The Busy High Street

Wm. Kurelek again to soothe our nerves.

Yesterday was another day of staring at the screen, asking people for statements and resisting conspiracy theories. Here's one: China covered up a deadly virus to the extent of allowing citizens from the worst-hit area to continue flying all over the world, thus infecting people in other parts of Asia, Europe and America. The resulting pandemic killed over 170, 000 people, and forced Western economies to shut down. Christian churches, including the Catholic Church, suspended public worship.

Oh, sorry. That one actually happened.

But there were some relatively tranquil times yesterday. In the morning, I rushed out in my bathrobe to take the newspaper pages off the bean seedings. Then later in the morning I addressed an envelope to my girl student and walked to the new High Street (British for the principal shopping street of an area) to the post office. Although not exactly warm, it was another lovely, sunny, blue-skied day. 

I was shocked by the crowds, which weren't actually crowds, as everyone was more-or-less six feet apart. There were just a lot of people around, which I see now makes me nervous. There was a Romany beggar sitting on one side of the road, and a blonde beggar sitting on the other side. There was a long queue outside the chemist's shop and another long queue outside the bank. There was no queue outside the five-and-dime that houses the post office, I was happy to see. 

The homeless aren't bound by the lockdown rules, but all the same I was surprised to see the Romany beggar, despite Romany beggars being a part of contemporary Edinburgh life. Perhaps it was just too normal a sight for the perilous times. The blonde beggar and the long queue for the bank made me feel worried and sad; I wondered if she was a newly unemployed waitress and if the people outside the bank were there to beg for clemency on missed payments. 

On the way home, I was tempted to pop into Tesco for a falafel sandwich. I love the fancy falafel sandwiches with their crunchy veg and tangy sauce. However, I decided it was not worth risking the Vile Germ yet again, so I went straight home. 

In the late afternoon I took a break and popped out dandelions for half an hour. B.A. had gone out in a green boiler suit earlier and dug up some himself. I am not sure what his method was; from the looks of it, he attacked just the bigger, more obvious ones instead of minutely searching the grass, square foot by square foot. That took him rather far, which was a nice morale booster for me. I now predict that the dandelions will be gone from the lawn by the end of the week.

The neighbours further along the street were out. One of the best thing about our humble street is that the residents, no matter how impoverished, have a long strip of garden. The two-storey buildings were built for local workers by the local government circa 1930 when the Scottish poor still had many children. It was a manufacturing district, and must have been very noisy, but the buildings were well-built and the gardens generous: some philanthropic notions were clearly at play. 

Beginning in the 1980s, the local council began to sell the apartments to their occupants. Eventually the occupants sold them on at a profit or rented them out. I'm not sure if the Council still owns any of them; whoever owns the Moppet's part of the building is certainly neglectful. 

The gardens are separated by low hedges or wooden fences in good or bad repair, and it is easy to see right across them down the street. Three or four gardens over a tent has been erected in the lawn, and I spotted a boy near it, dressed in a purple velvet cloak and yet still staring down at the phone in his hand. 

After work, I went outside to grub again. The Moppet's mother sat on her stairs and chatted to someone sitting in the garden and coughing shallowly. She coughed; the pal coughed; I noticed the wind blowing in my direction. Cough, cough, cough. 

"Smoker's cough," suggested B.A. when I told him. 

Coconut aubergine curry for supper, rubbish telly, and becoming irritated by stupid opinions on Twitter. I suspect I will have to limit any reading of Catholic News and Opinion to Monday to Friday, 10 AM to 6 PM, for otherwise I will go insane. B.A. reads Catholic News and Opinions obsessively, too, and came in to tell me yesterday about Diane Montagna's tweet about Mayor Gabriele Gallina sicking the cops on a priest while he said Mass. I was working on something else, and thinking about another story--which my editor, of course, already knew about and had assigned to someone else--gave me an instant headache. 

Another conspiracy theory that is true: there are Catholics who tweet their hatred of anything beautiful or traditional just to make other Catholics upset. At least, that is the only reason I can think of for this message by a private high school religion teacher calling himself a "theologian."  

Okay: new resolution. No more internet reading before 10 AM or after 6 PM. I will force myself back to my language studies and also read some actual books. 

VERGOGNA

Sorry, but I must share my rage. All the English-speaking world must know what a petty despot an otherwise completely unimportant and irrelevant minor Italian mayor named Gabriele Gallina is.

