Peebles – Blood and Porridge

June 26, 2024June 26, 2024

An honest John

From wikipedia.org / © Scottish Government

John Swinney became leader of the Scottish National Party on May 6^th 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 4^th. 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 4^th, 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.

September 11, 2023September 19, 2023

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 25^th, 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.

December 10, 2022December 10, 2022

Remember the Ally-mo

© BBC

It’s come to my attention that a football World Cup is in progress. Time, then, to dust down and repost the following item, which surfaces on this blog every four years when the competition is underway to decide the global champions of the ‘beautiful game’.

One unsettling feature of growing older is that when an anniversary arrives and you think back to the original event, you feel shocked when you realise how much time separates now and then. The other week, the 2022 World Cup competition began in Qatar, and it’s just occurred to me that the 1978 World Cup in Argentina took place 44 whole years and eleven whole World Cups ago. It’s almost traumatic to realise how much time has elapsed.

However, if you’re old enough to remember the 1978 Argentinian World Cup and you were in Scotland at the time, you’ll testify that the event itself was traumatic.

For those of you who’re unacquainted with the topic… What happened in 1978 was that of the four national football teams in the UK, Scotland was the only one to qualify for Argentina. And the country had a team that, on paper, looked like it might achieve something. It boasted players from some of the mightiest football clubs in Britain: for example, from Manchester United (Martin Buchan, Gordon McQueen, Lou Macari, Joe Jordan), Liverpool (Graham Souness, the legendary Kenny Dalgleish), Glasgow Rangers (Derek Johnstone, Tom Forsyth, Sandy Jardine), Nottingham Forest (Kenny Burns, John Robertson, Archie Gemmill) and, er, Partick Thistle (Alan Rough). And in charge of these remarkable players was a manager called Ally MacLeod, who was remarkable in his own way. Though not necessarily in the right way.

From the Independent / © Getty Images

Ally had been emboldened by wins in 1977 over the European champions Czechoslovakia and over the Auld Enemy, England. The game against England concluded with the Scottish fans swarming onto the pitch at Wembley and digging up clods of the turf and breaking the goalposts into wee pieces to bring home as souvenirs, much to the horror of the English commentators and much to the hilarity of everyone in Scotland. He then began to talk up his team’s chances in Argentina. When early in 1978 Scotland failed to win the Home International championship involving England, Wales and Northern Ireland, Ally shrugged it off with the tantalising comment that the championship’s title “could be dwarfed by the World Cup.” Such statements, and Ally’s general air of swagger and optimism – “My name is Ally MacLeod,” he announced when he became Scotland manager, “and I am a born winner!” – acted like catnip to both football fans and the hacks working on the sports pages of Scotland’s newspapers.

As the World Cup approached, a heady sense of expectation began to infect the Scottish population. Folk started to believe that the Argentinian World Cup would be a jamboree of Scottish footballing genius, culminating in Ally and the gang lifting the trophy. No wonder a carpet company cannily signed Ally to do a commercial where he sat on one of their rugs whilst dressed as a gaucho, which was 1970s Britain’s idea of what everybody in Argentina looked like. This led to a priceless incident where, just before he departed for Argentina, Ally was accosted by an exuberant fan who announced, “Ally, see the day after your commercial? My ma bought one o they carpets!”

Ally was indeed a great salesman. He could truly market the brand. Unfortunately, that was not quite the same as delivering the goods.

Even one of my favourite rock bands, the Australian (but mostly Scottish-born) AC/DC, got in on the act and played a gig in 1978 at Glasgow Apollo Theatre wearing Scotland football strips. Also getting in on the act was the Scottish comedian Andy Cameron, who recorded a song called Ally’s Tartan Army that soon rode high in the charts. It contained such catchy, if posthumously cringeworthy, lines as: “And we’re fairly shake them up / When we win the World Cup / Cos Scotland’s got the greatest football team!”

