Tourists

I've started a book by a journalist called Madeleine Bunting. She used to write for the Guardian but has given that up to concentrate on her writing. The book is called Love of Country and it's about the Hebrides.

Ms Bunting is originally from Yorkshire but now lives in London. She's the very opposite of me: southern, middle-class (educated at Cambridge/Harvard or Oxford/Yale. I forget) and brought up British by patriotic parents who used the words 'British' and 'English' interchangeably.

It didn't take me long to work out that Ms Bunting's view of Scotland is coloured by her childhood summer holidays spent in a rented croft near Tain. The holidays lasted two weeks every summer for ten years, and began with the family packing up the van with two weeks of food shopping. She and her 4 brothers and sisters happily ran wild, spending a lot of time hanging out with the only real crofters left in the area. That gave me an idea who I was dealing with here: the stereotype well-off southern tourist who seems to think places like Tain have no shops, and certainly no shops that could do with business from tourists visiting the area. I'm pleased she got this holiday experience but she could have been anywhere for all the effect it had on her. And she and her family put nothing in to the community when they were there.

Then she mentions in her introduction that she plans to rope in family and friends to go with her on her travels round the Hebrides. I wonder what she thought would happen to her if she'd set off on her own. She'd get a very different view of life in the Highlands and Islands for one thing. She might even have met some real locals rather than staying huddled in her comfort group.

So she's a tourist then. An academic, well-educated tourist but not a traveller and certainly not an anthropologist.

What puzzles me most is who this book is written for. It's a bit dense for tourists. It's too weak on detail for historians and anthropologists. And it is highly selective. So places like Arran, Islay, Mull, Gigha and Skye don't get a mention but there is, as usual, a whole chapter devoted to St Kilda.

I've dipped into different chapters of the book and have learned nothing new. I'll return it to the shelf of the library that I got it from. This is not the book that will inform Scottish readers as well as southern tourists about the half of Scotland that isn't in the Central Belt.