Category: Scotland

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The Eck’s Factor

 

From the Jersey Evening Post

 

So it’s farewell to Alex Salmond, former First Minister of Scotland, former leader of the Scottish National Party and the man who gave Scots their first opportunity in 300 years to make their country independent again.  The most formidable Scottish politician of his generation – of a couple of generations, surely – Salmond was apparently the victim of a heart attack soon after he’d given a speech in North Macedonia on October 12th. 

 

To say I had conflicted feelings about Salmond is an understatement.  For a quarter-century, from his election to the London parliament in 1987 to his resignation as Scotland’s First Minister in 2014, after the referendum on Scottish independence went against him and 55% of the Scottish electorate voted to remain in the United Kingdom, he was a man who achieved what had previously seemed impossible – he made Scottish politics interesting. His eloquence, wit and energy gave Scottish politics some oomph.  He gave it the elusive ‘X’ factor.

 

And then… It went pear-shaped.  I’ll stress the fact that in 2020 Salmond was cleared of the charges of sexual misconduct levelled against him.  Also, the Scottish government, which bungled the initial investigation into him, and the Scottish media, which gleefully turned the coverage of Salmond’s trial into a circus, came out of the affair poorly too.  But Salmond’s own lawyer admitted his client “could have been a better man.”  All too often in Scotland’s top political job, he’d behaved with the decorum of a lewd schoolboy – to the point where staffing procedures around him were changed to prevent women having to work with him on their own.  Also, after the trial, which had been a traumatic experience for the women who’d spoken out against him, Salmond displayed zero contrition.  He could have shown himself to be ‘a better man’, but didn’t.     

 

Anyway, here’s a slightly revised excerpt from something I wrote about him in 2021.  It was just after the Alba party, which he’d formed in the wake of his acquittal, had flopped at that year’s elections to the Scottish parliament.  Obviously, since I wrote it, the electoral shine has faded from the SNP too.

 

From en.wikipedia.org / © The Scottish Government

 

For the last 35 years, since the dark days when Margaret Thatcher ran Scotland with the imperious disregard one would give a colonial possession, Scottish politics has felt like a rollercoaster with both giddy peaks and despairing troughs.  And Salmond has been a constant presence on that rollercoaster.  I know plenty of people who detest him but I’ve seen him as a force for both the good and the bad, the good earlier on and bad more recently.  It’s the memory of the good things that makes me sad to see him end up like this, even if he brought a lot of it upon himself.

 

I remember when I first saw him.  One afternoon in early 1987, while a fourth-year undergraduate student, I was nursing a pint in the Central Refectory building at Aberdeen University.  I noticed from the corner of my eye a group of students whom I knew as members of the campus branch of the SNP – Alan Kennedy, Val Bremner, Gillian Pollock, Nick Goode – enter and wander over to the counter.  They were in the company of a young, round-faced bloke in an un-studenty suit, shirt and tie.  I identified him as an up-and-coming SNP politician whom Alan Kennedy, a good mate of mine, had told me was standing in the next general election in nearby Banff and Buchan against the incumbent Conservative Party MP Albert McQuarrie.  He’d come to the university that day to address the SNP group and this was the SNP students showing their visitor some post-talk hospitality.  The politician, I’d been assured, was one to watch.  Indeed, Alan said something along the lines of: “He’s going to do great things.”

 

A few months later, on June 11th, the general election took place and this rising SNP star wrestled Banff and Buchan away from Albert McQuarrie and became its new MP.  I recall McQuarrie, a doughty old-school Scottish Tory MP who revelled in the nickname ‘the Buchan Bulldog’, bursting into tears during a subsequent interview at what he saw as the unfairness and indignity of losing his beloved constituency to an SNP whippersnapper.  He was perhaps the first politician, but certainly not the last, to have his nose put out of joint by Alexander Elliot Anderson Salmond.

 

By the early 1990s, Salmond was SNP leader.  I lived in London at the time and occasionally I’d drink with a Labour Party spin doctor, also from Scotland.  He had no inhibitions about telling me, at every opportunity, what a detestable creep he thought Salmond was.  With his smartass manner and habitual smirk, which frequently expanded into a Cheshire-cat grin, and a general arrogance that no doubt came from knowing he was intellectually and rhetorically streets ahead of the numpties making up the majority of Westminster’s Scottish Labour MPs, you could understand how much of an annoyance Salmond was to his opponents.  But back then the SNP had just three MPs, so at least he could be dismissed as a minor annoyance.

 

How long ago that seems now.  In those far-off days, the Labour Party controlled much of Scotland at council level, provided the lion’s share of Scottish MPs for Westminster and, when it arrived in 1999, dominated the Scottish parliament too.  If their party also happened to be in power at Westminster, which it was occasionally, Scottish Labour-ites surely felt like masters of all they surveyed.  If the Conservatives were in power at Westminster, which they were most of the time, those Scottish Labour-ites grumbled a bit, but diplomatically kept their heads down while right-wing Tory policies were imposed on Scotland.

 

Then in 2007 the sky fell in.  Salmond’s SNP won the biggest number of seats in the Scottish parliament and he became Scotland’s First Minister.  The SNP have remained in power there during the 14 years and three Scottish parliamentary elections since.  They also won the majority of Scotland’s Westminster seats in the UK general elections in 2015, 2017 and 2019.  They lost the independence referendum in 2014 – an event that led to Salmond resigning as First Minister and making way for his deputy and supposed protégé Nicola Sturgeon – but the percentage of the vote they got, 45%, was still far more than what anyone had expected at the campaign’s start.  They upended the cosy old tradition of Scottish deference to the London-based overlords.  Thank God for that, in my opinion.

 

© William Collins

 

This stuck in many craws. Not just in those of the Scottish Labour Party, with its historical sense of entitlement, but in those of the majority of Scotland’s newspapers, whose hacks had enjoyed a close relationship with the old political clique and liked to see themselves as part of Scotland’s establishment. It must have horrified them to discover that, no matter how negatively they reported the SNP and its performance in government, a significant proportion of the Scottish public ignored them and kept on voting SNP.  Meanwhile, the grin of Alex Salmond, the bastard who seemed emblematic of their good times coming to an end, grew ever wider, his mood grew ever merrier and his girth grew ever more Falstaffian.

 

However, from 2017 onwards, Salmond’s many foes scented blood.  2017 saw him lose the Westminster seat that, after quitting as Scottish First Minister, he’d been elected to in 2015. That same year, he put on at the Edinburgh Festival a chat-show called Alex Salmond: Unleashed, which from all accounts was a graceless, self-indulgent and ego-driven mess.  Soon after, he developed his stage-show into a programme called The Alex Salmond Show, which was broadcast on RT, Russia’s international English-language news channel.  Associating himself with Vladimir Putin’s televisual voice to the world was not a wise move. Salmond hadn’t just given his detractors ammunition to use against him.  He’d handed them a whole arsenal.

 

I’d always assumed there was no dirt to dig up on Alex Salmond, for the simple reason that if there had been, his enemies in the old Scottish establishment would have dug it up and used it to wreck his reputation long ago.  Thus, it was a surprise in 2018 when the Daily Record newspaper reported that Salmond faced allegations of sexual misconduct while he’d been First Minister.  This had lately been the subject of an inquiry by the Scottish government and its findings had been passed on to the police.  Although Salmond made sure there was a legal review of this, which resulted in the Scottish government admitting that its investigative procedures had been flawed and paying him half a million pounds in legal expenses, the police still charged him with 14 offences, including two counts of attempted rape, in 2019.

 

One year later, Salmond was cleared of these charges. The prosecutors dropped one charge, the jury found him not guilty in 12 more and the final charge was deemed ‘not proven’.  Nonetheless, Salmond’s defence admitted he’d acted inappropriately, been overly ‘touchy feely’ with female staff and ‘could certainly have been a better man’.

 

Meanwhile, the Scottish government and First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, now totally at odds with Salmond, were subject to both an investigation by a Scottish Parliamentary committee and an independent investigation about how they’d handled, or mishandled, the affair. The committee concluded there’d been both individual and corporate incompetence but these conclusions weren’t enough to topple Sturgeon. The independent investigation judged that Sturgeon hadn’t breached the ministerial code, something that Salmond and his supporters, convinced of a conspiracy against him in high places, maintained she had.

 

From facebook.com

 

In 2021 Salmond founded the Alba Party, supposedly more gung-ho in its desire for Scottish independence than the cautious SNP, and claimed this wasn’t an attempt to undermine Sturgeon. But it was generally perceived as an effort to diminish her party’s vote in the Scottish election that year – Salmond’s revenge after his acquittal.  Whether Alba’s purpose was malevolent or benevolent, it didn’t work because the SNP ended up with 64 seats in the new parliament, with the Greens bumping up the number of pro-independence MSPs to 72, compared with the Unionist parties’ tally of 57 MSPs and Alba’s tally of zero.

 

It didn’t help Alba’s cause that it attracted a lot of fringe-dwelling dingbats in the independence movement, dingbats whom I’m sure Sturgeon’s SNP was delighted to see head Salmond’s way.  These included conspiracy fantasists (former ambassador Craig Murray, a man who couldn’t pop out to the shops to buy a pint of milk without claiming to have met an MI5 operative and uncovered an evil plot by the British government along the way), frothing social conservatives (Margaret Lynch, who peddled the lie that LGBT organisations were trying to lower the age of consent to ‘ten’) and the generally ‘hard of thinking’ (MSP Ash Regan, whose big idea was to create an ‘independence thermometer’, measuring Scotland’s readiness to leave the UK).

 

Finally, one thing I will say in Salmond’s defence.  The Scottish press was pretty disgraceful in how it reported the case.  From columnist Alex Massie declaring at the investigation’s outset that ‘WHATEVER HAPPENS, IT’S OVER FOR SALMOND’, to the Herald previewing the trial with a ‘Big Read’ feature that it illustrated with pictures of the Yorkshire Ripper, Fred and Rosemary West, the Moors Murderers, Dennis Nilsen, Charles Manson and Adolf Eichmann, to a dodgy, nod-and-a-wink post-trial documentary by the BBC’s Kirsty Wark, the tone of the coverage didn’t suggest that a person is ‘innocent until proven guilty’.  Rather, it suggested that a person is ‘guilty because we want them to be guilty’.

***

The piece I wrote in 2021 ended with an observation, “the Salmond Rollercoaster has run out of track,” and a plea to him: “Call it a day for Christ’s sake.” 

 

Since then, of course, Nicola Sturgeon’s reign as Scottish First Minister has come to an ignominious end too.  These events call to mind the famous quote by that old Conservative politician and racist Enoch Powell: “All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.”

 

If only Alex Salmond had kept his hands to himself whilst First Minister.  And if only he’d retired and accepted the role of distinguished ‘elder statesman’ in 2014.  He wouldn’t have disproven Powell’s famous edict, because his career would still have ended with the disappointment of the referendum.  But at least today I’d be remembering him as ‘a better man’.  And it’s as ‘a better man’ that I’d like to remember him.

 

© Slainte Media / RT / From archive.org

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Mither

 

© Jim Barton / From wikipedia.org

 

Today, September 18th, is the tenth anniversary of 2014’s referendum on Scottish independence.  Yes, a decade has now passed since the Scottish electorate voted, by a majority of 55% to 45%, in favour of remaining part of the United Kingdom. 

 

In the referendum’s aftermath, I was inspired to write a short story entitled Mither.  This poked fun at a narrative peddled by the mainstream media that the referendum had turned Scotland into a bitterly divided country – parents, children, siblings who’d previously lived together in harmony suddenly transformed into rabid yes-sers and no-ers who were at each other’s throats, families in turmoil, that sort of thing.  It also paid homage to a classic and highly influential movie.  Needless to say, the story was too weird and too daft to ever get published.

 

However, ten years on, I thought I would take advantage of the occasion and post it here.  I now give you…  Mither.

 

© Labour for Independence / From wikipedia.org

 

I must have dozed while I sat in the office and read the literature that’d landed on our porch floor that morning.  I hadn’t heard her go out.  I only heard the porch door scrape open and shut as she came back.

