One Hundred Years Old

The Flying Scotsman locomotive (LNER Class A3 4472) celebrated its centenary this morning at Waverley station. Coincidentally the Royal Scottish Country Dance Society (RSCDS) is also celebrating its centenary this year and the two combined with dancers at the station doing the dance called the Flying Scotsman. I was working for the RSCDS taking pictures. There was an interesting hierarchy of importance going on, with people from the National Railway Museum and Hornby, the sponsors of the Centenary event, clearly more favoured than the RSCDS people who had to wait for some time to get access to the platform for their pictures with the engine. Considering we were in Edinburgh there was a marked lack of Scottish voices from the podium. There was Mary Archer, chair of the Science Museum Group which includes the NRM. The woman who is currently head of the NRM said that despite her accent she was born in Inverness but then also said that one of her earliest railway memories was travelling from London to Edinburgh on the train as a young child with a railway chaperone coming to stay with her grandparents so I wonder how long she actually lived in Scotland. And the poet that read a poem they had written for the occasion was the UK Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage (extra), not the Scots Makar, Kathleen Jamie. And then someone from sponsors Hornby. Local colour was provided by the RSCDS dancers and then the Red Hot Chilli Pipers but no-one local spoke from the podium (aka the 'important people').