To make a long story short because I'm working, a priest was saying a live-streamed in Soncino, Lombardy. There are six people assisting. Another six people turn up out of the blue. They are grieving. Family has died. They want the consolation of the Mass. They're wearing masks. They maintain social-distancing. As you can hear from the echo, it's a big church.

Anyway, word gets around and the mayor--Gabriele Gallina, make him internationally famous--sends police over to disrupt the Mass. To disrupt the Mass. IN ITALY.  Full story at La Nuova Bussola. Just chuck it through Google translate.

I am no longer going to use any insult but "Gabriele Gallina" for the rest of the day. "Oh, he's such a Gabriele Gallina." "Some people defend Vidkun Quisling, but I think he was a total Gabriele Gallina." "Those people at Marquette who bragged that their graduates are helping out at Planned Parenthood--and I still have the screenshot--are absolutely Gabriele Gallinas. They are simply Gallina."

A Sunday Walk

Butterfly

Returning to our pre-Lenten diet may have been a mistake. I feel very tired. Yesterday I had the sense not to drink coffee in the afternoon, though.

B.A. came into the sitting-room, where I was with my morning coffee, to tell me that there had been frost in the night. I was terrified for my beans and rushed out with pop bottle cloches that I had cut too short. Fortunately the beans looked okay. There was frost on the lawn, but not on the trug. Possibly I am too invested in the survival of six broad beans.

Closest look at the butterfly

Then I wrote a letter to my writing student to explain what
she needs to work on, in case that was not clear from the red scribbles on her submission. I also went through the draft again to mark in black everything that was particularly good. Then I was haunted that I hadn't done this for her brother. I am going crazy worrying about seedlings and the psyches of two children.

At 10:55 AM I dragged myself away to get ready for Mass. I set up two chairs in front of the sofa table, found Warrington on my computer, put on a dress, and filled up the incense defuser. The homily was fiery about lockdown conditions, and B.A. repeated told the screen that this would all pass until he realised the homilist's rhetorical strategy.

Country path.

Leftover spaghetti bolognese for lunch, and then we went for a walk to the countryside. I had a headache and indigestion, but indigestion is not a symptom of the Vile Germ, so I didn't worry. However, after we had walked though a few fields and reached the next settlement, I vetoed walking to a copse. I was simply too tired and sick. So we turned around and took an even more scenic path home. Halfway there, B.A. also felt tired, so he sat on a grassy knoll and I lay in the sun with my Panama hat over my face. This I enjoyed. It was not a warm day, but it was certainly sunny. The sky was clear and bright blue. Apparently dogs came along and showed an interest in my hair, which presumably they took for a beast of some kind.

Rocky wall & the Pentlands

B.A. stopped off at Tesco to get a Sunday newspaper for my beans, but I went straight home to lie down. I took my computer and read an unintentionally funny article in the Harvard Review against homeschooling. The central arguments were that  90% of homeschoolers are conservative Christians (the horror) and that it is bad for children to be in their parents' clutches 24/7. The illustration showed a child locked up in a house of books (including the hated Bible) as other children played outside, which homeschooling Twitter users found risible.

As this is the first time in centuries that schools are closed all over the world and most children in America are being homeschooled, it seems like an odd-time for the Harvard Review to publish an anti-homeschooling piece. Perhaps it's to warn parents who have newly developed a taste for directing their children's education not to get any ideas.

One thing I am reasonably sure about schools is that children pick up the ethos of the one they're in during the most impressionable part of their lives and then it is hard for them to lose it. (This can take curious forms.) Meanwhile when my family in Quebec discerned that their children were being treated like Anglo-Saxon Uber Untermenschen they had the children out of that school and into another in a minute de la Ville de New York. Not all parents have the choice of a different school, though.

B.A. returned with the Observer, and I read its left-wing point of view with some interest. I skipped the Trump-hate in favour of the Boris-hate and Royal-hate. My goodness. Also hated: lifting restrictions on the quarantine, except for children in Spain, and lying about the neighbours to police to settle old scores. Loved: ratting on the neighbours for not following the social-distancing guidelines. I was vaguely reminded of the cult of Pavlik Morozov--here he is.

Pentlands again.

I had a telephonic Italian class, which I cancelled. B.A. jokingly called me a slug-a-bed, which did not go down well, especially as under my Observer reading, I was worrying about the dandelions.  When the sun went down, I put pages of the Observer over the beans.