 

‘Mither,’ I said when she entered the office.  ‘You were outside.’

 

She settled into the armchair with the tartan-patterned cushions that’d been her seat – her throne, we called it – when she ran the business by herself.  Now that I was mostly in charge, I had my own seat in the office but I kept the throne there should she want to use it.  She smoothed her skirt across her knees.  She was a modern-minded woman – at times too modern-minded because she had some ideas you’d expect more in a giddy teenager – but she avoided trousers and stuck to old-fashioned long skirts.  ‘Aye, Norrie.  I’ve been out and about.’

 

I didn’t like the sound of that but before I could quiz her she leaned forward from the throne and took the leaflet out of my hand.  ‘What’s this you’re reading?  Don’t say they’ve shovelled more shite through our door.’

 

It pained me to hear her genteel voice soiled by coarse language.  But I stayed patient.  ‘It’s actually interesting, Mither.  It’s an interview with a normal young couple, a professional young couple, about what might happen if the referendum result is…’  I searched for a word that’d cause minimum offence.  ‘Unexpected.’

 

Mither sighed and her eyes swivelled up in their sockets.

 

‘Now I ken you’re sceptical, Mither.  But they seem decent.  He’s called Kenneth and she’s called Gina.  And they’re worried about the effect independence would have on them.’

 

Mither’s eyes swivelled down again.  Then I saw them twitch from side to side while they scanned the text on the leaflet.

 

I pressed on.  ‘It wouldn’t have a good effect, Mither.  It’d be bad for them.’  Why did my voice tremble?  Why was I afraid?  ‘The financial uncertainty. How would decent hardworking people like them – like me – cope if all the business fled south and the prices shot up?  And the banks…  Why, I read in the paper the other day about an expert who said the bank machines would stop dispensing cash if the vote was yes.’

 

‘Does,’ asked Mither, ‘this say what Kenneth does for a living?’

 

‘And even if we still have cash, Mither, what would our currency be?  We won’t have the pound – George Osborne and Ed Balls down in Westminster won’t allow it.  We’ll have to make do with some banana-republic-type currency.  Or worse, the euro!’

 

‘Norrie,’ said Mither, ‘calm down.  Does this leaflet actually say what Kenneth’s job is?’

 

‘Aye, of course it does.’  I faltered.  ‘Well, no. Maybe it doesn’t.’

 

She sighed.  ‘It certainly doesn’t, Norrie.  And I’ll tell you why.’  She raised the leaflet so that I could see a picture of Kenneth, Gina and their children on it.  She placed a fingertip against Kenneth.  ‘It’s because he’s Kenneth Braithwaite, who’s one of our local councillors.  One of our Conservative Party councillors.  But that fact isn’t mentioned here.  It pretends that he’s an ordinary unbiased person like you or me.’

 

I chuckled nervously.  ‘Now Mither.  I wouldn’t say you were unbiased.’

 

Mither rose from her throne.  ‘I am unbiased.  My mind’s open to facts and I form opinions and make decisions based on those facts.  Facts, mind you.  Not the propaganda, smears and scaremongering that’s poured out of the political, business and media establishments during the last year.  Not the drivel that’s clogged and befuddled your impressionable young mind.’

 

Before I could reply, she tore the leaflet down the middle and returned it to my hands in two pieces.  Then she hustled out of the office and shut the door behind her with enough force to make a stuffed owl wobble and almost fall off a nearby shelf.  I heard her shoes go clacking up the stairs and then another door slam, presumably the one leading into her room.

 

I seethed.  How I hated, how I loathed this referendum!  Setting family members against one another day after day!  I looked at the leaflet again and realised that by a creepy coincidence Mither had ripped it down the middle of the family-picture.  Now Kenneth and a little boy occupied one half of it while Gina and a little girl were sundered and separate in the other half.

 

A family literally torn apart.

***

I hated the referendum but I couldn’t wait for the day of it, September 18th, to come – and take place and be over with.  The problem was that the time until then seemed to pass very slowly.  And during this time it felt like a war of attrition was being waged against me.  I grew more tired and depressed the longer those separatists raved in the media and on the streets and from the literature they popped through the slot in our porch door.  A rash of yes stickers and posters spread along the windows in the street-fronts of our neighbourhood.  Some of them even appeared on the houses of people I’d thought were decent and sensible.

 

I began to panic.  God, could it happen?  I had visions of the doors padlocked and the windows boarded up on the old family business and Mither and I living in poverty alongside hundreds of thousands of other suddenly-penniless Scots.  While around us, food prices and fuel prices skyrocketed, the banks and financial companies whisked all their offices away to London, the housing market disappeared into a giant hole, the hospitals became like those in the developing world, and terrorist cells congregated in Glasgow and Edinburgh and prepared to attack England across the new border.

 

But worst of all was the madness this referendum campaign inspired in Mither.

 

She sensed when I was worn out.  While I was napping, or nodding off behind the desk in the office, or slumped in a stupor in front of the TV, she’d leave her room and creep down the stairs and do things.

 

These might be wee things.  If I wasn’t in the office, she might use the computer and I’d discover hours later that it was open at frightful separatist websites like Bella Caledonia or National Collective or Wings over Scotland.  The day’s Scottish Daily Express might disappear from the kitchen table and turn up, scrunched into a ball, in the recycling bin in the corner.  Or if the Express was left on the table, any photographs in it of Alistair Darling or George Osborne might have shocking words like tosser or bampot graffiti-ed across them in Mither’s curly handwriting.

 

More worrying was her tendency sometimes to sneak outdoors.  It would’ve been bad enough in normal times because she was too old and frail to be wandering the streets alone.  But in these dangerous times, who knew what she was up to and who she was associating with?

 

© National Collective / From Stirling Centre of Scottish Studies

 

The evidence disturbed me.  When I visited her room I found a growing collection of things that she could only have acquired during trips outside – little Scottish saltire and lion-rampant flags, booklets of essays and poems written in support of independence, brochures for events with sinister titles like Imagi-Nation and Yestival, posters where the word can’t had the t scrawled out so that they read can instead.  She’d amassed badges, stickers and flyers with the word yes emblazoned on them.  What a disgusting-sounding word yes had become to me.  I’d contemplate Mither and imagine that horrible word spurting from her lips –

 

‘Yes!  Yes!  Yes – !’

 

And she’d argue.  Goodness me, what had got into the woman to make her so bloody-minded?  In between quoting names of people I’d never heard of, but who were undoubtedly up to no good, like Gerry Hassan, David Greig and Lesley Riddoch, she’d taunt me mercilessly.

 

‘So go on.  Tell me.  Explain.  Why can we not be independent?’

 

‘Because… We can’t!  We just can’t!  We’re too… too…’

 

‘Too wee?’

 

‘Aye!  Well, no.  Not that, not only that.  We’re also…’

 

‘Too poor?’

 

‘Aye, that’s true, Scotland’s too poor to be independent.  But the main reason is that we’re…’

 

‘Too stupid?’

 

‘Och stop it, Mither!  Stop!  You’re putting words in my mouth!’

 

‘But you agree with that basic proposition?  Scotland can’t be independent because it’s too small, its economy’s too weak and its people aren’t educated enough?’  She sighed.  ‘That’s what we’re up against.  A mass of our fellow Scots, yourself included, brainwashed by the establishment into believing their own inferiority!’

 

I stormed out of the room at that point.  What horrible people had she been talking to?

 

A few weeks before the referendum-day, her madness reached what I assumed was its peak.  After the last guests had left the premises and after I’d washed and put away the breakfast things, I took the vacuum cleaner into the porch and started on the carpet there.  It took me a minute to notice something odd about the rack on the porch wall where I stored leaflets about local attractions that our guests might be interested in: Rosslyn Chapel, Abbotsford, Traquair House, Melrose Abbey and so on.  The leaflets in the rack had changed.  The tourist ones had disappeared.  In their place were different ones.  Political ones.

 

© Women for Independence / From wikipedia.org

 

I put down the vacuum-hose and approached the rack.  Crammed into it now were leaflets I’d seen in her room advertising those sinister-sounding events like Imagi-Nation and Yestival and other ones promoting the unsavoury websites she’d consulted on the computer like National Collective, Bella Caledonia and Wings over Scotland.  Also there were leaflets for organisations with different but strangely-repetitive names: Women for Independence, Liberals for Independence, Polish for Independence, Asians for Independence, English for Independence, Farmers for Independence…  One organisation, whose leaflets were merely sheets of photocopied and folded-up A4 paper, was even called Hoteliers for Independence.

 

I couldn’t help reading that Hoteliers for Independence leaflet.  It ended with the exhortation, ‘Please contact Hoteliers for Independence for more information at…’ and gave an address.  My insides turned cold as I read the address.  I found myself pivoting around inside the porch and facing different internal doors that led to different parts of the guesthouse.  I half-expected one door to have hanging on it a sign that said HOTELIERS FOR INDEPENDENCE – THIS WAY.

 

Then I peered up towards the first floor, where a certain bedroom was located, and lamented, ‘Oh, Mither.’

***

One afternoon, close to September 18th, I woke from an unplanned doze at the desk in the office.  I’d been dreaming.  A voice in the dream had droned about – what else? – that ghastly referendum.  Disconcertingly, back in the conscious world, the voice continued to talk to me.  I realised it came from a shelf above me, where the radio was positioned between a stuffed gull and a stuffed pheasant.  The radio was tuned in to a local station and the voice belonged to a newsreader.  He was explaining that a politician, a Labour Party MP, was visiting our region today.

 

This MP had toured the high streets and town centres of Scotland lately.  To get people’s attention he’d place a crate on the pavement, stand on top of the crate and deliver a speech from it.  He’d speak bravely in favour of Great Britain and the Union of Parliaments and denounce the separatists and their vile foolish notions of independence.  And I’d heard from recent news reports that the separatists hadn’t taken kindly to his tour.  Well, as bullies, they wouldn’t.  They’d gone to his speaking appearances with the purpose of heckling him and shouting him down.

 

Then the newsreader named the town the MP was due to speak in this afternoon.  It was our town.

 

And immediately I felt uneasy because I realised I hadn’t seen or heard anything of Mither for the past while.  I went upstairs and knocked on her door.  There was no reply.  The guesthouse was empty that afternoon and so I hung the BACK SOON sign in the porch-window, went out and locked the door after me.  Then I headed for the middle of town.

 

It wasn’t hard to find where the Labour MP was speaking because of the hubbub.  The MP seemed to have turned his microphone’s volume to maximum so that he could drown out the heckling and shouting from the separatists in his audience.  I emerged from a vennel, onto the high street, and saw the crowd ahead of me.  It contained fewer people than I’d expected.  Some of them wore no badges and carried no placards – among them, I thought I glimpsed Kenneth and Gina from the brochure that Mither had ripped up – and some had badges and placards saying yes.  Looming above everyone was the MP on his crate.

 

© Thomas Nugent / From wikipedia.org

 

The separatists present were trying to make themselves heard – without success, thanks to the MP’s bellowing voice and the amplification provided by the microphone.  It wasn’t until I reached the edge of the small crowd that I could understand what they were saying.

 

‘Answer the question, Murphy!’

 

‘He won’t answer the question!’

 

‘Quit shouting, man, and answer the question for God’s sake!’

 

Then I saw a figure standing at the back of the crowd a few yards along from me.  The figure wore a long flowing skirt, a woollen cardigan and a lacy Sunday bonnet that obscured its face.  A handbag dangled from one of its elbows and a small egg carton was clasped in its hands.  As I watched, the figure prised the lid off the carton,  lifted one of the six eggs inside and stretched back an arm in readiness to throw it –

 

I rushed at her and shouted, ‘Mither! Oh my God!’

 

What happened next is confusing.  I remember reaching her and knocking the carton from her hands so that eggs flew in all directions.  I remember not being able to halt myself in time and crashing into her so that she fell and I fell too, on top of her.  But then, somehow, I found myself lying alone on the ground.  Mither had disappeared.  She must’ve been sprightlier than I’d thought.  She’d gathered herself up and hurried away and left me there.

