DAY FIVE: Live from the train to Aberdeen

Here’s something new:  I’m writing this post on a moving train.  Starting this post on a moving train.  We’ll see if I making it through without losing my lunch.  No big fan of activities on moving vehicles, me.  

Today I have no choice.  Our train rolls into Aberdeen (as in, “Aberdeen?  Why on earth do ye want to go there?” — friendly old guy who took us under his wing and showed us a secret route from today’s Miner’s Gala parade to the train station. No way do we get there without him) at 17:06, leaving me little time to jot stuff down before dinner. The ride is four hours long and I’m tired of podcasts, so why don’t I do this while Sandra Bullock reads her latest  (huge, because she hilariously bought the large type edition by mistake) Tana French thriller?  Until I hurl, I mean. 

Now those miners.

I’m a loser.  I didn’t do my research.  Rick Steves doesn’t even care about Durham, Sandra Bullock wondered aloud why I’d chosen it for an overnight and we’d covered the highlights — the market (disappointing), the cathedral (majestic), the castle (closed) and riverwalk (bucolic) in a couple of hours.  The Swann pub was fun, even if nobody talked to us and we stood in a corner watching the shaved head guys and their incongruently-dressed wives (a little problem getting on the same “going out wear” expectations page for them) pointedly ignore the socialist college students’ discussions about — ironically — authentic experience and the working class.

And this Miner’s Gala, oh yeah, that thing that was going to screw up our morning.  Roads closed.  No cabs.  “It’s a nice thing,” the front desk clerk with the shaking hands told us as we checked in.  “People who haven’t seen each other all year get together at the gala.”

Lets pause:  posting on a train means minimal photos.  I urge you to go over to Sandra Bullock’s Facebook page for photos.  That big “L” tattooed (in henna, I’m not insane) on my forehead stands for “Larry Rosen underestimated the Miner’s Gala in so many ways that even today’s modern equipment can’t measure them all.

By 6 AM this morning, I’d been awake for three hours.  No melatonin.  “The miners are on their way,” I thought.  

Here’s what I was told:

All of the miners in the surrounding villages walk to Durham.  They pick up others alone the way.  When they arrive, they have a parade.  Then they go to the racetrack and give speeches.  After that, they go back into town and get drunk.  End of Miner’s Gala. 

At around 8, Sandra Bullock woke up and announced, “I slept horribly last night.”  Turns out we’d slept in shifts.  I took the 11:30 to 3 shift.  She took the one after that. 

“Me too,” I mumbled.  I felt like someone had clubbed me awake with a mallet.  We shrugged our shoulders and went to breakfast, which, unlike the nerve-wracking, is-my-zipper-open paranoia inducing French, Swiss and Italian breakfasts, was not a silent study in manners but instead a rollicking collection of people wearing matching t-shirts, joking around and pounding tea and scrambled eggs to fortify themselves.  For what?

On the way back to our room we got an inkling.  Suddenly, we heard marching bands. “Lets go outside and check it out,” I said. 

Outside there was a smattering of people on the steps in front of the hotel.  Down the street, toward the center of town, were more people, but not a ton.  A band was marching down the street, followed by a badraggled group of people holding a banner.  An older couple of locals, he in Doc Martens and Members-Only jacket, quickly became our guides.

Now have no doubt, I love a parade, and this one was shaping up.  Within 10 minutes it’d already surpassed the July 4 parade in Larkspur.  No toddlers in electric Range Rovers, however.  We got the scoop from our new friends. The bands, once paid for by the mines, were now hired by the towns. The banners represent the town, the lodge, the mine. The mines, however, were all closed.  “By that Margaret Thatcher,” spat the wife, who’d appointed herself Sandra Bullock’s mentor.  “See that?” she said, pointing to a small group a few feet away.  “They’re loading up their cooler with beers.”

I looked around.  It wasn’t just them.  Everyone was loading up their cooler with beers.  

Sandra Bullock and I went in to take showers.  I took mine then came back out and announced to our new friends, “I think I’m going to go take a walk around.”

The wife, whose name we obviously never got, raised her eyebrows.  “You’re going to the market square?  Good luck.”  

It's 9:30 AM.

I looked toward the center of town.  It was now one amorphous, unbroken blog of people, mostly guys way tougher than me slamming their second and third beers of the young morning, 

Suddenly, her husband, whose name we also obviously never got, piped up.  “Jeremy is coming!”  So excited by the appearance of Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn was he that he interrupted his explanation of how and why Thatcher and John Major closed the mines. I adopted a blank look.

“He’s an idiot,” his wife said.  “We’ve got 11 MPs and not a brain among them.”

Whew.

