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Location: Edinburgh
Distance travelled – 27,288 miles/43.915 km

Well, the tour of Fenway was the swan song for my holiday. All too soon it was time to head out to Logan airport and board the British Airways 747 that would whisk us to London in under 6 hours.

And thence to Edinburgh.

Edinburgh is in full Festival mode at the moment, but I haven't really managed to get into it – being more involved with retrieving boxes from storage and trying to sort out things like TV, telephone and internet.

My flat is just off a large park called The Meadows on which is sitting a circus big top:

Here's the street I live on – looking towards the Meadows. My front door is just off the picture to the right – next to the red truck.

It feels very odd to be back in Edinburgh for good. During previous visits, it was always temporary. This time I've had to go and buy supplies for the flat and think seriously about what work I'm looking for. It all seems much more permanent.

Moving back into my flat after almost 7 years has been less weird than I expected. It's been very well cared for and is very clean. Lying on the sofa, watching my new TV, it almost seemed as if I'd never been away. Amsterdam and the last 27,288 miles seem somehow unreal, except that I still find myself muttering away in pidgin Dutch and occasionally cycling on the wrong side of the road.

Reading some of the older entries on this blog, or looking at the (myriad) pictures that didn't get posted (believe me, it could have been a lot worse) brings back many happy memories. Looking further back to Amsterdam is now that little bit harder, which was part of the intention of the holiday. I will miss Amsterdam, there's no doubt about it. Even when I visit, it won't be the same because I won't live there. Things have already happened that I don't know about. Life has moved on for some of my friends (and stopped, tragically, for one of them). But, I'm not feeling as raw as I was. Principally what I'm missing now is the newness – discovering 4 new countries for myself and revisiting the US.

It was one heck of a trip but I'm glad I had the combination of luck that meant I could take it.

Now, does anyone have a vacancy for someone with a bit of a background in computers, who can speak Dutch and teach English? Historic churches a speciality and would be most willing to travel...

Take me out to the ball game

The other day, in passing, I mentioned Fenway Park – the home to the Boston Red Sox baseball team. Since I plan on going back to Boston at some point in the future, I think it's probably wise not to leave it at that. My entire American family are baseball-mad (or, at least, Red Sox mad) so it's more than my life's worth not to post a couple more pictures.

Fenway, built in 1912, is the oldest stadium in the US used for Major League Baseball. In fact, it's the oldest venue of any kind used for professional sports in the US. I took a guided tour with a guide who looked as if he might have been at the ground since it opened, but who was as sharp as a nail and had a wicked sense of humour. Many of his jokes, it must be said, were directed at the New York Yankees, the arch-rivals of the Red Sox. We got stories and facts thrown out at lightning speed, most of which, I'm afraid I've forgotten, but here are a few:

In 1928, a fire behind the third base (on the right of the picture above, next to the little truck that's parked just off the tarpaulin) destroyed a whole section of seating, but there wasn't enough money in the club to do anything about it beyond clearing away the debris. The seating wasn't replaced until 1934, one year after a chap from South Carolina called Tom Yawkey had bought the stadium and club. Yawkey was also responsible for building one of the most distinctive features of Fenway Park, the Green Monster:

When it was installed, the idea of using lights to indicate the number of balls and strikes was leading-edge, but things have stalled a little since then and the score for the game is still manually updated from inside the scoreboard. The far away section showing the current state of play in games in the National League has to be updated from the park and every so often, between innings, a little door will open and a man with a stepladder and a pile of numbers will run along and update things.

In 2003, seating was installed atop the green monster:

This is amongst the most popular seating in the park. Fans can enter a lottery every season for the right to buy up to 4 seats at $168 each!