 

One of the eggs had made its way into my right hand.  Now it was a ruin of broken shell.  Meanwhile, the yolks, whites and shell-pieces of other eggs formed a gelatinous mess on the front of my woollen cardigan.

 

Then I was being helped to my feet.  Around me, I heard voices:

 

‘Who is it?’

 

‘Some auld lady.’

 

‘No, wait… Christ!  It’s a man!’

 

‘It’s young Bates.  You ken, Norrie Bates?  Him that runs the Bates Bed and Breakfast?’

 

‘Why’s he togged out like that?’

 

Someone took my arm and led me away.  Behind us, the MP, who seemed not to have noticed the commotion with Mither and me, kept roaring into his microphone.  We turned a corner into a side-street and paused there.  I identified the man steering me as Dougie Bremner, who was the proprietor of another B and B in the town, a few streets away from ours.  He’d always seemed a gentle friendly type and it surprised me to see a yes badge stuck to his jacket lapel.

 

© Yes Scotland / From wikipedia.org

 

Dougie looked perplexed.  He scanned me up and down as if my appearance was a puzzle he wanted to solve.  ‘Norrie,’ he said at last.  ‘I think you need to go home.  As fast as you can manage.’

 

My head ached.  Something was squeezing my skull, which in turn was squeezing my brain.  I raised a hand and found my head enclosed in a lady’s bonnet.  It exuded two ribbons that were knotted under my chin.  In a final gesture of spite Mither must’ve fastened it on my head before she’d escaped.  ‘Aye,’ I whispered.  ‘I’ll go home.’

 

‘By the way,’ added Dougie, who seemed greatly troubled now.  ‘How’s your mither?  I haven’t seen her for a while.’

***

It was the morning of September 19th.  The radio had disappeared from the office and I guessed it’d travelled upstairs to Mither’s room and informed her of the result.  Still, in case she hadn’t heard, I felt obliged to go to her room and let her know.

 

She looked very small, thin and frail as she huddled there amid the paraphernalia she’d acquired, the flags, placards, badges, posters, leaflets and booklets.  On the floor around her, in a serpentine coil, there even lay a blue-and-white woollen scarf with a pair of knitting needles embedded in one unfinished end of it.  That was another lark she’d been up to.  Knitting for independence.

 

Because she looked so weak and unwell now, I understood that she knew.  The result seemed to have drained the life from her, leaving her a husk.

 

But I repeated the news.  ‘Mither.  It’s a no.’

 

She didn’t answer.  No sound came from her mouth, which was stretched back in a rictus – if I hadn’t known she was grimacing in pain and dismay, I’d have thought she was grinning.  I looked into her eyes, trying to find a glimmer of acknowledgement for me, a spark of recognition that I was standing before her.  But the eyes were blank and gaping, almost like they weren’t eyes at all but two dark holes.

 

And although I was relieved and delighted about the result, I suddenly and inexplicably felt as though a part of me was dead.

 

© Paramount Pictures / From tvtropes.org

 

With apologies to Robert Bloch, Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Perkins.  No apologies to Jim Murphy.

 

And tomorrow, on September 19th, I’ll raise a glass to the memory of the late Charlie Massie, who cheered me up after the result ten years ago by taking me on a pub crawl in Delhi.  Though it probably wasn’t wise to go into the bar in the British High Commission, where we ended up stuck at a table in front of a giant TV screen, showing the news, with a lengthy interview in progress with Boris Johnson.  Bojo was spewing shite about how great it was that the Jocks had embraced the Union and all the benefits that went with it.  Those future Union benefits would include Brexit and having him as Prime Minister. 

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Cultural Alasdair-isation

 

© Film4 / Element Pictures / Fruit Tree / Searchlight Pictures

 

Finally, I’ve managed to catch up with the movie Poor Things (2023).  This is Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’s adaptation of the novel of the same name, which was written, designed and illustrated by the Scottish polymath Alasdair Gray and published in 1992.  Early this year, it got a brief release in Singapore, courtesy of the city-state’s arthouse cinema The Projector.  But when I tried to buy tickets for it on a day I wasn’t working, I found it was already sold out.  So, I had to wait until it turned up on a streaming service I had access to.

 

Anyway, nine months later, here are my thoughts on the film and how it compares to Alasdair Gray’s novel.  A warning before I proceed – there will be spoilers about both, including about their endings.

 

I’m a huge fan of Gray, who passed away in 2019, and I consider Poor Things one of the key Scottish novels of the 1990s.  It’s a retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) set in Victorian Glasgow.  The bulk of the book has a narrator, Archibald McCandless, relating how his scientist colleague Godwin Baxter creates a young woman, Bella, out of dead flesh just as Frankenstein did with his creature.  What Baxter does is reanimate the body of a drowned woman and replace her brain with that of the baby she’d been pregnant with when she died. Thus, Bella, despite appearing to be an adult, has a lot of learning to do.  McCandless falls in love with her despite her initial infantilism (and later childishness and adolescent-ness) and there ensues a highly entertaining mishmash of sci-fi story, horror story, adventure, romance and comedy

 

I’m less of a fan of Lanthimos, having mixed feelings about his previous films.  I thought The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) and The Favourite (2018) were all right, but I found his earlier The Lobster (2015) witless and annoying. So, I wasn’t overjoyed to hear that a favourite book of mine was being filmed by someone I was, at best, conflicted about.

 

The good news is that, for the most part, Lanthimos’s cinematic version is very entertaining too.  For me, it’s his most engaging work so far.  However, because it’s stuffed to its bulwarks with scenes of sexual shenanigans, those of a prudish disposition would be advised to stay away from it.

 

© Film4 / Element Pictures / Fruit Tree / Searchlight Pictures

 

Firstly, it has many good performances.  Willem Dafoe does a decent job of playing Godwin Baxter – ‘God’ as Bella refers to him with unconscious irony – although he wasn’t the actor I imagined when I read the book 30 years ago.  I’d envisioned the late Robbie Coltrane as Baxter, whom Gray depicted as hulking and huge-headed, though with a high-pitched voice and small, dainty – practically Trump-like – hands.  Visually, Lanthimos and scriptwriter Tony McNamara rework the character.  They give him an unsettling habit of burping out bubbles and make his face malformed and stitched-together, so that he resembles a cross between Frankenstein’s creature and the 1930s-40s character actor Rondo Hatton, who in real life suffered from the disfiguring disease acromegaly.  But, helped by Dafoe’s understated, softy-spoken portrayal, Baxter retains the endearing blend of kindness and stubbornness he had in the novel.

 

Ramy Youssef is likeable as Max McCandles – the film’s renamed Archibald McCandless – though, as we’ll see, the excisions and simplifications the film imposes on the book make him a less complex character than the one Gray imagined.  Meanwhile, the most memorable male performance comes from Mark Ruffalo as Duncan Wedderburn, the lawyer who encounters Bella while doing legal business with Baxter and McCandles, falls in lust and elopes with her.  Or more accurately, since at this point Bella’s mind hasn’t developed much beyond that of a child, abducts her.  While Wedderburn takes her on a debauched ‘grand tour’ that extends from Portugal to Egypt and then to France – with the rapidly-evolving Bella gradually turning the tables on him – Ruffalo gloriously channels every cad, rotter and bounder who’s existed in British culture, from Harry Flashman to Terry-Thomas.

 

Even Ruffalo’s performance, though, is something of a sideshow compared to the one delivered by Emma Stone as Bella.  Mentally growing from a floor-pissing infant to a gawky child, from a rebellious (if naïve) teenager to a verbose and sophisticated adult, all the while wreaking havoc with the social, patriarchal and sexual mores of the society around her because she doesn’t have a filter and is fearless in challenging what doesn’t seem fair or sensible to her, Stone never puts a foot wrong with her portrayal. She fully deserved her Best Actress win for this at the 96th Academy Awards, though I was a little surprised she did win – films as provocative and hard to categorise as Poor Things don’t normally float the boat of the conservative-minded, play-it-safe Academy.

 

Poor Things also netted an Oscar for its production design by James Price and Shona Heath and set decoration by Zsuzsa Mihalek, which are the film’s other great strength.  Price, Heath and Mihalek place Bella and her associates in a world that draws on our popular images and stereotypes of the Victorian era, puts them through a mincing machine and reassembles them as somewhere both familiar and trippily different, one where everything is that much bigger, stranger and more baroque.  One where the traditional Hansom cabs mingle on the streets with chugging, steam-powered ones that have ornamental horses’ heads on their fronts, where Lisbon’s tram system has been replaced by an airborne network of cables and capsules, where the Mediterranean is ploughed by absurdly top-heavy and castle-like steamships churning out yellow smoke under psychedelically tumultuous skies.  I don’t think I’ve seen a live-action film that comes closer to capturing the vibe of the sci-fi subgenre of steampunk.

 

© Film4 / Element Pictures / Fruit Tree / Searchlight Pictures

 

I think the design team went too far with one detail, though.  Populating Baxter’s house and grounds are bizarre hybrid animals – a half-dog, half-goose creature, for instance, and a half-pig, half-chicken one – which are presumably the results of past experiments.  Doomed to wander around as house-decorations, with their anatomies horribly messed up, those hybrids can’t have much of an existence.  They suggest an uncharacteristic cruelty in Baxter’s nature.  Yet as we see from his fatherly concern for Bella, he isn’t Dr Moreau.

 

A bigger flaw in a generally excellent film is that, at 142 minutes, Poor Things is too long.  And its final stretch is a bit dissatisfying because it has a tagged-on feeling, involving a new character, Alfie Blessington (Christopher Abbott), who is Bella’s husband.  At least, he’s the husband of the woman whose corpse Godwin salvaged, revived and turned into Bella.  He takes her back to his house, proves to be a brute and imprisons her until, once again, she turns the tables on this latest antagonist.  Blessington appears near the end of the book too but Gray takes less time to deal with him – a few pages, if I remember correctly.

 

Unfortunately, as a last-minute villain, Abbott’s Blessington can’t quite match Ruffalo’s splendidly scenery-chewing Wedderburn who preceded him.  Also, the film ends with a weak punchline that, again, implies some out-of-character cruelty on Baxter’s part.  (Actually, it made me think of the 1944 Universal Studios potboiler House of Frankenstein, wherein Boris Karloff’s villainous Dr Gustav Niemann tried to transplant a man’s brain into the body of a dog).

 

Its length and final act aside, Lanthimos’s Poor Things gets a definite thumbs-up from me… as a self-contained film.  As an adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s novel, I’m less enamoured with it.  One issue is that it makes no attempt to replicate what happens at the book’s end.  This is when Gray turns everything on its head because he lets Bella take over as storyteller.  She denounces Archie McCandless’s version of events and makes him out to be devious and delusional.  She claims to be not a Frankenstein-type creation but an ordinary 19th-century woman – though one ahead of her time because she passionately believes in and campaigns for gender equality and social justice.  What we’ve read to this point is an insecure man’s gothic fabrication.  Thus, the book’s last part serves as a rebuke of male attitudes towards women that combine possessiveness with mad romanticism.

 

© Bloomsbury Press

 

This is both more disorientating and more satisfying than in the film. There, yes, Bella becomes an emancipated woman, fiercely intelligent and independent. But she remains a male fantasy creation, something that was made on a man’s laboratory table, reared and tutored in the ways of the world by men and used as a sexual plaything by dastardly men like Wedderburn – Bella, with her brain still trying to make sense of her experiences and her vocabulary still limited, describes those carnal encounters as ‘furious jumping’.  However, Gray pulls the rug from under us, making us question men’s treatment of women and their whole interpretation of women, in a way the film doesn’t.

 

The other thing the book has but the film doesn’t have is Scotland.  Gray’s Glasgow setting has disappeared, supplanted by a sprawling, steampunk-styled, Victorian London one.  And what was generally a very Scottish book has been turned into a film where the only hints that Scotland exists are Dafoe’s low-key Scottish accent and a few Scottish-sounding character names.  This de-Scottification of the story strips from it a layer of symbolism that was obviously important to Gray, an enthusiastic supporter of Scottish independence.

