Arthur Montford – Blood and Porridge

November 30, 2024December 3, 2024

Favourite Scots words, S – part 2

© Channel Four Films / PolyGram Filmed Entertainment

Today is November 30^th, the feast-day of Andrew the Apostle, now better known as St Andrew, the national saint of Scotland. And seeing as it’s St Andrew’s Day, I will post another instalment of my guide to my favourite words in Scots, the dialect of Middle English still spoken in modern-day Scotland. Like Singlish, the unofficial fifth language of Singapore, there’s a good case for Scots to be considered a language of its own. Indeed, it’s been recognised as such by the Council of Europe’s Charter on Regional and Minority Languages.

In my previous entry, the words I covered began with ‘S’ and I only got as far as ‘snaw’. So here are the rest of the ‘S’-words.

Sneck (n) – the latch or catch used for fastening a gate. Actually, my trusty and much-thumbed copy of the Collins Pocket Scots Dictionary tells me that snib, the mechanism for securing the bolt on a door, is a Scots word too, though I’d always thought it came from standard English. Both sneck and snib can be used as verbs.

Soap dodger (n) – an unhygienic and un-fragrant person who has a deep aversion to soap, baths and showers. I looked up ‘soap dodger’ online and was told it was a general ‘British’ slang-word that appeared around 1990. But I’m sure I’d heard it in Scotland long before that – mainly by fans of arch-enemy Scottish football clubs Glasgow Rangers and Glasgow Celtic, who used it as a term of abuse for each other.

Sodger (n) – a soldier.

Sonsie (adj) – plump, rosy and healthy. This adjective appears in the opening lines of Robert Burns’ poem about Scotland’s premier foodstuff, Address to a Haggis (1786). Saluting the bulging-with-sheep’s-offal haggis, he writes: “Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face / Great chieftain o’ the puddin-race!“

Sook (n) – nothing to do with an Arabic marketplace or commercial district, a sook is a person who sucks up to, those in authority. The term is commonly used for school pupils who grovel shamelessly before their teachers. However, the whole obsequious, cap-doffing, belly-crawling, brown-nosing British establishment could be described as ‘sooks’ because of their behaviour towards the Royal Family.

© Mainstream Publishing

Meanwhile, in his book Scots – The Mither Tongue (1986), Billy Kay identifies the first great sook in history as being James Boswell, the companion, biographer and toady of Dr Samuel Johnson, who was perfectly happy to pander to the Doctor’s anti-Scottish prejudices even though he was Scottish himself. (“I do indeed come from Scotland,” he whined when he first met Johnson. “But I cannot help it.” To which the Doctor snorted contemptuously, “That, Sir, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help.”)

Souch (v) – a verb denoting the activity of the wind when it blows in a noisy fashion.

Souter (n) – a shoemaker or cobbler. Famously, Burns used the word as a nickname for a character – a cobbler by trade – in his magnum opus Tam O’Shanter (1791). Souter Johnnie is a drinking buddy of the poem’s titular, dissolute hero. Early in the poem, we see Tam in the pub with “…at his elbow, Souter Johnnie / His ancient, trusty, drouthy cronie / Tam lo’ed him like a very brither / They had been fou for weeks thegither.”

Also, at school, I had a teacher called Mr Souter. But I won’t crack the obvious joke about him talking ‘a lot of cobblers’.

Spaewife (n) – a woman who tells fortunes. The Spaewife is the name of an 1885 poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, in which the narrator plies a spaewife with all manner of philosophical questions (“Hoo a’ things come to be whaur we find them when we try…”, “Why lads are a’ to sell an’ lasses a’ to buy…”, “The reason o’ the cause an’ the wherefore o’ the why…”). However, he keeps getting brushed off with the glib answer, “It’s gey an’ easy spierin’.” (“It’s very easy asking.”)

Spaver (n) – a trouser zip or fly. The now-defunct online Doric Dictionary showed how the word was used with this eye-watering example-sentence: “Help, mither, av nipped ma tadger in ma spaver!”

Speir (v) – as the quote from Stevenson’s The Spaewife indicates above, this means to ask.

Spurtle (n) – a long wooden utensil once used in Scottish cooking, sometimes a spatula for turning over oatcakes, sometimes a stick for stirring porridge. I can’t recall the name of the story it was in, but I vividly remember reading a description of a sheep’s carcass lying on a Scottish hillside with its four stiff legs “sticking up like spurtles”.

