It's A Miracle
Prestwick
“No, wha this tale o' truth shall read,
Ilk man and mother's son take heed”
- Robert BurnsThe waters of the well at St Ninian’s Episcopal church in Prestwick are said to have cured famous spider-fancier Robert the Bruce of leprosy.
The story about the well is that he arrived here too tired and sick to continue his journey any further. He rested here for several days and drank the water from the well and was then miraculously able to carry on. How much of a miracle does that really sound like? It’s like the juniper bush bringing forth juniper berries. A tired man rested for three or four days and had a nice refreshing drink of cool water and was no longer tired.
Leprosy is actually quite challenging to diagnose accurately and the ability to take a skin and nerve biopsy for laboratory testing for the presence of the bacterium Mycobacterium leprae in early fourteenth century Scotland was not yet at its zenith. So, he might not even have had leprosy in the first place. The initial symptoms of leprosy are muscle weakness and numbness in the legs and feet, pretty much the same as the symptoms of going for a long walk. Anyway, that’s the miracle of St Ninian’s.
Tuition Fees
Robert the Bruce won the Battle of Bannockburn and freed the Scots from the oppression of the English and the need to pay tuition fees. He was crowned King of Scotland having handily murdered his rival and best mate, John “The Red” Comyn – not to be confused with Jeremy “The Red” Corbyn whose name is unlikely to last seven centuries.
Being king can’t have been easy, seeing as many of Scotland’s castles were still full of English troops. He was crowned in 1306 but didn’t actually kick the English out until 1314 and didn’t capture Berwick-on-Tweed until 1318, so he must have had a tricky few years. He wasn’t actually recognised by the English as being King of Scotland until 1328 and he died in 1329, possibly of leprosy, so much for the miracle of the well at St. Ninian’s.
Prestwick
Despite the best part of a millennium of history as a settlement, Prestwick stayed a small village until the arrival of the railways in the 1840s. The rich of Glasgow started spreading out to the coast here and building large homes and facilities for leisure such as golf courses. The Open Championship, the oldest golf tournament in the world, started here on the Prestwick Old Course in 1860. It became known as The Open because after that first invitational tournament it was declared that it would on all future occasions “be open to all the world”. It takes place over four days and always starts on “the day before the third Friday in July”; I’m not sure why they can’t call that Thursday. The tournament stayed at Prestwick for a dozen years before it headed off on a tour of links courses. A links course has to be by the sea, the bunkers and hills and water reflecting the natural environment and the habitat in which golf first grew.
Prestwick town has a very, very long main street full of all the shops you might never need. If you ever find yourself at one end of Main Street, Prestwick, I can save you a lot of time by telling you that I can think of no reason at all to venture to the other end. It starts at the BP garage and the first of about a dozen unwelcoming looking pubs and bars and then peters out a little over half a mile later, some time just after the tattoo parlour. Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of shops and cafes and takeaways and charity shops, more than in most towns of this size. There are even three branches of Boots the chemist along this one street, it’s just that on a dark and drizzly Tuesday, I find it hard to imagine ever needing the services of one of the four estate agents, unless it was to move out.
Luton
I am being unkind as there are eighty-seven thousand four hundred and sixty-three places which I could list that are worse places to live. Take Luton, for example, Luton, unusually for a town its size, is not twinned with anywhere. It does have a suicide pact with the Kandahar Province, though. Some people say that it’s not fair to single out Luton in this way. Others would say that if Luton doesn’t want to be singled out, it shouldn’t be so shit. I think that’s what psychologists mean by confirmation bias, our tendency to see things which confirm the prejudices we already hold. That’s true, every time I look at Luton, it’s shit. Much as I don’t hold with prejudice or intolerance of any kind, you simply can’t reason with someone who doesn’t hate Luton. So, Luton and at least 87,462 other places are worse than Prestwick, it’s just that the weather can affect how we feel, quite markedly, and the weather today is just awful.