 

You can read Poor Things-the-book as an analogy for the relationship between Scotland and England.  When Archie – falsely – portrays Bella as a creature of gothic fantasy, this parallels how the common image of Scotland was fashioned by 19th-century English monarchs like King George IV and Queen Victoria (with, admittedly, help from locals like Sir Walter Scott) into a fanciful, ethereal never-never-land of castles, mountains, lochs, heather, tartan, kilts, bagpipes and so on.  When Bella finds her voice, refutes Archie’s fantasizing and finds her true identity as a campaigner for feminist and socialist causes, it can be seen as Gray’s wish for Scotland to cut loose from fusty old history-obsessed England / Britain and become a new, egalitarian and forward-looking nation.  Mind you, the tenth anniversary of Scotland’s independence referendum, which ended in failure for Gray’s side in 2014, is just a day or two away – so such a thing probably won’t happen for a while yet.

 

© Estate of Alasdair Gray / From Scottish Poetry Library

 

I don’t think Gray – a man so idealistic that in 2019, rather than have a funeral, he left his body to science – would have been too annoyed had he lived to see the cinematic Poor Things.  I don’t think he’d have indulged in literal ‘furious jumping’.  Rather, he’d have understood why Lanthimos, a Greek, probably didn’t feel comfortable with the Scottish aspects of the story and elected to leave them out.  (It also wouldn’t have surprised me if Gray had donated his royalties from the film to his nearest foodbank.)

 

I suspect, though, he’d have been depressed that no Scottish filmmaker had tried to make a celluloid version of Poor Things that was closer to his original, Glasgow-set vision.  Or that there seems to be zero funding and infrastructure in Scotland’s modern-day arts world to support a local filmmaker wanting to adapt the book to the screen.

 

And I don’t agree with certain Scottish commentators – invariably of a ‘Unionist’ hue – who’ve argued that it doesn’t matter that Scotland has been omitted from the movie.  Journalist Kenny Farquharson, for instance, has claimed that “Poor Things is a triumph for Scotland,” which makes no sense at all.  How can it be a triumph for Scotland if Scotland isn’t in it?  It’s like saying The Godfather (1972) is a triumph for Indonesia.  Or Blade Runner (1982) is a triumph for Birmingham.

 

Incidentally, there is one magical moment where Poor Things-the-film achieves an alchemy with Poor Things-the-book.  That’s the scene at the end where Bella and Archie snuggle up beside the dying Godwin Baxter – a visual reference to the image Gray created for the novel’s cover.

 

© Bloomsbury Press

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An honest John

 

From wikipedia.org / © Scottish Government

 

John Swinney became leader of the Scottish National Party on May 6th and was sworn into office as First Minister of Scotland two days later.  His arrival in the two roles comes during a difficult period for his party.  First, the SNP has had to endure the spectacle of its once-mightily-respected, once-seemingly-unassailable former boss Nicola Sturgeon, who served as First Minister from 2014 to 2023, mired in a scandal whereby her husband, Peter Murrell, has been investigated and arrested over possible mismanagement of the party’s finances.

 

Then came the sorry saga of Sturgeon’s replacement as party leader and First Minister, Humza Yousaf.   Yousaf was brave enough to defy the British-establishment line and challenge Benjamin Netanyahu’s policy of killing huge numbers of innocent Palestinians in revenge for Hamas’s slaughter of Israeli civilians on October 7th, 2023.  But in most other respects, he was pretty hapless.

 

Most notably, he didn’t so much shoot himself in the foot as blow the foot off at the ankle when he ended his party’s alliance with Scotland’s other pro-independence party, the Scottish Greens. The Greens were so outraged they made it clear that they would vote against Yousaf in a no-confidence vote in the Scottish Parliament.  Realising he was going to lose that vote, Yousaf resigned.  His resignation at least seems principled compared with the behaviour of another First Minister recently.  Labour’s Vaughan Gething, First Minister of Wales, recently lost a no-confidence vote in the Welsh Senedd and blithely refused to quit, dismissing the vote as a ‘gimmick’.

 

Swinney’s arrival as Yousaf’s replacement happened at an incredibly inopportune time.  Barely had he got through the door of Bute House, the First Minister’s official residence in Edinburgh, than Rishi Sunak, British Prime Minister and a politician so clodhopping he makes Humza Yousaf look like a smooth operator, announced a general election for July 4th.  The polls say the SNP are going to lose a swathe of seats in the London parliament to Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.  Even if Swinney was the best politician in the world, I don’t see what he could do to avoid that.

 

Not that I think Scottish voters are enamoured with Labour, who are so obsessed with attracting former Conservative Party voters they’ve made their policies a continuation of the right-wing ones that’ve damned Britain to rack and ruin during the past 14 years.  For instance, they’ve vowed not to revisit the terms of the Tories’ Brexit arrangement with the European Union, even though it’s hobbled British businesses and it’ll thwart their plans to ‘grow’ the economy; and they won’t countenance raising taxes, which makes you wonder how they’re ever going to lift Britain’s public services out of their current, dire state.  But I suspect folk in Scotland are so scunnered by the SNP’s recent scandals and mishaps, and so desperate to see the back of the Tories, that they’ll vote for Labour en masse next month.

 

For this reason, and because of Swinney’s bespectacled, unexcitable and unshowy demeanour – he’s often likened to a ‘bank manager’ or an ‘accountant’, although I remember one Scottish hack comparing him to ‘Harry Potter’, which I’m sure didn’t please the famously anti-SNP J.K. Rowling – there’s been speculation that he’s serving merely as a ‘caretaker’ leader, steadying the helm until someone of more substance takes over.  In particular, many in the Scottish media expect the leadership to soon go to Kate Forbes, who’s currently Deputy First Minister.  Famous for his negotiating skills, Swinney managed to talk Forbes out of taking him on in a leadership contest in May.

 

Anyway, I should say that back in my misspent youth, I crossed paths a few times with John Swinney – whose youth, I imagine, was somewhat less misspent than mine.  When I’d been a pupil at Peebles High School in the late 1970s and early 1980s, one of my best pals was a guy called Roger Small.  Once we finished school, Roger went to university in Edinburgh and I to university in Aberdeen.  I kept in touch with him and on a few weekends came down from Aberdeen to stay in his flat in Edinburgh.  My reasons for those visits were not wholly because of friendship.  They coincided with the Five Nations Rugby championship, as it was then, which was held every spring and saw two Scottish home-games played at Edinburgh’s Murrayfield Stadium.  I’d get a ticket, arrange to spend the night at Roger’s place, go to see the game in the afternoon and enjoy the post-match festivities in the evening.

 

From www.sportspages.com

 

On February 4th, 1984, I dropped my stuff off at Roger’s and went to Murrayfield to see Scotland play England.  Scotland won 18-6.  In the Scotsman newspaper, back in those long-ago, pre-Andrew Neil days when it was worth reading, Chris Rea – no, not that Chris Rea – opined: “The Scottish forwards… were immense – a finely blended unit, alert and supportive. Their breakaways forced England into elementary errors.  They foraged with devastating accuracy…  Every Scot… played his part to the full.”

 

When the final whistle blew, I was extremely pleased that Scotland had demolished England, the Auld Enemy.  So pleased that, on my way back to Roger’s flat, I indulged in a wee, celebratory pub-crawl along Rose Street, taking in such hostelries as the Auld Hundred, the Kenilworth and the Abbotsford.  It probably didn’t help that I’d already done a pub crawl of Rose Street in the late morning and early afternoon, on my way to Murrayfield.  Anyway, the result was that I was well-refreshed when I returned to the flat.

 

Roger had told me he was entertaining some Edinburgh University mates that evening, with the intention of going to a party later on.  I was welcome to join them.  So, at about seven o’clock, I trotted into Roger’s living room, plonked myself on the sofa in the midst of some people I hadn’t met before and, trying to be sociable, joined in the conversation.  After a few minutes, a tall, lean, slightly intense-looking young man sitting on the sofa beside me turned his head towards me and asked incredulously, “Are you drunk?”

 

Ladies and gentlemen, meet John Swinney, future leader of the Scottish National Party, an outfit dedicated to the cause of Scottish independence, to freeing Scotland from the shackles of political rule from London, capital of England.  Shocked that someone in Edinburgh, capital of Scotland, should be a wee bit inebriated after Scotland had trounced England at rugby.

 

But I can’t have been that inebriated because I managed to accompany Roger, John and friends to the party that night and managed to participate in the conversation enough to form the opinion that Roger’s mate John was a decent-enough, if sober, bloke.  It turned out that the party was being held by someone from Peebles, the town where Roger and I had attended school, so I knew some of the folk there.  Actually, it amuses me to think that the future First Minister of Scotland was once at a party rubbing shoulders with such well-kent Peebles eccentrics as the late Andrew Cleghorn.

 

Thereafter, I encountered John Swinney a couple of times in Edinburgh, briefly, while I was in Roger’s company.  The last time was a summer or two later, during the Edinburgh Festival, when Teviot Row, the Edinburgh University students’ union building, had been turned into a venue and the pair of them were working there as bouncers.  What a pity Oxford University’s notorious Bullingdon Club didn’t arrange a field-trip to Edinburgh at the time and try to subject Teviot Row to their yobbish antics…  I would have paid good money to see John Swinney eject Boris Johnson from the premises.

 

I lost touch with Roger for a while after that, but bumped into him again in the late 1980s after I’d moved to Edinburgh.  He kindly fixed me up with a part-time job at the (now-long-gone) Greyfriars Bookshop at the bottom of George IV Bridge.  At some point I asked how John Swinney was getting on and Roger told me he was ascending in the ranks of the SNP.  Later, when I mentioned his name to some mates from Aberdeen who were heavily into the cause of Scottish independence, they reported they’d seen him deliver a speech at an SNP conference and were greatly impressed by him.

 

I completely lost touch with Roger Small in the 1990s – he took off for Australia – and, several years ago, wondering what’d happened to him, I tried Googling him.  I didn’t find him, but learnt something about his mother, Christian Small, who’d passed away in 2016 at the age of 90.  Christian had been an immensely-talented amateur painter, but according to a friend she was ‘extraordinarily diffident about her work’ and needed ‘a great deal of persuasion’ to allow her paintings to appear in local exhibitions.  Because of her modesty, presumably, it didn’t really dawn on people – family and friends alike – how good an artist she’d been until after her death.  However, in 2018 and 2019, some events were held to commemorate her and her art, including exhibitions and the launch of a book called Inside & Out.  The book featured her paintings interspersed with verse written by another friend, the poet and actress Gerda Stevenson.

 

One of those events was attended by John Swinney, who by then was Deputy First Minister of Scotland.  On Twitter, he remarked that Christian Small had been the mother ‘of my dear university friend Roger.’  So, I’m glad he still remembers his old mate and still holds him in high regard.

 

© Scotland Street Press

 

Though he’s made his name as a cautious type – too cautious for some people’s tastes, which has led to them questioning his political acumen – it’s hard to find anyone with a bad word to say about John Swinney as a person.  For example, the former Scottish Labour Party leader Jim Murphy once commented: “There’s nobody in Scotland who doesn’t like John Swinney.”  I recall my old English teacher, Ian Jenkins, who served in the Scottish Parliament for four years as the Liberal Democrat representative for Tweeddale, Ettrick and Lauderdale, speaking highly of him too.

 

Thus, I’m pleased that Swinney now holds the highest political office in his country.  He struck me as a decent guy and it’s good to see decency rewarded.  Unfortunately, politics isn’t an arena where being decent always works in your favour.  I suspect he has his work cut out for him – especially if the polls prove to be right and his party takes a pounding in the general election.

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Nostalgic wallows 2: youth hotels

 

From pixabay.com / © Hans

 

I’ve been meaning to write about youth hostels since last July.  That was when the journalist John Harris penned an article for the Guardian that was both a tribute to and a lamentation about them.  Harris reported: “The Youth Hostel Association of England and Wales (YHA) has announced the sell-off of 20 of its 150 hostels, and identified a further 30 for possible uploading over the next three years – which, in total, would mean the loss of a third of its properties.  Its spokespeople blame ‘pandemic shutdowns, the cost-of-living crisis and steep inflation.’”  He also observed: “Insiders… talk about how Brexit has hugely reduced the number of school trips to the UK from Europe, thereby hitting a crucial part of the YHA’s revenue.”

