Incidental tourism
Travel's satisfaction emerges between monuments and tourist sites. A first entry recounting episodes and exploits. This one includes Kelpies and boobs.
Bond Girl Bride and I went to Scotland for a good part of April, and that’s why you haven’t heard from me. We made a big loop, beginning in Edinburgh, west to Glasgow, and then toward the western coast and north to Inverness before heading returning south. It was our plan—no group travel for us—and so the textures of the experience comfortably meandered from milestones of tourism. “We're a bit unconventional in our approach,” I wrote to a friend shortly after we’d returned home. “A bit light on the Official Monuments and Road Markers and heavier on the sidewalks, the experience of getting lost (we managed that, too!), happenstance, what you see in stores, and the camaraderie of travelers in restaurants and in trams. So I do think we drank deeply of some aspects of the place.”
I’ll recount some of the happy byways of our trip in a couple posts in the future, with this one beginning the lot. I came close to calling the series of posts “accidental tourism,” in part to recall the novel and movie from the 1980s.1 “Incidental tourism” seems a better moniker, though, since the experiences of travel are not really accidents. They are incidents that we can live within or oftentimes ignore. Travel itself dislocates us enough to bring such episodes to life, and maybe they can inform regular old life at home, too.
Our trip was bookended by shoes, so that might be a good place to start accounts of incidental tourism.
M&S shoes and underwear
Our hotel window overlooked the neogothic Sir Walter Scott monument and a statue of David Livingstone (he of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”). A hop over the Princes Street Gardens lay Edinburgh’s Old Town. Still a bit bleary-eyed from travel, we trekked Edinburgh’s “Royal Mile” that runs between Edinburgh Castle with the Palace of Holyroodhouse. The mile is heavily ornamented for the sake of tourists, who thronged even in the rain. The next day, we wandered behind the hotel’s façade toward the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century city, where real people live, and managed to find a jeweler whom BGB had wanted to visit. We finished the day at Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
Incidental tourism began the next morning—when the blisters appeared.
BGB’s fashionable knee-high boots had taken a toll, and so we ducked into a Marks & Spencer a block or so from our hotel to get her comfy socks and sensible shoes. While she rummaged through footwear, I decided to look at the linen sportcoats that were in the sidewalk window displays.
That meant Menswear on Third Floor via Second Floor … “Love Your Boobs.”
I wasn’t expecting an entire floor of M&S to be devoted to bras and “knickers,” but there it was.
I rose into the section on the escalator, and by some cunning design of the building’s architect, I had to traverse the entire floor—past row after row of flashy feminine underclothes—to continue my journey to Menswear. Displays in my last steps gave way to panties with large posters of callipygous models of every size. Women bustled through the aisles, searching, no doubt, for the just right balance of modern suspension engineering (“underwire bras” had a sizeable section) and comfort … elusive comfort, it seems. (I haven’t tried a bra on in a while, I admit, so that’s a guess.)
I recalled when Victoria’s Secret catalogues would appear in our mailbox back home. BGB probably looked for comfort—uh, I don’t know—and maybe that special look of a “push-up”; I was motivated to thumb through the pages for other reasons. The same dynamic may not have operated on the Bra & Knickers Floor. Some men, mostly forlorn followers of their partners, wandered through the aisles, no doubt looking for a place to sit down and wait it all out. Men like me, who were wondering about the cut and trim of linen sportcoats, ran the gauntlet to get to the next “up” escalator.
In the end, the linen goods in Menswear confirmed that I’m not an M&S kind of guy. That decided, I went in search of my bride and dove back downstairs.
The search took about thirty minutes, give-or-take, during which time I discovered the M&S grocery market in the basement, which was a treat and a revealing view of how Edinburghians stock their pantries. I’m sure that the Scots pursuing veggies wouldn’t have noticed what I saw, since I had the advantage of contrast and comparison. I knew the sprawl of US grocers, the sizes of the packaging, the stuffed aisles and impossibly varied selections of dog food, toothpaste, salad dressing, detergent. Scots had these products, too, but M&S’s basement grocer invited the more frequently recurring shopper—someone who would visit maybe twice a week or more—and I got the impression that the food was fresher and more local than what we saw in the States.
I found a loft-like place in M&S where I could spy on all of the first floor. There I waited for my bride to come into view.
She eventually appeared with new black shoes and a shopping bag. “I got a really cute pair of pants,” she explained.
We left to continue playing our role as classical tourists.
Gigantic fearsome Kelpies and fancy shoes at dinner
Our last night in Scotland was in Stirling, a short drive from the Edinburgh Airport, where we would drop off our car and head to the gates. That evening we walked the mile-and-a-half to town and ate at Brea Scottish Restaurant, both of us a bit weary of travel and ready to see our animals and sleep in our own bed.
We’d spent part of the day visiting the castle, naturally, but BGB recognized a mammoth sculpture in a brochure we picked up at the tourist information office near the Old Jail. Kelpies.2 I’d never heard of them, but BGB had. The two statues near Falkirk are about a hundred feet tall, towering over the M9 that runs nearby. We hopped in the car and visited them.
The park was well worth the few-minute drive from Stirling to Falkirk, but our incidental tourism happened at dinner at Brea.
A woman at the table next to us leaned nearer. “You went to see the Kelpies today,” she said. “I saw your shoes.” She glanced at BGB’s red and black checkered Chelsea-like boots.