But Jeremy Coubyn, I realized later, is a hero to these people.  Not our new friends but

"Don't tell him you're Jewish, okay?"

plenty of others.  He was there, in fact, slated to give a huge speech about his own Green Deal and was rumored to be hanging out on a balcony behind a purple banner reading “DURHAM FOR CORBYN,” though when I walked by it he wasn’t there.  Maybe he knew a Jew was coming.  

More to the point, there was no way I was getting through that crowd to the market square and even less chance that my wife and I were dragging our enormous bags through that crowd.  Physics, you know. Instead, I walked away from the parade, through the adjacent neighborhoods.  I was the only person walking in that direction.  Everyone else was walking toward the parade, pulling coolers.  Some… okay most, just not the kids… okay, some of the kids too, were already drinking beers.

I passed the racetrack.  It contained the largest county fair I’d ever seen — rides, food, a giant stage,more booths selling socialist agitprop t-shirts than even my mom’s Aunt Rae and Uncle Ralph could imagine, plus a bar that was “OPEN FROM 9 AM - 4 PM” but why bother, since everyone was walking around carrying their own half-box of Guinness all over town?

I came back and reported my findings to our new friends.  By the time I returned the crowd had doubled. 

“You should just stay here another night,” said the wife.  “You won’t be able to get out.  Why do you want to go to Aberdeen anyway?”

I thought it over longer than I’m willing to admit to Sandra Bullock.  Here we were in the middle of this fantastic, enormous block party.  People were already three beers deep and it wasn’t even close to noon yet.  There were marching bands and banners!  And a balcony that allegedly contained Jeremy Corbyn!  There were people handing out socialist newspapers!

I did the numbers in my head:  the room in Aberdeen was pre-paid.  So were the train tickets.  And we’d have to pay for another night at the glorious and wonderful Hotel Indigo.  It was just too much money to throw away.  Later on we learned that $200 is also too much money for Sandra Bullock to throw away when she realized that, in our haste to drag our massive luggage through the crowds to the train station, she’d lost her beloved Lululemon rain coat.  After blaming me (?!) in front of a small crowd of amused hooligans  (“That’s your women, eh?”), she retraced our path in a trot until she found her coat, politely hung on a wall by some not-yet-aggressively drunk local who’d be torn to shreds in San Francisco, where they’d just take the coat and toast their good fortune over such a find. 

By now the crowds had doubled again.  People were streaming in.  We were the trout swimming upstream, only with massive luggage and a re-found Lululemon jacket.  Okay, okay, maybe when I stepped over those red shorts I saw on the ground I should’ve connected them to the red jacket my wife loves, but no.

And now we’re on a train, two hours outside of Aberdeen, where there will be no miners.  And honestly, there are no miners in Durham, either, just former miners and the descendants of miners.  Like their brethren at Bethlehem Steel, they got aged out or teched out or made obsolete or into political tools.  I haven’t done the research yet but I will.  There’s a little bit of an edge to the Miner’s Gala, with its t-shirts and slogans and tough-looking guys pounding beers at 9 in the morning.  I’m guessing that today probably isn’t a choice assignment for all of those coppers lining the entrance to the racetrack.  Durham will likely see more than a few brawls before it’s all done.  

When we checked out of the Indigo, I asked the front desk clerk with the shaking hands if they were full tonight.  I was hoping she’d say “yes,” making my decision no decision at all, but instead she said, “Actually we have quite a few rooms.”

“Really?  That seems odd,” I said.

“Oh, it isn’t.” She pointed towards the street outside.  “Most people just sleep out there.”

Today’s numbers:

100,000 — partying ex-miners in Durham.  Estimated by our new Doc Martens-shod friend.  “Depends on the weather.”

7 — combined hours of sleep logged by Sandra Bullock and I, in two shifts.

800 — amount of money, in US dollars, it would have cost us to stay an extra night in Durham.  It probably would’ve been worth it.  

24 — number of beers I saw two guys stuffing into a pair of ice-filled shopping bags at 9:30 AM this morning.

0 — number of words the guy who looked like the Nazi from Raiders of the Lost Ark and was sitting in my assigned (window) seat said to me before saying “Excuse me,” when we reached his stop and Sandra Bullock woke me up after a five-minute nap to let him out. 

4 — different socialist-themed newspapers being handed out for free at the Miner’s Gala.  Something bad happened at a mine in 1984.  They haven’t forgotten.

6 -- times I almost had to say what I really thought of Jeremy Corbyn

15 — estimated age (at the most) of the two boys I saw drinking Budweiser tall boys on the street near the middle of town.

3 — Random castles spotted from the train since crossing into Scotland.

Okay.  That’s it.  I’m missing all the scenery and besides, I think I’m gonna hurl.