Vagabonde

The Filmhouse's season on French director Agnes Varda featured a particularly haunting moody film I had last seen 20 years before on Channel 4. Conversion to big screen intensity gave a terrific edge to that shaky feeling when you relive in full a distant memory. Vagabonde (also billed as Sans Toit Ni Loi, without roof or law) is about a young woman fleeing from all bonds with the society around her, and the emotional impact she makes before and by her death in a farm ditch. Compare watching it when the film was new and the story felt recent, to revisiting it now after so long, when the perspective is now even more moving, that the world has moved on without this character who it gave no place to and is oblivious to the dimmed trace that she ever lived. Just like life has been for how many millions of real folks who deserved better?

As nothing much has shifted in economic life, the story has not lost its contemporariness, save for the thought that it is about someone who lived before blogs. We are not told how serious is what Mona has run away from, only that she has chosen this aimless rural wandering, with just a backpack and a tent as possessions, over being a shorthand secretary. That is what makes her enigmatic, to the film characters she encounters. Can we who are not making the same choice, make sense of it? and of what our answer says about freedom and society? Mona finds nothing of value that lasts, in her journey, yet there are any number of reasons why she may be right to have fled from oppressive life options, that even knowing her fate we can't say she should have stuck with them.

She liberates for a moment a housebound old lady who is stuck having games of family respectability played around her. They get drunk together. But as for when chances arise for Mona to attach her life to those of any of the folks she meets, the practical questions never work out, and the moment is always lost. We are all drifting around in collision and clash and rivalry and trickery, when you find yourself with no niche amid those negative forces it becomes this impossible to create one yet guard your freedom too. There is a parallel with what happens to refugees.

Even the "counterculture" lets her down, but viewers with harsher down to earth minds might see it as her letting it down. A green philosopher-farmer takes her in and gives her some land, then throws her back out for failing to put the work into it, and calls her hut dirty too. So bloody what, how dare he, it's her own room? and the work is new to her, she needs room to find her pace. While preening his ego with the delusion that he was offering Mona help, he was power-tripping, insulting her, doing her emotional hurt and feeling good about himself at her expense.

This is an all too common pattern: autocratic help. It may epitomise how the counterculture failed, the same way as school and communism and Victorian parenting and psychiatry and the World Bank fail. The giver of help must force the results, loses the faculty of wanting to see that results might be a harder to attain than instantly, brings in ideals of their own to push onto the helped person, becomes a tyrant, takes away their freedom, their own being. It actually ruins the chance of attaining a practical success, it destroys. It's playing God: "I cast you out, a fugitive and a vagabond shall you be." My sympathies are totally with Mona in storming away from him feeling cheated. It sums up the world's failing of her and of millions of folks through history who it has given no niche of viable free life to. THEY ARE THE MARTYRS. Vagabonde lives this failiure of the world at its most intense, when suffered not from the state but from the nature of real people. It deeply offends fairness, that in his high handed sneer the jerk predicts Mona's fate correctly, but that his own treatment of her helps to cause it. How often does that happen? "Yah boo, you'll end up in some stigmatised lowlife state unless you live exactly as I say." It has been said too many times to children by adult controlling egos, and in mental health work.

Mona fits that emotionally egalitarian theme in the Old Testament, of unlikely figures getting called to a task sometimes beyond their own awareness - for perhaps she does achieve a purpose, just by bearing witness to her choice, helping the folks she meets to judge their own life choices with a deeper insight re fairness and ties. They recognise the dilemma just as the viewer does. At the level of practical comforts we who are not living like her may feel lucky for it, yet she is lucky not to be tied down as we often are, to fight prolonged life issues and quarrels. That may be what matters most to her, she may have good cause to feel lucky she has escaped that. It's swings and roundabouts, it is never assumable what is lucky or not in anyone's life.

Yet it seems a clear issue of luck that your martyrdom might happen at the wrong time. It is distressing to have to think and remember the likelihood that there have been unrecognised aspies of my age who got into states of collision with society that led to endings like Mona's in the film's era, which was in the dark ages before aspies emerged, and meant missing out on being in the scene now and all it means for scoring against past wrongs.