 

For a long time, I was a member of the Scottish Youth Hostels Association (SYHA), or Hostelling Scotland as it is now, and I assume the situation north of the border is bleak too.  The youth hostel in Melrose, the one closest to my home address in the Scottish Borders, ceased trading some years ago.  Indeed, as far as I know, the Borders region has only one SYHA hostel these days, in Kirk Yetholm.  It’s insane when you consider how the Borders is choc-a-bloc with beautiful countryside and offers great opportunities for walking, hiking and cycling.  It should have half-a-dozen such hostels offering holiday accommodation for outdoor enthusiasts who are on a budget.

 

The first youth hotel association I was a member of, though, was the Northern Irish one.  I joined it during the summer of 1982, when I was 16 and temporarily employed on an uncle’s farm in County Tyrone.  I was making plans to go to the French-speaking part of Switzerland that October and work as a grape-picker, and then travel around Europe, and as I didn’t have much money to finance this it made sense to get a youth-hostel membership card that’d allow me to use any cheap European hostel I came across.  The autumn arrived, I headed abroad and I ended up staying in a slew of hostels.  These included ones in Lausanne, Fribourg, Grindelwald, Lucerne and Zurich in Switzerland, in Vaduz in Liechtenstein, in Munich, Ulm, Freiburg and Bonn in Germany, in Brussels in Belgium and in Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

 

To my young, innocent mind, it seemed marvellous that every city and decent-sized town in Switzerland, Liechtenstein – well, Vaduz was the only town in Liechtenstein – Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands should have an establishment where you could get basic but adequate accommodation for a price that was as cheap as the proverbial chips.

 

From those 1982 wanderings, the Grindelwald youth hostel remains most vivid in my memory.  I arrived in the Alpine town one evening when everything was shrouded in fog as well as in darkness and I had no idea what my surroundings looked like.  The next morning, I woke in a hostel dormitory, put on some clothes and emerged onto a balcony.  The hostel was sited high on one side of a valley and across from it, confronting me, was the vast craggy awesomeness of the Eiger.  Wow!

 

From pixabay.com / © Goodlynx

 

There were downsides, of course.  At the time, many of those hostels were strictly run – especially the Swiss ones. They had ten o’clock curfews and the wardens showed their guests as much humanity as Victorian schoolmasters showed their pupils in Charles Dickens’ novels.  In one hostel, I noticed some graffiti scrawled on the inside of a toilet door.  “The warden,” it said bluntly, “is a fascist.”

 

I also met a wide range of humanity in those places.  In the common rooms, dining rooms, kitchens and dormitories, I had conversations with philosophers, poets, communists, anarchists, rabid Irish nationalists, belligerent English football hooligans, drunkards, thieves – a sweater was swiped from my rucksack in Brussels – and more.  I met an old Australian guy who talked about the months he’d spent roaming the Sahara Desert and hanging out with the Tuareg.  I met an American woman who couldn’t understand a single word I uttered – I ’d say something in my hybrid Northern Irish / Scottish accent and, panic-stricken, she’d look to her travelling companion for a translation.  In Rotterdam, on my way from the station to the youth hostel, a guy pulled a knife on me and tried to rob me, and then at the hostel I was consoled by a devout Dutch Christian.  After telling him about my misadventure, he exclaimed, “Thank God for saving your life!”

 

The following summer, I worked in Switzerland again, this time on a farm, and I did a little more hostelling – in the Swiss cities of Zug and Berne and in the French coastal town of Boulogne, from which I caught a ferry back to the UK.  And soon afterwards, I spent a couple of weeks tramping around England’s Lake District and stayed in several youth hostels there: Ambleside, Keswick, Grasmere, Windermere, Borrowdale.

 

It wasn’t until 1988, when I was in my early twenties, that I was reacquainted with the youth hostelling world. This was shortly after I’d graduated from college in Aberdeen. Needing employment for the summer, I was taken on as a seasonal warden at Aberdeen Youth Hostel on Queen’s Road.  I worked under the supervision of the hostel’s head warden, the relaxed and affable Bill Dick, and alongside fellow wardens Andrew Gordon and Paul Hunter.  It was a pleasant summer on a personal level – even my memories of wrestling a lawnmower over the building’s extensive and unruly back garden seem idyllic now.  That said, it was a traumatic one for Aberdeen generally because, on the night of July 6th-7th, the Piper Alpha oil platform exploded in the sea 120 miles north-east of the city, resulting in 167 deaths.  In fact, some of the guys staying in the hostel were looking for employment in the local oil industry.  Before they did anything else, they had to complete a Helicopter Underwater Escape Training (HUET) course at the city’s Robert Gordon Institute of Technology (now Robert Gordon University) and they’d tell me about how they were strapped inside a mock-up of a helicopter fuselage and then dunked in a giant tank of water.

 

Bill Dick was a laidback boss but one thing seriously worried him.  That was the thought of a fire.  The premises contained cheap plastic furniture that might give off toxic fumes if it burned and, also, the external fire escapes were showing signs of wear and tear.  He’d raised these issues with the SYHA but so far nothing had been done about them, presumably due to a lack of funds.  Thus, Andrew, Paul and I had the procedures to follow in the event of a fire, and the locations of the fire extinguishers and fire alarms, drummed into our heads.

 

From wikimedia.org / © AlasdairW

 

One evening, just after eleven, I was completing a shift at the front desk.  The hostellers all seemed to be in bed and Bill and the other staff had gone out for a drink, save for Nicky, the night-porter, who was upstairs, and Mary, the cook, who was finishing up in the kitchen.  I was wrestling with the usual end-of-day headache of counting up the till – not an easy job because youth hostels in those days (and maybe still now) used elaborate systems of discounts and vouchers that meant guests were often paying less than the official prices.  Then an agonisingly loud, shrill noise pierced through the building – the fire alarm.

 

I grabbed the phone and dialled 999.  Yelling above the noise, I gave the emergency-services operator our address.  By this time, guests were shambling down the stairs, into the front lobby, wearing pyjamas, dressing gowns and other nighttime attire.  “Get outside,” I ordered, even pushing a couple of them towards the door, “get outside!”  Mary appeared from the kitchen – Nicky, it transpired later, was detained because he’d been in the middle of using the loo when the alarm went off – and we headed into the building’s interior in search of the fire.  We didn’t find it.  We did, however, find a fire alarm with its protective glass broken.  Some wanker, who’d probably been in the pub all evening, had smashed it and pressed the activation button inside for a laugh.  Meanwhile, the windows at the front of the hostel brimmed with dazzling white light, as if the mothership from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) had just landed in the front yard.  It was actually the headlights of a couple of engines arriving from Aberdeen Fire Station.

 

Later, after I’d filled in forms confirming the fire had been a false alarm and a number of disgruntled Aberdonian firefighters had returned to their vehicles, Mary remarked, “My hands are still shaking.”  I realised mine were too.  I felt pretty stupid about summoning all those firemen for nothing, but when Bill returned and heard what’d happened, he assured me I’d done the right thing.

 

I’m sure that later, as health-and-safety regulations became more stringent, the SYHA sorted out the hostel’s furniture and fire escapes.  However, that’s academic now, as the the building was put up for sale in 2022 and I assume Aberdeen, like so many other places, is now youth-hostel-less.

 

During the 1990s I lived in Japan and in 1995 I got a temporary job as a researcher for the Fodor’s Guidebook company.  My assignment was to update and rewrite two chapters in the previous edition of their Japanese guide, about Hokkaido and Tohoku, for a new edition.  As Hokkaido and Tohoku constitute the northern third of the Japanese landmass, this involved a lot of travelling around.  To cut costs, I stayed in several youth hostels – in the cities of Hakodate, Aomori, Hirosaki and Akita, and by Lake Tazawa, which is up in the mountains to the east of Akita City and is Japan’s deepest lake.  The hostels were pretty basic but, crucially, they were warm – I was carrying out this job in March, when northern Japan was still in the grip of winter and buried in snowdrifts.

 

From pixabay.com / © hydroxyquinol

 

My visit to the Lake Tazawa youth hostel was a spooky experience.  I’d phoned earlier in the day from Akita and booked a bed there – a friendly-sounding lady had answered and confirmed the booking – but it was dark when I arrived on the train.  To get to the hostel, I had to walk along a silent, lonely road that had snow banked high along its sides.  Indeed, the wind had sculpted the tops of those snowbanks into weird, twisted shapes that in the glow from the sporadic streetlights, and the attendant shadows, looked like props from Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979).  Finally, I reached the hostel, entered it… and found it totally deserted.  Its lights were on, but however much I wandered around its interior, and however loudly I shouted, I couldn’t locate another soul.

 

Yet I had spoken to a real human being on the phone… hadn’t I?  By this time, with the wind moaning outside and flinging shards of snow against the hostel’s walls and roof, I’d stopped thinking about Alien and started thinking about the traditional Japanese ghost stories famously transcribed by Lafcadio Hearn.  Maybe I was a character in one of those ghost stories now.  Maybe one also involving the yuki–onna…

 

But after staying there for a bewildering half-hour, I ventured outside again – and discovered a second building close by, one I hadn’t noticed earlier.  Inside it, I found the youth hostel staff, including the woman I’d spoken to earlier.  What I’d entered first of all had been an annex building of the hostel.  I hadn’t been ensnared in a wintry Japanese ghost story after all.

 

After Japan, I lived in East Anglia – one of the loveliest parts of England – on three occasions.  These were for a couple of months in Norwich in 1998, while I was doing a course to get a teaching diploma; for half-a-year working in County Suffolk in 2002; and in Norwich again from 2008 to 2009 while I was doing a Master’s Degree at the University of East Anglia.

 

When I first turned up in Norwich in 1998, I checked into the town’s youth hostel assuming I would then find normal accommodation in a flat or bedsit for the duration of my diploma course.  However, I soon decided that, because it was off-season, I might as well just stay in the hostel, attend the course and do its homework assignments in the usually-quiet common room.  Elsewhere in East Anglia, I have fond memories of staying at the youth hostel in the Suffolk village of Snape and, from there, exploring the tidal estuary of the River Alde; and using the hostel in the north Norfolk town of Wells-next-the-Sea as my base while I went walking in the local salt marshes.  Sadly, all three of those hostels, Norwich, Snape and Wells-next-the-Sea, appear to be defunct in 2024.

 

Also, from 2002 to 2005, I worked in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.  My family didn’t live that far away from Newcastle, being on the other side of the English / Scottish border, and by that time I’d become an ardent cyclist.  Thus, several times, I cycled north from Newcastle to visit my folks.  The journey took the most of two days by bike and I’d break the journey by staying in youth hostels along the way – either in the midge-infested village of Byrness just south of the border in England, or in Kirk Yetholm just north of it in Scotland.  The Byrness Hostel – yes, you guessed it – has given up the ghost since then too.

 

© YHA Alston

 

I also cycled westwards from Newcastle, visited the Lake District again and stayed in some of the youth hostels I’d been in two decades earlier.  While returning to Newcastle I had another eerie hostel-related experience.  Again, I planned to break the journey, this time spending a night in the hostel in Alston, which is said to be the highest market town in England.  To get there, I cycled through Penrith and, afterwards, had a gruelling time getting my bicycle up the mercilessly steep A686 road to Hartside Pass.  It was evening-time when I finally reached the pass and by then I felt about 200 years old.  But, unexpectedly, the road descended gently for the next few miles. I coasted along it, barely pedalling, gradually getting my strength back.  The ride was also discombobulating, though, because the light was fading and everything around me was shrouded in mist.  Finally, I scooted into Alston.  The town had a dream-like quality – almost phantasmagorical as it materialised out of the dusk and mist in what felt like the middle of nowhere.

 

Incidentally, I’ve just looked up the Alston Youth Hostel and – hurrah! – it’s still on the go.

