Aberdeen

Amazing how dependant our world is on air travel, so much so that 6 days without it can create unprecedented chaos, and touch so many people. One friend was meant to be the best man in a wedding ceremony, which he obviously missed. A colleague was stranded in Rome and had to take a several day trip, patching together cars and trains to get back to London. Another colleague got stranded in Dubai, whilst changing planes on the way from Tokyo to London. I ended up commuting by train between London, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. Aberdeen is the oil capital of the country. My father was raised in a satellite town 20 kilometres or so out in the countryside to the West of city, and in those days it was a sleepy backwater place, poor by even Scottish standards. Most of the lads my father grew up with planned to work on the land after school. Secondary school was voluntary back then, and my father was the only boy from his year who chose to go. The others didn’t really see the point. No one imagined that oil reserves would be found offshore, but they were in the 1970s, transforming Aberdeen forever.
That said, it is still a fairly bleak place, albeit an expensive one. As I arrived in the evening it was snowing, although it is late April and Spring in London. But then Scotland is known for condensing all four seasons into a day, rather than stretching them over the course of the year as the rest of the planet does. Sure enough, it was sunny for a few hours the next afternoon, although still blisteringly cold. For reasons beyond my comprehension, the entire core of the city was built with granite, giving it a gloomy grey colour to match the sky. But most of my meetings take place on industrial estates outside the city centre. From the outside, these estates look pretty grim, but that hides the activity that takes place on them, and the incredible sums of money being pumped about. Equally surprising is there multi-national character. Over the course of any given day, I find myself talking to Texans, Norwegians and Mexicans. But, unlike in most European cities, the cab drivers are all locally born, and astonished when they discover my local origins. One fellow driving me out to a meeting in Dyce was only two years younger than my father, but had gone to school a couple of towns over. He marvelled at my exotic accent, especially when I told him that my (adoptive) grandfather had been the headmaster of the school in Oldmeldrum. “You sound like a real Australian!” the taxi driver marvelled, and I didn’t bother complicating the story by correcting him. But it turned out that Australia was more on his mind than in my accent- he and his wife had thought of moving out there in the late 50s, during the Australian government’s “bring out a Briton” programme. Passage was apparently only 10 pounds a head in those days, and nearly all who went got land. The taxi drivers eyes got misty, looking out in the distance to the future that never materialized: a ailing father in law, the birth of children, a minor job promotion….and in the end they just never made it out there. “Just think, if I had gone, my grandkids would all sound like you” the driver said with a forced laugh, whilst I thought that if my father had stayed, I would no doubt be speaking proper Doric myself, instead of my bastard hybid tongue. The driver and I sat in silence, I guess each imagining how things could have been, had different decisions been taken half a century ago.