Tag: Douglas Stuart

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Agnes, Queen of the West

 

© Polygon Books

 

By a coincidence I’d just finished reading Gentlemen of the West (1984), the first book published by the late Scottish writer Agnes Owens, when I learned that May 24th – last Sunday – was the 100th anniversary of Owens’s birth.  This article in last Sunday’s Observer informed me.

 

A long time ago, I’d read nine of Owens’s short stories included in Lean Tales (1985), an anthology showcasing work by her and her friends (and originally mentors) Alasdair Gray and James Kelman.  No disrespect to Gray and Kelman, but I thought her stories were the best stuff in Lean Tales and one of them, Arabella, blew me away.  In just six pages, Arabella paints a devastating picture of the title character, who may or may not be a witch.  Arabella obviously doesn’t have much command of , or regard for, normal social skills.  She visits her parents seemingly oblivious to the fact her mother can’t stand the sight of her, she isn’t someone you’d want looking after your pets (though she owns four dogs, whom she carts around in a pram), and her way of dealing with a sanitary inspector’s visit to her ruinous house is not for the weak-stomached.

 

Arabella was the story that brought her to the attention of her literary peers.  In the late 1970s Gray, Kelman and the poet Liz Lochhead ran evening classes in creative writing in Owens’s hometown of Alexandria, northwest of Glasgow.  Owens attended the first class and gave a copy of Arabella to Lochhead, who read it on the train back to Glasgow.  Lochhead recalled trying “to put this terrifying, terribly funny story, so anarchic and archetypal, so short and so complete, together with the class I’d just left and that middle-aged lady in the neat coat and woolly hat with the fringe of dark blonde hair sticking out and the full mouth that turned so decisively down at the corners.”  Owens, who’d been busy raising seven children and working variously as a typist, factory worker and cleaner, later claimed she’d only signed up for the writing course to ‘get out of the house’.

 

Anyway, I’m a fan of Douglas Stuart, author of Shuggie Bain (2020), Young Mungo (2022) and the forthcoming John of John (2026), and I recently read an article of his on Literary Hub entitled Poverty, Anxiety and Gender in Scottish Working-Class Literature.  This recommended a reading list that included Agnes Owens’s Gentlemen of the West alongside such better-known titles as Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late (1994), Alexander Trocchi’s Young Adam (1954), Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993) and Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar (1995).  Stuart described her as “one of the most detailed observers of working-class life that I have ever read” and opined that “her writing brings a tenderness and a kindness to a hard, industrial landscape that is usually dominated by men.”  I realised I had on my bookshelf a very old copy of Gentlemen of the West that I’d purchased in a charity shop and, following Stuart’s endorsement, I retrieved it and read it.

 

The book can be described as either a collection of connected short stories, told by the same narrator, or an episodic novel, each chapter recounting an adventure experienced by its hero.  That hero is Mac, a young west-of-Scotland man who spends his time toiling in frequently shite weather on a building site, jousting with his curmudgeonly mother in the small tenement flat he shares with her, and drinking in the local pub, the Paxton, among a weird, sometimes frightening range of what could be euphemistically termed ‘characters’.  The tenor of Mac’s existence is nicely summed up by the opening paragraphs of one story / chapter entitled Christmas Day at the Paxton:

 

“It was Christmas Day, a Saturday.  The streets were covered in ice and nothing was moving except me.  There was not a soul, a dog or even a bus in sight and worst of all I suspected the pubs would be closed.  I headed in the direction of the Paxton with my mother’s Christmas message ringing in my ears.

 

“’Where’s yer Christmas present ye ask?  Well, where’s mine?  Every year it’s the same.  Not a sausage dae I get aff ye.  No’ even an extra pound an’ a’ the neighbours showing aff their presents.   Well, I’m sick o’ it – ‘

 

“’And a Merry Christmas to you!’ I had shouted as I walked out.”

 

The reader never loses sight of the precariousness of Mac’s life.  In the following story, The Aftermath, he reports, “All the week after Christmas I was in a foul mood.  It was a long holiday for the building-site worker.  My money was gone by Boxing Day.  I faced New Year without a penny in my pocket…”  In the Paxton, he often wonders where his next beer or whisky will come from – though modern readers may find it quaint that the stories are set in an era when a pint cost 50 pence.  Of course, wages then were correspondingly low.  (Incidentally, I’m of a vintage whereby I can just remember being able to buy two pints of Light for a pound at the Rugby Club’s wee upstairs bar on the Northgate in Peebles.)

 

Among the tales recounted in Gentlemen of the West…  Mac, a Protestant, goes looking for a dead friend’s memorial service and gets stuck in a Roman Catholic chapel while mass is being performed.  He encounters an old schoolmate who then limpets onto him when he discovers there’s a gang after him.  He intervenes when he believes his mother is getting too friendly with a character called Proctor Mallion, who’s the very last person he wants as a stepdad – “His first wife ran away wi’ the insurance man and his second left him efter he pushed her out the windae.  Lucky for her it wis on the ground floor”.

 

He gets paid off at his work following a row between the brickies and the building site’s boss-man.  He gets re-hired, only to discover later the boss-man has employed as a general labourer someone called McCluskie, who’s just spent time in prison for manslaughter.  Mac explains the crime to a young apprentice thus: “…if I take this brick hammer an’ smash it ower yer heid, that would be murder.  On the other haun’, if I accidentally push ye aff the scaffolding when ye get up, that’s manslaughter.”

