simonvarwell.co.uk

Happy World Book Day, everyone.  If, of course, you’re not too busy celebrating St David’s Day in Wales, National Pig Day in the USA or the rather enticing prospect of Iceland’s Beer Day.

As part of World Book Day today, I was privileged to be invited to a local secondary school, Millburn Academy, to do some readings and talks about my book.  I was a little nervous, largely because I’d never spoken to an exclusively younger audience (and it was my first event through the Scottish Book Trust’s Live Literature Fund), and also because I hadn’t done a talk since August last year so I was a mite rusty.

However, I think it all went smoothly and I got some nice feedback, including from one of the janitors who caught me as I was leaving to tell me he was in the middle of the book and was really enjoying it.  Which was nice.

I was delighted to be working alongside Peter Wright, author of Ribbons of Wildness, one of the first real explorations of Scotland’s watershed.  I think we presented a good contrast in approaches to adventure – one silly and global, one more serious and local – and with any luck inspired people to get out themselves and follow the “what if” that lies inside us all.

So a big hello to any staff or pupils from Millburn who might have stumbled their way here after today’s events.  I hope I didn’t bore you too much!

It’s a little scary to think, but my last mullet-related trip was in 2008: a road trip along the west coast of the USA with Justin. You’ll read all about it, of course, in my second book, news of which I hope to have for you soon.

One particular highlight of the trip, which I blogged about soon after returning, was Salvation Mountain. On a hill in the middle of the sorching, desolate Californian desert, one man brought life, colour and love through the creation of a quite incredible place. His name was Leonard Knight and Salvation Mountain was the result of years of work.

I was told by a friend in Los Angeles, Jenny – who you’ll also meet in the sequel – that there was an article about Salvation Mountain in the LA Times the other day. It reports, sadly, that the now elderly Leonard Knight is no longer at the site and is living in a home some distance away. The mountain is, it seems, missing him as the paint is starting to wear. Thankfully friends and supporters are stepping in to do something about it.

I wish them well. It’s a special place that deserves to be protected. If you are ever in that corner of the USA, it’s well worth a significant detour to see it.

I’ve got two trips for this year bubbling away in the planning stage, and they’re both rail-based.

The second one, scheduled for the summer, is the bigger of the two.  Nicole and I will be travelling Europe by train, overlapping with the southern France leg of Niall’s world wonder hunting and taking in a total of six countries.  Though I have to confess those six include Scotland and England plus only a few hours between trains in Switzerland and Germany, so perhaps I’m inflating the epicness just a tad.

While that is certainly going to be an exciting trip, I’m no less looking forward to the first one, which will be an entirely domestic endeavour.  Much as I love having a job that involves travel, it’s not the truly fun sort of travel.  The time and money for big trips abroad (such as the remaining mullets) have been few and far between lately, and my feet have been increasingly itchy.  No matter, though – in a country as diverse and beautiful as Scotland, there are plenty trips to be chiselled out of my own back yard.

This other trip is in fact inspired by those work-related travels, specifically the countless long and often antisocially timed train journeys to Edinburgh that I take, and I mentioned the idea briefly in this post.  I want to try to scratch the surface of the Inverness to Edinburgh route and see a little of the places that I normally just zip through on the three and a half hour trip with just the occasional half-curious glance out of the window.

I plan to stop at every station along the way for at least two or so hours, a basis which presented quite a logistical puzzle given how rarely one or two stations along the way are served – there is only one train a day from Newtonmore to Dalwhinnie, for instance.  As such, the journey, which I’ll be doing later in the spring, will take me nearly a week.

I aim to write up and publish my account of the trip on this website, as a free download, under the working title “The Next Stop”.

Who knows, I might even write up the summer’s European adventure too.  I’ll keep you posted.

Inverness really feels like the middle of the country at times.

Though that’s not far from the truth.  If you were to draw a straight line from the top of Shetland to the bottom of the Scottish mainland, then draw another from the westernmost inhabited part of Scotland (the south end of the Western Isles) to the easternmost part of the mainland (the coast somewhere near Peterhead), then by my crude calculation on Google Maps those lines would cross less than forty miles southeast of Inverness.

Anyway, it’s not just cartographical semantics.  Inverness is also at major cross-roads of the Scottish road and rail networks, and you can easily travel in all four compass directions to discover great places.  Within an hour or two, you have some of the best scenery, and most famous castles, distilleries, lochs, ruins, villages and much more, that Scotland can offer.  We’re very lucky to live here.