Those of us who have made a defining escape at some time in our life, but without it placing us on the streets, are very personally impacted by this question. Like my escape from my teachers, in the same year as Vagabonde was made, 1985: itself also haunting to look back at! I have the anti-school issue in my life, as an emotionally vital prolonged cause, I want the means to pursue it all the way, so I feel lucky that in a sedentary life I have the means. Mona might instead feel lucky not to have any such prolonged issue in her life, or emotional tie to its pursuit. Even when she dies in the ditch she may be relieved she has been sucessful in avoiding the burden of having a prolonged issue to cope with, which would have restricted her choice to march away from her unhappy working life. Maybe if she had been restricted by the emotional importance of other life issues already in progress, she would still just have strongly needed to escape. The threshold might or might not be higher, for we don't know what she escaped from.

Certainly if my escape from my teachers had resulted in a life and fate like Mona's, it would have been every bit as vital a matter of survival, still a million times worth doing. I affirm that from watching Vagabonde. Yet my avoidance of that fate also really matters. Since my first watching, at a hard economic time when my escape was still fairly recent and life not much rebuilt at all, time has let me advance it to a far more complete distance from everything about my teachers and make it clear to all, with successive acts of writing against their ideas. Time, like this, is exactly what Mona's path did not give her. Neither may it be what she needed, and you never want the stress for relying on it when it is still future, but without it, no chance for good surprises like the aspie scene's creation, to come along in your future. Another unsolvable dilemma there. It puts my escape experience, and anyone's, into this context of 2 alternative paths: the effort of long term struggle or the finality of quick martyrdom. Circumstances don't always give us the choice between them, they may lead us to one or the other, and that has to be the weight off our consciences at the hour of our death.

You see that when Mona is lying in the ditch in exhausted tears. Life eventually is just that. Not a place where anything good can be relied on. It is tempting to credit that scene as the meaning of life. Mona dies of living on her own terms, true to herself. Snooty respectable viewers will pounce to judgment against that, yet it is a far better fate than dying in a war for a state that rates ordinary lives expendable, or of an industrial disease after being a good worker who never went on strike, or by violence in a place where you chose to remain, or full of psychiatric drugs. It encapsulates the grounds for a gnostic disgust at this life. If we find ourselves with a better chance than Mona of extending our lives' duration, what does that mean, when it the chance aspect of it is so unfair? Life only has meaning when lived in a state of struggle against all its unfair aspects. Purpose lies in being identified personally with the struggle and with what you stand for, so that it becomes what you are remembered for, by as much of the world after your time as remembers you at all.

If Vagabonde is haunting because of this, then also because any aspie viewer can identify with any figure drifting on the margins, observing society critically and fearfully from the outside, not managing to connect lastingly with it. Mona is certainly not autistic, she is too easily able to hitch-hike and to ask for favours like refills of her water bottle, for that. But here is the amazing twist -not in the story but in real life. The actress who plays Mona is Sandrine Bonnaire, who has an autistic sister and much more recently made the angry documentary film Her Name Is Sabine, which we also saw at the Filmhouse as an Elas party, about how the mental health system drugged her and made her condition worse. Might this biological link to autism have enhanced her acting ability to portray outsidership and engimatic distance? It means looking at Vagabonde now in the eerie light of remembering having no idea of this, no knowledge yet of aspies or of being one, at the time of originally seeing it and feeling such a strong impact.

Maurice Frank

voting hung

Which kind of economy would you prefer us to have?

Germany: Largest economy in Europe, already out of recession, hung parliament since 1961.
Greece: Bankrupt, draconian cuts causing civil unrest, electoral system designed to prevent hung parliaments.

The question comes from Unlock Democracy.

There is a Conundrum Farm near Berwick On Tweed, adjacent to the border. Here's the puzzle. Scotland, hung parliament since 1999, England, maybe having a last minute panic against it. When we went to Berwick, the grass and the road, and further away the shops, looked the same both sides of the line.

I want an economy where minorities' needs have to be listened to, around what type of jobs and education we can cope with. So that some care is taken to make it work out right, to society's gain. Hung or nearly hung parliament is best for pushing these concerns.

Polling day: I'm annoyed to hear 2 workmates today saying they missed the registering deadline and so they think they can't vote. This link shows they can still vote at their former addresses: http://www.runnymede.gov.uk/portal/site/elections/menuitem.253bb9aafce9ffd18bfbfb10af8ca028/
and they wouldn't believe it. They thought they couldn't vote. When one is keenly supporting the same side as me, too: grrr. The way the deadline for registering has been publicised or not, too much at the last minute, has not been clear enough with enough advance notice for all the folks it would catch, that is an item of democratic deficit, even for NTs, and it could be even more so for folks who take messages literally. Will aspies, except the ones who are really keen on politics, remember when they move home, or when an election is called, to check on their voter registration? When the system for doing that, replacing the old reliance on the annual canvass, is fairly new? There should be a message given out to do it, every time anyone registers a change of address.

