What to Look for in Winter by Candia McWilliam Page B

thing; how Miss Brodie would have abhorred this sloppy generalising. But there’s no denying the precision of the echoes for St George’s. We were superbly taught by fine Scotswomen, mostly unwed, who had been unmanned by war. We started Latin and Greek before these languages could alarm us, while we were yet in our baby-pinafores.
    My parents could not afford the fees. I got some kind of scholarship. My mother’s parents paid the rest, and I think minded. My parents fought about it. My father was vehemently agin private education. (I believe he married two women who may at least once in their lives have voted Conservative.) My maternal grandfather was self-made and highly suspicious of education beyond the respectable zones of business, boxing and golf. He read the FT and the Reading Gazette . He was quite right about the power of learning for its own sake, its huge and blessed leverage for freedom, the vital key it hands you should you require to escape.
    Cousin Audrey’s hot on business too and to this very day often berates me, quite correctly and very loudly, for my pointlessness and the pointlessness of what I laughably do for a living. Nonetheless, she has in her time loyally attended readings given by me and at least one gentleman known in the wider world to be ‘that way’. She’s a bonny heckler and one of the bravest souls you will ever meet, a glamorous spinster of the old school, shrewd, courageous, greatly loved and on her own. She reads the right-wing press with close attention. It broke my heart when I suggested the Guardian or the Independent and she took up both. I feared for her imbalance. Her favourite paper is nowofficially the Independent, her favourite man in the world Boris Johnson, with two little pouches for my sons Oliver and Minoo. She is a man’s woman and has the hairdo to prove it, confected weekly by her dear friend Muriel Brattisani, of the famous Brattisani family, whose lobster and chips and cairry-oot Champagne are the talk of the entire globe.
    My German publisher wrote to me once describing Oxford as ‘the Omphalos of the known world’. He went on to become Minister of the Arts for Germany and then, with some relief, the editor of Die Zeit.
    Anyhow, Edinburgh knows that it is the centre of the known world and wheesht to your omphaloi. Has a doughnut an omphalos? We’re talking baked goods here. Omphalos? Can you export it? Well, of course you can, and we are an emigrated race, the Scots, bringing our notion of civilisation wherever we go, bridges, sugary snacks, books and stories, fighting and drinking.
    What I’m trying to get round to is my birthday, the 1st of July 1955, the birthday of Julius Caesar, for whom my third name is Juliet. In October I was christened at Rosslyn Chapel, burial place of the Earls of Orkney, scene of The Lay of the Last Minstrel by Sir Walter Scott, reputed resting place of, among other things, the Holy Grail and the True Cross and scored with a number of unexplained Masonic symbols. I wrote in a novel twenty years ago about this numinous jewel in stone. Of course, its anonymity has since been rather blown by Dan Brown. It contains among countless other solid beauties, the ‘Apprentice Pillar’, a piece of carving so virtuosic that the chief mason is said to have murdered its maker, a mere apprentice, for his presumption, and then hanged himself in remorse. There is a small carving of the grieving master mason, his mouth an appalled hole. This pillar is depicted on the front of one of my father’s volumes in ‘The Buildings of Scotland’ series. Daddy died in the middle of writing Dumfries and Galloway. On the front of that volume is one of the Duke of Buccleuch’s palaces, Drumlanrig House, out of which, notvery long ago, someone walked unnoticed carrying a small painting by Leonardo.
    That’s carry-out for you on a scale beyond even lobster. The painting has since been returned. The