This past weekend, we had two really nice walks.  One was north of Inverness, near Evanton, overlooking the rigs of the Cromarty Firth.  The other was to the south, near Boleskin, among the seemingly endless network of roads and paths that criss-cross the south side of Loch Ness; the quieter, less famous, but in my mind more interesting, side.

The weather is slowly warming, but the days are still quite short, the sun still hanging lazily in the sky and casting brooding afternoon light across slowly thawing landscapes.  It’s a good time of year for photographs.

I took a few at the weekend and bunged them on Flickr.  Enjoy.

The first time I met him, it was barely minutes after arriving in the Slovenian coastal resort of Koper.  It was September 2001.

We were fresh off the bus, from Ljubljana if I recall correctly.  While Niall watched the bags I was despatched into town to suss out our intended accommodation options. I must have looked like an English speaker because the stranger addressed me in perfect English and with sincere politeness, asking me if I knew where a cash machine was.  He was casually dressed, of Middle Eastern ethnicity and sported a neat beard.  I’d have put him in his early thirties, and his silent companion around the same age.  I informed them that I was, unfortunately, new in town myself and I had no idea.  We exchanged goodbyes and continued our respective hunts.

We stayed two nights in Koper, I think, after the successs of my mission to check out the hall of residence in our guide book that doubled as a hostel out of term time.  It was either later that day or the next when we met him again, with a different companion, sitting on a park bench.  He had a can of beer in one hand and a mobile phone in the other.  He and I recognised each other and said hello.  We all got talking.

Ishmael, as he introduced himself, was chief engineer on a cargo ship that was docked for a couple of days in Koper, one of the few port towns on Slovenia’s narrow wisp of coastline.  He and his crew were Syrian.  Raising the phone, he explained that he was just about to call his girlfriend back home.  He wasn’t much looking forward to the call, because his girlfriend always gave him grief for being at sea for so long.  The beer, then, was for a bit of Dutch courage.  Though that metaphor may not have been his exact words.

He would work months at a time on the boat, and while he told us he loved travelling the world, he rarely saw more than the insides of a boat and the occasional port.  He wanted to travel properly, to see places.  Like we were doing, I supposed.

We explained we were heading in the general direction of his homeland.  We had no particular route or plan, only that we flew home from Cairo in early December.  We’d heard good things about Syria though – the people, the scenery, the history, the warm welcome – and in our brief conversation on the street, Ishmael thoroughly reinforced that perception.  He encouraged us to visit the country.

We said our goodbyes and parted company again.  He had a call to make; we had… well, whatever we were doing that evening.  Same as most evenings on that trip, I suspect: walking around, taking photos, exploring, maybe finding some food or a quiet beer somewhere among the attractive streets of Koper.

The next day, we met him once more, and we laughed together at the coincidence.  He was coming out of a bar with yet another man, presumably a different colleague.  We talked again, about Ishmael’s boat, the places he’d been, where we’d been and were headed on our trip, and again about Syria.

He wanted to write things down for us, so I handed him my notepad and he scribbled some things as he talked, including a rudimentary map of Syria in relation to its neighbours, with some of the main towns marked.  He told us where the most interesting historical parts were (and there were many).  He wrote the name of his ship, the Wadei’aa, and his own name in Arabic script.  He urged us again to go see his country.

I’ve thought occasionally of Ishmael and his colleagues, not least as Syria has hit the headlines in recent months as the latest theatre in the Arab Spring.  I found my notepad by chance in a box in the attic the other day while looking for something else, and thought of him again.  His quick doodles include names of Syrian towns and cities – Damascus, Aleppo, Homs – that are all too sadly familiar for the violence now raging there.

I wonder how Ishmael is.  I wonder whether he’s been caught up by the revolution breaking out across his country.  I wonder if he’s still at sea.  I wonder if he married his girlfriend.

We never made it to Syria.  Such was the aimless meander of our trip that we dawdled our way through the Balkans (there’s a whole host of other stories to tell from there) and left the Middle East with far too little time.  In any case, we needed to go through Israel, so also visiting Syria would have created too many visa issues.

Who knows whether I’ll ever get to Syria.  I really hope so.  It sounds too good to miss.  And I have recommendations to follow up.

I’ve been zipping about a fair amount this past week.  I’ve been ambling around in Inverness…

…and exploring Glasgow at night.