If you look very closely at this picture, about 15 rows in front of the Ford sign, following the lines of seats down from the “d” you can just make out a red seat. In 1946, Ted Williams, one of the greatest hitters in the history of the game, hit a home run which landed on the head of the occupant of this seat. Appropriately enough, the man in question was a Yankees fan who had fallen asleep and so didn't notice the ball coming towards him. Ironically, he didn't even get to keep the ball as it bounced off his head and someone else grabbed it. Balls that end up in the seating are never retrieved and fans take them home as souvenirs. Sometimes the struggle over who grabbed it first can get quite lively. Anyway, Williams home run was, at 502' (153m), the longest ever scored inside Fenway. For the non-cognoscenti, a home run is a ball which is hit between the lines leading to first and third base and which doesn't touch the ground before clearing the field.

The longest home run ever was, according to our guide, hit by Babe Ruth, another legend of the game. In 1915, Ruth hit the ball right over the Green Monster where it landed on a train. It was found the following day in Grand Central Station, New York!

The press boxes are behind home plate:

Below the press areas and stretching out to the left and right is a row of private boxes. To rent one to watch a game could cost up to $11,000 (for a single game). That said, you'd get some seriously good treatment while you were there and a great view of the game, but that's pretty serious money whichever way you look at it. Another option, cheaper in a way, is to rent it for the season – say 80 games. That option only costs $250,000 per season, but the minimum rental is 10 seasons. However, if you have $2½ million burning a hole in your pocket, you can have a lot of fun over the next ten years and I can guarantee that you'll have lots of very good friends...

In 1919, the then owner, Harry Frazee, sold Babe Ruth and 15 other players to fund a production of “No, no, Nanette” on Broadway. Ruth was sold to the Yankees – simply rubbing salt into the wound from the point of view of the Red Sox fans. Well, the show was a failure and the Sox didn't win a single World Series from then until 2004, giving rise to the Legend of the Bambino. The fact that the Sox beat the Yankees for the American League title only made the victory all the sweeter.

Fenway Park has sold out every home game since 2003 - a record in Major League Baseball. Now, the games may be sold out, but there are always some tickets available – some are kept for sale on game day and others are returned by fans unable to use them. Which is how two of my cousins and I ended up watching the Sox playing the Los Angeles Angels.

One of the first things we noticed was the great view of downtown:

But we weren't there to look at the cityscape. The ground comes alive when it's full of people:

And the atmosphere changes as night falls

The title of the post comes from a song which is traditionally sung during the seventh innings stretch. A game of baseball normally lasts for 9 innings (an innings being a cycle where each team has a turn at fielding and batting). Between the two halves of the seventh innings, there is a pause to allow the fans to stand up and stretch their legs. The words of the song are shown on the message board.

A specifically Fenway tradition is that during the eighth innings, they sing Sweet Caroline.
Well, the evening ended well from a Boston point of view:

Here you can see the final 0 being put in place for Los Angeles. Since they had already won, the Red Sox didn't need to play any further, so this is the final score – 6-0 to the home team Yay! Go Red Sox!

If you look closely you can see that the Sox scored 4 runs in the fourth innings. All of those came from a single ball – when a batter hits a home run, not only does he get to run round the bases unopposed, thereby scoring a run, but any of his team-mates who are on a base already also get to complete their run. In this case, we had players on all three bases (the bases were “loaded”) and so we scored 4 runs. This is called a grand slam and it's quite rare – I was lucky to witness it. There was much rejoicing in the ground when it happened.

Well, all good things must come to an end, and now it was time to wend my weary way home. Of course, several tens of thousands of other fans were also wending their ways home. And many of those ways seemed to involved Kenmore Square T station (the “T” is the Boston metro system). It was, shall we say, a little crowded, but everyone was in a good mood and the police made sure everything was safe – holding people above ground until the platforms were clear – and the MBTA, who run the T, made sure there were plenty of trains.

A mystery solved

Remember this:

from Kaikoura? Well, a friend of mine in Greymouth (on the West Coast, a little south of Westport) has solved the mystery. It is the remains of the open hearth and chimney of a house that would have once stood on the spot. Probably a whaler's house.

