theyoda
Scotland
Aberdeen — 2 years ago
Worth visiting!
Nice to visit – but …
Europe’s Oil Capital. Honestly. The first time I heard the expression, I assumed it was a bit of self-deprecatory humour. That was before I learned that there was no such thing as self-deprecatory humour in Aberdeen, particularly when it came to the town’s utterly unfounded conceit of itself. It was a provincial fishing port that had struck it astronomically lucky with the discovery of North Sea oil, and the result was comparable to a country bumpkin who had won the lottery, minus the dopey grin and colossal sense of incredulous gratitude. The prevalent local delusion isn’t that the town had merely been in the right place at the right time, but that it had somehow done something to deserve this massive good fortune, and not before time, either. Nor did the billions ploughed into the area’s economy stop them whining about every penny of Scottish public money that got spent anywhere south of the Stracathro motorway service station.
I don’t imagine the locals had first asked anyone else in the European oil industry whether they concurred before conferring this status upon their home town, but as anyone in marketing will understand the necessity of such misleading promotion in face of the less glamorous truth. ‘Scotland’s Fourth City’ isn’t exactly a winning slogan, especially considering that there is a dizzyingly steep drop-off after the first two, and it still puts Aberdeen behind the ungodly shit-hole that was Dundee.
The also self-conferred nickname ‘Silver City’ is another over-reaching feat of turd-polishing euphemism. It is grey. Everything is grey. There is just no getting away from it. The buildings are all – all – made of granite and the sky is covered in a thick layer of permacloud. It. Is. Grey. If Aberdeen is silver, then shite isn’t brown, it is coppertone. It is grey, as in dull, as in dreary, as in chromatically challenged. It is grey, grey, grey. And the only thing greyer than the city itself is the fucking natives. A couple of quotes to illustrate.
‘An Aberdonian would pick a shilling from a dunghill with his teeth.’ Paul Theroux.
‘There’s nae folk sae fine as them that bide by Don and Dee.’ Lewis Grassic Gibbon.
Apposite as the former might be, it was actually the latter that offers a deeper insight, though not quite in the way the author intended. To understand, you first have to take a wild stab at what part of the globe you thought Grassic Gibbon might hail from. Then having miraculously plucked that one out of the ether, you might begin to develop a picture of a people who either didn’t get around much, or wilfully failed to absorb anything if and when they did. How else could they remain ignorant of the existence of even the most basic foreign customs, such as smiling?
Living in Aberdeen teaches the difference between the parochial and the truly insular. The parochial was defined by a naïve, even innocent ignorance of the world beyond its borders. The truly insular knew fine there was a world outside, they just didnae fuckin’ like it, and had nae fuckin’ need for it!
Living in Aberdeen also teaches that as you only get one shot at life, it is way too precious to waste living in Aberdeen. The inescapable nature of this truth only fully dawns on one when one realizes that life there has become just that: inescapable. It is the kind of place you only go to in the first instance because you assumed you won’t be there for long; you’d bide your time, serve your sentence and get back to civilisation at the first opportunity. But what you hadn’t foreseen was that that opportunity might never come, and in the meantime circumstances could wrap themselves around you like the coils of a snake.