From pinterest.co.uk

Being in Scotland in the spring of 1978 and watching this happen was disconcerting for me. The year before, my family had moved from Northern Ireland and taken up residency in a farm near the Scottish town of Peebles. I’d assumed that the Scots were a stoical, down-to-earth lot, not given to flights of fancy. But then, all-of-a-sudden, they’d succumbed to this madness about Ally MacLeod, winning the World Cup and having the greatest football team in the universe. What was going on? I found it particularly noticeable the day before Scotland played Northern Ireland in the Home Internationals. When I walked into a meeting of the local Scouts that evening, all the other (Scottish) scouts had an insane glint in their eyes and were gleefully predicting how Scotland was going to slaughter, dismember and stomp on the grave of poor, lowly Northern Ireland the next day. As it turned out, all Scotland could manage with Northern Ireland was a 1-1 draw, much to my satisfaction.

Still, over time, the madness seemed to seep into even my non-ethnically Scottish soul. Hey, I thought, it would be cool to live in the country that’d won the World Cup, wouldn’t it?

After a delirious send-off at Hampden Stadium where 30,000 Scotland fans whooped and screamed as if their team had just come back from Argentina clutching the World Cup trophy, Ally’s Tartan Army flew out and got ready for their first game of the competition’s first round, which was against Peru. The evening that the game was on TV, I missed the beginning of it for my dad had sent me out to move some cows from one field to another. I was in the middle of moving those cows when I heard a huge rumbling roar. It was like how I’d imagine the approach of a tsunami to sound. I needed a few seconds to realise I was hearing cheering coming from the town, a half-mile away beyond the last of my parents’ fields. It was the sound of 5000-odd people in Peebles celebrating Joe Jordan knocking in a first goal for Scotland in the game’s 14^th minute. Gosh, I thought, it’s started. Scotland really are going to win the World Cup!

I completed my task, hurried back to the house and hunkered down in front of the television next to my younger brother, who’d really caught the Scotland World Cup bug and was watching the match with avid excitement. Scarcely had I arrived there when, just before half-time, Peru equalised. Then in the second half Peru scored two more, so that by the game’s end Scotland had been beaten 3-1. In a pathetic attempt to hide my disappointment, I pretended that, being Northern Irish, I hadn’t really been supporting Scotland and I thought their defeat was funny. So I turned around and started laughing at my brother. I stopped, though, when I realised he was in floods of tears. However, my mother had already seen me laughing at him and she gave me a deserved bollocking for making him even more upset.

Next up for Scotland was Iran, an unstable country in the early throes of a revolution. Scotland was surely going to win this one, right? Wrong. The team played so badly that they scraped a 1-1 draw and that was only because an Iranian player called Eskandarian scored an own-goal. This game was famous for its images of a totally-deflated Ally Macleod sitting hunched over in the Scotland dugout, his hands clamped over the top of his skull in an attempt to shut out the world – “Ally trying to dismantle his head,” as one wag described it later.

© Daily Record

To heighten the misery, the Scottish striker Willie Johnston was sent home after failing a drugs test. Other football players have suffered drugs scandals, most notably the cocaine-snorting Diego Maradona. But the hapless Johnston wasn’t even caught taking a glamorous, hedonistic drug. He tested positive for Reacitivan, a medication prescribed to him because he had hay fever. Poor old Willie might as well have been busted for taking Benylin Chesty Cough Mixture.

By now the Scotland situation was looking grim. Also grim was the atmosphere at Peebles High School. One guy in my class told me there was a record shop in Glasgow that was now selling copies of Ally’s Tartan Army by Andy Cameron for a penny each, so that disgruntled punters could make a public display of smashing them into vinyl slivers on the pavement outside. Meanwhile, a girl told me she couldn’t bear to drink Scotland’s national fizzy drink Irn Bru any more, because its name sounded it too much like ‘Iran Peru’. Lessons with our English teacher, Iain Jenkins, strayed off the topic of Shakespeare and became lengthy post-mortem discussions about what was going horribly wrong in Argentina.