So, thanks and kudos to David.

Historic Boston

In 1625, a slightly-jaded Anglican minister by the name of William Blaxton arrived in what is now Boston and set up shop as a hermit. At the time, Boston was almost an island - connected to the mainland only by a narrow isthmus across the marshy coastal area.

Four years later, his peace was disturbed by a shipload of English Puritans who'd crossed the Atlantic looking for religious freedom. Freedom, you understand, for themselves, not for anyone else. It didn't do to be anything but Puritan in those days, and a pretty good Puritan at that. You could end up in the stocks for falling asleep in church and the gallows were kept busy with more serious offences, such as being a Quaker. The stocks and gallows were set up on common land. The land is still referred to as the Boston Common, and is the oldest public park in the US. Bostonians have the right to graze their sheep on the Common, though I haven't noticed anyone exercising this right.

In the large group of trees in the middle of that picture, is a playground. The gallows, apparently occupied the same site, and there are those who will swear that not all the screams you hear there today are from excited children.

In time, the little seaport grew into a fully-fledged colony. Bays were filled in to create more land out of the coastal marshes and new wharves and warehouses were built. Soon, Boston was an important colonial town. Trade with the United Kingdom brought wealth to the merchants of the town. The sailors brought their own particular culture and the various “services” they expected were all to be found.

By any standards, Boston has a fair amount of history, and by American standards, it's positively ancient. To celebrate this, the Freedom Trail was developed – a walking tour of the most important historical sites in the city, many of them directly connected to the American Independence movement. The trail is marked by a red line that runs from Boston Common across the river to Bunker Hill. As well as the option simply to walk along the trail, it's possible to take a guided walk, which is what I did. The guides don period costume, which must be quite a trial in the warm weather which is typical of a Boston summer.

Here's a shot of the State House, the first stop on the trail, that I took one evening:

I can't be the only person who's cursed the existence of that tree. Moving to one side, you get a bit more of the actual State House:

In that second picture, you can also see the red line (you'll have to take my word for it that it's red) that denotes the Freedom Trail running up the middle of the path towards the steps. The dome was originally covered in shingles, before being clad in beaten copper by one Paul Revere, of whom more later. Apparently nobody knew that copper turns green when exposed to the elements, so the dome was later covered in 23 carat gold. It is re-gilded every 30 years or so, the last time being in 1997 at a cost of $300,000. People of Massachusetts, this is how they're spending your tax dollars!

Directly beneath the dome is the State Senate House:

As I mentioned elsewhere, the New State House is pretty old, but its predecessor is still there too:

As one of the most important towns in the American colonies, Boston saw more than its fair share of revolutionaries and revolutionary behaviour. The Declaration of Independence was first read from that balcony, for example. Apparently, the crowd were so exercised by the spirit of the Declaration that they went on the rampage, destroying property belonging to known royalists. The originals of the lion and unicorn which you can see on the gable were torn down and burnt.

The Freedom Trail passes Park Street Church on the corner of the Common before reaching the Granary Burial Ground where three of the signatories to the Declaration of Independence are buried – John Hancock, Samuel Adams and Robert Treat Paine.

Samuel Adams had several goes at making a career, but ended up in the family brewing business. There is still a popular local ale called “Sam Adams” but it is merely another company cashing in on the name. Apparently, the beer brewed in the Adams Brewery was pretty unpleasant, whereas I can personally attest that modern Sam Adams Ale is perfectly drinkable. Now, I want to make it clear that I was only tasting it for research purposes and, although I could tell that it was a fine ale, I didn't enjoy the experience at all. Just so we're clear.