The Glasgow visit was for an Explosions in the Sky gig on Monday night. It was my third time of seeing them and they were excellent. Beautiful, uplifting, energetic and powerful. The Texan post-rock outfit remain my favourite band right now. It was a great set, though to my mild surprise they didn’t play much of their most recent album, but with such a strong catalogue that was no loss.

The support was in the form of Lanterns on the Lake, a Sigur Ros-like outfit from Newcastle. I’d not heard of them but they were very good, and I’ll definitely be checking them out further.

Then on Wednesday night I was in Edinburgh overnight for work, and took the opportunity of a quiet evening to take some night shots from the top of Calton Hill. Being at a major spot overlooking the capital felt somehow apt on the day that the referendum consultation was launched.

It’s interesting times in Scotland these days.

See the whole upload of this week’s shots here on Flickr.

I spend a lot of time on trains.  Too much, at times.  I’m at the stage where I recognise train conductors, can recite stations along routes my most regular routes, and have often found myself at the whim of the vagaries and foibles of ScotRail.  Mostly, to be fair, ScotRail does a good job, though its staff do let it (and passengers) down terribly at times, for instance by not having a clue how to get places or not checking whether passengers have all fully boarded.

One regular consequence of being on trains is the delays.  Sometimes the weather, technical problems, staffing shortages or whatever else mean that trains can’t run, and I’ve had more than my fair share of replacement buses, freezing cold station platforms, late night replacement taxis and soul-sapping experiences at the life-void that is Perth railway station, which incidentally is home to The Worst Cafe In The World.

I’ve come to be philosophical about delays.  There’s nothing you can do about them, except sit back, try enjoy your journey, and politely complain in writing later.  And if you’re delayed by a certain length of time – as I all too often am – you can get part or all of your ticket reimbursed.  I’ve obviously been unlucky in the past few months because I’ve found myself amassing about a hundred pounds of compensatory rail vouchers.

Much as compensation in the form of rail vouchers is like giving the victim of a botched tooth extraction the chance to have the rest of their healthy teeth extracted for free, I’m too much of a lover of travel to turn down the chance for free trips.  And the vouchers will certainly come in useful.

In a couple of weeks, I’m going to Glasgow overnight to see Explosions in the Sky play – the third time I’ll have seen them live – and I’m very much looking forward to it.  In April, I’ll be attending the joint Scottish and British Esperanto Congress in Edinburgh.  Both will be all the more enjoyable for them costing me nothing in terms of train tickets.

Those trips will still leave plenty vouchers left, which will come in handy for another rail adventure I am planning.  I am not sure when precisely it will be, but it will be this year, certainly.  I want to get under the skin of my very regular Inverness-Edinburgh journey, by finding out more about the places I pass through with often the barest of glances, towns and villages I have mostly never been to.  The plan, therefore, is to travel from home in Inverness to Edinburgh by rail, stopping for a minimum of two hours at every station.  It will take me the best part of a week: though of course that doesn’t account for any delays…

You may have read a wee while back about the Scottish Government’s consultation on rail services in Scotland beyond 2014.

When launched, it made a few headlines because of eye-catching questions like whether alcohol should be banned from trains or whether the sleeper service and daytime cross-border journeys between the north of Scotland and England should continue. Instantly, campaigns began to “save” the sleeper services to the three northern destinations of Aberdeen, Inverness and Fort William – those services to Glasgow and Edinburgh remaining safe because, so the suggestion went, as with most daytime services you could easily change trains in the central belt. Which, of course, is an argument for passengers changing at every station on their journey because it’s seemingly so easy, and trains only ever shunting backwards and forwards between two adjacent stops.

To be fair, it was only a consultation – and that’s the idea of consultations, to generate debate and get people’s views.  But the recent announcement from George Osborne that he wants to put money towards preserving the sleepers (a clever piece of politics to catch out the Scottish Government, to which we can doubtless attribute the input of his right-hand man, the LibDem MP for Inverness, Danny Alexander) clearly shows up the SNP’s poor handling of the issue. And the fact that I admit the Tories have made the SNP look silly on an issue demonstrates my strength of feeling.

But despite only being a consultation, the document gave out poor messages by asking the questions the wrong way round – frequently it ponders whether things are still justifiable, when really the questions should be about what can be done to improve and expand the rail network in Scotland. And as a regular rail traveller in Scotland, boy is there much that can be done.

