Thursday 17 Nov: My second birthday celebration in Scotland!

I wake up refreshed in spite of the fiasco that met our arrival. I’ve been looking forward to a traditional UK breakfast and I know that the Apex City Quay does not disappoint. For those who don’t know, the British breakfast is a belly buster: eggs, sausage, bacon, black pudding, stewed tomatoes, fried mushrooms, baked beans, and, in Scotland at least, a patty of haggis. It’s enough food to keep one full until tomorrow’s breakfast. I can really only get away with this monster once, and I figure after yesterday, I deserve a treat.

Dreich

After this hearty fast-breaking, we have a brief orientation meeting with the students in the hotel lounge, and then it’s off to the Dundee Comics Creative Space, located in the Vision Building on the south side of Nethergate, opposite from the University campus. I warn the students the walk is rainy. The Scots have the best word for this kind of weather: dreich (pronounced drrrr-eye-cccchhhh like your warming up for a professional long-distance spitting contest).

In spite of the warning, not a few of them are walking in light jackets, one even just in shirtsleeves. Another student is hopefully toting an umbrella, which on more than one occasion I’ve cautioned the Dundee winds will cheerfully whisk away as a trophy. This particular umbrella lasts until the complicated crossing at the intersection of Nethergate and West Marketgait, a pedestrian no-man’s-land compounded by the traffic going the “wrong” way to our Yankee eyes. The wind really comes whipping up West Marketgait in gale force. Several of these under-prepared travelers are destined to purchase “Scottish souvenirs” before the end of the day — you know: raincoats, hats, gloves… what were they thinking?

Dundee Comic Creative Space

DCCS is a community outreach space for the University. They’ve moved to more spacious quarters in the building since our last visit. Our students have met Chris Murray, Mary Modeen, and Norrie Millar remotely, but they get to meet them face to face today. Chris and Mary give a “tour” of the University via slideshow to make up for our lost live tour yesterday, and introduce the concept behind the Being Human Festival of which we will be a part.

We then break out into work groups with Norrie, who supervises the creating of cover art for the comics our students have created. There are four collaborative groups, each comprised of writers and artists, each having come up with a comic or graphic novel treatment of an original story. They’ve been working on these for six weeks and several of the groups have very well developed work, but there’s still a lot of work to do to present it by Saturday, just three days from now.

While the students are working on their drawings, it falls to me to do some technical work to set up the presentations. My first task is to break their comic pages down into slideshows for the Saturday event. This proves to be difficult to concentrate on, because there are a lot of interruptions for questions from very anxious students. But I manage to get a rough draft complete for each of the four shows in about two hours.

A visit to Abertay

Our mornings in Dundee will typically look like this: prep for the presentation. Afternoons are reserved for time on our own, and evenings will be filled either with Being Human events or dinner or both. For today’s time-on-own, I’m inviting interested students to visit Abertay University’s world famous game design program. About half our group decide to come along. We slog through the now absolutely drenching rains to the Abertay campus, where we are treated to light snacks and presentations by faculty. Iain Donald, my acquaintance there, is moving on to an academic assignment in Edinburgh, so he kindly set us up with colleagues.

Dr. William Huber starts us off with a comprehensive look at the history and structure of the game design program. Professor Joseph De Lappe gives us an amazing talk about his work as a game developer. His work is like nothing else out there: subversive, provocative, culturally critical activism disguised as game. I keep thinking I’ve met this guy somewhere before, then it hits me: we met him at Biome Collective the last time we were in Dundee. He’s part of that crew. I’m so happy he’s talking with us, because we simply ran out of bandwidth to link up with Biome again, so this chat has become a BOGO bonus.

After the presentations, we’re invited into a game development pod where some experimental input devices are being tested. One designer is experimenting with a stationary bike as an input device… one pedals and steers to navigate in the game. I talk with Bill and Joseph while the students take turns on the games.

DJCAD sessions

We return back to the Dundee campus for some presentations by Duncan of Jordanstone School of Art and Design (hereinafter DJCAD) faculty touting the illustration, animation, and visual special effects programs. From there, we race in the rain (it goes without saying the whole day has been rain from start to finish!) back to DCCS where we have a special treat: a look at original artwork from the comics archives at the University, presented by Matthew Jarron, the Curator of Museum Collections. Matthew, who looks precisely like an archivist from central casting, goes through the archival boxes rapidly, sometimes too quickly to see what he’s describing because there is so much, but it’s still a pleasure to see these old works in their original inking.

Gutters to Galaxies

Thankful not to brave the rain again, we stay at DCCS for Norrie Millar’s Being Human workshop, Gutters to Galaxies. The gutter, for those who aren’t jargon-aware, references the space between panels in a comic page. Norrie’s workshop is an all-ages event open to the community, but the all-day downpour tamps down the attendance significantly. I’m glad we are here to fill up some space. Norrie gives us a prompt to create a 3-panel comic in one hour: identify a planet, describe how you get there, and portray who lives there. For my comic, I invent a planet called Cake, I get there in a candle rocket, and who lives there? Me, because it’s my birthday!

Sadly I didn’t think to document my work to share here, but let’s just say it wasn’t my best masterpiece. The colored markers were of the kludgy kid-grade variety and the paper was standard white copy paper, though I tried to work within the limits of these media and not fight them. I know it’s a poor craftsperson who blames their tools, but you know, sometimes it’s just the bloody tool. Still it was light-hearted and fun, and I got a round of applause for the effort.

Welcome feast

Our day’s activities having concluded, we are off to a welcome feast for our group hosted by the University. We slog through the rain to the Gidi Grill, a fusion restaurant with an Afro-Caribbean vibe. Our large group had pre-ordered our food through Mary, and since I love the seafood in Scotland, I chose a grilled haddock which was delicious. Adult beverages are on our own, so at the bar I end up with a Peroni draft — for the kind of food this is, the beer choices are quite minimal and oddly stocked. I thought this was Scotland…

A toned-down evening

Parenthetically, I have to admit that the food is absolutely delicious, the company is splendid, and Chris, Mary, Stephen and I have plenty of time to get to know one another better, but the evening is a bit of a letdown for a couple of reasons. On prior trips, we had always been treated to a really ritzy spread at the Dundee Contemporary Art galleries, where wine flowed like water and the food was decidedly fine dining. Gidi, while satisfying, is not “our” place for the evening in quite that same way — it is a night out with a large group at a restaurant. Another disappointment: Mary had long discussed plans for a traditional Scottish ceilidh, a dance party, following the meal. It became clear just before our departure that this had been scrapped.

The toning down of this evening is something I put down to the budgetary constraints faced by Scottish universities (which are described as charities in their literature) in tandem with the overall bitterness of the economy in post-Brexit Scotland that is fueling such discontent with Westminster, especially in post-industrial cities like Dundee. I don’t let these unmet expectations spoil the evening, because I understand why things are the way they are, and I certainly don’t hold it against our hosts, who are going above and beyond to the degree their resources allow.

Draffen’s

After dinner, I invite a small group to visit Draffen’s, my favorite bar in Dundee, though it probably shouldn’t be. It’s a speakeasy bar inspired by the American Prohibition era, right down to the unmarked door in an alley leading to a basement filled with 1920’s jazz music. Yeah, pretty kitschy, I know, but I find this to be a hilarious conceit. It’s a pleasant cap to the evening and I can think of no better place to conclude my second birthday celebration in Scotland.

Tomorrow brings a big day of preparation, a long-awaited visit to the Victoria and Albert Design Museum, and a family reunion with my cousins!