Flowering tree.

We had duck legs (which had been on special) for supper and watched some rubbish telly before I,   cross-eyed with exhaustion, called my mother on Skype.

One cheerful thing: a Glaswegian acquaintance of long ago wrote asking if my short story manuscript had been published, as he wanted something to read. My manuscript (from 2015) was rejected so many times, I had given up on it. But I sent it off to the Glaswegian and a friend-fan in America, too, who accepted it happily. So that was gratifying.

Gardening of two kinds

Victory-over-Virus Garden

Blah! Only five hours sleep last night and I awoke with a headache. Naturally I thought at once of the Vile Germ and did some deep breathing while I could. After an hour of chasing the sandman, I got up and made a cup of coffee. I hope this cures my headache and meanwhile 1) no more afternoon coffee and 2) no more editing student stories at midnight.

Yesterday morning B.A. and I went to Tesco and carried home our last bags of compose for the trug. It was truly sad how we failed to keep sums in our heads as we argued about whether or not we had 420 L. B.A. thought we didn't, and I thought we did. When we lined up our collection of sacks on the grass, we discovered we had only 400 L. B.A. won that one, but I decided we should go ahead and fill the trug with what we had. We can put on 20 L of fresh compost in the autumn.

It was not a difficult operation. I emptied the sacks into the trug, and B.A. whacked at it with a gardening fork. Then B.A. went inside, spent from his exertions, and I planted my broad bean seedlings, cardboard tubes and all. After brunch, I returned to fuss over them, which meant draping butterfly netting over flowerpots stuck in the corners.

The lady downstairs was so entranced by the trug, she asked if she could come over and look at it. We had a nice conversation, moving apart when we realised we were breaking the social-distancing rule.

Although it was not warm--and tonight I am definitely putting newspapers over the beans--it was sunny, and I kept warm by grubbing up the dandelions. It is now a race between me and the dandelion blossoms. Apparently dandelions can go into the composter until they blossom, and this is a serious issue now that the Council is not picking up garden refuse. At the moment, our state-funded brown bin--which has a 240 L capacity--is half full, mostly of young dandelions.

I pulled out dandelions in the sun for two hours, and eventually B.A. came out with a garden chair, the Spectator and a cup of tea. It wasn't warm enough for sitting, so he soon went back inside. He returned with a load of laundry to hang, redeeming himself in the eyes of any judgemental neighbours who might have contrasted his repose with my labour.

Speaking of neighbours, I've seen mine more often in the past month than I had in a year. This is presumably because I've been out in the garden every day, but I suspect the neighbours are out in theirs more often, too. The Moppet's mother came out in a fluffy pink bathrobe to sit in her garden, and Sandy comes out periodically to smoke a cigarette. I've even seen our neighbour on the other side, whom we have never met and B.A. has still never seen. I've always assumed he is an airline steward or has some other peripatetic profession, as there is almost never any noise coming from his flat.

At 3:30 PM I went in for a cup of coffee and to work on my student's short story. My student, having formed the impression that proper stories are over 3,000 words long, half-killed herself turning out a 3,800+ long adventure tale. After hearing she needed to edit it, she was daunted--and no wonder. Editing is a lot of work, and it's very painful when it's your own story and cutting parts out feels like jabbing a fork into your leg.

Photo by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net)

I haven't taught children since I was twenty-one. For three years I taught writing skills to mature students at a community college, for two I taught essay-writing to my fellow students at theology school, and before my full-time gig I made $40 an hour editing doctoral theses in theology. I also proofread the scholarly work of Polish pals, all over 21 and smart and mature enough to do graduate degrees in a foreign language. Therefore, I find it very hard to read a piece of writing and not red-ink everything I think is wrong with it. I would feel I was not doing my job. So what if she's twelve? Gordon Korman wrote his first book when he was twelve.

Well, I'm joking about the book stuff. I was haunted by Gordon-Korman-wrote-his-first-book-at-twelve from the ages of seven to thirty-seven. It's too much pressure for a child to put on herself, especially when she thinks stories are dropped into the author's mind from above. It never occurred to me to sit down and consciously examine G.K.'s books to see how he did it.

