazz hit different.

• Pub: Prince of Wales
  
  

• Cafe: The Picturehouse is shut now.

See also

• Glasgow
• Bristol
• Taipei
• Prague
• AK’s “Eminent Aberdonians” is very sweet, with not much of the stench of the Commerce Chamber.
• https://doriccolumns.wordpress.com is a work of exhausting and eccentric devotion
• Stanley Robertson, Fish Hooses (1990),
• Gazetteer
• https://www.silvercityvault.org.uk/
• https://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/aberdeen/aberdeen/index.html