Results day: I think these concerns about the clarity of messages to voters have been borne out shockingly by all these stories from the English cities of voters getting stuck in long queues and shut out at 10 o'clock and missing their chance. Just as passionately unfair to them as to all the 17 year olds who are emotionally abused by missing their vote by very short margins of age. You can imagine an aspie voter faithfully taking literally the public information that they can turn up any time before 10 o'clock and vote. Any contrary conclusion would have to be reached in an unwritten way.

I fear all unforseen events that can happen during a day to knock out your schedule, and how big the hurt would be of losing your vote because of a disrupted day. So I vote as early as possible. First thing.

Local campaign on compulsory treatment

Aspies may have past experiences and/or future worries with the mental health system. We have contact with it for getting diagnoses, and some folks have ongoing contact with it over coping issues or anxiety or depression. We may have had aspie life problems grouped under the mental health label in the past, or be dealing with services where there is still an overlap.

So we are concerned with the safety of our civil liberties, and the fact that aspieness is not a mental illness and aspies are still ordinary citizens. We must be on guard against any reading of mental health issues into what are actually aspie items, and any impulse to turn them into grounds for authoritarian interventions by the mental health system.

Edinburgh Users' Forum, which is part of the local collective advocacy for mental health, is doing a local campaign on the problems arising in compulsory treatment or the threat of it. Whether interventions were unjust, the effect of being threatened with them or actually suffering them, the practicalities observed by the system when making an intervention, and whether it was avoidably frightening. They are looking for personal stories to draw info from.

So if the mental health system features as an issue in either your present or your past, please respond at the following link...

www.surveymonkey.com/s/7CTRGL2

... to speak out about it.

Even if you have not experienced anything to do with compulsory treatment, but just you have made or wanted to make an "Advance Statement", like a living will that will apply if it ever happens, you can still valuably respond. They want to know about this too. Advance Statements were introduced in 2005 but folks are still finding it difficult or confusing to get information about them.

Contributionism

This is an article written by David Seagrave about Contributionism, which has appeared in the publication Asperger United.

Contributionism: a psychic lifebelt?

I was diagnosed with AS at age 62. As early as age 9, in 1950, I saw a yawning disparity between my parents' religion and the world I was growing into. My parents practised Thomas-the-Tank-Engine Christianity - that is, Christian dogma at a reading age of 7. My short story Saint James the Less has the boy of 10 meet the man I was to become in 1984.

In 1953, I was dared to commit pranks with a sexual content and I was expelled. This inflicted inextirpable irrational guilt which was greatly worsened by chronic unemployment. My father made me out to be flawed from head to toe. My very name stank of abject ignominy. I was sent to Red Hill Remedial School which moulded my character.

Following a narrow escape from a railway accident I had a major row with my father who insisted that God had contrived me to miss the doomed 7:43 from Hastings that was preordained to crash at Hither Green to warn the world that He is in charge. I was so sickened by this claptrap that I should repent and attend Church regularly and go to bed at 9pm sharp! So I created a plausible myth about Alan, aka the Socrates of Charford.

Alan may be the pseudonym of a real old Redhillian. He dares to invent a better code of behaviour than Christian morality after he too misses that 7:43 train in 1967. He too was taught to question the wisdom of our elders, so his brainchild, Contributionism, amounts to a moral Highway Code as logical as arithmetic.

Contributionism incorporates de Chardin's idea that humans are cells in God's brain, so it is possible definable as a religion. In also incorporating the Pelagian heresy, that we do not need to pray to God, and the concept of reincarnation in parallel universes, it is arrant heresy to Christians and has landed me in trouble for expounding its tenets.

When I took up climbing lofty mountains, I underwent a metamorphosis which I describe in many of my literary works. I also underwent convulsive paradigm shifts at Red Hill. When I was maimed I had to redefine myself and a decisive moment was the ascent of Cader Idris with false leg. I call this change of life-perspective "growing dragon's wings". All of us can view society from aloft, so we see through the myths, lies and half-truths forced on us by the people in power.