 

© Little, Brown Book Group Limited

 

There’s a supporting cast that includes the winos who drink by a local riverbank – “Billy Brown, Big Mick, Baldy Paterson and Craw Young… huddled round a large flat stone that displayed two bottles of Eldorado wine and some cans of beer” – and the memorably erratic Paddy McDonald who lives in a tumbledown bothy alongside “live rabbits in the oven – lucky for them it was in disuse – pigeons in a cage in the bedroom, and a scabby cat always asleep at the end of a lumpy sofa, with the dog at the other end.”

 

It’s tempting to view Gentlemen of the West, episodic in nature and populated by unfortunates and never-do-wells, as a forerunner to Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting.  But there are important differences.  Mac and at least some of his associates are in employment.  That employment’s shaky, though.  And as the 1980s unfold, you dread to think how the doctrine of Thatcherism (resources concentrated in London and southeastern England, to hell with the rest of Britain) will upend their community.  Also, they don’t have the drug-fueled nihilism of Welsh’s characters, though I suppose the Trainspotting gang could be seen as the feral, heroin-raddled offspring of Mac and his mates a generation later.

 

If you compare the chapter / story Up Country, in which Mac makes a spontaneous daytrip out of his town, ends up on a boat on the Firth of Clyde with “some sightseers on deck with the loud English patter”, and then ends up for a few hours on an uninhabited island, with the episode in Trainspotting where Renton and co. briefly visit the Scottish Highlands, the differences are stark.  Mac blunders around the island like an innocent child, first feeling euphoric (“The view was terrific, all lochs and mountains.  I felt contempt for my mates who would be firmly established in the boozer by now, slugging away at whisky and beer, unaware that were better ways of passing the time”), then feeling creeped out as he realises he’s all alone there and stumbles across a small cemetery.  In Trainspotting, the Scottish scenery inspires the far more cynical Renton to embark on his famous rant about the Scots: “The lowest of the low, the scum of the earth. The most wretched servile, miserable, pathetic trash that was ever shat intae creation.”

 

On his way back from the island, Mac encounters an eccentric German tourist who’s come to Scotland “to study castles…  Then I shall write my book.”  Mac reacts with bemusement but also respect: “I looked after him wishing I could be as sure of everything.”  He even takes inspiration from him and the story ends with the line, “…some day I will get away from this place.  Some day I might go and see castles myself.”  In Welsh’s novel, unlike Danny Boyle’s 1996 film adaptation of it, Renton and the others don’t run into a foreign tourist.  But with drug habits to finance, you know their reaction to one would be far more predatory.

 

In other parts too of Gentlemen of the West, we see decency in Mac, for example, in his interactions with the hapless Paddy McDonald.  And we see it in other characters.  McCafferty, in charge of the building site, comes across as an insufferable dick in the episode Paid Aff, but in the very next one, McCluskie’s Out, he’s willing to give a second chance to a guy just out of prison.

 

But the book’s real heart isn’t Mac but his long-suffering and sharp-tongued mother, the ‘auld wife’ as he calls her.  On the surface, their relationship is one of never-ending bickering and arguing – ‘banter’ is much too gentle a word for it.  Yet it’s clear that the auld wife is the bedrock supporting Mac’s meandering, occasionally chaotic existence.  And no doubt there are countless other, resilient women in the surrounding tenements providing a similar service to countless other men.  Owens, whose son John was a bricklayer, was probably all too familiar with the role.  In the article in the Observer, John is quoted as saying that if his mother based Mac and the Auld Wife’s relationship on the relationship she had with him, things were “a bit exaggerated… though I may be forgetting how cheeky I could have been as a young man.”

 

Only at the end of the final story / chapter, Goodbye Everybody, is the true nature of their relationship made explicit.  Mac makes good on the promise he made in Up Country and sets off for Aberdeen in the hope of finding a better living for himself.  It’s impossible not to feel a lump in your throat as you read his account of the morning of his departure and he describes how his usually formidable mother is ‘shaking’ and ‘searching for words’.  When he walks off down the street, not looking back, he knows “she would stay there watching until I was out of sight.”

 

And you suddenly appreciate Douglas Stuart’s observation that Agnes Owens brings a ‘tenderness’ and ‘kindness’ to a ‘hard, industrial landscape… dominated by men.’

 

From Glasgow Women’s Library

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Favourite Scots words, T-V

 

From unsplash.com / © Edward Howell

 

Yesterday was January 25th and yesterday evening saw a multitude of whisky-and-haggis-fuelled suppers held across the world to honour the 266th birthday of Robert Burns, Scotland’s national poet and one of its most distinguished writers in the Scots language.  This is an appropriate time, then, to publish the latest instalment of my list of favourite words and phrases from Scots.  I’m getting near the end of the alphabet now – the items in this post begin with letters ‘T’, ‘U’ and ‘V’.

 

Tablet (n) – a sweet foodstuff peculiar to Scotland, described by one culinary website as ‘crumbly, buttery fudge’.  Actually, I remember tablet being hard rather than crumbly.  At the end of its cooking process, it’d be a big solid slab in a tin, which you then cut up into little blocks.  It was also unhealthily laden with sugar, so obviously it became a popular Scottish treat.  In fact, in a short story I wrote a couple of years ago, I referred to tablet as ‘that tooth-rotting, Scottish confection of butter, sugar and condensed milk.’

 

Tackety boots (n) – hobnailed boots, the tackety bits being the hobnails.

