Michael Fry: A special country for connoisseurs

LAST Sunday, I was invited to tea by my landlady in Leipzig, and to my relief the tea gave way after a suitable interval to schnapps. We kicked off a wide-ranging discussion with a survey of our respective plans for the festive season. Frau Friedrich is heading for the Canary Islands and commiserated with me for whatever it was that would call me back to cold, dark Scotland. I said I preferred my winters that way.

During the rest of the evening, I learned that Frau Friedrich is an enterprising widow who has done well in the last 20 years. She grew up in the German Democratic Republic. It offered its citizens little, but one thing it did do was ensure equality of the sexes in their working lives. She became an expert in machine tools (which probably would never have happened in the West). After 1990, she set up a business to sell them to the newly liberated joiners and plumbers of Leipzig. The business boomed, because till then these tools had not been available for personal ownership but could only be nicked from state enterprises.

Now, though her husband died young, Frau Friedrich can look forward to a comfortable, even adventurous, widowhood. Among her assets is the big house, much like a tenement in Edinburgh or Glasgow, where she rents out the flats to birds of passage like myself. The money lets her do what she really wants to do, which is to take long foreign holidays, a month at a time, at least twice a year.

She should come to Scotland, I suggested.

“You said it’s dark.”

“But in the summer it’s light’.”

“It will still be cold, though.”

“Well, it gets warmer sometimes.”

The exchange sums up the problem of attracting to Scottish shores not only a merry widow but in general the sun-loving, fun-loving masses of Europe with money to spend. Rothesay and North Berwick just do not compare with Benidorm and Malia for what such people want. If even Scots do not think they compare, as they have shown by deserting the Firths of Forth and Clyde for the Mediterranean Sea, then why should anybody else?

And yet it remains the dream of those who think they can administer and control these matters in Scotland that some form of mass tourism might be created. That has been the basic philosophy of the Scottish Tourist Board, now VisitScotland, in a number of dubious campaigns run over the years.

Remember Autumn Gold? It was an attempt in the 1990s to persuade foreigners that if they came to Scotland in October (policy objective: extend the tourist season) they might witness the same natural kaleidoscope as is to be seen in New England, with its immense forests showing a gorgeous range of colour often right up till Christmas in the tranquil, cooling climate created by a peculiar geography.

In Scotland there are, thanks to the deer and the sheep, not that many trees, most of them evergreens anyway, and when the leaves fall they tend to drop off in a couple of days during the first week of October as the first storms hit them. I would have said this promotional campaign was simply a deceptive one, and if any tourists had been fooled by it they were unlikely to have come back a second time – not, presumably, the point of the exercise.

I hope Mike Cantlay, the present head of VisitScotland, is an improvement on his feeble forerunners. But I am not sure he will be after reading this week of his clarion call for Scotland to seize the opportunity of a step-change in its touristic fortunes, supposedly to be presented by the Olympic Games in London next year and by the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow in 2014, among other grand spectaculars in the pipeline.

It may be good for Cantlay’s career, though hardly otherwise commendable, that he should fall into line with the official Cameronian propaganda extolling the Olympics as something not just for one place at an extremity of Great Britain, in fact right at the other end from Scotland, but for the whole of it. Yet the investment being ploughed into the regeneration of some rundown suburbs of London exceeds next year’s budget for what we used to call regional aid in the rest of the country.

The gross London-centrism of the entire business will not be countered by draping Edinburgh Castle in an Olympic banner, or whatever they mean to do. That prospect alone might be enough to send this resident of the Scottish capital away into the Amazonian jungle for the duration of the Olympiad so as to see or hear nothing of it. I only hope the Peruvians do not win a gold for spear-chucking.

I have never met the sort of people who spend a fortune on tickets for the Olympic Games, and I am unsure I would want to, but I imagine they will be bronzed, strapping, muscle-bound types from California or Australia with a deep interest in synchronised swimming. In other words, they are emphatically not culture vultures who will take a couple of days out to see Zaha Hadid’s Museum of Transport or the refurbished Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Yet this is just what Cantlay hopes and expects them to do.

In principle, it seems to me a bad idea for one country to rest its touristic hopes on what is happening in another country (are the Irish going to contend that Olympic ticket-holders should, while in London, drop in on Dublin?). In any case, I would like to put it to VisitScotland that a long-term improvement in its performance is going to come not through desperate overselling of transient spectaculars but through concentration on the true virtues of the country.

In Scotland, we have little sun, only a limited amount of surf and not enough sex. What we do have are landscapes and seascapes, the picturesque changes of the seasons (often within a single day), wildlife you can watch but also shoot or catch and eat, for instance in one of our 15 Michelin-starred restaurants (VisitScotland never boast of them: they are too elitist).

It is a country not for the masses, in other words, but for connoisseurs, not for package tours but for discerning individuals.

These may never break statistical records in numbers of visitors, but they may be persuaded to spend a lot of money. How else does Switzerland continue to exist as a prime destination?

Switzerland does not want its peace and quiet broken by hordes of drunken yobs and their sluttish girlfriends, toasting themselves by day, drinking and fighting and spewing by night. The Swiss keep their standards and their prices high and they get a class of clientele to match. They cannily use their tidy profits to maintain a level of tourist facilities which is, in certain specialisms, unmatched.

Scotland ought to follow the Swiss rather than the Spanish model, a model not of quantity but of quality.