I needed a walk in the hills to calm down after all the excitement of the Trump tour this week and the mayhem to come with the start of the Edinburgh Festival.
I headed up from Nine Mile Burn in the Pentlands and came upon the North Esk Reservoir, built in 1850 for the paper-making industry in Penicuik. It’s now used by the local angling club and is a site of special scientific interest for its flora and its geological features. It’s a peaceful spot in a mad world.
It doesn’t get madder than Donald Trump’s golfing “holiday” in Scotland. It was a whirlwind of trade deals, peace-making, off-the-cuff insults and, yes, a few rounds of golf. The expected protests whimpered out and the 6,500 police officers found themselves with little to do. The “security” was obviously successful, if wildly over-the-top. The beaches and sand dunes were defended like it was 1940. The president’s personal jumbo jet was not enough, his armoured car and helicopter were flown across the Atlantic to keep him safe. The security operation has cost the British tax-payers up to £14m, according to the protestors. The police are still adding up the figures.
It was almost comic to watch Sir Keir Starmer and our own First Minister, John Swinney, in their diplomatic dancing with Trump as he patronised them and trampled on their political dreams. The European Union commissioner Ursula von der Leyen managed to keep her head and signed “the biggest trade deal ever” – reducing tariffs from 30 per cent to 15 per cent.
In the midst of all this, Trump got the Israelis to allow aid trucks into Gaza and he gave Putin 10 days to end the bombardment of Ukraine. He also claimed to have stopped war breaking out between Cambodia and Thailand. Not since the Roman times have emperors had such summary power.
In the midst of all this too, John Swinney chose to make a major announcement on Scottish independence. It was rather dwarfed by the surrounding excitements and also by its unsurprising nature. Independence would only come, Mr Swinney said, when a clear majority of the population want it, when the SNP win a majority of the seats in the Scottish parliament and when the UK government will allow a referendum.
In a way he was stating the obvious but it’s a change from the Sturgeon plan to make every election a referendum on independence, which, if the SNP won, would lead to a unilateral declaration of independence. So we are back to a “slowly-slowly” approach.
Meanwhile, we are watching one of our new “freeports” losing its leading company to Japanese investors. Roy MacGregor’s Global Energy has sold the port of Nigg, north of Inverness, to Mitsue a large engineering company specialising in off-shore wind.
Foreign investors are obviously keen to get involved in Scotland’s expanding wind-power industry. Just this week, the government granted permission for one of the world’s largest off-shore wind-farms, Berwick Bank, 23 miles off St Abbs Head. Its 307 turbines will provide twice as much electricity as all of Scotland’s homes need in a year. Environmental groups have opposed the plan because of the threat to sea bird populations. And in a curious alliance, Donald Trump doesn’t like “ugly windmills” anywhere.
In a direct challenge to Trumpism, the Edinburgh International Festival director, the violinist Nicola Benedetti , has chosen as the theme for this year’s festival “The Truth We Seek”. In a world of fake news and social media assertions she says we are losing the discipline to check our facts. In her foreword to the official programme she says: “But it is still the case that, through the arts, we find leaps of imaginative power, helping us to glimpse truth in its poetic, metaphorical wisdom.”
So Edinburgh is bracing itself for the friendly invasion of festival-goers. Throughout August there will be 133 performances in the “official” festival and 3,853 out on the “fringe”, not including the book festival and the film and television festivals. The city bursts at the seams with people and ideas.
Perhaps you can understand my need, sometimes, to get away from it all. Maybe I should join that angling club at North Esk Reservoir.