 

Tappit hen (n) – originally a hen with a crest, although more recently it’s become the term for a type of pewter tankard or jug, with a lid, and a little knob on the lid.  I remember from my youth how the Tappit Hen was also the name of a pub in Aberdeen and, if my memory serves me correctly, it had a little nightclub called ‘Roosters’ upstairs.  Ha-ha, Roosters… On top of the Tappit Hen.  Get it?

 

Tapsalteerie (adj) – upside down.

 

Tattie (n) – a potato.  Potatoes are a staple of the Scottish diet – see the ubiquity of the dish mince an’ tatties.  If you get work on a farm picking potatoes, you are said to go tattie howkin’.  And there’s a savoury snack in Scotland, a wedge of potato flatbread that goes very nicely with a fried breakfast, called a tattie scone.

 

© Grove Atlantic

 

Tattiebogle (n) – a scarecrow.  In Douglas Stuart’s novel Young Mungo (2022), set in Glasgow in the early 1990s, Tattiebogle is the nickname that the title character, 15-year-old Mungo Hamilton, and his sister Jodie give their mother whenever she’s on one of her (frequent) alcoholic benders.  That’s when she seemingly transforms into a deranged, subhuman horror.

 

Tawse (n) – also known as ‘the belt’, a tawse was a strip of leather that had a sadistically forked tail and was an instrument of corporal punishment in Scottish schools.  Misbehaving pupils would be brought to the front of the classroom, made to stand with one hand outstretched and the other hand supporting it under the wrist, and given ‘six of the belt’, i.e., half-a-dozen whacks from the tawse across the palm.  Thanks to a judgement against its use by the European Court of Human Rights, the tawse disappeared from Scottish schools in the early-to-mid-1980s – making folk my age the last schoolkids to have been terrorised by it.

 

Teem (v) – to pour (with rain).  I’ve seen this included in lists of Scots words but I’ve only ever heard it used in Northern Ireland, where a lot of those words ended up.  “Ach, it’s teemin’!” my mum, who hailed from near Enniskillen, would exclaim when the heavens opened and rain started pounding us.

 

Teuchter (n) – a derogatory word used by Lowland Scots towards a person from the Highlands and Islands (often one who speaks the Scottish Gaelic language).  In Robin Jenkins’ 1979 novel Fergus Lamont, the title character describes the word as “the most contemptuous name a Lowlander can call a Highlander: it implies, among other things, heathery ears and sheep-like wits.”  I’ve also heard Aberdonians use teuchter in reference to anybody from the surrounding countryside of North East Scotland.

 

From ebay.co.uk / © B. Feldman & Co

 

The day / the morra / the nicht (adv) – today, tomorrow and tonight.  The nicht is immortalised in the saying It’s a braw moonlicht nicht the nicht (‘It’s a beautiful moonlit night tonight’), which comes from a song called Wee Deoch and Doris by the popular Scottish music-hall performer Sir Harry Lauder.  The song includes the lines: “There’s a wee wifie waitin’ in a wee but an’ ben / If you can say, ‘It’s a braw bricht moonlicht nicht’ / Then ye’re a’richt, ye ken.”

 

Thirled (adj) – being bound to something, by law, by contract, by loyalty or by habit.  John Buchan’s novel Witch Wood (1927), whose action takes place in the 17th-century Scottish Borders, contains the questioning line: “Or were they so thirled to their evil-doing that his appeals were no more than an idle wind?”

 

Thrapple (n) – the throat or windpipe.

 

Thrawn (adj) – stubborn, obstinate and bloody-minded, inclined to do the opposite of what everyone urges you to do.  However, there’s a macabre short story called Thrawn Janet (1881) by Robert Louis Stevenson, in which the word has a different meaning – ‘twisted’ or ‘deformed’.  The title character is described as having “her neck thrawn, and her heid on ae side, like a body that has been hangit…”

 

© Charles River Editors

 

Tod (n) – a fox.  The Scottish author James Robertson once translated Roald Dahl’s children’s book Fantastic Mr Fox into Scots, where it sported the more Caledonian-friendly title Sleekit Mr Tod.

 

Trauchle (v) – to walk slowly and wearily.

 

Trews (n) – tartan trousers, once worn by Scotland’s southern regiments and regarded as a traditional garment of the country’s Lowlands (although in reality, like kilts, trews originated in the Highlands).  I’ve heard it said that trews were the prototype for the tartan plus-fours that golfers used to wear.

 

At modern Scottish gatherings, kilts tend to vastly outnumber trews, although I can think of a couple of famous people who had a liking for this form of Scottish legwear: the late Alex Salmond, First Minister of Scotland from 2007 to 2014, who once got involved in a stushie when he went on an official visit to China, forgot to pack his trews and then bought an emergency pair at the cost of 250 pounds to the Scottish taxpayer; the late and much-loved rugby player, Doddie Weir who, off the rugby field, was rarely photographed not in his trews; RuPaul, host of RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009-present), who wore them the day he got a star on Hollywood Boulevard; and, if yellow trews count, the British children’s cartoon character Rupert Bear.

 

Tup (n) – a ram.  Supposedly this term is used in the north of England too, but I’ve only ever heard it used in Scotland.

 

From unsplash.com / © Wolfgang Hasselmann

 

Turnshie (n) – a turnip.  Somewhat less common than neep, the other Scots word for turnip, turnshie has nonetheless spawned a couple of memorable compound nouns.  A turnshie-gowk is another Scots word for a scarecrow, while turnshie-heid is a term of abuse meaning ‘turnip-head’, i.e., a glaikit Liz Truss-style idiot.