Cold, Wet and Windy
The website weatherspark.com summarises Prestwick’s weather thusly: “In Prestwick, the summers are cool; the winters are long, very cold, and wet; and it is windy and mostly cloudy year round.” I have not made that up, I assure you. Prestwick has rainfall on two hundred and forty-six days of the year, on average. That does mean that you’re about twice as likely to arrive on a day when it’s raining than a day when it isn’t. Across the year the average number of hours of sunshine per day is significantly less than four and, in the winter months, the average is around an hour. So, it’s not like I picked a bad day to visit, I just picked a day.
Back on Prestwick seafront, I sat in Mancini’s café, a low, single-storey block painted the colour of vanilla ice cream. Iron pillars, like Victorian streetlamps painted pale blue and cream, hold up a veranda which surrounds almost the entire building; testament to the understanding of the builder that shelter would be a priority for customers. The rain was still whipped by the wind and blown in, crackling on the windows. Ropes rapped on flagpoles but there were no flags out of season. That was for the best as they’d have ended up in Northumberland today anyway. Desultory dog walkers with heads down and hoods up trudge along the beach. The waves are low, thick white scars on the slate grey sea.
Beauty if you Look
I enjoy it immensely, though. I really think it’s a wonderful sight to see. The beauty of this part of the world is not always immediately obvious. It is there, though, as beauty of some sort usually is if you take the time to look. If we decide to enjoy only the warm and sunny times of our lives then we’re writing off a huge number of days wishing for something different and uncontrollable when we could be appreciating what is right there in front of us.
The people of Prestwick don’t seem put off too much by the weather, they are still out and about, perhaps they, more than most, realise just how many days they’d have to write off waiting for the sun. But, even as I’m thinking that, there’s suddenly a break in the clouds and a weak and watery sun spotlights the distant houses and chimneys of Troon against the battleship grey sky.
If you take time to notice the details of life then it won’t take most people too long to spot that the world is pretty perfect just as it is. It’s not that some things couldn’t be better, it’s just that everything is as it’s supposed to be right now. Any fool can find things to complain about or make fun of – I should know, I’ve just spent almost a year doing just that on Substack - but, if you pause for just a few seconds you can always find things to bring you joy. Perhaps that, right there, is the real miracle of Prestwick.
Elvis Presley
Elvis Presley visited Prestwick, and it is unfortunate that he didn’t have the chance to visit the seafront and come to the same conclusions as me but instead chose to find his joy through enough prescription drugs to stop a whole herd of stampeding buffalo and enough peanut butter, banana and bacon grilled sandwiches to bring coronaries to an entire village. It is against the law to write an article about Prestwick without mentioning Elvis Presley, so here goes.
Sergeant Presley landed at Prestwick on 3rd March 1960 on his way back to the United States from service in Germany with the U.S. Army. He only spent two hours here but apparently took the time to talk to everyone he met. Later that same day, he flew back to Fort Dix in New Jersey to be greeted by Colonel Tom Parker and Nancy Sinatra. He would never visit the United Kingdom again.
Wee Jimmy Crankie
For a long time, Prestwick was the last refuelling stop for aircraft before they tackled the skies over the Atlantic. There has been an airport here since the 1930s and it reached the peak of its passenger numbers in 2007 with over 2.4 million people departing from here. Over the next few years, as more and more routes moved to Glasgow, the numbers were cut in half and the airport was finally bought by the Scottish government in 2013 for just one pound. Nicola Sturgeon said that the government would start "turning Prestwick around and making it a viable enterprise". The number of passengers continued to plummet last year just over half a million passengers passed through the vast terminal.
Prestwick is Scotland’s fifth busiest airport and the website Scotland.org offers the information that the country has a total of five main international airports. So, it’s fifth out of five. Of course, there are more airports in Scotland than just the main five it’s just that the sixth busiest is closer to Bergen in Norway than it is to Edinburgh and closer to Oslo than it is to London. It serves the main Shetland island and it’s called Sumburgh.
Sumburgh is where I’ll be heading for my next free post in two week’s time. See you there.