 

After that, I stayed in youth hostels only a few times more, in Edinburgh and London when I had a plane or train to catch early the next morning and didn’t feel like splashing out on a hotel-room.  In the last decade I haven’t youth-hostelled at all.  Nowadays, I’m able to afford less spartan accommodation and, as I’m old, cranky and ‘high maintenance’, I doubt if a youth-hostel bunkbed would meet my expectations for comfort.  Still, though they were called ‘youth’ hostels, I was frequenting them into my forties, long after my youth had ended.  I certainly got plenty of mileage out of them.

 

Now, as John Harris observes, they appear to be heading for extinction, in Britain at least.  Yes, I know, modern phenomena like Airbnb have vastly widened people’s options when they search for and choose accommodation.  But that’s only if people have money.  If you’re to believe the figures, some 12 million people in Britain – 18% of the population – are living in absolute poverty, including 3.6 million children.  I assume the majority of them live in the cities.  I doubt if the existence of Airbnb and the like enables them to travel far from home and see much of the countryside.  Now more than ever, young folk need the humble youth hostel as somewhere to provide a warm berth and a roof over their heads while they wander, and explore, and broaden their horizons – cheaply.

 

And yet, though they’re so needed, youth hostels are being allowed to die out.  That’s another indictment of Britain in 2024, a country where the powers-that-be know the cost of everything but the value of absolutely nothing.

 

From pixabay.com / © Sabrinayrafa

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Nostalgic wallows 1: Bill McLaren

 

© BBC

 

We’re nearing the end of the 2024 Six Nations rugby championship and my mental health feels more kicked around than the ball in the matches.  Up until the Saturday just past, the two teams I support, Ireland and Scotland, had been doing well and I was entertaining hopes that the championship would conclude with them at the top of the table.  But what a difference a Saturday afternoon makes.  Ireland got beaten by England, the team nobody wants to get beaten by.  Against all expectations, Scotland lost to Italy, the team regarded as the one in the championship ‘making up the numbers’ and who usually finish bottom.

 

Anyhow, aside from the anguish…  The championship reminds me yet again of how much I miss being able to watch an international rugby match and at the same time listen to the knowledgeable and dulcet tones of Bill McLaren.

 

Although McLaren, who died in 2010 at the age of 86, worked as late as 2002, it was in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s that he was indisputably the voice of British rugby union.  This was an era when sport, if you weren’t at the live event itself, was viewable only on a handful of terrestrial TV channels.  It was common for one channel to have a monopoly on broadcasting one sport and, by extension, for one commentator to have a monopoly on talking about that sport.  Hence, in my youth, it was almost impossible to see horse racing without hearing the posh but eerily robotic tones of Peter O’Sullivan, or boxing without hearing the excitable Harry Carpenter, or Formula One without hearing the gaffe-prone Murray Walker, or rugby league without hearing the indescribable-sounding Eddie Waring.  McLaren fulfilled this role in the world of rugby union and for me was the best sports commentator of the lot, though I’m undoubtedly biased.  Rugby has always been my favourite team sport.  Plus McLaren came from Hawick in the Scottish Borders, the region where I spent many of my formative years.

 

There were three reasons for McLaren’s greatness.  Firstly, he knew his stuff.  I remember watching a McLaren-commentated game on a pub TV in Aberdeen sometime in the 1980s.  I was in the company of my good friend, the late Finlay McLean, and at one point, Finlay turned around to me and marvelled, “He’s just steeped in the game, isn’t he?”

 

When a try was scored, McLaren didn’t just tell you the name of the player who’d crossed the line.  No, he’d also observe how the player was the great-great-nephew of the man who’d kicked the winning points in the legendary Hawick-Galashiels derby of 1937, or a direct descendent of the tight-head prop with the great Western Province team that’d dominated South Africa’s Currie Cup in the 1890s.  It wouldn’t have surprised you if he’d identified the player’s granny as the stylist responsible for grooming the mutton-chop sideburns of J.P.R. Williams, which were rugby’s main contribution to fashion in the 1970s.  McLaren seemed to know everything about rugby.

 

His knowledge was encyclopaedic, but this was backed by a conscientious and professional attitude to research.  I read somewhere that when preparing for a game, he’d cover a full sheet of foolscap with notes about each player.  This meant that in the commentator’s box he was constantly shuffling around some 30 sheets of paper.

 

Secondly, although he was a Scotsman and often commentated on games involving the Scottish rugby team, he was never biased.  On the contrary, he always applauded good rugby, no matter who was playing it and even if Scotland was on the receiving end of it.  McLaren’s neutrality was especially admirable when you compared him with the international football commentators on the BBC at the time (and indeed still now), who seemed incapable of narrating an England World Cup match without speculating every second minute about whether ‘we’ could win the World Cup just like ‘we’ won it back in 1966.

 

Thirdly, and most importantly for me, his commentaries were laden with poetry.  McLaren had an amusing, fanciful, frequently wonderful talent with language.  Admittedly, he could be a tad unflattering in the turn of phrase he used to describe the over-sized players on the field.  English prop Colin Smart – famous for getting stomach-pumped after drinking a bottle of aftershave as a post-match lark – consisted of ‘considerable acreage’; English captain and lock Bill Beaumont looked ‘like someone who enjoys his food’; Welsh forwards Scott and Craig Quinnell were ‘two well-nourished individuals’; Scottish flanker Finlay Calder had ‘hands like dinner plates’; and Calder’s gangly fellow-Scot Doddie Weir was ‘the lamppost of the line-out.’  As for the legendary and frankly massive New Zealand flanker Jonah Lomu, running into him was like ‘trying to tackle a snooker table’.

 

© BBC

 

He had a fondness to likening players to animals.  They might behave like ‘a demented ferret’ or a ‘bag of weasels’ of a ‘raging bull with a bad head’ or ‘a whirling tsetse fly’ or ‘a runaway giraffe’ or ‘a slippery salmon’.  The Scottish scrum-half Roy Laidlaw (whose nephew Greig captained Scotland for seven years up until 2019) was as elusive as ‘a baggy up a Borders burn’ – a baggy being, to quote the Dictionary of the Scottish Language, ‘a species of large minnow.’  Unsurprisingly for a Borders man, Scotticisms were common in his delivery.  Rugby balls were likened to ‘three pounds of haggis’, the famously square-shouldered Scottish skipper Peter Brown was like ‘a coo kicking over a milk pail’ and an injured player sitting dejectedly at the side of the field whilst sucking on a mint was at least ‘enjoying his sweetie.’

 

When it came to describing the turbulent passions and physical violence often unleashed on the pitch, McLaren was amusingly euphemistic.  Cheating was frequently described as ‘jiggery-pokery’ and punch-ups were dismissed as ‘a bit of argy-bargy’.  I remember when fists started flying in the middle of one scrum, he commented: “It’s getting a bit unceremonious in that front row.”  And when Scottish centre Jim Renwick – whom McLaren had coached as a schoolboy – missed a kick and was caught by the camera mouthing the F-word, McLaren diplomatically remarked that he was ‘muttering a few naughty Hawick words.’

 

Some of his sayings became catchphrases.  When a player prepared to kick a conversion and half the stadium made disparaging noises in the hope of distracting him and making him fluff it, McLaren would invariably remark: “There’s some ill-mannered whistling.”  And when a conversion-kick made it between the posts despite being taken from a torturous angle, he’d declare: “It’s high enough, it’s long enough and it’s straight enough!”

 

Aware that in the Borders towns local players who’d made it onto the national team were seen as heroes, he’d often serenade the scorer of a Scottish try with the lines, “And they’ll be dancing on the streets of…” or “And they’ll be drinking his health in…” – Hawick, Galashiels, Kelso, Melrose, Selkirk, wherever – “…tonight!”  As an honorary Borderer, I’d say they were more likely to be drinking his health than dancing in the streets.

 

McLaren’s manner and delivery were immensely relaxed and comforting, but his early life had been no bed of roses.  As a young World War II serviceman, he had to endure the Battle of Monte Cassino, of which one eyewitness said, “The men were so tired that it was a living death.  They had come from such a depth of weariness that I wondered if they would quite be able to make the return to the lives and thoughts they had known.’  McLaren himself described Monte Cassino as a ‘vision of hell on earth.’

 

After the war, he was diagnosed as having tuberculosis, which put a prompt end to any hopes he had of becoming a rugby internationalist.  TB was then considered incurable and he wasn’t expected to survive, but he and four fellow sufferers agreed to be guinea pigs for the trials of a new drug, streptomycin.  Thanks to this treatment he recovered, but three of the four other volunteers died.  It was while he was convalescing that he produced his first sports commentaries – describing table-tennis matches over the hospital radio.

 

McLaren was passionately attached to his hometown and famously said, “A day out of Hawick is a day wasted.”  Several years ago I visited Hawick for the first time since the 1980s, and saw to my dismay how much it’d deteriorated.  Its high street was run-down and riddled with derelict properties – thanks to a faltering economy caused by the closure of local woolen mills, and also thanks no doubt to the opening of branches of Morrison’s, Sainsbury’s and Lidl, which’d sucked the retailing life out of the place.  My first thought was: “What would Bill McLaren have said?”

 

© From rugbyrelics.com

 

McLaren’s commentaries were emblematic of an earlier, more innocent age, when rugby was still an amateur sport and because of that it was incredibly accessible.  This was especially true if you lived in a rugby-daft place like the Borders, where the guys you saw performing heroic deeds for Scotland on TV on Saturday afternoons existed during weekdays as mortals like everyone else.  As a kid living there, I was delighted when the man from the electricity board who came to our house to check on a power outage was none other than Jim Renwick.  Meanwhile, Scottish fullback Peter Dods was a joiner down the road in Galashiels and my old man, a farmer, was on nodding terms with Scottish flanker John Jeffrey, who farmed in Kelso – Jeffrey’s teammates had nicknamed him ‘the Great White Shark’ but to Bill McLaren he was just ‘the big Kelso farmer’.  And let’s not forget local electrician Roy Laidlaw, whom legend has it had to rewire the public toilets in Jedburgh the Monday morning after the Scotland team he was part of won the Grand Slam in Paris.

 

Yes, Bill McLaren’s voice evokes a simpler time in rugby, before professionalism, sponsorship, corporatism, razzmatazz and a profit-driven need to win at all costs took over.  But homespun though his persona was, I don’t believe there’s been a sports commentator in the years since who’s come close to matching him.

 

From artuk.org / © Beltane Studios

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Favourite Scots words, S – part 1

 

© Channel 4 Films / PolyGram Filmed Entertainment

 

Hot on the heels of my post about Robert Burns, here’s the latest in my series about favourite words in Scots, the language Burns wrote in.  Many Scots words begin with the letter ‘S’, so in this instalment I’m only going to list the first half of them.

 

Scaffy (n) – not, as you might expect, a scaffolder, but a streetcleaner or binman.

 

Scheme / Schemie (n) – a scheme is the Scottish word for a housing estate and schemie is the derogatory word for someone who lives on one.  One long-ago Saturday evening, while I was wandering around central Edinburgh, I went past a nightclub and was suddenly accosted by an upset young woman who demanded, “Dae I look like a schemie?”  Her supposed resemblance to a schemie was why the bouncer at the nightclub door had just turned her away.

 

Meanwhile, a much-quoted line from Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993) comes from Mark Renton when he turns up for a job interview: “They’d rather gie a merchant school old boy with severe brain damage a job in nuclear engineering than gie a schemie wi a Ph. D. a post as a cleaner in an abattoir.”

 

Scooby (n), as in ‘I havenae a Scooby’ – rhyming slang for ‘clue’.  Scooby refers to Scooby Doo, the famous American TV cartoon dog who first appeared in 1969, accompanying some ‘meddling kids’, without whose investigations many, many, many criminals “would have gotten away with it.”  I’ve seen arguments online about whether this started as Scottish rhyming slang and then spread to England, or started as Cockney rhyming slang and spread to Scotland.  But I’m sure I heard it in Scotland back in the 1980s, and it was appearing in Scottish newspapers in the 1990s, so its Caledonian pedigree is pretty venerable.