We laughed, and replied that indeed we did spend time with the Kelpies. Then we conversed, having discovered a connection.
I had my order—a very first-time taste of pigeon—and a dark beer brewed near Stirling called “Old Engine Oil.” I recommended it to the gentleman friend of The Lady Who Remembers Shoes. The pigeon breast was intended as an appetizer, so it was small, somewhat gamey (and, I must say, a bit tough and very dark), but our charming server reminded me that “there’s always the dessert menu” to fill in the cracks.
Indeed, there was a dessert menu, and it offered creme brulée!
Detail of the conversation that began with red and black checkered shoes doesn’t stick in my mind but ranged, as informal chats do, to share experiences of the day across our tables. In itself, this was the delight of the incidental moment like so many that we live through as we travel—if we pay attention. The Lady had purple highlights in her hair, and I recalled her photographing the Kelpies earlier in the day.
Travel is always incomplete. You choose what you miss, and sometimes by doing so you land upon matters that you can treasure. Travel treasure, true to form, often appears unexpectedly, between the sites that tourists are assigned to see.
Those moments are the ones you definitely shouldn’t miss.
A note on other writing
Before BGB and I left on our adventure, I took care to send off a chapter of my book project to readers. I wanted to push aside prose concerns and word wrestling. It was great to see some of the responses after we got back, and I’m still pondering them. My gracious “beta readers” come from different backgrounds and are at different stages of life; every one of them is a ravenous reader. A few are writers, too. I am guaranteed a close and critical view, sometimes contradictory, often sharply uttered, though never cross or malicious.
The chapter was the last of my planned bunch, and I’m set again to return to the whole set to push and pull in revision. That’s the next phase, and I look forward to it with a certain excitement and dread. You learn a lot as you write, especially when a project brings you through years as this one has; and returning to the first drafts always means re-evaluating (and re-writing) in light of what you discovered as you moved forward and then penned that last first-drafty period on the last sentence.
So with the voices distilled from the dozen-and-some eyes that have run through my pages, I’ll begin revising.
But it is good to have a draft of a book and honest friends enough to help me through it.
Ever been an incidental tourist?
Tags: travel, tourism, happenstance, shoes, boots, Scotland, Edinburgh, Stirling, breasts, Kelpies
Links, cited and not, some just interesting
This scene sticks in my mind because of the word specialty, pronounced by Muriel (Geena Davis) as spesh-ee-al-i-tee. That drives Macon (William Hurt) nuts. The movie is available on Youtube, I believe. [Scene from] The Accidental Tourist (1988), William Hurt, Geena Davis. YouTube video, 2015.
Maybe a bit much, but, still, this light show must have been impressive: The International Launch of The Kelpies. YouTube video, 2014.
Apparently, it’s a big deal for Marks & Spencer. Note the chronology of bra development on this press release: Marks & Spencer. “M&S Unveils ‘Love Your Boobs’ Art Installation on London’s South Bank,” March 10, 2023. https://corporate.marksandspencer.com/media/press-releases/ms-unveils-love-your-boobs-art-installation-londons-south-bank.
Heralding the end of the Victoria’s Secret mail-order catalogue, a retrospective view. Things have really changed in the past five-to-ten years when it comes to women’s fashion and, especially, lingerie for a lot of market and societal reasons. Lewis, Casey. “Here’s What the Victoria’s Secret Catalog Looked Like 40 Years Ago.” Racked, July 25, 2016. https://www.racked.com/2016/7/25/12119174/victorias-secret-catalog-rip.
Two scientific studies might shed light on why M&S and, presumably, other merchants are willing to offer a wonderland of bras. (This study has scores of authors. It was a biggie!) Swami, Viren, Ulrich S. Tran, David Barron, Reza Afhami, Annie Aimé, Carlos A. Almenara, Nursel Alp Dal, et al. “The Breast Size Satisfaction Survey (BSSS): Breast Size Dissatisfaction and Its Antecedents and Outcomes in Women from 40 Nations.” Body Image 32 (March 2020): 199–217. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bodyim.2020.01.006. Perhaps I could file this under “Barbie” but it fits here, too. A psychological study of what women think of their “girls”: Frederick, David A., Anne Peplau, and Janet Lever. “The Barbie Mystique: Satisfaction with Breast Size and Shape across the Lifespan.” International Journal of Sexual Health 20, no. 3 (2008): 200–211. https://doi.org/10.1080/19317610802240170.
The Accidental Tourist is a 1985 novel by Anne Tyler and a movie that appeared in 1988. The movie is worth watching, and it shows the changes in taste that have come over the decades. It’s a nice title for what I’m interested in doing here, but I think “incidental” is better.
Kelpies are horse-like creatures that live in bodies of water, are able to shift shape (often appearing as beautiful women), and prey upon humans, often children. They lure them, drag them into the water, and devour them. They cast their victims’ entrails to shore. It’s not just a Scottish thing, either, since similar creatures are found in German, Irish, Central American, and Australian folk stories. The Wikipedia page is pretty good.
The Kelpies in Falkirk are impressive. Take a look at the Vimeo time-lapse of the installation. The statues were modeled after Clydesdales, appropriately enough. I have to say that Falkirk seems to be energetically renewing itself.
Callipygous? You definitely went to the well for that one (and me to the dictionary)! I want more pictures (said your simplest of readers and—oh god, I hope—not the sharpest-tongued of your readers.)