There is nothing like going through a child's story to think about the relationship between imagination and structure. Imagination is a like a privet hedge free to grow all over the place. Structure is the shape of the hedge. Editing is like topiary, turning what could be a boring bush into something that will grab the audience's attention from beginning to end.

Editing also is the difference between Real Life and Art. Real Life, lived minute by minute, is mostly mundane and not of much interest to strangers. Art, however, takes interesting episodes or images from life and sets them in an unobtrusive narrative frame.

When writing stories, it is fun to begin at a beginning and to write until the end. Serial stories for newspapers certainly have to be written that way. Perhaps the first drafts of many scripts are written that way. However, films aren't shot that way. They are shot scene by scene, edited, and stuck together. They are transformed from a written daydream pleasant for the dreamer into something magical for thousands or millions of viewers.

But as I mentioned, editing one's own story, or having one's own story edited, is painful. It is hard to remember that a piece of writing is not really an extension of our very selves. When I bake a pie, I am perfectly capable of discerning that it could be flakier or less sweet or do with a bit of cinnamon without going into fits of depression. I just decide to try again. When I make pierogi dough, and a Polish pal looks critically at the lump and tells me it needs more kneading, I don't fall into a sulk. I believe she knows what she's talking about, as she has been making pierogi dough since she was seven, like her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother before her. Why, then, do writers go insane over editing?

Of course, there are terrible editors out there. Some people just cannot hear the difference between good phrases and bad, between educated speech and regional solecisms, or between fresh metaphors and clunking cliches. Being edited by someone like that is torture. However, some editors are excellent landscape artists, as it were, and turn a slightly off-kilter privet squirrel into a glorious green beast.

I hope I have shaped my student's privet squirrel into a glorious green beast, for between writing remarks all over her submitted draft and inserting my suggestions into a new draft, I spent seven hours on it. This is not because she isn't bright but because she is. If I didn't think she had the talent and drive to become the next Georgette Heyer (who published her first book at 19) or Rosemary Sutcliff, I wouldn't bother.

"What did you do during the Great Pandemic?"

Hello from our tiny corner of the international quarantine to yours. I am trying to image what my readers are doing and what their little corners look like.

My parents have a big house and two small gardens, but the temperature keeps them in the one and out of the other. I imagine its the same for my paterfamilias brother, who is probably doing all his karate exercises and beating the stuffing out of his heavy bag in the cellar. My other siblings who, like us, live in small apartments, go for runs. They're all working from home. I'm working from home. Five out of five siblings are still employed, thank heavens.

What will you say when your grandchildren or great-nephews and -nieces ask "What did you do during the Great Pandemic?"

I will say, "Well, I was in Britain, and everyone was very concerned about food all at once. So first I collected as many tins as seemed fair, and then I started growing vegetables. I had never been interesting in gardening before, but after 10 years in a gardening-mad nation, I gave it a try."

"Would it not have made more sense, Auntie, to have become a virologist and helped to find a cure?"

"That is a very clever thought, and I hope you will study and train for such a useful career."

Anyway, an insightful doctor in Milan said that we should not dream about when this time is over but  truly experience and learn from it, so I shall return from the future and talk about yesterday.

Yesterday I went to work after we returned from Tesco with our sacks of compost, but like St. Martha Konfederacja a viable option and will my majority-American readership care? Which of my assigned stories should I do first? Why should traditionalist Catholics take an interest in St. Faustina?

My beanie babies.

I was distracted by many cares. How to send my homeschooled students their corrected stories, and how to correct their stories without giving them a deep distaste for story-writing? How much stick to give Poland's "Law and Justice" party for kicking the anti-eugenic bill into the long grass or "Parliamentary freezer", as the Poles call it? Is there a party more likely than PiS to pass the bill? Is

Soon I had a raging headache, which was worrisome as that is a symptom of the Vile Germ. However, I comforted myself that this felt like a work headache, but made sure B.A. wore his mask when he went to see a priest for confession. Mad props to the local parish priest for hearing confessions, by the way. When all this is over, the faithful will most definitely remember which priests took the risk, and which priests didn't. Anyway, I took two ibuprofen, stopped trying to do everything at once, and my headache cleared.

Our most complicated project ever.

After a productive day (three articles and an update on the Polish parliamentary situation), I collected B.A. and rushed outside to finish building the Vegetable Trug. B.A. did most of it; I mostly held pieces of wood still while he screwed them together. Then I screwed the west end of the trough to the frame, and I suddenly remembered being 20 or so, watching my idol of the time building a medieval  hoisting device in the attic of a Victorian-era college building.