 

Unco (adv) – very.  Robert Burns used this word in the following lines from his epic poem Tam O’Shanter (1791) to show the extreme happiness felt by Scotsmen whilst drinking alcohol: “While we sit bousin, at the nappy / And gettin fou and unco happy…”

 

Uisge beatha (n) – the Scottish Gaelic word for ‘whisky’, this has been commandeered by Scotland’s non-Gaelic speakers as an admiring term for their nation’s famous firewater.   Uisge beatha is sometimes spelt in Anglicised form as usquebaugh and it gets its poetic force from the fact that it means ‘water of life’.

 

Vennel (n) – an alleyway or narrow lane, the word being derived from the French one ‘venelle’.  Scottish terms with similar meanings include wynd and close.  Probably the most famous vennel in Scotland is one simply called ‘The Vennel’, which threads upwards from the southwestern end of the Grassmarket in Edinburgh and, at its highest point, provides a good vantage point for viewing and photographing Edinburgh Castle.

 

From unsplash.com / © Ross Findlay

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The magnificent Seven Moons

 

© Sort Of Books

 

I’ve just realised that over the past year or so I’ve coincidentally read five novels that were winners of Britain’s most prestigious literary award, the Booker Prize.  The first four I read are as follows, ranked in descending order of greatness:

 

  • Very good: Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, which won the Booker in 2020.  Inevitably, being about alcoholism, betrayal and homophobia in economically-ravaged, 1980s Glasgow, it’s a tough read.  One thing I found oddly depressing about it is how it reminded me of a time, not so long ago, when everyone from 15 years upwards seemed to have dentures.

 

  • Good: The Testaments by Margaret Atwood, joint-winner in 2019. Atwood is always decent value, but this follow-up to 1985’s The Handmaid’s Tale doesn’t quite have the same punch.  Partly this is because, as a sequel, it’s less ideas-driven than the original.  Partly it’s because The Testaments dares to have a happy ending.  But it’s certainly interesting to see Aunt Lydia get a redemptive arc.

 

  • Okay: The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, winner in 2013.  Parts of this 19th-century, New Zealand-set murder mystery were engrossing, but with 832 pages and what felt like a cast of thousands – well, dozens – my interest was inevitably going to flag in places.  Still, kudos to Catton for constructing a novel that’s positively Dickensian in its size and ambition.

 

  • Tedious bollocks: The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis, winner in 1986.  Geriatric, right-wing Welsh windbags make fools of themselves in a gentrified version of 1980s Wales that I suspect only ever existed in Kingsley Amis’s imagination.

 

But for me the best of the lot was The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka, which netted the Booker in 2022 and which I finished reading the other day.  No doubt I’m biased and have an advantage when it comes to this novel.  It’s set in Colombo and I lived in that city for eight years myself, which makes me familiar with much of the book’s geography, cultural references and historical context, to say nothing of the cynical and self-deprecating Sri Lankan humour that pervades its pages.  That sense of humour, by the way, is one of the  things I now miss most about the place.

 

But even if you’re not acquainted with Sri Lanka when you open the book, I suspect you’ll be impressed by Seven Moons – at least, if you give it a chance to draw you in.  Karunatilaka’s work veers from the exuberantly fantastical to the grimly realistic, from the hilarious to the horrific, from the vauntingly highbrow to the cheerfully lowbrow, from the sublime to the ridiculous, sometimes within the space of one page.

 

The novel takes place in the late 1980s and begins with titular character Maali Almeida experiencing the end of his physical existence, as a human, and the start of his ephemeral existence, as a ghost.  He finds himself in a weird, netherworld version of Colombo, where he can see, but not interact with, the living, but where ghosts and other supernatural beings mill about too – the more adept of them have mastered the neat trick of travelling around on the winds.  The spectral bureaucracy that processes the newly deceased urges him to continue onto the proper afterlife, which is only open to him for the next seven nights, or seven moons, of his passing.

 

But Maali is more concerned with hanging around and finding out the details of his death. Suffering from a sort of Post-Death Stress Disorder, he can’t remember how it happened.  As he was a war photographer when he was alive – 1980s Sri Lanka being in the throes of civil war – it’s likely he was murdered.  And the reason for his murder was likely some sensitive photographs he took that could have serious consequences for one of the country’s top politicians.

 

Half-murder-mystery, half-phantasmagorical-adventure, the story rattles along with Maali trying to overcome his limitations as a ghost and find a way of communicating with the two people he was closest to when he was alive, his ‘official’ girlfriend Jaki and his ‘unofficial’ boyfriend DD – Maali was a gay man in a time and place where it was probably safer to stay closeted – with the ultimate aim of solving the mystery of his death and securing the important photographs.