I would earnestly wish to liberate Neil and all the others, who were squashed in the name of God, by taking them on excursions to the wild beauty in Fife, and teaching them my hobbies. As a young man living in London, every Sunday I went on hikes along then-just-closed railways where I would melt into the landscape and unravel my mind.

Following an assault in my home, I am so traumatised that I want to move to a quiet cathedral city environment, perhaps Dorchester, there to set up exactly the supportive community which Alan operates. If I was to set up a supportive community at Prince Charles's eco-town of Poundbury near Dorchester many Aspies could reach me from London and nearby. Then at last I could play Plato to Alan's Socrates and provide a psychic lifebelt to all.

Genetic selection against us

Genetic selection to prevent our existence is now demonstrably happening. See this page by Helen Keeler on fertility services rejecting eggs from women who have had aspie kids.

the-newrepublic.blogspot.com/2009/12/genetic-screening-for-as.html

Mentoring Aspies and providing them with Moral Armament

We Senior Aspies have a paramount duty to young Aspies who have just set out on Life's journey in a manifestly evil world. When I left school in 1960 I admit that I was still emotionally a schoolboy until my mid twenties. I did NOT fall prey to charlatans as have so many young people today thanks to the lifeskills I learned at Red Hill Remideial School which decisively moulded my character in a quite unexpected way. Today a young person is readily drawn into gambling, binge drnking, indebtedness, drugtaking, and violence. Young Aspies are naive and gullible; so very much at risk from people with thoroughly ulterior motives who see them as soft targets - easily exploited. MORAL ARMAMENT of the kind I had learned at Red Hill Schiool enables young Aspies to see through deceptions and adopt measures to thwart the nefarious goals of people with evil inclinations.

Our duty to young Aspies is to provide them with this MORAL ARMAMENT. Our goals must always be kept in mind; our proteges deserve rewarding careers, happy marriages, the joy of parenthood, friendships and widening horizons that come about by the development of all their latent abilities.

(Important: Do not confuse Moral Armament with MORAL REARMAMENT a religious movement founded by a German that flourished for about 40 years and is now quite moribund).

Despite our Aspergerisms and ingrained autonomous relexes that give rise to distressing behaviours, we can overcome these Aspergerisms by acceptance, understanding and the lifelong exercise of STERN WILLPOWER. So each is destined in his own right way, an exemplary life to display (Q.v. below: "Exemplary Life Movement") We have apparently intractable problems to solve. The young Aspie who sees through the shallowness of modern society may well retreat into his private obsessionalisms and become totally isolated in what amounts to a private fantasy world. This is no less damaging than being corrupted by his peers and so acquiring a criminal record. IF Senior Aspies befriend such vulnerable young people it is OUR DUTY to provide them with a varied menu of life-affirming pursuits and training in vocationally related lifeskills.

We need a better Code of Behaviour than traditional morality.

Traditional Judaeo-Christian morality is very much a packhorse bridge truly collapsed under the traffic of modern wrongdoing. This morality was satisfactory for a quite primitive agricultural society. Its prohibitions are no longer appropriate to our world. Hence it is rightly rejected. But as the French philosopher Durkheim observed a century ago:

"the central problem of every civilisation is the restraint of greed" and

"those most in need of morality are those most likely to reject it"

I owe my late, devoutly Christian father an enormous backhanded compliment following his fatuous fulminations during a row about religion in 1967. This spurred me to construct a Rational Code of Human Conduct thjat made God redundant, that came to be known as Contributionism. As 1967 was the year of the Gay News blasphemy trial I feared that I would be charged with blasphemy if I was found to be the author. So I invented a myth that it was the work of a schoolpal called Alan Wright, and this mythology has given rise to my greatest achievement in life, my trilogy of novels about Alan Wright, a.k.a. The Socrates of Charford (q.v. Appendix)

Functional and Dysfunctional Prohibitions

Orthodox Judaism lives in the past and its practitioners share a corporate obsessional compulsive disorder. It has failed to come to terms with science and the need for society to operate continuously day and night. Never more so than the Sabbatarian restrictions. A reliable source told me about an Orthodox Jew who alighted in a tiny Shropshire town just before dusk on a Friday in December because his religion FORBADE HIM TO USE PUBLIC TRANSPORT after dusk on Fridays and the train was delayed. He is said to have made a thorough nuisance of himself and eventually was taken willy nilly by police car to Shrewsbury! He lacked the intelligence to realise that no harm could come to him by travelling by train after dark on a Friday!