To give just one example, it asks whether the sleeper from Fort William should run from Oban instead. Instead? Where’s the ambition? Why not both?

But rather than go through the consultation document with an angry toothcomb, here instead are four broad areas that I reckon they should have asked questions about.

1. Reopening old lines

A quick glance at the effects of the Beeching Report shows that a huge number of lines in Scotland were scrapped. Many communities that were dependent on these lines never really recovered economically. Of course, Beeching was not the only time lines were cut, and many lines closed before and, I think, after. By reopening many of these lines, great cultural and economic benefit will be derived.

The Scottish Government gets this to a degree, as can be seen in the long-running efforts to get the Borders line reopened, but why not other ones too? What were the Moray Coast Railway (which forms the spectacular viaducts at Cullen), the Deeside Line and the Invergarry and Fort Augustus line are all spectacularly beautiful and would probably be as famous and as marketable in tourist terms if reopened as our other beautiful and well-known lines like those to Fort William or Kyle of Lochalsh.  Meanwhile, other closed lines such as the Edinburgh suburban line or some of those lost in Glasgow could revolutionise transport in our two biggest cities.

2. Making better use of existing lines

I’ve blogged before about how Inverness could be better served by its lines, while it is astonishing that the cities of Aberdeen and Dundee only have one station each when both, particularly Aberdeen, are crying out for suburban halts to alleviate serious traffic congestion.

By adding stations, upgrading lines and improving services, the existing rail network can work much better, increasing its patronage and economic benefit.

3. Building new lines

There are plenty parts of the country where lines need building, and in most of the cases I can think of it is about connecting to other transport forms. The airport rail links are well-known: the SNP have ditched (or, to be slightly kinder, been forced to ditch by either parliamentary arithmetic or economic conditions) rail links to Glasgow and Edinburgh airports, but Inverness, Dundee and Aberdeen airports (and for that matter Wick airport) are all a hair’s breadth away from railway lines and just small adjustments could connect them to the rail network. This will increase their use, encourage tourism, and benefit the local and national economies.

But let’s not forget other vital interchanges, such as those between ferries and rail.  The southwest of Scotland has many, such as Gourock or Stranraer, but the north does not. Ullapool, for instance, is the ferry port for Stornoway and is only 30 miles from the Kyle line. Imagine getting off the ferry from Stornoway and being able to hop on a train to Inverness, Aberdeen, Glasgow or Edinburgh without having to change from a bus. Or take Scrabster – the main port for sailings to Orkney, just a couple of miles or so outside rail-served Thurso.

I could go on, but I’ll not labour the point: integrated transport, where all the different forms connect seamlessly, is what makes a good economy and provides convenience for both locals and tourists. Other countries do it easily. We, for some reason, fail depressingly. The consultation should address this.

4. Starting HSR from the north

We’ve heard a great deal in the high-speed rail debate about how it is important to extend the UK’s tiny network (currently just London to the channel tunnel) northwards. The UK government plans a line north to Birmingham which, it is proposed, will fork there and go on to Manchester and Leeds. Talk – but no more than that – is of the lines continuing to Glasgow and Edinburgh, but for me that’s the barest minimum acceptable for connecting the big cities of this island.

The high-speed network needs to go further than that and the Scottish Government should be consulting on whether it should start building high-speed rail from the north, and if so from what locations. They say Edinburgh would be just two and a half hours from London by high-speed rail, and so on that logic Aberdeen, Scotland’s third city and Europe’s oil capital, might be about an hour and a half to Edinburgh.  Imagine, therefore, a four hour rail journey from Aberdeen to that great transport hub of London, or – with through trains that stop in London – overnight trips from Scotland to mainland European locations like Brussels, Paris or Amsterdam. This is the sort of vision that the Scottish Government should be inspiring us with.

So there you go – four areas of questioning that the rail consultation should have been exploring, four key areas of potential development for our rail network, and none hopefully particularly difficult to envisage or see the benefits in. That nobody – least of all our government – seems to be talking about them particularly loudly is depressing when connectivity within our country and with the rest of Europe is ever more important.

Of course, there’s the issue of money.  All of the above would be several billions of pounds the Scottish Government simply does not have.  Other spending priorities exist.  But I’m not proposing that all of these are committed to – just perhaps some of then.  A consultation doesn’t need to present fixed ideas (that’s the whole idea, isn’t it?) but to put ideas out for debate and consideration so that priorities can be shaped.