 

Along the way, he encounters all manner of eccentrics, misfits and miscreants.  In the living world, there are crooked politicians, crooked policemen, dodgy NGO workers, dodgy journalists, arms dealers, torturers, ‘garbage collectors’ (the goons who dispose of the bodies of those eliminated during the government’s dirty war against real and imagined dissent) and an unhelpful clairvoyant called the Crow Man.  In the ethereal world, there are ghosts, ghouls and yakas (demons from Sri Lankan mythology), including one embittered spirit, a murdered Marxist called Sena, who’s assembling an army of the dead whilst trying to figure out a way, intangible though he is, of violently striking back at his still-living tormentors and executioners.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Deshan Tennekoon

 

Seven Moons‘s allegory about the victim of a senseless war trying to make sense of it on the other side, as a ghost, could come across as heavy-handed.  But Karunatilaka invests the fantastical elements of his narrative with the exactly the right amounts of absurdity and bemusement.  It’s no surprise that he lists Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut in the book’s acknowledgements.  Again, the humour has a distinctly local flavour.  For example, the celestial sorting office where Maali, deceased, finds himself at the beginning is conceptually like something from Michael Powell and Emric Pressburger’s classic movie A Matter of Life and Death (1945), but its chaotic nature feels pretty Sri Lankan.  Anyone who’s ever tried to get their EPF (Employees’ Provident Fund) from the Department of Labour off Kirula Road will understand.

 

Meanwhile, a famous quote by legendary science-fiction author and long-term Sri Lankan resident Arthur C. Clarke could be the blueprint for Karunatilaka’s vision of Colombo, overrun with the souls of the dead: “Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.”  In the midst of the spectral mayhem, Maali refers to Clarke’s quote and adds, “You look around you and fear the great man’s estimate might have been conservative.”

 

At the same time, the fantasy in no way diminishes the book’s accounts of the horrors perpetrated during the Sri Lankan Civil War.  This was when the government wasn’t locked in a struggle just with the LTTE, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who wanted a separate Tamil state but were “prepared to slaughter Tamil civilians and moderates to achieve this”, but also with the JVP, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, who wanted “to overthrow the capitalist state” but were “willing to murder the working class while they liberate them.”  These organisations and others – including the STF, the Special Task Force, the government’s abduction, torture and execution squad – are listed and described in a passage near the beginning, for the benefit of readers unfamiliar with the country back then.  It comes with the advice: “Don’t try and look for the good guys ‘cause there ain’t none.”

 

In one interview, Karunatilaka observed that bleak though things have been in Sri Lanka during its recent economic crisis, brought about by the corrupt and idiotic mismanagement of the Rajapaksa regime, the situation doesn’t come close to how it was in the war-torn 1980s.  “I’ve no doubt many novels will be penned against Sri Lanka’s protests, petrol queues and fleeing Presidents.  But even though there have been scattered incidents of violence, today’s economic hardship cannot be compared to the terror of 1989 or the horror of the 1983 anti-Tamil pogroms.  We all pray it stays that way.”

 

One other thing I enjoyed about Seven Moons is how it captures the odd, hybrid culture that young people in 1980s Colombo must have inhabited – at least, the more affluent, English-speaking ones, of whom Maali is an example.  Mixed in with the Sri Lankan cultural references are the expected ones from America – Elvis Presley is prominent and Maali seems to have a hankering for Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982).  Of course, looming over the whole novel is the shadow of that most 1980s-feeling of Hollywood movies, the Demi Moore / Patrick Swayze schmaltz-a-thon Ghost.  (Though I’ve just checked and discovered it wasn’t a 1980s movie.  It came out in 1990.)

 

British culture – due no doubt to the colonial connection – gets a look-in too, with mentions of Yorkshire Television’s durable lunchtime legal-drama show Crown Court (1972-84), the BBC’s rickety but impressively downbeat space opera Blake’s Seven (1977-81) and cheesy but popular Welsh retro-rocker Shakin’ Stevens.

 

But most amusing is Maali’s love of bombastic British rock-pop band Queen and their flamboyant singer, the late Freddie Mercury.  I found it hilarious that – watch out, spoilers approaching! – one of the plot’s main MacGuffins turns out to have been concealed inside the sleeve of Queen’s universally derided 1982 album Hot Space.  It’s the perfect hiding place.  Because no one in their right mind would ever dream of opening the sleeve of Hot Space.

 

© EMI / Elektra

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Favourite Scots words, P-R

 

From pixabay.com / © Dimitris Vetsikas

 

Today, November 30th, is Saint Andrew’s Day, the national day of Scotland.  Also, I’m in the middle of reading Douglas Stuart’s 2022 novel Young Mungo, which is set in Glasgow during the 1990s and is choc-a-bloc with cherishable Scots vocabulary: bevvy, chib, doo, midden, schemie, sook, smirr, tattie–bogle, wean, winchin’…  Thus, this seems an opportune time to post the latest instalment of my attempt to catalogue my favourite words from the Scots language.

 

Patter (n) – A long time ago, I remember Iain Jenkins, my English teacher at Peebles High School, trying to explain to my class why William Shakespeare placed Mercutio’s monologue about Queen Mab in the middle of Act 1, Scene 4 of Romeo and Juliet.  After all, the monologue didn’t have any bearing on the plot that came before or after it.  It was merely Shakespeare showing off his own verbal flamboyance and inventiveness.  Eventually, Jenkins exclaimed, “Patter!  It’s just patter!  It’s Mercutio indulging in a bit of patter!”

 

Patter, then, is smooth talk, smart talk or funny talk – often delivered by someone, like a politician or a salesman, who’s trying to sell you something.  The word crops in phrases like, “I gave her the auld patter,” or “Enough ay yer patter!”   And a person who comes out with it a lot is called a patter–merchant.  The city of Glasgow seems full of patter–merchants, surprisingly enough.

 

Pawkie (adj) – used to describe a person possessed of a dry and quietly mocking sense of humour.

 

Pech (v) – to gasp or wheeze breathlessly.  In Robert Louis Stevenson’s short supernatural story Thrawn Janet, you get the line: “Even the auld folk cuist the covers frae their beds an’ lay pechin’ for their breath.”