Paul Revere is also buried in the Granary Burial Ground. As well as being a metalsmith, he was active in fomenting the uprising that became the American Revolution:

Down the hill, we pass the Old South Meeting House. The building was constructed as a place of worship by the Puritans in 1729 but it has always done service for general public meetings. It was here that the rebels (curiously, called “patriots” by the guide throughout the tour...) met to discuss their grievances with the colonial authorities. In particular, there was much unrest at a series of taxes and duties imposed on the colonies. These were all quickly reversed, except for the tax on tea. This led to the famous “Boston Tea Party” where a shipload of the British East India Company's tea was thrown into the harbour. Now, I know that it's popular to criticise American tea-making abilities, but, honestly, making tea with cold, salty water...?

In March 1770, the so-called Boston Massacre took place. A mob surrounded a small group of British soldiers and began taunting them. The soldiers had been given orders not to shoot and, at first, they didn't. To help stir thing up, the rioters began ringing church bells, a signal normally associated with fires. The people spilled out of their houses in alarm (remember, much of the town was constructed of wood), shouting “fire”. Of course, the inevitable happened, and one of the soldiers began to shoot. In the ensuing chaos, 5 people lost their lives. They, too, are buried in the Granary Burial Ground

The soldiers were put on trial for murder but were found guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter. Now, 5 deaths may be highly regrettable, but hardly qualify as a massacre and certainly not by the standards of the day. Nevertheless, it suited the revolutionaries' purposes to overstate their case. It was Paul Revere (him again!) who first used the term in one of his speeches.

As well as their memorial in the Granary Burial Ground, the dead are commemorated by the circle of cobblestones in front of the Old State House which lies on the spot where the shootings occurred.

Leaving revolutionary fervour for a moment, a, slightly earlier, stop on the Trail is the King's Chapel. In the late seventeenth century, the Church of England wanted to establish an Anglican congregation in the Massachusetts colony. The problem was that the area was still very much a Puritan stronghold and, having crossed the Atlantic to escape Anglicanism, they were very loathe to give the fledgling congregation anywhere to build their church. In the end, the Anglicans simply took part of the Puritan burial ground which was considered public land. You can guess at the Puritan's reaction, but the established church effectively wielded Royal power. The new church was opened in 1689.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, the church was in a poor state of repair and was, in any case, too small for the congregation. Reluctant to risk demolishing their existing building in case the Puritans took the land back, the congregation had a new, stone church constructed around the outside of the existing building. When the stone building was almost complete, the wooden structure was dismantled and removed.

The interior is still largely as it was in 1754.

Box pews could be rented for 54 shillings per year (roughly $650/£421/€512 today). For visitors and those unable to afford the pew rent, free seating was available in the gallery. The pulpit from the original church remained and is now the oldest pulpit still in use in the US.


In addition to the church at ground and balcony level, there is also a crypt beneath the floor where wealthy church members could be buried. This practice continued until the mid nineteenth century when it was banned by the city authorities who feared that it could lead to the spread of cholera. The tombs were bricked up at that point, and remain that way today. There are 21 in all, including this one, the strangers tomb which was a place to bury the poor, the unknown and the abandoned.

The whole crypt is now a rather ragtag sort of place; the tombs are around the edge with the central area used for storage, coffee making, heating boilers and so on.

Upstairs is the organ. Kings Chapel was the first church in America to install an organ (in 1713) and they're now on their sixth. The case is a replica of the case of an organ installed in 1756 and some of the mouldings are actually from the 1756 case.

The wooden front is a replica of the original organ. To the left of the organ was an area reserved for condemned prisoners who would stand here to listen to one last sermon before being led out to the gallows on the Common.

Upstairs again, is the bell. The original plans for the church included a steeple, and the materials to build it were purchased. Unfortunately, the budget didn't stretch to paying the labour costs, so it was never constructed beyond the rather squat stone structure you can see today. The original bell was cast in London in 1772 but it cracked in 1814 and was replaced by one cast by Paul Revere (remember him?) who put in a deliberately low bid in order to win the contract.

If you look very closely, you can just see the words “Boston 1816”. Round the other side it says “Revere and Sons”.