All those dogmatic religious people whom I have ever suffered were those who lacked the intelligence to cope with the world as we find it. That included my late parents, for whom, the correct wine to serve with roast beef was far more important than my schoolwork. I have yet to meet Christians who understand the elementary general science I had mastered even at age 12. All too often I meet Christians who are dangerously incompetent at such matters as using electricity. At Red Hill School, boys were encouraged to find out for themselves so I read science textbooks. Ar age 12 I had understood the principles of flight so well as to design and build a small model aircraft with swept back wings like the then state of the art Hawker Hunter fighter. My father sternly frowned upon my scientific hobbies particularly model railways. It was through model railways that I decisively overcame one major Asperger handicap - clumsiness with hands, and absorbed far more applied maths than I learned in school. Today however Christians in the Blair government are bent on prohibiting all those life affirming pursuits which form good character in young people.

YET self-destructive behaviours are tacitly condoned indeed encouraged (e.g. by the extension of licensing hours).

I have coined the word GRICEHOOD from the German GREIS, stupid old man, to denote a state of self-inflicted stupefaction. Our society is GRICEBOUND, incapable of rising out of this stupefaction. Advertisers GRICE (maliciously stupefy) the public.

What grices, diminishes people, and is evil. A rational code of behaviour would prohibit anything that diminishes anybody in any way. So to a total ban on smoking, gambling, and the consumption of substances which impair mental or physical functioning. It would however encourage every possible kind of life-affirming, mentally expanding activity. The outcome would be a society of polymaths such as I describe in my novella WHERE RADIANT PEOPLE MEET (q.v.).

Moral watertightness is expected of Mentors.

All in a fellowship of Mentors have to struggle to live exemplary lives and abstain from any behaviours that diminish themselves or anyboidy else. They must therefore be teetotal non smokers who do not gamble, do not get into debt and do not over eat. Yet they can be excused minor peccadilloes which can be the vices of their virtues. It would be inconsistent of a Mentor for example to jump on anybody with bad handwriting if he wrote with an illegible scrawl. But Mentors can be excused such traits as parsimony, untidiness and scatterbrainedness.

Young Aspies at risk of psychotic breakdown if rejected by their peers.

We Senior Aspies must reach into the hurt minds of such people and gently guide them into as wide a range of wholesome challenging intelligence-enhacing pursuits as possible. Othersise as they are rejected by their peers they will be locked into their own private fantasy-worlds and never acquire either the lifeskills or the motivation to hold down jobs, still less find partners and ultimately when their partners die they will be totally incapable of fending for themselves.

Conflict with Religious Fundamentalists.

Aspies from Muslim, Catholic or fundamentalist Christian homes need very special care. There is a likelihood of a head on clash with paretns or siblings and priests because AS is seen as a besetting moral failing to be extirpated by cruel and ineffective "treatment". The client needs to be taken away from the damaging home environment and transplanted into a community where his latent abilities are drawn out (e.g. by taking up challenging outdoor activities). So to redefining himself in terms of his new found prowess and so to a convulsive paradigm shift, a penetrating change of attitudes, values and behaviour. Then (as I portray my characters in my Socrates of Charford scripts) the young person finds a partner and lives happily ever after in the felowsip of insightful people. However (as I have portrayed in a few of my scripts) it is likely that the young person will abruptly and painfully regress to his former self when in the company of culprit kinspeople. Then the young person needs a Mentor and Guide of the calibre of Alan Wright who always scorches the culprit kinspeople with righteous wrath. Aspies from fundamentalist backgrounds desperately need champions of the downtrodden, of the calibre of Alan Wright.