 

© Kypros Press

 

Peely-wally (adj) – looking pale and sick-looking.  That’s why in Solo (2013), the James Bond ‘continuity’ novel written by William Boyd, there’s a bit where an injured Bond is scolded by May, his formidable old Scottish housekeeper, for looking ‘awfy peely-wally’.

 

I’d assumed this was derived from ‘peeling wall’, something that obviously doesn’t look healthy.  But I’ve recently learnt that peely comes from an early 19th century word peelie, meaning ‘a gaunt, pale person’.  And wally is a Scots word meaning ‘made of china’.  Even now, people refer to an ornamental china dog as a wally dug and to false teeth (once made of porcelain) as wallies.  So peely–wally really means ‘as pale as china’.

 

Peep (n) – the lowest level at which you can set a gas flame before it goes out.  To ‘put someone’s gas at a peep’ is to seriously knock them out of their stride or deprive them of their vigour.

 

Peewit (n) – a lapwing.

 

Pieces (n) – sandwiches.  Years ago, while I was living with my Dad, I got a job at a local warehouse.  I needed to make myself a packed lunch every morning, to eat during the short break I got in the middle of the day.  My Dad would always inquire before I left the house if I’d remembered to get my pieces together.

 

Pisht (adj) – drunk.  Just as the Eskimos are said to have a hundred words for snow, there must be at least a hundred words in Scots for being inebriated.  See also arsed, bevied, bleezin’, blootered, buckled, fou’, gubbered, hingin’, minced, mingin’, miraculous, miracked, mortal, reekin’, reelin’, steamboats, steamin’, stocious, wellied, etc.  This, of course, is a tragic reflection on the state of the Scottish psyche…  I wrote, whilst sipping a large whisky.

 

From pixabay.com / © rebcenter-moscow

 

Plook (n) – the curse of many a Scottish person’s adolescence,  plooks are pus-filled pimples.  It was rumoured at my school that every time you ate a Mars Bar, you got a plook.  The adjective is plooky and, predictably, this figured in countless playground insults: “Ye plooky bastart, ye!”

 

Plump (n) – as in ‘a plump ay rain’, i.e., a sudden downpour.

 

Poke (n) – a small paper bag.  I suspect this word is most commonly heard in Scotland’s chippies, where people request ‘a poke ay chips’.

 

Poultice (n) – an arsehole.  For example, “Thon Boris Johnson is a right poultice, so he is.”

 

Puddock (n) – a frog.

 

Pure (adv) – popularised by the actress Elaine C. Smith, whose character in the Glasgow-set comedy TV show City Lights (1984-1991) used the catchphrase, “Pure deid brilliant!”  Placed before adjectives to amplify their meaning to the nth degree, it crops up in phrases like ‘pure mental’, ‘pure radge’ and ‘pure sleekit’.

 

Puggled (adj) – exhausted.

 

Quaich (n) – in the words of the Meriam-Webster dictionary, ‘a small shallow drinking vessel with ears for use as handles.’  These days, ornate quaichs are often used as pint-sized trophies at Scottish sports events.

 

Quine (n) – a girl or young woman.  This is commonly used in Scotland’s North-East, where boys and young men are also described as loons, so you hear a lot about quines an’ loons.  In the early 1990s, a group of Scottish feminists, including the journalist Lesley Riddich, started up a magazine called Harpies and Quines – harpy being a word commonly used in Scotland to describe a grumpy, ill-tempered and mean-minded woman.  The famous high-society magazine Harpers and Queen failed to see the joke and attempted to sue them.

 

© Channel Four Films / Polygram Filmed Entertainment

 

Radge (adj) – violently wild and crazy.  Used as a noun, it refers to a mad hooligan.  It had humble beginnings in Eastern Scotland, where it may have come from a Romany word with a similar meaning, ‘raj’, but radge was for a while a trendy term used the length and breadth of Britain.  This was because of its copious use in Danny Boyle’s hit movie Trainspotting (1996), where it was associated with Robert Carlyle’s ultra-violent character Frank Begbie.  I seem to remember the author Irvine Welsh, on whose novel the film was based, remarking disgustedly that he’d heard Hooray Henrys using the word radge in London wine bars.  And I also remember Q magazine running an interview with Robert Carlyle under the memorable headline RADGE AGAINST THE MACHINE.

 

Rammy (n) – a fight or brawl.  A stairheid rammy is a brawl that breaks out among the womenfolk in the staircases and on the landings of Scotland’s urban tenement buildings.  During the run-up to the Scottish independence referendum in 2014, a heated television debate between then-SNP deputy leader Nicola Sturgeon and then-Scottish Labour leader Johann Lamont was described afterwards by journalist Ruth Wishart as “a right good stairheid rammy” that “made strong men avert their eyes”.

 

Randan (n) – a drunken knees-up, as in “He’s away oot on the randan!”

 

Rector (n) – the Scottish term for headmaster.

 

Redd (v) – to tidy up.  I’ve rarely heard this verb used in Scotland, or at least in the parts of it I’ve inhabited.  But I frequently heard it during my childhood in Northern Ireland, where a good number of the people are descended from Scots.  My Mum would frequently explain, “Get this room redd up!” or “Give that place a wee redd!”

 

Riddy (n) – an embarrassment.  As in: “Liz Truss!  What an absolute riddy!”