Down the hill from the King's Chapel, and not far from the Old State House is Faneuil Hall – a market and meeting place, constructed in 1742:

The land was donated by Peter Faneuil expressly to build a market hall. Sadly, he died very soon after the building was finished, and the first public meeting there was actually his funeral. When the hall was built, it was on the shore line – in fact the building was on stilts in the coastal marsh. High tides might wash underneath it. Everything that stands behind it now is on reclaimed land.

Now, in passing, you may have heard mention of a chap called Paul Revere (who?). He was born in 1735 and played a crucial role in the American independence movement. He lived from 1770 to 1800 in this house – the oldest wooden house still standing in Boston:

In particular Paul Revere is remembered for his “midnight ride”. In April 1775, the rebel strongholds were in Concord and Lexington to the north-west of Boston:

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On April 18, the British soldiers who were camped in Boston set off to attack the rebel headquarters in Lexington and their armoury in Concord. In those days, there was much less land and much more sea about than there is now. Revere set off across the Charles River while another messenger, William Dawes, was sent via the isthmus connecting Boston to the mainland to the south-west. The land route was longer, but horses were quicker than boats. Revere arrived in Charlestown on the opposite bank of the river where he collected a horse and began his famous ride.

In fact, though, news had already reached Charlestown of the British mobilisation. Previously, Revere had made arrangements with the sexton of the Old North Church in Boston to hang signal lanterns in the steeple – one lantern if the soldiers left by road and two if they left across the water.

The Old North Church is still there and is another stop on the Freedom Trail:

The interior is similar to the Kings Chapel, with box pews and a wineglass pulpit:


Downstairs, as at Kings Chapel, there is a crypt with a number of tombs around the outside, also bricked up in accordance with the same city decree. They even have a strangers' tomb:

The window at the front of the right aisle of the church was bricked up for many years – you can see in the second of the two pictures above that it's still bricked up on the outside. Hanging in front of it is a lantern as a reminder of the rôle that the church played in the revolution. The story goes that it wasn't just the rebels in Charlestown who saw the signal lights – the patrolling British soldiers did too and came to investigate. The sexton, Robert Newman, hurried down the stairs when he heard the banging on the church door, ran down the aisle and threw himself out the window to escape. As the recorded keeper of the church keys, Newman was arrested and questioned, but he'd had the good sense to throw away the keys and, when searches of his house failed to find them, he was released for lack of evidence.

On the outside, the window is still visible - above the black, wooden door:

The church's part in the revolution is recorded on a plaque half way up the tower:

The Freedom Trail continues across the river to Charlestown and to the oldest commissioned warship in the world still afloat, the USS Constitution, but the guided tour ended here and I was too tired to walk over.

On the way back into town, I stopped at a memorial to much more recent history:

This is the New England Holocaust Memorial. There are 6 glass columns inscribed with the numbers tattooed on the arms of the victims of the Nazi Holocaust – not just the Jews, but also gypsies, homosexuals and those considered mentally defective. Within each of the columns, smoke drifts from gratings in the floor - a sobering reminder of the fate of so many. The columns also have quotations on them from survivors of the atrocity:

It's hard to read them on the photographs, but this was one of the most poignant for me:

Ilse, a childhood friend of mine once found a raspberry in the camp and carried it in her pocket all day to present to me that night on a leaf.

Imagine a world in which your entire possession is one raspberry and you give it to your friend.

It seems to remind us that even amidst the horror of the Sobibor Concentration Camp, there could still be simple acts of human kindness.

Not wanting to end on such a sombre note, here's something more positive:

This is part of the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway – a mile long ribbon of park. When I first visited Boston, there was an ugly two-level elevated highway which, like the Embarcadero in San Francisco, carried the interstate highway through the city. In the most expensive public works project in US history ($15 billion) the highway was buried under the city and this park was created where it had been. That seems to me to be progress.

