Indulgently, I dined out, and dined well, on three successive days over the weekend. Lovely purvey (as we say in Glasgow). It was a chance to catch up with friends and relatives. The chat was as nourishing as the food. My mother was very fond of a quotation from Alexander Pope:
Here let us feast, and to the feast be join’d
Discourse, the sweeter banquet of the mind;
I’ve been saving it up for any occasion where I might be called upon to say grace. The last time I said grace in a public manner was at a Burns’ Supper in New Zealand, and it was the Selkirk Grace:
Some hae meat an’ canna eat
And some wu’d eat that want it:
But we hae meat, and we can eat
Sae let the Lord be thankit.
Of course I was asked to recite this because I have a Scottish accent, and indeed, since my father was from Ayrshire, I can make a reasonable fist of Mauchline patois. When I lived in New Zealand, Scottish Television’s Glasgow-based police drama Taggart was very popular, and I was occasionally called upon to recite the line:
It wuzznae suicide; it wuzz murdur!
Personally I preferred to recite DCI Taggart’s line, when enquiring after the whereabouts of his boss, Superintendent Jack McVitie:
Where’s the biscuit?
Such it is to be a cultural curiosity. But in fact, to return to the Selkirk Grace, Burns wrote it, at least in the edition on my shelf, in English.
I remember once as a kid dining in Drynoch, Isle of Skye, with the family of a very elderly and some three-time-removed relative (my family genealogy defeats me), who prefaced the meal with a long and, to me, incomprehensible grace in Gaelic, and then after the meal, somewhat mischievously, he tried to put my father on the spot by asking him to “return the blessing”. Without hesitation, deviation, or repetition, my father intoned, “For what we have received, may the Lord make us truly thankful.” This appeared to pass muster.
On Friday I was in Haddington, birthplace of John Knox, and we lunched at the Waterside, overlooking the River Tyne, a stone’s throw from St Mary’s Parish Church, where Knox (in whose company my three-times-removed relative in Skye would have felt perfectly at home) was almost certainly baptised. The food was delicious. The sweeter banquet: we touched on Knox’s The First Blast Against The Monstrous Regimen Of Women, and concluded that Knox, were he around today, would be cancelled. Since, in Edinburgh, the David Hume Tower no longer exists, and the statue of Lord Dundas, who purportedly delayed the abolition of the slave trade, was, at least temporarily, modified by the addition of a plaque, I am surprised that Knox, whose statue resides in St Giles Cathedral, has not been similarly modified and attenuated. I have an idea that the City Fathers are a little afraid of him.
On Saturday evening I was back in my local, the Lion & Unicorn, where the food is always delicious. I was with my cousin from New York, her son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter. The sweeter banquet: we reminisced about my uncle, who emigrated as a teenager from Skye to New York just in time for the Wall Street Crash. I remember driving along Fifth Avenue with him in 1982, in his 1962 Hillman Minx. Yellow cab drivers would lean out of their window and yell disparaging remarks at us.
I last saw my cousin at a wedding in Waxhaw, North Carolina. She and I had gone to a Presbyterian church in Charlotte. I felt right at home there. Of course the folks were very hospitable. So it was nice to return the compliment, and my cousin and I went to Dunblane Cathedral on Sunday morning. Then we all foregathered at my place for tea and coffee; here, the sweeter banquet was a piano recital. Thence to the third of my lunches, at the River House in Stirling. Despite the restaurant being very busy, the service was impeccable, and again, the food delicious. The sweeter banquet: we spoke about hospitality, the theme of the service at Dunblane.
In Dunblane, we had celebrated Holy Communion. More breaking of bread. And the homily, thoughtful as ever, concerned the superabundance of dinners in the Gospels. Jesus dined out a lot. Zacchaeus, I’m coming for dinner tonight! The minister at Dunblane, who has visited some extraordinary locations across the globe, and has lived and worked with many people of all faiths and none, made the point that, in his experience, the best meetings of minds occur over a meal. I wondered what chance there was of representatives of the governments from Jerusalem and Gaza City sitting down together over a bowl of humus, if there is any left in the warehouses. The world as we all know is going to hell in a handcart, and the blanket media coverage of the Middle East might convince you that nothing else across the planet is happening. But one of our party foregathered in the River House is Russian, and she was able to tell me that the war in Ukraine is currently extremely bitter. In the cathedral, the minister had prayed for the people of Maine; apposite, such a prayer coming out of Dunblane, of all places. All violence is local.
The news can be overwhelming, to the extent that one might lose one’s appetite. Maybe I ought not to have embarked on a culinary tour of central Scotland. Then again, I am reminded of a line from the Cold War movie Bridge of Spies. Tom Hanks’ character is a US lawyer called upon to represent a Soviet spy (Mark Rylance) who has been rumbled by the FBI and looks to all intents and purposes to be headed for an appointment with “Old Sparky”. Hanks says to Rylance, “You don’t seem worried.” And Rylance replies, “Would it help?”
Better to put some money in the Christian Aid envelope, and then go out for lunch.
jamescalumcampbell 