For all the SNP’s admirable talk – and action – of raising Scotland’s aspirations, of imagining the best for our country, they never quite seem to extend this vision to the railways.

But then again, no party does.

Nicole and I celebrated our second wedding anniversary this past weekend (it’s a great fortitude that our anniversaries are on the same day, really).  We’ve set a pattern of taking it in turns to organise a surprise for each other, and last year I took us to Austria.  This year was Nicole’s turn and she chose one of the prettiest parts of Scotland, the dramatic Applecross peninsula.

Before getting there, though, we spent a night in a hotel north of Inverness.  It was lovely, but I’ll keep them anonymous as I’d like to have a dig at one aspect.  In their luxurious lounge were some bookshelves filled with a curious and entirely unrelated collection of books, seemingly acquired in an entirely random way over time.

The oddest were the Usborne Guide to Hamsters (“with internet links”) and a book that looked out of the 1970s and featured Terry Wogan on the cover.  I only wish I’d gone back to my room for my camera.

There was also a 19th century book titled “Why I Am A Christian” written with all the colour, verve and cheer you could imagine emanating from a dour, hardback Victorian-era epistle.  Besides all that, there was, for some inexplicable reason, a large number of novels translated into German, including a Dan Brown I’d never heard of and a science fiction novel or two.  It was quite the oddest collection of books I’ve seen for a long time and perhaps leaves some clues as to the sorts of people who have stayed at the hotel over the years.

When we got to Applecross, we stayed in a beautiful and snug wee cottage for a few nights, enjoying the occasional breaks in the rain to go for walks, drives and expeditions to the (justifiably) famous Applecross Inn.  But the cottage rivalled the hotel for its curious reading material, principally in the form of entries in its guestbook.  Among the numerous glowing comments were some that led me to really fear for this country’s city dwellers.

One guest complained about the steep gradient to the cottage, saying it was “not good for people with disabilities (heart condition)”.  Another objected to the fact that the cottage’s view was of a “farmyard” (when it was actually of a modern house on a croft – a bit of education about the differences between farms and crofts needed there I think); though someone from the same town as that writer thoughtfully though unnecessarily followed up a few comments later with an apology for his brethren.  Someone else complained that their two year old had been caught trying to escape through a skylight.  Another person even thought it fair to criticise a bed in a particularly cosy and snug bedroom for being too small: despite the fact that if the bed had been any bigger the room would have been less of a bedroom and more of a dojo.

Quite how these stupid people survive outside the limits of the city they come from (and why they bother venturing furth) is a mystery to me.  Much as, I imagine, the “countryside” (as everyone except those living there seems to call it) is a mystery to them.  One of the strengths of Inverness as a place to live is that you’re always able to appreciate and understand both rural and urban Scotland.  This beautiful part of the world was barely a couple of hours’ drive from home, and a gorgeous drive at that.

Enough of the rantings. Beyond all that, it was a lovely weekend.  I’d been to Applecross before, but really enjoyed taking the time to relax, explore with the camera, and see a lot more of the peninsula than I had before.  Here are the photos.

If you’ve been in Aberdeen recently, you won’t have escaped the furore over the plans to turn Union Terrace Gardens (right) into a big square.

The idea came from Sir Iain Wood, one of the city’s richest oil industrialists, who has wanted to give £50million of his own money back to the city that helped generate his wealth.

On the face of it, it’s a striking and thoroughly altruistic gesture.  However it’s proved to be a hugely divisive one because the plan involves building over Union Terrace Gardens and raising the ground to the level of the buildings around it.

There are six options, and a consultation has recently been running to gauge public views about them.  I noticed it when I was in Aberdeen on Wednesday, and given that I had a spare hour I decided to pop in to have a look.  I discovered the next day that it closed just a couple of hours after I’d visited, so my being in the area with a little free time was a lucky coincidence.

Let me explain the basic idea of the plans.

The night-time photo above is, I’m afraid, the best one I have on Flickr of the area in question.  To set the scene, Aberdeen was, a little like the Old Town in Edinburgh, a medieval city built on a number of hills.  Later developments such as bridges and new streets effectively raised the city, leaving parts like the Denburn Valley, pictured, a little below the new street level.

If you explore the side streets around Aberdeen city centre you get a real sense of that historic heart  lurking beside (and often below) the city centre’s main artery, Union Street, and such explorations will show you how the city was raised to a higher level (1|2|3).

