The Campbell Academy Blog | Colin Campbell (68)

Pilgrimage

In Eoin Colfer's excellent Children/adolescence book, Artemis Fowl, he describes at the start of that book how Holly, the fairy, has to return to Ireland and bury an acorn underneath an oak tree to replenish her magical powers.

As far as he describes in the book, all fairies have to do this from time to time or else they lose their magical ability and their ability to be amazing.

And so, it was with that in mind that I set off last Friday on the train from Newark to Edinburgh and then Edinburgh to Glasgow and then Glasgow to Gourock to visit my parents.

I'm going to tell you now that it was 1995 when I packed my car up with my record player, vinyl and everything that was in my room in the west end of Glasgow and drove to Nottingham like Dick Whittington, hoping to seek my fortune.

As I came, I was reminded of 'The Secret of My Success' starring Michael J. Fox when he said that he would never come back home to his hometown unless he arrived on a private jet.

I was on my pilgrimage back to Scotland on the good old British train system, quite a long way from a private jet.

I'm also going to tell you here that I've lived in Nottingham for almost 30 years, so it would seem reasonable (I'm 52, so living there for much longer than I ever lived in Scotland) that I would now consider Nottingham my home through and through.

As I live on a day-to-day basis in Nottingham, that is the case, but as I hurtle towards Scotland on the LNER train from Newark to Edinburgh, it doesn't feel like that.

Back in the day, there was an advert on television for a typical brand of Scottish lager based around the song Caledonia, where a guy in London throws his briefcase in a bin, takes off his suit jacket and gets on the train.

He arrives at Edinburgh station, walks into a pub, and has a pint of Tennent's lager with his friends.

It always feels like that when I arrive in Scotland (or cross the border in my car).

I entered Edinburgh Station in the middle of the morning (the place where Avengers: Endgame was filmed when Captain America appeared back again).

I quickly jumped trains and travelled across the country to Glasgow.

I got to Glasgow Queen Street, which opens out onto George Square, which was the square that I walked through every day for a year in my final year at dental school, as I walked from the place I studied to the place I lived in the east of the city centre in Glasgow.

The emotions that it produced were quite unexpected but shouldn't be unexpected because it happens every single time.

It's a mixture of happiness to be back and sadness about all the years I've lost from when I was 22 and walking through George Square.

I passed some of the shops that I used to go into (some still there, some not) and went to Glasgow Central Station, the sight of our Christmas ball as final-year dental students.

I then jumped on the train from Glasgow to Gourock (my hometown), the train I travelled on for four years back and forth to university before the Clyde opened up in front of me, and I ended up back in the land where I grew up.

I don't see any set of circumstances that ever exist where I will come back here and live, but neither do I see any possibilities that exist where I will not come back here to recharge my fairy power as it did when I walked around in the evening after spending the day with my Mum and Dad.

I walked around my hometown to the places I used to hang out as a boy, to the place where I used to do my paper run and then the walk up to the school I used to go to for six years.

I am a sad old fool. A romantic at heart.

But what these trips do back to Glasgow, back to Gourock, back to Scotland, is it reminds me where I came from, the days that created the values that I live by, the place that I was so proud to come from and to represent in another country and makes me come back to my second home in Nottingham and start it all again.