Conflict with "Mammonism"

The young Aspie has to live in a society bent on self-destruction. I am one of many who foresee the imminent breakdown of civilisation. Accordingly I have described a Successor-civilisation in my novella WHERE RADIANT PEOPLE MEET. Here American businessman Lincoln Steen has a severely emotionally disturbed son who will not talk. He flies to "Avalonshire" in south Wales to observe Alan Wright's Contributionist civilisation - a society of polymaths whose only passion is to share the fruits of their self-createdness with their neighbours and Distinguished Foreign Visitors. Alan Wright agrees to treat Steen's son and his son moves to Avalonshire to flourish ever after. The basis of this civilisation is moral deveopment to Alan's own lofty level. This is quite independent of any pre-existent religious teaching but its ethics are congruent with those of Judaism, Nonconformist Christianity and to a certain extent, Buddhism. Masefield's poens SEEKERS and A CREED synerae to form much of Contributionst theology so that the fictitious Welsh city of Romanbridge becomes the "City of God, where Radiant people meet" in SEEKERS, whilst A CREED's Reincarnationist Strict Consequentialism is a more certain moral sheet anchor than any Christian prohibitionisms. So I portray a society where people with distressing peculiarities of every possible kind redefine themselves by their Contributions to the Common Good; and paramountly their practice of the Higher Loves.

"Love" is an utterly devalued word.

I replace it with the Greek words AGAPE, CARITAS and DELPHILY.

AGAPE is the general duty to care for the planet in every possible way.

CARITAS is the universl obligation of every adult to one another - "good Samaritanism".

DELPHILY is the highest of loves; care for someone as a Vessel of God, Willingness to make sacrifices for that person and in the ultimate resort, the duty to take such steps as are necessary to prevent a self-harming loved person from further harm. That may sadly include "sectioning".

Can we Aspies initiate a life-affirmation movement that might yet save Earth from Mankind?

There is NO active influential life-affirmation movement comparable to the Temperance Movement of a century ago. This was backed by the Nonconformist Churches and Scottish Presbyterianism. It provided wholesome pursuits for vulnerable young people and even operated an alcohol-free paddle steamer that took poor Glaswegians to fabulous distant places like Kilcreggan!

I put it to ELAS and PHAD and the Glasgow Autistic Centre.

I am now 64 years old and I have a paramount duty to pass on all my lifeskills, expereince, knowledge, insights and supremely my values to young Aspies before I die, so that they shall develop all their latent faculties and pursue careers, enjoy happy marriages, parenthood, friendships, widening horzons, fulfilment despite what we must all come to terms with. And so become what I term CARYATIDS after the statues in the Erectheum on the Acropolis - people who by their exemplary lives affirm the God Within Themselves and form the moral engine of society. So giving rise to that indefinitely sustainable society I describe in WHERE RADIANT PEOPLE MEET. Accordingly I seek FEEDBACK from this Account and the next stage will be to draw up a programme with my commitment to give all of myself to the service of my fellow Aspies until I drop dead. Thus my life preaches my faith.

I anxiously await that Feedback from Readers of this Account.

David Seagrave, Kirkcaldy 3.1.2006

ELAS Weekend Away 2009 - Berwick-upon-Tweed

The Berwick Trip

This year, the local Edinburgh-based AS group, ELAS, located their long weekend break in Berwick with the plan of hanging out together and exploring the attractions of the town and neighbouring Northumberland area.

The trip was organised by members of ELAS and consisted of seven AS people and a NT support worker. The ensemble took over a charming guesthouse, very close to the historic town hall, which had an elaborate layout of rooms and included external metal spiral staircases and balconies.

On Friday, we walked round the impressive Elizabethan Walls and visited the Gymnasium Gallery to see a film installation of abandoned Soviet gymnasia from the Brezhnev era.

On Saturday, we spent the morning in the Holy Island of Lindisfarne. We looked at the ruins of the Benedictine Chapel and walked around the striking Lindisfarne Castle. In the afternoon, we went to Bamburgh, a town dominated by a mighty castle, though only one of us actually visited it, the others went into town or set off on a trek along the lovely beach and dunes to Seahouses – a fish, chips and mushy peas paradise.

On Sunday, we went to Alnwick. We all went to the gardens except one who visited the large castle. With the sun shining, the gardens were beautiful. There were lots of things to see including the great water cascade, the tree house, the poisoned garden and the serpent garden full of intriguing water sculptures.

On Monday, some of us left early while others walked around the town walls down by the quay and scrutinised the ruins of the castle, viewed incongruously from the platform of Berwick Train Station. The last party caught the 3:55pm bus back to Edinburgh.

We mostly ate out. My favourite haunts were the Castlegate Café, Sinners, the Castle and the Maltings Theatre and Arts Centre in Berwick, the Bamburgh Castle Inn in Seahouses and the incredible tree house in Alnwick.