And this is all, by the way, entirely separate from the beautiful atmosphere of Old Aberdeen proper, lying about twenty minutes’ walk north, the main features of which include Aberdeen University (Scotland’s only medieval campus university, founded in 1495) and the gorgeous St Machar’s Cathedral (left).

Belmont Street, at the heart of Aberdeen’s nightlife and cultural scene, is just out of the big photograph above, running along the other side of the buildings which back onto the left of the picture.  Union Street, the main shopping thoroughfare, is at the far end above the arched bridge.  The three gorgeous Victorian icons of “education, salvation and damnation” are behind where this photo was taken from.  The road and railway run through the centre of the picture, and Union Terrace Gardens are to the right.

You can see from the bridge in the background, plus where the gardens meet the street on the right, the level to which it is proposed the ground is raised.  The road and railway would be covered, but so would Union Terrace Gardens.

There has been substantial opposition to the plans in the city, with protesters claiming that the beauty of the gardens and an important green space at the heart of the city would be lost forever.

I am not convinced I ever had much sympathy for the opponents of the plan.  I never thought that Union Terrace Gardens were particularly well-used or promoted enough, and while they were certainly pretty they seemed to be more of a spot for sleeping rough than enjoying the serenity of a public park.  Having lived in Aberdeen for over five years and still being a regular visitor, I can say that I’ve probably been in the gardens no more than a handful of times, barely for more than a few minutes, and never to spend any prolonged time in.  The lack of footfall through the park is surely in the main due to the lack of sunlight that come from it being at a sunken level.  Yes they are nice gardens but they are just not sunny enough compared to the city’s other lovely public spaces such as Seaton Park or Duthie Park.

Moreover, building over the dual carriageway and railway line will be of great benefit to the aesthetics of the scene, and the idea of connecting Union Terrace (the road to the right of the gardens in the picture), Belmont Street, Union Street and Rosemount Viaduct (behind the photographer’s vantage point) seems quit sensible on paper.

Not that I am unequivocally in favour of the proposed new city gardens, however.

It was with a mixture of lazy ambivalence and only mild curiosity that I ventured into the exhibition to see the six options, and having considered them briefly I am somewhat underwhelmed by them all and unpersuaded that any  would truly add something to the city that couldn’t be done in other ways.  They all represent sledgehammers lining up to crack a nut that nobody can agree requires cracking in the first place.  So that’s my main reason for being concerned about the plans.

Secondly, I passionately believe there are better ways of thanking or cheering up Aberdeen than by giving it a square it’s not sure it wants.  If I had fifty million spare, I’d give it to Aberdeen Football Club.  Nothing would enthuse the city’s overoptimistic football fans, not to mention wider population, more than its perennially underachieving and underfunded football team returning to former glory.

And sadly it is down the highway of massive investment that you achieve things in football these days.  So what better way of using your wealth to restore morale, profile and exposure to the city of Aberdeen than through rebuilding a European-class football team?  Plus, you’d never have to put your hands in your pocket in a city pub for the rest of your life.

But my third reason for being sceptical of the city square plans is that I think they’re picking the wrong spot.

I reckon that the true heart of the city is further east, at the Castlegate – the historic connection between King Street (the road north), Union Street (heading west) and the roads down to the harbour and beach.

Castlegate – so called because it was the site of the city’s castle, destroyed in the Wars of Independence in the 1300s and never rebuilt – is perhaps a tired spot, and no doubt it lost some of its purpose when the city’s trams were removed along with the Castlegate’s role as its interchange.

And incidentally, I think Aberdeen would really suit and benefit from having trams back and it’s a tragedy that Edinburgh has given the mode of transport a bad name.

But anyway.  Surrounded by a mixture of the imposing and the ornate, the medieval and Victorian, and across from the Town House and the magnificent pub designed by and named after Archibald Simpson, Castlegate is an impressive spot and could easily be more so.  The neglect it has experienced over the years could easily be repaired, and if the beautiful Citadel and other buildings fronting the square could be used for a more inclusive civic or cultural purpose then you could have a magnificent setting in the making.

Restoring life to the Castlegate would be much cheaper than trying to create it from scratch over Union Terrace Gardens, more effective, and – as it would draw more obviously upon the city’s historic layout and architectural heritage – significantly more in keeping with the character and soul of the city.

But maybe, just as I found with the exhibition and consultation I browsed round in its final few hours, my not being an Aberdeen resident perhaps negates the validity of my views.

For what they’re worth, though, you’ve just read them.