 

Right (adj) – uttered with the appropriate intonation, right becomes a contemptuous response, dismissing something that another person has just said.  Though for maximum impact, use the phrase Aye, right.  “Maggie Thatcher wis the best prime minister since Churchill?  Aye, right.”  And indeed, Glasgow’s annual book festival is called Aye Write.

 

© Glasgow Life

 

Rone (n) – the length of guttering along the edge of a roof for collecting and removing rainwater.

 

That’s all for now.  More Scots words, and more example-sentences that insult famous Conservative Party politicians, will come shortly…

Posted on

No fool like an old fool

 

© Vintage Classics

 

The death of Martin Amis on May 19th this year brought forth a glut of media tributes that often included the claim he was the ‘greatest British novelist of his generation’.  I have to say that’s not something I agree with.  However, it did remind me that one generation before Martin Amis’s heyday, his father, Kingsley Amis, was also commonly feted as a major figure in British letters.

 

Neither was I greatly impressed by Amis Senior, although that’s no doubt an unfair opinion because, until recently, I’d read only one literary work by him.  (I have also read a couple of Kingsley Amis novels that were classified as ‘genre’ fiction, and therefore not worthy of serious consideration by Britain’s snobby literary establishment, but I’ll talk about those later.)  That book was his 1954 satire Lucky Jim, which I found awkwardly dated and, for a satire, not very funny.  Yes, all literature is of its time, but good literature doesn’t feel dated the way that Lucky Jim did.  And most books I’ve read by Anthony Burgess, William Golding and Graham Greene, contemporaries of Amis whom I do admire, don’t feel dated that way either.

 

That said, I was always keen to read Amis’s 1986 novel The Old Devils.  Partly this was because its basic scenario, about a bunch of boozy, cantankerous Welshmen and Welshwomen refusing to grow old gracefully and instead doing so disgracefully, sounded like one I could identify with.  Various people have accused me of being boozy and cantankerous and disgraceful in my old age too.  Admittedly, I’m not Welsh, but I’m from an Irish-Scottish background, which is surely the next best thing.  And in its day, The Old Devils received much praise.  It prompted Anthony Burgess, for example, to say of Amis: “There is one old devil who is writing better than he ever did.”  And in its year of publication, The Old Devils won the Booker Prize.  So it had to be good.  Right?

 

Well I’ve just read the book, and…  Wrong.

 

But first, here’s the plot, such as it is.  A small, tight-knit group of married couples live in the town of Dinedor in southwest Wales.  There’s the frail, beleaguered literary scholar Malcolm and his wife Gwen; the greatly-overweight retired engineer and one-time lecturer Peter and his wife Muriel; the seriously alcoholic and panic-attack-prone restauranteur Charlie and his wife Sophie; plus a few associates.  If I haven’t described the women in detail, there’s a reason for that, as we’ll see.  The men spend their time in a snug-room of the local pub, the Bible and Crown.  The room’s decorated with memorabilia from the Dinedor Squash Racquets Club, which they’d been members of in their long-ago primes.  The women devote themselves to a circuit of get-togethers at each other’s houses where cups of coffee rapidly give way to ‘one-and-a-half-litre bottles of Soave Superiore’ and the air soon fills with a fug of cigarette smoke.

 

The routineness and predictability of their existence is disrupted by the return of Alun and Rhiannon.  They are members of the gang who relocated decades before to London, where Alun has done very well as a TV presenter.  In particular, he’s become a ‘professional Welshman’, fronting shows about his home country that paint a mythologised and caricatured picture of it, and also establishing himself as an expert on an influential Welsh poet called Brydan.  (Brydan is clearly based on Dylan Thomas, whom Amis once dismissed as “an outstandingly unpleasant man who cheated and stole from his friends and peed on their carpets.”)

 

Back living in Dinedor, Alun and Rhiannon soon stir the emotional pot.  Firstly, Rhiannon has a history with Peter.  He ‘wronged’ her while he was a young lecturer and she a student, and he’s still tormented by guilt about it.  Also, the meek Malcolm has always secretly carried a torch for her and finds his old feelings bubbling up again.  But Alun’s impact is more immediately dramatic.  He’s a randy old goat and, before long, his insatiable carnal hunger has him cuckolding his supposed mates left, right and centre.

 

And that’s about it.  The book mostly held my interest for the first 200 or 250 pages – it’s nearly 400 pages long – but eventually I realised how meandering and predictable the plot was.  The likely climax would involve one of the male characters popping his clogs, either Malcolm with his general infirmity, Peter with his obesity, or Charlie with his alcoholism and panic attacks.  Or indeed Alun, who despite his obvious, continuing virility has been subject to brief but worrying ‘funny turns’.  My prediction proved correct, but I won’t say who snuffs it at the end.  Meanwhile, the female characters are sketched with a perfunctory sameness – world-weary, gossipy, bitchy, chain-smoking, wine-guzzling – and even late in the book I was having problems telling them apart and remembering which marriages they were in.

 

The one female character Amis draws distinctly is Rhiannon, since she’s got baggage with Peter and Malcolm, the former regretful about his past treatment of her, the latter still worshipping her.  The book’s most heartfelt part is where Malcolm persuades her to go for a drive with him, around some of their old hangouts during their youth, when he was close to her and hopeful of getting closer.  Needless to say, and sadly for Malcolm, Rhiannon doesn’t remember them with anything like the same clarity.