Square go (n) – a face-to-face brawl where neither opponent carries a weapon nor has any advantage over the other. Inevitably, this term is used by the psychotic Frank Begbie in Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993), during his account of a fight he got into in a poolroom: “…this hard c*nt comes in. Obviously f*ckin’ fancied himself, like. Starts staring at me. Lookin’ at me, right f*ckin’ at me, as if to say, ‘Come ahead, square go.’ You ken me, I’m not the type of c*nt that goes looking for f*ckin’ bother, like, but…”

From wikipedia.org / © Moncrief

Stairheid (n) – the top of a flight of stairs. Long ago in urban Scotland, when much of the working-class population lived in close proximity in one or two-bedroom flats in tenement buildings, accessed by steep, stone stairs, a stairhead rammy was what you got when two neighbours – often female – had a falling-out and came to blows.

Stave (v) – to incur an injury by spraining or twisting a limb or digit.

Steamin’ (adj) – one of the many adjectives in Scots for describing a drunk person. (Others include arsed, bevied, bleezin’, blootered, buckled, fou’, gubbered, hingin’, minced, mingin’, miraculous, miracked, mortal, reekin’, reelin’, stocious and wellied.) Steamin’ also spawned the word steamboats: “By the end o’ the night I wis absolutely steamboats!”

Stoater (n) – a person or thing that is especially wonderful, beautiful or excellent. “Donald Trump’s a stoater!” cried nobody in Scotland, ever.

Stob (n) – a wooden post, like one you’d find in a fence.

Stookie (n) – a plaster-of-Paris cast put around a broken limb.

Stour (n) – a black, grimy dust. I’ve seen ‘stour’ used to describe smoke, but it would have be foul, tarry smoke that leaves deposits of dirt over everything. Stourie is the adjective derived from stour.

In my Scottish hometown of Peebles, a stourie-fit – a ‘dusty-foot’ – was someone who wasn’t a native of the town but an incomer. Presumably, their wandering feet had collected much stour before they arrived in pristine, stour-free Peebles. And as the town is a wee bit clannish, your family might have to be settled there for a few generations before your feet were considered less stourie.

Stowed oot (adj) – packed with people. Many times in my youth, I tried to enter a social venue, only to be pushed back by a bouncer who snarled, “Ye cannae come in! We’re stowed oot awreidy!”

Stramash (n) – a disorderly commotion or argument. A word popularised by the late Scottish TV commentator Arthur Montford, famous for his extravagantly checked jackets, who would rarely let a football match go by without referring to some sort of stramash breaking out in the penalty box.

© One Little Indian

Stushie (n) – a disagreement or row, perhaps not quite of the violent character of a rammy or a stramash. Years ago, In 1992, I remember somebody Scottish remarking on how there’d been “a stushie aboot thon song Ebenezer Goode by the Shamen” (whose chorus was the dodgy-when-heard-out-of-context ‘Ez-er Goode! Ez-er Goode!’). So maybe it approximates to a rumpus or uproar. Sadly, I have never heard people arguing bitterly over the bill for a platter of sushi, so I haven’t had the chance to cry poetically, “There’s a stushie about the sushi!”

Swallie (n) – a drink of alcohol, derived from the word ‘swallow’. A Scottish person offering you a tipple might ask, “Dae ye fancy a wee swallie?” Needless to say, a ‘wee swallie’ is usually anything but wee.

Sweetie wife (n) – not a female spouse who sells confectionery but a person who’s a gossip. Interestingly, the term sweetie wife is normally applied to a man, not a woman.

Swither (v) – to oscillate indecisively between various options or courses of action. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Boris Johnson swithered about whether or not he should impose lockdown on England, with disastrous and tragic results. Of course, Johnson is such a reptile he does something that rhymes with swither too.

From ontheterracing.blogstspot.com

June 9, 2023June 14, 2023

Remembering Iain Banks

From wikipedia.com / © Tim Duncan

Ten years ago today, on June 9^th, 2013, the Scottish novelist Iain Banks passed away at the age of 59, struck down by a gall-bladder cancer that’d only been diagnosed two months earlier. Here’s a slightly updated version of the tribute to him I wrote at the time.

Iain Banks became a big thing for me, and for many people like me, when he found success, fame and a certain notoriety with the publication of his first novel, The Wasp Factory, in 1984. This was because he seemed to tick a lot of important boxes.

Like me and the crowd I hung out with, he came from a Scottish background, so we were familiar with many of the places he wrote about. Like us, his politics were left-of-centre, with a leaning towards the cause of Scottish independence because independence seemed the best way to avoid being saddled with right-wing Tory governments whom few people in Scotland ever voted for. And like us, he was obviously into literature, but he was also into some strange, off-beat writers whom stuffy literary critics would dismiss as being too ‘genre’ for serious consideration – Mervyn Peake, Brian Aldiss, M. John Harrison, and so on.

