On the Dunes

I don’t suppose Donald Trump or Keir Starmer saw the row of flags, black, white and green with a red triangle, on a high dune near the Trump International golf course, eight miles north of Aberdeen, when they flew in together on Monday evening – very cosy – on one of two identical helicopters, Marine One or its empty decoy twin. It was like the start of an ancient battle. One dune, held in solidarity with the people of Palestine; another with uniformed police in hi-vis jackets, and a sniper in black, I was told, and thermal cameras, and who knows what other operations hidden in the grass and sand. There were more flags stuck on the beach, and on the back of a boat being chased by a police launch. ‘Children starve, Trump plays golf,’ a placard read. A man lounged in self-admiring Secret Service fashion on the open door of his Merc.

We used to come to Balmedie when we were children, my brothers and I, hiding among the pillboxes and digging in the immense flat stretches of beautiful clean sand. Apart from a couple of hours one Christmas morning in maybe 2016, I hadn’t been back to see the nasty branding on the Trump International clubhouse or the magnificent wind turbines that spoil Trump’s view of the sea. So I went to take a look around on the Sunday afternoon before the great arrival, and walked to a little creek just below the Sand Bothy kiosk, which was, I discovered, the current border. A policewoman stopped me and told me, sorry, I’d have to go back the way I’d come.

I sat on the beach for ages, the high flats by Aberdeen harbour just visible to the south, and a string of oil-platform supply boats, and a four-masted schooner with its sails down, left behind from the international Tall Ships regatta, which had docked in Aberdeen, to city-wide revels and monetisation, the week before. And the hated ‘windmills’, the blades moving counter-clockwise on nine, still on the other two. I found shells and stones like the ones we used to collect when I was little: granites and quartzites, common cockle, banded wedge. I took photos of the different sorts of seaweed, kelps and wracks and ulvas, because it’s about time I learned which is which, and of a dead gull, a heap of feathers really, stuck to a single bone.

I walked back to the creek, which had huge rough blocks piled up along it, dragons’ teeth, concrete anti-tank barriers laid down in the 1940s; they get buried as the sand shifts, and exposed when it shifts again. A scrap of black plastic had trapped a branch of seaweed, which had dried out and gone black; maybe that was what was feeding the spike of tough, deep-rooted marram grass that had settled there, stabilising the sand enough to allow a tiny gorse and another plant that looked a bit familiar – I took lots of photos so I could work out what it was – to grow there too. In time, more grass may root, more gorse, stabilising more sand and plants, until a new dune is established, or else it will all get blown or washed away. I took lots more photos, of the turbines, of my fledgling sand dune, of the police in their hi-vis jackets, of the boats.

Behind the beach it was the annual Sand Bothy ‘Seaside Fun-draiser’, raising money for the volunteer-run hut and beach wheelchair service. The chairs themselves, with their enormous puffy doughnut wheels, were a main attraction, along with the Blood Bikes, the Hebridean ponies, the man dressed up as a Ghostbuster with a Ghostbusters car. A reporter from the Turkish broadcaster TRT World asked me if I was local, and I said, no, not any more, not really. Then NPR’s London correspondent asked me what I thought of Starmer, and I felt like telling her, so I did. ‘It’s like Cold War Vienna,’ I messaged my husband, with a picture of a person in a Baby Shark costume. ‘Undercover cops,’ I wrote under a snap of Highland alpacas. ‘Noticeably short and aggressive hair.’

Then a man called Jim asked me where I’d come from, and when I said London, he asked what bit, and when I said Camberwell, he asked if I knew the barracks. I said I didn’t, and he said I should because he used to stay in them, at which point I started laughing and said: so I suppose you’re working here today. He agreed that he was, but for the police, not the army, and he showed me his warrant card. So people reading this may be better prepared than I was for such an encounter: ‘Jim’ did indeed have short and strict-looking hair, as did his silent wingmen, ‘Paul’ and ‘Dave’. They were white, they were wearing jeans and trainers, ‘Jim’ flitted skilfully between jocularity and menace whereas ‘Paul’ just stuck with the menace and ‘Dave’ never stopped looking around him, never ceased in his constant scan of the crowd.

I’d been noted, asking questions of the policewoman at the creek and taking photos. They were wondering what I thought I was doing, and would I please show some ID. I did, though if I’d read the bust cards that get handed out at protests, I would have known I didn’t have to; but also, I was shaking with humiliation that my big mouth and nosy nature had somehow led me into the purview of the Terrorism Act, not as a disciplined practitioner of civil disobedience, but a bumbling fool. They checked me on the police computer and offered me a lift, which I couldn’t turn down fast enough. And then I went on my way.

‘Paul’ was back the next day, which for protesters began outside the White Horse Inn in Balmedie, followed by a procession through fields and woodland to the beach. It’s a strange thing, the Stop Trump Coalition, righteous and well organised, but with a predilection for the antipolitical waggish insult: ‘Trump’s still a cunt’, in memory of the late Janey Godley; ‘Donald Where’s Your Troosers?’ and variations thereon; a Trump-headed bog-brush that you can buy, I’m told, from Amazon; and, from Saturday’s bigger demonstration in Aberdeen city centre, ‘Impotus’, ‘Meanies out of Menie’, ‘Veto the Cheeto’, the Trump-with-Epstein photo on a helium balloon. Monday’s procession was augmented not only by ‘Paul’, now with a different plain-clothes pal, but a sweet group of local boys on bikes and scooters, one of whom was inspired by the chanting to perform a Highland fling on his Adidas slides.

The Palestine bloc at the back brought the political rigour, with some new chants: ‘Destroys our landscape, bullies our neighbours, this is modern-day colonisation’; ‘Five thousand police and the CIA, protecting a felon on his holiday.’ And the flags, which aren’t waggish, or gawping or sentimental, or wordy, or in any way hard to understand.

The flags arrayed on a sandy cliff-edge, in a fragile ecosystem, looking out to sea: Starmer and Trump wouldn’t have got it, even if they’d tried. But the people out on the dunes did, and will have made their own connections. And will have seen the lines drawn, as if for battle. And may be thinking that it’s time to pick a side.