 

It’s here that we get a jolting reminder that these characters, for all their affairs, dissolution and bad behaviour, are actually old.  Rhiannon retreats into the ladies’ toilet of a restaurant, where she gets “down to work on her falsies,” i.e., picking tomato seeds from the meal she’s just had out of her dentures: “…she straightened to her full height, shook back her hair and did her best in the way of putting on an important, haughty expression…  the idea was to give herself a head start, an improved chance of facing down anyone who might presume to come barging in and find the sudden sight of an old girl with her teeth in her hand somehow remarkable, or embarrassing…”

 

Mind you, given the time, false teeth might not be a sign of elderliness.  I’ve recently finished reading another Booker prize-winner, Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain, which was published in 2020 but set like The Old Devils in the 1980s.  That book’s a reminder of the astonishing fact that not so long ago, in Britain, many people believed it was desirable to get every tooth pulled out of their heads at as early an age as possible.

 

© From artinfiction.wordpress.com

 

Anyway, Amis portrays his male characters more vividly.  But it’s hard to like them, especially as they’re such a moaning and reactionary shower of old farts.  For one thing, they spend a lot of their time whinging about everything has changed for the worse.  Now admittedly, the belief that modern life is rubbish seems an inescapable trait of growing old.  Well, I should know…  But you don’t feel much sympathy for them when they start discussing politics and have “a lovely time seeing who could say the most outrageous thing about the national Labour Party, the local Labour Party, the Labour-controlled county council, the trade unions, the education system, the penal system, the Health Service, the BBC, black people and youth… They varied this with eulogies of Ronald Reagan, Enoch Powell, the South African government, the Israeli hawks and whatever his name was that ran Singapore.”

 

Elsewhere, we hear how Alun “dreamt that Mrs Thatcher had told him that without him her life would be a mere shell, an empty husk…”  That actually sounds like one of Kingsley Amis’s real-life wet dreams, as he once described the dreaded Maggie as “one of the best-looking women I had ever met… The fact that it is not a sensual or sexy beauty does not make it a less sexual beauty…”

 

In my view, British life did change and take a definite turn for the worse in the 1980s, with Thatcher’s Conservative government abandoning traditional industries and ushering in mass unemployment, squandering oil revenues from the North Sea, and basically marketizing and monetarising everything.  The latter policy included selling off publicly-owned infrastructure to the highest bidders, the legacy of which is the terrible transport system, sewage-filled rivers and exorbitant energy bills that bedevil Britain in 2023.  From Thatcher onwards, for a party that called themselves Conservatives, they weren’t very good at conserving anything, which makes Amis’s right-wing-Tory characters’ bellyaching about everything going to the dogs sound hollow.  Still, Thatcher won the Falklands War in 1982 and emasculated the unions, which I suppose was good enough for them.

 

That brings me to my other bone of contention with The Od Devils.  Its characters spend a lot of time prattling on about being Welsh, but they don’t feel very Welsh.  They don’t come across like any Welsh person I’ve ever met, either on a cultural level – for instance, there’s barely a mention of the country’s beloved sport of rugby – or on a political one.  Okay, they’re Tories, so you’d expect them to be dismissive of Wales’s main political traditions, exemplified by the likes of Labour’s Aneurin Bevan, Jim Callaghan and Neil Kinnock, the Liberals’ David Lloyd George, and Plaid Cymru’s Gwynfor Evans, and they carp about the ineptitude of local Labour politicians and describe the Welsh nationalists as ‘c*nts’.  But you’d expect the trauma of Wales’s 1980s industrial decline – following the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike, for instance, 25,000 Welsh miners lost their jobs in pit closures – to register at least a little on their radar.  It doesn’t, though.

 

I knew plenty of Scottish Tories back in the 1980s who, while they thought Thatcher was the bees’ knees and regarded themselves as loyal subjects of Her Majesty and the Union Jack, saw themselves too as Scottish to the core.  Maybe some of this was a pose – tartan, whisky, golf, Burns’s poetry – but deep down they seemed to have a genuine love for Scotland’s traditions and fiercely supported the country in its cultural and sporting endeavours.  I suspect these dual loyalties had often been forged by military experience during their youth, when they’d proudly served in Scottish regiments whilst also fighting for Britain.

 

But I didn’t get that feeling with Amis’s characters here.  It’s like they’ve been transplanted from the English Home Counties, with Welshness slathered over them like the trappings of some prestigious club-membership they can show off and banter about, but underneath means nothing to them – unless, as with Alun, it can be turned into money.  And there’s little or no talk in the book of World War II.  Given the book’s setting and the characters’ ages, shouldn’t this have been a big thing for them?  Wouldn’t the men have served in the Welsh regiments?

 

So, The Old Devils neither impressed me as a book nor convinced me as a representation of life in Wales nearly 40 years ago.  Indeed, when I look at what else was on the shortlist for the Booker Prize in 1986, I find it mind-melting that this beat both Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World and Margaret Atwood’s prescient The Handmaid’s Tale to the title.  And it won’t improve my opinion of Amis as a writer of mainstream literary fiction.  However, I’ll qualify that by saying that as a genre writer, I’ve enjoyed his output.  I highly rate both his James Bond pastiche Colonel Sun (1968) and his supernatural novel The Green Man (1968).  If only old Kingsley had written more spy and ghost stories, and crime, horror and science-fiction ones too…

 

Meanwhile, as the antics of Alun, Malcolm, Peter and co. increasingly set my teeth on edge, I found myself thinking of something my Dad liked to say: “There’s no fool like an old fool.”

 

© David Smith / From the Guardian