Day 76 of the End to End in 2019 had us arriving at Kilmarnock. There’s a joke I once saw in a Guardian obituary:
Name 3 fish beginning and ending in “K”:
Kwik Save Frozen Haddock
Killer Shark
Kilmarnock, a small place (sic) in Scotland.
Hence the title of today’s blog which is also influenced by the best fish and chip shop in these parts, which we have visited more than once. There was also a notice on the ring road that assured us that Kilmarnock was ‘The most improved place in Scotland’.
In general there was a lot more Burns today. Everything he’s ever been associated with has a plaque on it somewhere, it seems. The Burns National Memorial is alongside a group of Almshouses and further up the road there’s one of the farms where he used to work.
In 2020 there’s a lot of debate about who should be remembered and how. Burns was only 37 when he died, but had managed to father 12 children with various women. He is said to have held egalitarian views and didn’t take up the job offer as a book keeper on a Jamaican sugar plantation , partly because he couldn’t afford the fare to Jamaica. He is called the National Bard of Scotland and his work covers a wide range of historical and social subjects, as well as promoting the Scots Language. So suitable for a statue then? Seems so, as there are plenty to be seen in different places he lived or visited or worked in.
I think the statue thing is problematic in many ways, not just because we uncover the ‘warts and all’ stories and worse of the people that have been celebrated by our forebears. History is told by the victors as we known. When the victors fall, which they so often do, then the new victors are bound to want to change the signs of oppression to reflect the new reality. Talk of levelling up becomes ridiculous with statues: we’d just have too many. In the past it was money and influence that bought statues. Who decides now? Maybe we should learn to see all these things as temporary: roads, airports, large civic buildings, can all be renamed any time. Or maybe we need to be more creative in the first place and not use the names of people who for whatever reasons are bound to come crashing down at some point. After all, every language has lots of other possibilities: the Rainbow Building, Larch Avenue, Blue Sky Thinking Airport.
Meanwhile, I’ll celebrate Kilmarnock, that small, improved place in Scotland, with the excellent fish and chips.
From the remembered bible: There’s a time for everything under heaven:
a time to name places and a time to rename them, a time to put up statues, and a time to take them down, a time to write poetry and a time to tear it up, a time to remember and a time to forget, a time to fight and a time for peace.
Timeless God, we know you’ve seen it all.
Enlarge our small minds to see your expanding vision of equality and justice.
May we seize this time and use it to make a difference in our naming and building, our writing and remembering.
JAL: 29.06.2020 in Longdendale