Looking Down on Boston

Having family here, I have visited Boston several times, but it's many years since I was last here in summer. It was odd to see the Common without snow on it, or to see the lake in the Public Garden unfrozen. It was odd not to be wearing a ski-jacket.

My aunt and uncle now live up in New Hampshire, but have a small apartment in Boston for when they need to stay in the city. It's in a tower block right in the middle of the city centre, and has some impressive views. When I first arrived, it was dark, but Boston, like many cities, looks good even in the dark:

Looking down from the buliding in the daylight, the green spire in this picture (just below and to the left of the centre) is on the Old South Meeting House. Boston is like this - colonial-era buildings surrounded by medium rise buildings from the 19^th and 20^th centuries with genuine skyscrapers towering over them all.

Boston stands on the Charles River - we're looking upstream in this picture:

The building with the gold dome is the New State House. “New”, here, is a relative term – the building is over 200 years old, but it's newer than the “Old” State House. To the right of the river, is Cambridge.

Looking west from my aunt and uncle's building:

the large, green area is Boston Common in the foreground with the Boston Public Garden behind it. The wider of the two avenues of trees leading away from the Public Garden is Commonwealth Avenue - Massachusetts is a commonwealth, not a state. The cross streets of Commonwealth Avenue are, handily, in alphabetical order so you have Arlington Street, Berkeley Street, Clarendon Street, and so on. This seems to me to give the navigational convenience of 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc, Streets but while still retaining some character.

In the upper left are two towers - the larger is the John Hancock Tower and the other is the Prudential Tower where there is an observation deck near the top. Which is where I headed on the first day I was in town. The deck is very well done, with an audio guide at each window to tell you what you're looking at, as well as some historical notes.

This is looking back to the downtown area:

The green space in the middle is the combination of the Common and the Public Garden with the gold dome of the State House to their left. The white spire just above the middle of the Common is Park Street Church.

Boston is home to the Church of Jesus Christ Scientist – the Scientologists. They have a seriously large campus almost beneath the Prudential Tower:

The original church is the little grey building to the right of the pond. The, much larger, domed extension was added later. The squarer building in front of the church is the headquarters of the Church's Publishing Branch.

The building with the green roof behind the Scientology Plaza is the Boston Symphony Hall. Apparently the name “Beethoven” is inscribed above the stage – the only musician that the entire design committee felt deserved the honour.

Looking to the north-west, we have The Fens - originally a boggy area until it was drained. During World War II, a co-operative garden was established on the Fens which is still in operation. Although these “victory” gardens were widespread at the time of the war, the one in Boston is one of very few still in use as a public fruit and vegetable garden.

A more significant aspect of the Fens to everyone in Boston, and pretty much everyone in New England, is that they lent their name to the next green space over:

Fenway Park is one of the oldest baseball parks in America and has the status of shrine to millions of Boston Red Sox fans. The first game was played in 1912 against the New York Highlanders which the Red Sox won 7-6. The Highlanders, now renamed the New York Yankees, are still the biggest rivals to the Sox with little love lost between the two teams or their fans.

Boston is home to 52 institutions of higher education with around 230,000 students between them. Harvard University is the oldest in the United States, for example, and this:

the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, is one of the most respected universities in the world. Technically, though, both Harvard and MIT are in Cambridge, not Boston, being on the other side of the Charles River.

Right next to the Prudential Tower is Copley Square. My aunt and uncle used to live a couple of blocks from here, so it's an area I know reasonably well:

The square itself is the small green patch in the middle. The tall black-glass tower is the John Hancock tower. John Hancock was one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence. On this side of the square is the Boston Public Library – the oldest public lending library in the US.

Once back on the ground, I walked round to the square for a closer look.

The church on the far side is the Episcopalian Trinity Church:

And turning round, we have the Public Library again:

The entrance to the library is impressive; it's hard to imagine what effect it must have had on people when it first opened at the end of the 19^th century. This is the main stair:

By now, though, it was time to walk back into town.