You could argue that Alasdair Gray had blazed the same trail a few years earlier with his 1980 novel Lanark, but there was one important difference. Gray had been a young man in the 1950s. Banks, like us, was clearly of the 1980s. Like it or not – and we did not – Banks and us, his readers, were Maggie Thatcher’s children.

The Wasp Factory made an immediate stir with its blackly funny plot about Frank Cauldhame, a maimed delinquent living in a remote part of Scotland, who amuses himself with the shamanistic killings of insects, seagulls, rabbits and young children. In quick succession Banks followed it with Walking on Glass (1985), which showed the influence of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books (1946-59); The Bridge (1986), a paean to both the Forth Rail Bridge and Gray’s Lanark, with a healthy dose of the J.G. Ballard short story Concentration City (1957) mixed in; and in 1987 Consider Phlebas, the first of many epic outer-space novels about an interstellar anarcho-utopian society called the Culture. The Culture novels were attributed to Iain M. Banks, a move by his publisher to help fans of ‘serious’ mainstream fiction and fans of science fiction identify what was what in his output. At the time, the speculative fiction magazine Interzone remarked that it was delighted to see Banks at last ‘come out of the closet’ as a sci-fi writer.

In August 1987 Banks was scheduled to appear on a discussion panel at the Edinburgh Book Festival. Around the same time I’d agreed to edit the latest edition of a small literary magazine called Alma Mater, published by some fellow-students at the University of Aberdeen’s English Literature Department. Dr Isobel Murray, who’d been my tutor at Aberdeen for the past year, was chairing the Book Festival panel and I used my connection with her to persuade Banks’s agent to let me interview him after the panel, for Alma Mater. I later offered Dr Murray a grovelling apology for brazenly using her name as my calling card.

The panel, which I attended, produced a few sparks. In addition to Banks and Murray, it featured the Glaswegian writer Frederic Lindsay, whose 1983 novel Brond had recently been made into a TV series, directed by Michael Caton-Jones and starring a very young John Hannah. (By a sad coincidence, Lindsay also died in 2013, just ten days before Banks did.) And it was rounded off by another Glaswegian, Ronald Frame, author of the just-published novel Sandmouth People. If it’s unfair to say that the tweedy Frame was a young fogey at the time, he certainly gave the impression of being one. When somebody in the audience asked the authors about their views on self-censorship, he said pompously: “I would never include anything I might regret in five years’ time.”

Banks immediately spluttered, “But those are the best bits!”

Afterwards I met up with Banks and a few of his friends and conducted the interview in a pub in Edinburgh’s Rose Street – either the Kenilworth or the Auld Hundred, if I remember correctly – with Banks speaking into the mic of the clunky tape recorder I’d bought with me, transferring his voice onto a crackly cassette tape that, like almost everything else I possess, now resides inside a cardboard box somewhere in my Dad’s attic.

I asked him about the hostile reception that The Wasp Factory had received in some quarters. (The Irish Times had described it as ‘a work of unparalleled depravity’.) Banks had been surprised by this. He’d expected some flak from animal rights groups, but not from the critics. He’d learned that one reviewer who’d blasted the book as ‘the literary equivalent of a video nasty’ also worked in the Conservative Party office in London, which pleased him no end. Offending that guy had been an honour.

I also asked him about his fondness for peppering his novels with references to the popular culture of the time. In The Bridge, for example, just before the car accident that sets the surreal plot in motion, the hero slots a copy of the Pogues album Rum, Sodomy and the Lash (1985) into his car stereo. Wouldn’t that make the books look rather dated a few years later? “Yeah,” he agreed, “it’ll date them. But what the hell?” He believed that characters living in a particular time and particular place would be influenced by the current popular culture, so he didn’t see why he should shirk from mentioning the music, books, films and TV programmes of the moment.

I quoted Brian Aldiss at him – Aldiss had famously said that all good science fiction hovers at the edge of being something different from science fiction. Banks agreed with that, sort of, but he also disagreed. Enthusiastically, he told me how Consider Phlebas came with all the trimmings of the traditional Isaac Asimov / Robert Heinlein ‘space opera’: giant spaceships, laser cannons, inter-planetary battles.

Did he, I asked finally, worry about being pigeon-holed, with one half of the world viewing him as a ‘Scottish’ author and the other half viewing him as a ‘sci-fi’ one? Not at all, he said. He was quite at ease with being regarded as Scottish. And being seen as a sci-fi author didn’t bother him either, since science fiction was an ‘old love’ for him.