B.A. and the trug.

As B.A. tightened the bolts, I rushed off to Tesco to get another bag of compost. I wore my mask for the first time and discovered that breathing through a thick fabric mask is not that simple. There was only a very short queue outside Tesco, and there was still compost, hooray. Today we will get the last of what we need--if there is any left, of course.

Depending on how long the quarantine lasts, or how long the pandemic lasts, really, we are more and more likely to become a generation that doesn't take supplies for granted. I suspect we will demand more from our holidays, which will be fewer but longer, more expensive, and in smaller planes. I sincerely hope there will be a resurgence in local manufacturing, but I've gone on about that before.

It was Easter Friday, so B.A. grilled up two delicious Scottish steaks delivered by the butcher on Monday, and he served them with brussel sprouts. I love brussel sprouts, so I will attempt to grow them for our Christmas supper. This is assuming we'll still be in quarantine at Christmas. If so, we will be glad of our homegrown vegetables, to say nothing of the two big jars of blackcurrant vodka steeping away in the sideboard.

Then I was too lazy to commit to a show, so we read the internet, and I talked to my parents on Skype. They had gone on one of their wild and adventurous drives to post mail and admired the local daffodils.

Compost Victory in Sight

Yesterday was a much better day, for I kept off the sugar and pressed on with work, cranking out four articles and passing along an additional quote to be added to a previously published one. Also, our Veg Trug arrived, both weeks later and weeks earlier than I expected. Beautifully designed in the West, it was shoddily manufactured in China, but B.A. wielded the wood glue, and all will be well. By the time it falls apart, the quarantine will be over and I can hire a lovely local to make me a proper raised bed out of good British oak.

After B.A. and I had built as much of the Veg Trug as we could without the gluing part, I went to Tesco in search of compost. All soil and compost had disappeared the day before, so I was not too hopeful. However, to my joy there was a full pallet of Miracle Grow All-Purpose compost, so I put it in my Ikea bag and lugged it home. 

This morning B.A. and I went back to Tesco with two Ikea bags before the NHS-and-Elderly Hour and each carried a 40 L bag of compost home. I feel that this is a great victory over the Vile Germ, the suspension of our civil liberties, and a car-centred society.  Only 140 L to go!

I also amused myself, yesterday evening and this morning, by conversing on Twitter with a gay Muslim You-Clap-For-Me-Now fan in Qatar and a White Nationalist from who-knows-where. I'm quite pleased that I didn't ask the Qatar chap how he treats his mother's maid and that I haven't pointed out to the White Nationalist lady  that the biggest enemy to ethnic homogeneity in European nations is the birth control pill. The first reply would have been cheap and the second  probably pointless, as White Nationalist lady might fervently agree with me and want to know how many children I have. 

The Qatari was slightly amazed I'm talking to the White Nationalist at all, but I'm always intrigued by people who stick by incredibly unpopular views. What lies beneath them? Do they have coherent arguments or just strong emotion caused by--what?  

(I do draw the line, however, at her idea that Canada and the USA have been "white countries." Not only have there been black people in North America since 1619, there have always been millions of First Nations people. Meanwhile, it seems inevitable that Latin America will spread upward into the USA, and if I were American, I would learn Spanish and get with the historical program.) 

I'm also glad I looked up the biography of Baroness Warsi before publicly suggesting she has more privilege in her little finger than the drunken young Scot who told me and a Polish shopkeeper to speak English. In fact, Baroness Warsi clearly worked hard to get where she is now, so mad props to Baroness Warsi. Meanwhile, the Polish shop has gone out of business, weep weep, so the shopkeeper may be as much a victim of history as the Scot.

Right-o. I was going to give up politics on my blog for the duration of the lockdown, and now look. The pull of ethnic politics is just too strong for me; I blame my elementary school's International Nights and Italy's World Cup victory in 1982.  

In gardening news, I also bought a strawberry plant, and it is sitting happily out-of-doors. And if all goes well, the Veg Trug will be finished today and filled with compost tomorrow. I will be able to plant my precious broad bean babies in it, a much richer environment than the old raised bed the radishes and lettuce are growing so slowly in.

