I love this town. Or is it a village? Hamlet? Probably not city, but functionally it is.
Duns, Scotland is in the south of Scotland, around fifty miles south of Edinburgh in what’s known as The Scottish Borders.
That means it’s a cannon shot away from England.
There were a lot of battles around Duns, going back to the Battle of Duns in the 1300s.
You had the Burning of Duns, The Mustering for Berwick, The March on Berwick, the raid of Duns and The Mustering of Flodden.
Cooler names than stuff like Operation Heroic Justice To Smoosh The Bad Guys.
Now it’s a peaceful town of around 3000 souls and I can’t understand a one of them.
They’re speaking English, so to speak, but I always feel like a moron asking them to repeat themselves several times till I can pick out a meaning.
And it’s a bit of positive news that the battles here are over. It gives me hope that eventually, things will settle down and humans can stop killing each other. Sometimes. Here and there.
From talking with the locals, there’s very little crime, everyone gets on pretty well and they’d love another Indian restaurant because the last one got lost in a card game.
I kid you not.
How Texas is that? Losing a restaurant in a card game.
Sometimes on a walkabout, you just take a zero day to get a feel for the place. It’s not so much seeing all the stuff, but just hanging out and absorbing the place. Yesterday was a zero day in Duns.
I stopped into The White Swan Pub for a mighty Full Scottish Breakfast but I demured a bit on the pile of meat and got the vegetarian version with vegetarian haggis. I wrote for an hour or two and got to know everyone who came through the door. When I was done writing, I left my heavy day pack behind the bar with Claire and wandered the quiet town, loving the architecture and shooting a lot of obtuse photos and when I got back, Tom, The Guy Who Makes Stuff and Fixes Stuff at Fort Glen Whisky popped by for a pint. It was five, so it counted as happy hour.
Essentially, I sat in the same spot at the same table all damned day. I went from breakfast and coffee and writing and idle chitchat in the morning to no-idea-how-many pints in the afternoon to dinner and even stretched it out to a fine piece of wild salmon for dinner.
I’ve always admired the Don Juan concept of finding your spot, and that was my spot. The table under the TV and right next to the bar in The White Swan Pub in Duns, Scotland.
Peter and Matt from Fort Glen eventually came and joined me for dinner so that rounded out my day at My Spot.
It’s easy to love a place like this. Everyone seems to know everyone else, the streets are clean and tidy and beautiful, the homes are well kept, the gardens are lush, and you can smell food cooking while walking down any street. Everyone I met was friendly and kind, and I rarely could understand what they said. I smiled a lot and nodded and every so often I’d catch a word and could generally figure it out.
Every time I visit a wonderful new place, I wonder how it would be to live there. I look at home prices, and for the most part, those wonderful tourist places are way out of my league, but Duns, in its bucolic and historic glory, was a bargain. You could buy a row house in town on a neat little street for cheap. And if you want something outside town that might look like a little gothic cathedral, you could actually afford it.
And in my wanderings, it seems to be easily functional. Because I live out of a carry-on, I don’t have scissors, so my beard was edging on living-in-a-van-down-by-the-river, so I popped into the Fade Away Barbers for a beard trim. Ten friendly and talkative minutes later, I looked well-coiffed.
When you think about what you want in a town, surely being able to walk and get pretty much everything you need in a beautiful, peaceful place is a great existence. Even if you can’t speak the language very well. Duns is a kind and lovely place with everything you really need.
And you can get great whisky.
I like Duns. It doesn’t scream LOOK AT ME WITH MY BIG MONUMENTS AND GAUDY CHURCHES AND SNOOTY RESTAURANTS…
It says welcome.
Even if you can’t understand it at first.