 

Scrieve (v) – to write.  Accordingly, a scriever is a writer.  “Just been doin’ a wee bit scrievin’ you know,” says Matt Craig, the main character and aspiring scriever in Archie Hind’s Glasgow-set novel The Dear Green Place (1966), which is as good an account of the trials and tribulations facing a working-class person trying to make a name as a writer, and a living from it, as Jack London’s better-known Martin Eden (1909).

 

© Corgi Books

 

Scunnered (adj) – sickened or disgusted.  During the 1980s and 1990s, this word was commonly used in Scotland on the mornings following general elections, when it became clear that a majority of people in Scotland had voted for the Labour Party and a majority of people in the south of England had voted for Maggie Thatcher’s Conservatives.  Guess who ended up ruling Scotland each time?  For a 21st-century variation on this, see the Brexit vote.

 

Sharn (n) – dung.  Yes, Dungeons & Dragons enthusiasts may know Sharn as a city that ‘towers atop a cliff above the mouth of the Dagger River in southern Breland’ in the fictional world of Eberron, but in Scots sharn refers to cow-shite.  That’s a warning to fantasy creators.  When you dream up names for your fantasy characters, creatures and places, be sure to check they don’t also mean something embarrassing in Scots.  Now please excuse me while I get back to writing my latest sword-and-sorcery epic wherein Glaikit the Barbarian rescues Princess Jobbie from the clutches of the Dark Lord Pishy-Breeks in the Kingdom of Boak.

 

Shauckle (v) – to shuffle along, barely raising your feet off the ground.

 

Sheuch (n) – a channel for removing wastewater, i.e., a gutter at the side of a street or a ditch at the side of a field. In William McIlvanney’s 1975 novel Docherty, the young hero Conn gets battered by his school’s headmaster for saying to him, “Ah fell an bumped ma heid in the sheuch.”  The fact that he doesn’t use the ‘correct’ word, gutter, is seen as ‘insolence’.  Early in the 20th century, when the events of Docherty take place, Scottish schoolkids would be punished for using Scots rather than the King’s English.  The only day in the year when Scots was acceptable in schools was January 25th, Robert Buns’ birthday, when they were made to recite the poetry of their national bard.

 

© Canongate Books Ltd

 

Incidentally, in Northern Ireland, where I spent my childhood, a sheuch seemed to be only a ditch.  My dad was a farmer and once or twice I heard him cry, “There’s a cow got stuck in the sheuch!”  And the North Channel – the strip of water above the Irish Sea that separates Scotland and Northern Ireland – was called ‘the Sheuch’ and the land-masses east and west of it termed ‘baith sides o’ the Sheuch.’

 

Shieling (n) – a hut or shelter for animals, usually out in the wilds and / or up in the hills.

 

Shilpit (adj) – thin, pale and weak-looking.

 

Shoogly (adj) – wobbly.  To hang on a shoogly peg means to be in dodgy, precarious or dire circumstances.  Since the arrival of the ineffectual and accident-prone Humza Yousaf as First Minister of Scotland, it’s fair to say the peg the electoral fortunes of the Scottish National Party hang on has been pretty shoogly.

 

Skean–dhu (n) – the Anglicised (or Scotticised) version of the Gaelic term sgian-duhb, meaning the ceremonial dagger that’s tucked behind the top of the hose in male Highland dress.  Considering the popularity of Highland dress at Scottish weddings, and the amount of alcohol consumed at them, it’s always surprised me that the country has avoided having a sky-high death-toll of wedding guests stabbed with skean-dhus in drunken altercations.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Stubborn Stag

 

Skelf (n) – a splinter.

 

Skelp (n / v) – to slap or a slap.  Skelps were often administered by parents and teachers to wayward kids back in the days, fondly remembered by the Daily Mail and Daily Express, when it was believed that assaulting children was good for them.

 

Skite (n / v) – also to strike someone or the blow thereof.  However, a skite is more likely to come from a sharp, stinging cane or stick than the open hand that delivers by a skelp.  Both are nicely onomatopoeic words, in their different ways.

 

Skoosh (n / v) – a squirt or spray of liquid.  A commonly heard exchange in Scottish pubs: “Dae ye want water in yer whisky?”  “Aye, but just a wee skoosh.”

 

Sleekit (adj) – according to the Merriam Webster dictionary, either ‘sleek’ and ‘smooth’ or ‘crafty’ and ‘deceitful’.  Presumably it was with the first meaning that this word got immortalised in a line of Robert Burns’ 1785 poem To a Mouse: “Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie…”  Nowadays, it’s used mainly with the ‘crafty’ and ‘deceitful’ application.  I can think of many politicians I’d describe as sleekit, but I won’t mention any names.

 

From members.parliament.uk

 

Smeddum (n) – in physical terms, a powder.  However, smeddum has also come to mean the kernel or essence of something, and presumably from that to mean its vigour, spirit, determination or grit too.  Robert Burns – him again – had the first meaning in mind when he wrote about ‘fell, red smeddum’, possibly referring to red precipitate of mercury, in his 1785 poem To a Louse.  Whereas Lewis Grassic Gibbon was thinking of smeddum’s spiritual denotation when he made it the title of his most famous short story, about a hard-working Scottish matriarch called Meg Menzies who takes no shit from anyone.  As Meg herself says: “It all depends if you’ve smeddum or not.”

 

Smirr (n) – a drizzly rain falling in small droplets.  This sad, ghostly word perfectly describes the sad, ghostly semi-rain that sometimes seems to envelop Scotland’s landscapes 365 days of the year.

 

Snaw (n) – snow.  Like snaw aff a dyke is a simile commonly used to describe something that disappears, or is disappearing, super-fast: for example, jobs for life, polar icecaps, cashiers in supermarkets, CD and DVD drives in laptops, Twitter’s credibility after Elon Musk took it over, and Liz Truss premierships.

 

© Canongate Books Ltd

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Seven reasons why Robert Burns still rocks

 

From wikipedia.org / © Ron Waller

 

This is a revised and expanded version of a piece I had published one January 25th in the Arts section of Concrete, the students’ newspaper at the University of East Anglia, where I did a Master’s Degree many years ago.

 

Tonight, whisky will be guzzled, haggis devoured, bagpipes blasted and Scots-language poetry recited with gusto at thousands of special suppers and get-togethers around the globe.  This is because today, January 25th, is the 265th anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns, Scotland’s national bard and one of its most popular contributions to international culture.

 

Why, more than two-and-a-half centuries after he died at the age of 37, is Robert Burns such big deal?  Here are some reasons.

 

One.  Burns was a champion of the common man.  Born in humble circumstances, as one of seven children to a farmer in Ayrshire, he was much more in tune with the ordinary masses than any of his literary contemporaries.  The American poet Waldo Emerson described him as the poet of ‘the poor, anxious, cheerful, working humanity’.  The fullest expression of his egalitarian instincts was the song A Man’s a Man for a’ That (1795), which was adopted as an anthem by the anti-slavery abolitionist movement.  That, however, highlights an uncomfortable fact…

 

In 1786, Burns came within a hair’s breadth of travelling to Jamaica and taking up a job-offer as a bookkeeper on a sugar plantation – run on slave labour.  Burns’ defenders argue that as a young man at the time, pre-fame, facing destitution, and desperate to get out of Scotland, he probably didn’t consider the hideous moral implications of the job he was about to undertake.  Also, by 1792, he seemed aware enough of slavery’s horrors to pen The Slave’s Lament, which begins: “It was in sweet Senegal that my foes did me enthral / For the lands of Virginia-ginia, O.“  But the issue is murkier still, because Burns’ authorship of The Slave’s Lament has been disputed.

 

Anyhow, later, socialists claimed Burns as one of their own.  A 1929 translation of his works into Russian sold a million copies and the Soviet Union honoured him with a commemorative stamp in 1954.  However, Burns obviously had appeal for capitalists too, for there are allegedly more statues of him in North America than of any other writer.

 

Two.  Burns was a songwriter too.  Indeed, if anything, he is more pervasive as a songwriter than as a poet.  In addition to A Man’s a Man…, he put Auld Lang Syne on paper in 1788 – which, by virtue of being belted out at New Year celebrations everywhere, is arguably the most universally-sung song in the world.  In Japan it is played at everything from high school graduation ceremonies to evening closing-time in department stores.

 

Three.  Burns wasn’t afraid to criticise the moral and religious mores of his time.  His contempt for the censorious regime of Scotland’s Presbyterian Church was expressed most famously in Holy Willie’s Prayer (1785), wherein a supposedly pious pillar of the church prays to God and unwittingly reveals himself as a scheming, bitter, drunken hypocrite.  Particularly pathetic are his pleas to be forgiven for his lechery, which has targeted ladies by the name of Meg (“And I’ll ne’er lift a lawless leg / Again upon her”) and ‘Leezie’s lass’ (“…that Friday I was fou / When I cam near her”).  John Betjeman was so impressed by the conceit that he borrowed it for his 1940s poem In Westminster Abbey.

 

Four.  Burns has a massive cult that keeps his memory alive.  The first Burns societies began to congregate in his honour in about 1800, four years after his death. In 1859, the first centenary of his birth, almost 900 events were staged – 60 of them taking place outside Britain and the US.  Today, Burns societies are to be found everywhere from Rio de Janeiro to Tokyo and from Winnipeg to Jakarta.

 

It’s claimed that the Russians have more such societies than even the Scots do.  Well, in the unlikely of event of Vladimir Putin sticking his head into a Burns supper this evening, I hope he’s regaled with Burns’ 1792 rewrite of the song Ye Jacobites by Name, whose anti-war lyrics include: “What makes heroic strife? / To whet th’ assassin’s knife / Or hunt a parent’s life, wi’ bluidy war?”

 

From wikipedia.org / © Melissa Highton

 

Burns suppers on January 25th are marked by lusty recitals of his greatest poems, speeches and copious consumption of whisky and haggis.  Praised as the ‘great chieftain o’ the puddin’ race’ in Burns’ Address to a Haggis (1786), haggis is surely the only offal-based foodstuff to have a piece of world-class literature written in its honour.  No other writer is commemorated by a yearly celebration on this scale.  Dublin’s James Joyce-themed Bloomsday on June 16th doesn’t come close.

 

Five.  Burns invented the concept of the doomed, decadent romantic poet.  Long before Byron and Shelley were painting the towns of Europe red and proving themselves mad, bad and dangerous to know, Burns had earned himself a mighty reputation for dissipation, both in the pub and in the bedchamber.  His love of strong drink is obvious in poems like John Barleycorn (1782) while his promiscuity led to him siring at least a dozen children with at least four different women – a common jibe at the time was that you could see his face in every pram on Edinburgh’s Princes Street.

 

Six.  Burns is controversial.  And no doubt the arguments that have raged about him over the centuries have helped keep his fame alive.  Much debate has centred on whether or not someone with Burns’ obvious character flaws deserves such veneration.  At the beginning of 2009, just before the 250th anniversary of his birth, right-wing Scottish historian Michael Fry caused a storm when he denounced Burns as a ‘racist misogynist drunk’ who didn’t deserve to be presented to people as a role model.  Fry sounded a bit like a rock-and-roll era parent expressing concern about the examples the likes of Jim Morrison, Sid Vicious, Liam Gallagher, Pete Docherty, Amy Winehouse, etc., set for young people.

 

Seven.  Burns’ work has had a considerable influence on the English language and on English-language culture.  Here are a few examples:

 

Proverbs:

  • The best laid plans of mice and men will go astray (‘The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley’ / from 1785’s To a Mouse).
  • To see ourselves as others see us (‘To see ousel’s as ithers see us’ / from 1786’s To a Louse).
  • There is no such uncertainty as a sure thing (attributed to Burns).

 

Phrases:

 

Burns-inspired titles:

  • John Steinbeck’s novel, Of Mice and Men (1937).
  • R. James’ short story, reckoned by some to be the greatest ghost story in English literature, O, Whistle and I’ll Come to you my Lad (1904) – which is also the title of a 1793 Burns poem.
  • Ken Loach’s film, Ae Fond Kiss (2004) – which is also the title of a 1791 Burns song.
  • The Vin Diesel car-chase / street-racing movie The Fast and the Furious (2001) – ‘fast and furious’ was a phrase Burns coined in Tam O’Shanter.

