Raleigh, Virginia
On 19th of August I went to visit a friend in Raleigh called Allison. We were both on the Youth Festival on Iona in 2002 and it was really great to see her again. She is from upstate New York but has just started a doctorate there in Virginia in Industrial Organisational Psychology. A very clever girl.
Anyhoo in Raleigh we met up with some of her friends and went to a bar/grill and to my delight they had Belhaven Best and I nursed a pint of it and reminisced of glens and rain and all other things Scottish. The following day I, left to my own devices, found my way onto a Segway tour of Raleigh. For those of you that don’t know a Segway is one of those funny two-wheeled space-age things that George Bush fell off. I was very excited. I didn’t really take in all that much of the tour as I was trying to make the thing go as fast as it could without getting in trouble with the tour guide. I got it up to a whopping 9.6mph and managed to avoid the wrath of Toby the tour guide. A double success I think.
Whilst on the tour a section of downtown Raleigh was closed off and it turned out it was because Barack Obama was in town to speak at a town hall. Despite not having ticket’s Allison and I tried to see if we could wing it and get in. We got there and I put on my finest, ‘dear sir… all the way from Scotland… ever so pleased if we could get in… would make this the most fantastic trip ever, sort of spiel. He was buying it when the nasty Fire Marshall came out and shut the door because the room was at capacity.
Anyway they brought out a loudspeaker and we listened intently and I got very excited everytime a secret service agent came into view.
The following day I went to the North Carolina state history museum in which they had a huge collection of duck decoy’s. The display had the rather hammy title, Art Ducko. Apparently shooting bird’s there is a big deal, and it would seem crap patter is too. It was a spot on the bizzare side I have to admit.
Then I went onto the North Carolina at War display which I found all a bit distressing by the end. I noticed that the US has been in a war pretty much every 30 years since it’s inception. Next up there was a piece on the bombardier Thomas Ferebee who, along with his team dropped the first atomic weaponon Hiroshima. Interestingly a friend of mine spoke of the military alternative, a land invasion of Japan using a million allied troops, and how the projected fatalities and casualties was estimated to be higher than using the a-bomb.
All this military talk makes me think of how as a 17 year old I applied to join the Royal Navy. I was accepted but they offered me a contract amounting to 29 years with two earlier exit options. Thankfully I baulked at the length of the contract and turned down the offer. My life would have been drastically, almost unimaginably different had I joined.
Moving on from all that on my last night in Raleigh I played at an open mic which was mainly a blues jam sort of evening. I played some completely unbluesy songs of mine and no one really appeared to listen much.