Update: It did not end well with the Irish White Nationalist. He (turns out it was a he) She seems to lack intellectual integrity. But although pointing out that a vast number of disparate peoples fall under the category "white," I forbore from observing that at certain times in history, some unpleasant white people have regarded the Irish as subhuman. Of course, she could have replied that as she is dedicated to "White Togetherness", she objects to any European ethnic group labelling another subhuman. But ultimately she has decided that I have dismissed the apparent sufferings of white children in London, so no more interesting conversation.

Update 2: Actually we chatted some more, so I think it has ended pretty well.  

Choosing to Love

Despite the good weather, yesterday was a bad day for me. This was in part because I greedily ate Easter milk chocolate, which almost inevitably led to sugar-triggered depression, and part because of an aggressive viral video called "You Clap for Me Now."

The message of the video is that there are many Britons of Colour and non-British migrants working on the "frontlines" of the coronavirus crisis--in hospitals, as deliverymen, as shopkeepers, as farm labourers--and that on Thursdays, when Britons quarantined at home clap for the NHS, "you clap for me now." This would be innocuous, except that the message takes the form of a rather bad self-aggrandising poem, everyone who recites a line or two of it stares stone-faced at the camera, and the implication is that before the coronavirus clapping, Britons-in-general were a pack of nativist, racist, foreigner-bashing yahoos.   

To put this in perspective, Britons-in-general have been locked up in their homes for three weeks, many of their civil liberties suspended/criminalised, bored, grieving, frightened of illness, food shortages, the economy collapsing and, thanks to yesterday's headlines, the loss of two million jobs. Nevertheless, on Thursdays at 8 PM, those in this terrified country who enjoy mass demonstrations cheer and clap from their windows for the National Health Service (not the deliverymen, shopkeepers, and farm labourers, by the way). 

Sadly, it looks as though people who very much resent Brexit, which was first and foremost a rebellion against a continental European power, have used the simple-hearted demonstration as a stick to beat the vast majority of Britons whose grandparents were born in Britain. And this makes me absolutely furious. This is the worst time for an American-style conversation about race. 

There are, of course, people who absolutely love this video and the excuse to wallow in their resentment of the British. Among the Twitter traffic was the whine of a Dutch (Dutch!) NHS worker that someone had told her to go home while she was speaking in Dutch on her phone. There was no indication that this had happened to her more than once. There was also no indication that she was aware that public mobile phone calls in any language are one of the irritants of life, but I digress. 

I have lived as a foreigner in the UK for almost eleven years, and I can count the number of unpleasant remarks made at me for being foreign on one hand. (I don't include "So where are you from?" as unpleasant or unusual, as Torontonians ask each other that all the time, usually meaning "Where before Toronto?" or "Where did your ancestors come from?") The unpleasant remarks have almost always arisen from a misperception that I am Polish, and they have mostly come from a class of Scots euphemistically called the Socially Excluded. 

If I liked, I could wallow in my fear and resentment of the Socially Excluded, people who made my first years of reliance on the Rough Bus so alarming. However, the lives of the Socially Excluded seem pretty hellish, so I'd feel rather low sneering at them as a hobby or as a very ineffective way of making myself feel better. When I dutifully reported anti-Polish remarks directed to me (and then at a real Pole, who intervened) at a foundation that records this sort of thing, I ignored their request to call the police. 

That reminds me that the one amusing thing about the race-baiting "You Clap For Me Now" is that there are are least two or three Poles in it, roughly the number of Polish characters I have seen on British television in 11 years. British television vastly over-represents some minority groups, but very much under-represents Poles. But I digress again. Or do I? It triggers the thought that "You Clap For Me Now" is as much rooted in reality as an episode of "The Stranger."

The way to stop being angry at such videos, I suspect, is to stop watching them and (as B.A. begged) put them out of my head. They are just as unrepresentative of reality as any other entertainment/propaganda recorded in Britain. Yesterday, I was horrified thinking that the NHS might be full of people secretly harbouring racial resentment against the vast majority of their vulnerable patients. Heaven knows, deeply racist sexist violence against poor white British girls (another misery experienced by the Socially Excluded) definitely exists. However, today I've decided that a racially resentful NHS is very unlikely--or at least very unlikely in Edinburgh. There being no real way of knowing, the way forward is to assume from my experience of life in Scotland that this is untrue. 

I can just carry on living in Scotland, among my few fellow foreigners and the vast majority who are Scots, as happily as I can under the circumstances.