 

All right, with that that last example, the producers may not have been aware of the Robert Burns connection when they chose the title.

 

© National Trust for Scotland / Robert Burns Birthplace Museum

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A Dad story

 

From amazon.co.uk / © Smith, Smith & Swan

 

Back in 2006, I returned to my family’s home in the town of Peebles, in southeastern Scotland, for a fortnight’s vacation from a job I was doing in a particularly authoritarian, under-developed and hard-to-live-in country.  As that country offered little in the way of social life, I had plenty of free time on my hands when I wasn’t at my workplace.  And to fill in that free time, I’d spent the past year working on a project initiated by my brother Gareth and his mate Douglas Swan.  Basically, Gareth and Douglas wanted to publish a book about the history of a local football team, Peebles Rovers.  They conducted the research for it and sent the notes, newspaper cuttings, interview transcripts and so on to me.  I’d always fancied myself as a writer, so I took on the job of turning their research into prose.

 

The research had all been written up and the book was soon to be published when I arrived home that August.  As a thank-you for the work I’d put into it, Gareth and Dougie bought me a present: a ticket for the Rolling Stones concert on Friday, August 25th, at Hampden Stadium in Glasgow, which coincided with my return to Scotland.

 

This was a little sudden and unexpected.  Also, my parents’ house, where I was staying, was offline and I didn’t have a phone – so dictatorial was the country I was working in that private citizens weren’t allowed to carry one.  Thus, I was somewhat unprepared that Friday morning when I set off, via bus from Peebles to Edinburgh, and then train from Edinburgh to Glasgow.  I hadn’t, for example, been able to search for accommodation that night in Glasgow, after the concert.  “Och,” I thought to myself in my haphazard way, “I’m sure something will turn up.”

 

However, before I left the house in Peebles, my Dad told me: “If you can’t find a place to stay, and have problems getting home, call me from a pay-phone.  I’ll come and collect you.”

 

“Sure,” I said.  But as I prided myself on being an independent, ‘low-maintenance’ sort of person, I had no intention of phoning him late at night, and probably getting him out of bed, to lament that I needed help getting home.

 

Anyway…  I got to Glasgow and first of all visited the Tourist Information Centre in George Square to ask if the city had any hotel rooms free that evening.  “Not really,” the lady at the desk replied. “There’s a big concert here today, you see…”  Well, I knew that, having come to attend it.  From what she said, it sounded like the nearest hotel that did have vacancies was halfway between Glasgow and John O’Groats.  Oh well, I thought.  I’ll just have to head back to Edinburgh afterwards and see if I can get to Peebles from there.  Because the Edinburgh Festival was in full swing at the time, all accommodation in the Scottish capital was already booked too.  It’d been snapped up months ago.

 

From mixcloud.com

 

I enjoyed the Rolling Stones and the Charlatans, their support band, at Hampden that evening.  Following the show, I hopped on a late train to Edinburgh.  Unfortunately, I arrived in Edinburgh sometime after the final bus of the day had left the city for Peebles.  What to do?  Well, from previous experience of the Edinburgh Festival, I knew it was virtually impossible to find a taxi at night-time.  But there was a very late bus, leaving at around three o’clock in the morning, for the town of Penicuik, which was halfway between Edinburgh and Peebles.  From Penicuik, home was another ten miles away.  First, you had to traverse the wilds of Leadburn Moor, then you had to make your way along the more sheltered and scenic Eddleston Valley.

 

Ten miles, I thought to myself in a gung-ho manner, having downed quite a few pints that day and being full of Dutch courage.  I could walk that in two-and-a-half hours.  And, just in case there are any cars using the road at that late hour – I can always try hitchhiking.  Maybe I’ll strike it lucky and get a lift, and get back to Peebles sooner.   

 

Because it was Festival time, many of the pubs in Edinburgh were open very late.  And because I felt I could do with just a wee bit more Dutch courage, I spent the run-up to three o’clock sinking more pints in the Scotsman Lounge on Cockburn Street.  Finally, it was time to go.  I got on the three o’clock bus and a half-hour later got off in the centre of Penicuik, which was utterly still and silent.

 

From there, I walked down a street towards the southern edge of the town.  I didn’t see another soul on the pavements.  Neither did a single vehicle pass on the road.  The outskirts of town neared and, beyond, the darkness of Leadburn Moor beckoned.  I steeled myself.  Okay, I thought.  This is going to be a hell of a walk.  But I can do it…

 

As I got to the town’s edge, and the beginning of the darkness, a pair of headlights went blazing past on the other side of the road – northwards, into Penicuik, the opposite direction from where I was going.  A pity, I thought.  But there’s at least one person on the road at this hour.  Maybe there’ll be others, heading my way…

 

And sure enough, a minute later, I heard a car engine approaching behind me – driving southwards, towards Peebles!  I turned just before the headlights reached me and stuck out my hitchhiking thumb.  The car passed, and slowed, and stopped a few yards ahead.  Fortune was smiling on me for sure.  I ran to the car, grabbed the passenger’s door, yanked it open, stuck my head in and blurted: “Are you going towards Peebles – ?”

 

My voice died.  For sitting in the driver’s seat was… my Dad.

 

I spluttered, “What are you doing here?”

 

“Och,” he said, “I woke up a while ago and thought to myself, that fellah hasn’t come home yet. So I wondered what you would do.  I figured you’d be daft enough to get the bus from Penicuik and try walking home from there.  So I thought I’d get in the car and take a wee scoot up the road and have a look for you.  I spotted you on the pavement there a minute ago, found a place to turn and came back.”

 

I didn’t know whether I should feel annoyed, insulted, pleased, amused or relieved.  I probably ended up feeling a mixture of all five, but the biggest feeling was one of relief.

 

That wasn’t the only occasion that my auld man, kind and shrewd, came to my rescue.  But it was perhaps the most memorable one.

 

My Dad passed away at the end of last month, aged 88.  So I thought I would share this Dad story with you.

 

 

Four years after the event described above, I met up with my Dad for a week’s holiday in Malta.  Yes, we did end up one day in the pub in Valetta where thirsty movie star Oliver Reed breathed his last whilst filming Ridley Scott’s Gladiator there in 1999.

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Jim Mountfield hunts for cryptids

 

© Sirens Call Publications

 

My short story The Watchers in the Forest, which is attributed to the pseudonym Jim Mountfield, can now be read in issue 62 – the summer 2023 edition – of the fiction and poetry magazine The Sirens Call.

 

Much of the writing in this issue is on the theme of cryptids – a ‘cryptid’ being defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “an animal (such as Sasquatch or the Loch Ness Monster) that has been claimed to exist but never proven to exist.”  Accordingly, the young hero of The Watchers in the Forest one day notices something strange in the woodland that rises at the end of his grandparents’ garden, woodland in which there have been reports of mysterious ape-like creatures, and unwisely goes to investigate…

 

As usual with The Sirens Call, issue 62 is the sort of bargain that’s rare nowadays.  It contains 274 pages and features 169 stories and poems, yet is available free of charge.  It can be downloaded here.

 

Incidentally, while we’re on the subject of ape-like cryptids, here are my five favourite examples of them from the real world.  Well, I don’t think any of them are real, but there have certainly been real reports about them.

 

The Big Grey Man of Ben Macdui

This is Scotland’s number-one simian-cryptid.  The Big Grey Man of Ben Macdui (Am Fear Liath Mòr in Gaelic) is a huge, hairy creature that’s supposed to follow and loom up terrifyingly behind lone hikers and climbers on the country’s second-highest peak, the often-misty Ben Macdui in the Cairngorm Mountains.  Alas, nice though the idea of ape creatures lurking in Cairngorms is, I’m inclined to attribute the sightings of the Big Grey Man to the creepy optical effect known as the Brocken Spectre.  This involves the sun casting your shadow from a high position onto mist, fog or cloud and making it look monstrous.

 

The Bukit Timah Monkey Man

Fabulously, an ape-like cryptid is rumoured to stalk my current abode, Singapore, the island city-state that has an area of just over 700 square kilometres and is the third most densely populated nation in the world.  If cryptids can escape detection here, they can do it anywhere.  It’s said the Bukit Timah Monkey Man was originally sighted in 1805 and most recently in 2020.  In the intervening two centuries, those who claim to have seen the beast include Japanese soldiers during their country’s occupation of Singapore in World War II.

 

The Monkey Man’s sightings have centred around the Singaporean district of Bukit Timah where, on the slopes of Bukit Timah Hill (Singapore’s highest peak at 164 metres) there’s a nature reserve with a population of crab-eating macaque monkeys.  It’s assumed that people have seen the real monkeys in poor visibility and distorting light conditions and mistaken them for the cryptid.  Though as the crab-eating macaques are at most a half-metre long, and the Monkey Man is supposed to walk upright at a height of 1.75 metres, it seems an odd mistake to make.

 

A fixture in Singaporean popular culture, the Bukit Timah Monkey Man is sometimes known by the abbreviation BTM, which makes him sound like a Korean-Pop boy-band.

 

The Monkey Man of Delhi

Delhi is no stranger to monkeys.  The last time I was in the city, in 2014, I couldn’t believe the size of the monkey-gangs that were roaming the streets in the neighbourhood of the Indian parliament.  They swaggered about as if they owned the place.  Predictably, I heard jokes from local people about the parliament being full of monkeys in more way than one.

 

 

However, in 2001, the city’s monkey phenomenon took a sinister turn with reports about the Monkey Man of Delhi.  According to eyewitnesses, this apparition was a simian-type creature that ranged from four feet to eight feet in height.  It was seen about 350 times and supposedly attacked and injured some 60 people, even causing a couple of deaths.  The Monkey Man of Delhi’s reign of terror has been attributed to mass hysteria, not unlike the Spring-Heeled Jack panic that gripped Britain nearly two centuries earlier.  Thus, the creature is probably more of an urban myth than a ‘real’ cryptid.

 

The Monkey Man of Delhi had some surprisingly human tastes in accessories.  His Wikipedia entry mentions how eyewitness accounts had him not only “covered in thick black hair” but also endowed with “a metal helmet, metal claws, glowing red eyes and three buttons” on his chest.  “Some reports also claim that the Monkey Man wore roller-skates.”

 

The Nittaewo

Sri Lanka, the country where I lived from 2014 to 2022, is also home to tales of anthropoid cryptids.  The Nittaewo were said to be a species of bipedal, tailless primates dwelling in the nation’s forests, with talon-like fingers and a strange language that resembled the twittering of birds.  According to the traditions of the Vedda people – who are believed to be Sri Lanka’s oldest human inhabitants – the Vedda fought against and finally destroyed the Nittaewo in the 18th century.  All the same, there have been alleged sightings of the Nittaewo since then, indeed, as late as 1984.

 

But if you go down to the Sri Lankan woods today and hear strange rustlings and twittering sounds coming from the undergrowth, you needn’t be too alarmed.  The Nittaewo were said to be three feet tall at most.  So if they did exist, they shouldn’t have looked any more threatening than a Hobbit.

 

The Yeti

Obviously, the Yeti, the Abominable Snowmen of the Himalayas, vie with Bigfoot as being the world’s most famous ape-like cryptids.  I like them for two reasons.  Firstly, they inspired the haunting, wistful song Wild Man by Kate Bush, released in 2011.  (“Lying in my tent, I can hear your cry echoing round the mountainside / You sound lonely…”)

 

Secondly, I used to see a yeti regularly in Colombo, the Sri Lankan capital.  The venerable street-side walkway on York Street in the city’s downtown area had a huge fibreglass yeti hulking behind, and glowering out through, one of its shop windows.  The thing had been created as an eye-catching advertising gimmick for a product called Yeti Isotonic Energy.  This was a rehydrating sports drink “developed in collaboration by Austrian and Sri Lankan scientists”, and bottles of it were on display in the same window.

 

I wonder if he’s still there today?