My younger son spent the weekend at the British Universities and Colleges Sport surfing championships at Fistral beach in Newquay, representing the University of Strathclyde. He won his heat, but the second day of competition was called off because the sea was too flat.
Naturally, everyone was disappointed, but they made the best of it with a big beach party. The team piled in the minibus for the long trip home happy, if a little hung over.
His elder brother was also surfing at the weekend, down at Coldingham Bay in the Borders. Just an hour along the coast from Edinburgh, this is one of Scotland’s best surf spots. The St Vedas Hotel, overlooking the sands, has a cool and curiously Californian vibe, and a very good surf shop. My family started going to Coldingham more than a decade ago. I can vouch that there is no better cure for a hangover than to plunge head-first into the North Sea first thing on a Sunday morning. Waves along that coast — at Dunbar and Pease Bay as well as Coldingham — can be mountainous and awe-inspiring. And a bacon roll has never tasted better than after two briny, exhausting hours in the surf.
My sons caught the bug when they were very small, on holidays in Cornwall. Family holidays in the years since have tended to be in surf spots: St Ives in Cornwall, San Sebastian in the Basque country and, once, San Diego in California. But you can’t beat chilly Scottish waters for the feeling of being up against the elements.
I once reported on an international surf competition, the O’Neill Highland Open, in Thurso. It took pride in being the coldest stop on the global professional circuit. There were these young guys from Brazil and Hawaii, laughing with glee as they surfed during a hailstorm for the first time in their lives.
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I don’t go surfing any more, I’m sorry to say. I was never much good — the pleasure for me was just to be in the surf, feeling the power of the sea. And more often than not that was on a bodyboard rather than a surfboard. Instead, these days, I take pleasure in my sons’ grace and strength and mastery.
Mutual affection
The SNP conference in Aberdeen was thoroughly enjoyable, a great opportunity to catch up with old friends in the party and also in the press pack.
A few of us have been reporting on these events for more than 20 years. We could tell you some stories — but the people in these stories could tell some stories about us, so an uneasy truce exists, like the mutually assured destruction doctrine in the Cold War.
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There is a mutual affection between senior Nats and the older hacks that I think would surprise some more recent converts to the nationalist cause, who regard the press solely as a unionist enemy.
One prominent SNP figure recalls the first conversation he had with me, in the mid-1990s. I had been reading Primary Colors, the sensational novel about a US primary campaign written by the great American political reporter Joe Klein. It described a phenomenon called “campaign sex” — casual and meaningless sexual encounters between a party’s operatives during the heat of a campaign.
I decided to phone up all the Scottish party HQs to ask them on the record how much campaign sex happened in Scottish politics.
The Nationalist staffer who took my call in the SNP press office looked around the room at his pale, pasty, overworked, under-exercised, badly dressed colleagues and gave me the response: “Not a lot.”
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Portraits of compassion
The BP Portrait Award exhibition is back at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. As usual the technique on display is breath-taking. In addition, this year, the artists seem much more willing to take on social themes, especially old age, with some wonderful portraits of the elderly, including dementia sufferers. Very moving, and highly recommended.