From Rose Street, we moved to Greyfriars Bobby’s Bar in Candlemaker Row, just behind the statue of the famous Edinburgh terrier who’d spent 14 years in the adjacent graveyard guarding the grave of his dead master. Poor wee Bobby, I remember musing, wouldn’t have lasted long if he’d been a character in The Wasp Factory. By then a good number of pints had been drunk and the conversation had descended somewhat from the lofty heights of literary discussion. I recall talking to Banks about Arthur Montford, the lugubrious Scottish TV football commentator famous for his eccentrically patterned sports jackets and for his catchphrases that included “What a stramash!” and (uttered all too often) “Disaster for Scotland!” At some point too we discussed the 1966 Hammer horror film Dracula Prince of Darkness, which had featured the Scottish actor (from Shotts in North Lanarkshire) Andrew Keir.

The next issue of Alma Mater, containing my interview with Iain Banks, was published later that year. A series of cock-ups by the typesetter meant that it looked pretty ropey, though thankfully the pages featuring Banks were okay. The following year, I heard that Banks would be making an appearance at Edinburgh’s Science Fiction Bookshop in West Crosscauseway (now long vanished) and I went along to give him a copy of the magazine. To my surprise, he remembered me and enthused about the mini-pub crawl we’d done that day: “That was a good afternoon!”

After that I read several more Banks novels: Espedair Street (1987), Canal Dreams (1989), The Crow Road (1992), Complicity (1993). The Crow Road, his stab at writing a sprawling family saga, is the book that everyone talks about, although I have to say that it’s not one of my favourites. Sure, it has one of the best opening lines in modern literature (“It was the day my grandmother exploded”), but as with most other sprawling sagas about eccentric families, I find it too contrived for its own good.

On the other hand, I think Espedair Street, which is about a hapless rock musician who’s found fame, fortune and much unhappiness and is now trying to live anonymously in a rough part of Glasgow, is marvellous. I also think it’s the warmest and most relatable Iain Banks book that I’ve read. Among my all-time favourite novels about rock ‘n’ roll, it’s up there with Harlan Ellison’s Spider Kiss (1961) and John Niven’s Kill Your Friends (2008).

And I like Complicity, which welds a serial-killer plot onto Banks’ intense distaste for the corruption and inequalities of the recently-ended Thatcher era. Much of it is set in Edinburgh, where scuzzy journalist-hero Cameron Colley boozes in a series of pubs ranging from the upmarket Café Royal on West Register Street to the desperate, late-opening Casbah in the Cowgate. By then I’d lived in Edinburgh and I knew Colley’s haunts well. I’d even had an experience similar to one he has in the Café Royal, when he stands in front of the bar’s gantry (which doesn’t contain a mirror although it looks as though it does), can’t see his reflection and in a drunken panic believes himself to be a vampire.

After Complicity, however, I stopped reading Iain Banks, probably because by then there were just too many young Scottish writers competing for my attention: Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, James Robertson. Banks’s success in the 1980s, of course, had helped pave the way for all these slightly younger Turks. It wasn’t until after his death that I read more of his stuff: the collection State of the Art (1991), whose stories lean towards science fiction, so the name ‘Iain Banks’ on the cover contains that all-important initial-letter ‘M’ to warn readers of serious mainstream literature to keep clear; The Steep Approach to Garbadale (2007); Stonemouth (2012); The Quarry, published posthumously in 2013; and Banks’s one book of non-fiction, Raw Spirit (2003), which details his experiences while he works on the rather enviable assignment of visiting, and sampling the products of, as many of Scotland’s whisky distilleries as he can.

Among these later novels, The Steep Approach to Garbadale, another sprawling family saga, perhaps sticks most in my mind. That’s largely because of the following quote, wherein the narrator muses on the connection between being right-wing and not having an imagination, and which could be the manifesto for Banks’s own politics: “We got talking about how some people were selfish and some weren’t, and the difference between right-wing people and left-wing people. You said it all came down to imagination. Conservative people don’t usually have very much, so they find it hard to imagine what life is like for people who aren’t just like them. They can only empathise with people just like they are: the same sex, the same age, the same class, the same golf club or nation or race or whatever. Liberals can pretty much empathise with anybody else, no matter how different they are. It’s all to do with imagination, empathy and imagination are almost the same thing, and it’s why artists, creative people, are almost all liberals, left-leaning.”

Meanwhile, I found Raw Spirit so informative that, as I read it, I tried to record what it said about the distilleries Banks visited, the whiskies he drank, and his opinions on their flavours, in a series of mind-maps.

Banks was so prolific that, looking at his bibliography, I see there are still nearly 20 books of his that I haven’t read yet. That includes the entire series of Culture novels. So, I still have much catching up to do with the great man’s oeuvre.