I Like Birds: Less Birds than Planned

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After a good few hours sleep, we woke up convinced that our hotel-related issues were over, but after discovering the place didn’t have any hot water we quickly changed our mind. The smell of burnt toast greeted us as we headed for breakfast, though even if we wanted toast we needed to queue behind the entire hotel, as there was only one toaster to deal with the entire breakfast order, two slices at a time. The continental breakfast consisted of cereal with sour milk or toast, if you had the patience. Wanting to get our money’s worth, we made use of the tea on offer and downed our cereal, bad milk or not, then once the queue had lessened, Lyndsey patiently sat and made toast for us all. After breakfast, we needed to find the hotel manager to find out where we were being moved to, but he was nowhere to be seen. Once more, our reserves of patience held us together and eventually he turned up, looking slightly dusty. He had been mooching around the boiler room and had finally fixed the hot water, which was really useful just after check out time. Despite his obvious problems that weekend, he was much chirpier and charismatic that day, and so while we waited for John to finish a phone call and pack his bags up, we got into conversation. As suspected, he had now found an unnamed other to blame for yesterday’s booking cock-up, and his conversation was interesting and animated, particularly when we somehow got onto the subject of Scottish politics. This subject enabled him to produce a heartfelt cry of ‘Freedom!’, waving an imaginary sword aloft in an obvious attempt to relieve the hotel’s shortcomings through a decent, though by no means spectacular impression of Braveheart. I guess he has probably done that before, and it might have worked as well if we had been American.

In our search for birds, we were heading out of Edinburgh and into North Berwick, a seaside town only a short train journey away. I was impressed by the psychic ticket machine, which, without prompting, asked if I wanted a ticket to North Berwick, to which I replied yes, paid the money and got tickets within seconds. After a quick search for the platform, which was randomly hiding away in a dark corner of the train station, we were on the train and heading out of the city.

My first impressions of North Berwick were that it was, in many ways, much like an English seaside town. Within seconds of leaving the train, the cry of seagulls told us we were near the sea, and our first sight as we stepped out of the boundaries of the train station was that of a skip filled with rubble and cans of Irn Bru, which at least gave it a Scottish Edge. As we made our way through the town though, there was no evidence of the decay that has blighted much of the coast closer to home. The buildings still maintained a Georgian splendour and the shops were gloriously old fashioned in the way that they sold what they were meant to sell. As we walked up the street, there were sweet shops, trinket shops, butchers, bakers, shops selling lacy doilies and so on. One of the telltale signs that you are in an English seaside town is that all of the shops try to tell you they sell absolutely everything you need, but all end up selling slightly different versions of an inflatable banana. There was none of that here. As seaside towns go, particularly one so close to a major city, it is largely unspoilt by the influx of tourism bought on by the age of transport.

As we reached the beach, we took in the coastline as it curved around, making a fairly wide bay with small islands dotted here and there. The tide was out and the beach was covered in small rock pools and swathes of seaweed. Directly ahead of us, cutting the beach in half, was the Scottish Seabird Centre, where we were heading in search of puffins. As I followed the coast in the other direction, my eyes took in the visually stunning Bass Rock, a steep, cliff edged island sticking out of the water and catching my eye because of how white it was. In comparison to the other islands and cliffs, the whiteness absolutely shone in the late morning sunshine, to the point that it looked as if it didn’t really belong there, a glowing presence on the gentle Scottish coast, like lining up a bunch of average people next to David Hasslehoff and asking them all to smile. We reasoned that the colouring was possibly due to the cliffs being made of chalk, similar to Dover, or possibly that there had been a lot of birds who had left there dinner behind on it. Taking a closer look at the photos afterwards though, you can definitely make out plenty of bright white specks flying off the cliffs, so it is perfectly possible that Bass Rock was simply covered in thousands and thousands of birds, their feathers shimmering in the sunlight.

The Scottish Seabird Centre was nice enough, mostly just a bird-themed shop and a little cafe, but with another room where we could see live cameras of puffins out on the rocks. It sounded nice enough, but we could have probably have stayed at home and watched puffins on our screens, so we headed out to check out the boat tours instead, as out on the open sea and heading into those little islands was the only place we could realistically get up close to them. Despite it being Sunday, before dinnertime and the town not particularly buzzing with crowds, the boat tours were fully booked up for the rest of the day, and though the nice lady in the office took our number and promised to phone in the event of a cancellation, deep down we knew that, in a weekend where plan B had become a necessity, we needed to come up with a plan B. We took the convenience and luxury of a hot chocolate and slice of apple pie in the Seabird Centre cafe while we mulled over our options. The options were limited: we had the choice of walking round the beach to the rocky outcrops in the distance or watch those live puffin cameras in the Seabird Centre. By this point, the sun had belatedly followed us to Scotland, so we opted to comb the beach.

We spent the rest of the afternoon exploring the sand and the rocks, finding seagulls, jellyfish and house bricks in their droves, but the puffins remained elusive. It didn’t entirely matter though; the point of having the theme to get away for the weekend was simply to give us inspiration to get away, not to robotically stick to the script like a McDonalds employee making his first Big Mac. And so, after a few hours meandering around the coast, we headed back to the train station, puffinless but satisfied. As it turned out, we were all pretty tired as well, and so the journey back was quiet as the others gently dozed to the rhythm of the coastal train and I munched on the Edinburgh rock we bought from the sweet shop before we left.

Once back in Edinburgh, we livened up when we realised that a slice of apple pie was all we had eaten, and made it our mission to find the mystical Haggis. To be honest, we didn’t have to look far, where there was food, there was Haggis. Oddly enough, I don’t remember seeing it outside of the tourist areas, giving weight to that old tale that haggis was in fact a Scottish joke on the English, but that didn’t stop me ordering it alongside a pint of Caledonian as we made a rest stop at Deacon Brodie’s once more. Oddly enough, I liked it. Haggis reminds me slightly of minced up lamb with a bunch of spices, then made stodgy and filling by adding some oats, which, strangely enough, is exactly what it is. I’m pretty sure that, at some point in my childhood, somebody told me that Haggis was mashed up pig’s brain that was only eaten by giant people with ginger hair who wore a kilt. With it being the 80’s in my childhood, the idea of Mick Hucknall in a kilt should have put me off for life, but as I approach 30, I find myself more willing to try new things than ever. Apart from sprouts of course, but there is always a green, smelly exception to every rule.

Full on Haggis and a pint, we headed back to the hotel where we could pick up our clothes and make the five minute walk to the Ben Craig, the alternative accommodation found for us by our Braveheart impersonator. It turned out to be a good choice, the rooms were spacious, the water was hot and each room contained four teabags, compared to the three we had back in the Northumberland. Why would you put three teabags in a twin room?

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