In fact, I remember us doing some creative writing one day and then Iain Jenkins reading out a poem that a mischievous pupil from south of the border – England – had just penned about Scotland’s faltering World Cup campaign. It contained the memorable line, “Poor Ally will have to emigrate to the moon” and the even more memorable couplet, “Willie Johnston is over the hill / That’s why he’s on the pill.”

To get through to the World Cup’s next round, Scotland now had to beat the Netherlands… and beat them by three goals. There seemed zero chance of that happening. From the dire way the Scots were playing, it looked much more likely that the Dutch would murder them. Yet it was against the Dutch – who’d eventually make it to the competition’s final – that Scotland managed a victory. Indeed, they were 3-1 up at one point in the game and if they’d knocked in another goal they could have lived to fight another day. Alas, it wasn’t to be. The Dutch eventually pulled one back, making the final score 3-2. Scotland had won, but not by enough to stop them going home early.

Still, the game produced a brilliant Scottish goal by the diminutive Nottingham Forest player Archie Gemmill. It was the best goal of that World Cup and possibly the greatest World Cup goal ever. Incidentally, it’s also the goal whose footage is intercut with the hectic sex sequence in Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting (1995). No wonder a dazed Ewan MacGregor murmurs at the end of it, “I haven’t felt that good since Archie Gemmill scored against Holland in 1978!” Though I’m pretty sure that back in 1978 the Scottish football commentator Archie Macpherson didn’t really exclaim, as he does in Trainspotting, “A penetrating goal for Scotland!”

Thus, Scotland was out of the World Cup but with, technically, a wee bit of pride salvaged. Sadly, such was the hype that’d accompanied them to Argentina that their campaign didn’t feel like anything other than an absolute disaster. The day after the Holland game, I remember a classmate, the local postman’s son, coming into class. He pulled out a tartan scarf, waved it around for five seconds and said flatly and unenthusiastically, “See that? We beat Holland. Magic.” Then he put the scarf back in his bag and zipped it up again. And nobody at school seemed to talk about Scotland, Argentina and the World Cup ever again.

Mind you, later that summer, I returned to Northern Ireland for a holiday. People there seemed to view me as 100% Scottish now and they didn’t stop tearing the piss out of me about how crap Scotland had played in Argentina.

From twitter.com

But let’s be fair to Ally MacLeod, who died in 2004. In popular Scottish mythology he’s often depicted as a vainglorious balloon, bragging that his team would win the World Cup, and then win the next World Cup, and probably the Ryder Cup, the Stanley Cup, the America’s Cup, the Ashes and the Tour de France as well. But I’ve scoured the Internet and been unable to find most of the hyperbolic quotes that I’ve heard attributed to him. It’s fairer to say that he made a few tactless comments and exuded a lot of optimism, which the overheated imaginations of fans and journalists turned into mass hysteria. In the dispirited environment of post-World Cup Scotland, though, nobody wanted to admit their own culpability and poor Ally became the scapegoat.

Anyway, if you can ignore the hubris and focus only on the football, Ally’s 1978 squad didn’t do that badly. Yes, they had two duff games but they only lost one of those, and then they achieved a win against the eventual finalists. If the cards had fallen differently elsewhere in their first-round group, they might have got through to the competition’s next stage; and, having had their wake-up call, performed better. Other teams in other World Cups have done so with the same first-round record of one win, one draw and one defeat – including England.

Much has been blamed on that ill-fated World Cup campaign. People have found significance in how it came shortly before the 1979 referendum on creating a devolved Scottish parliament, which died a death because of apathy. The Scottish public voted for the parliament, but not in sufficiently high numbers. It’s tempting to join those two dots, but I’m inclined to blame this collapse in Scottish political willpower at the end of the decade on factors a lot more complex than Ally MacLeod bullshitting us a bit about football in 1978.

One thing that can be attributed to 1978 is the evolution of the Scotland football team’s travelling support, the Tartan Army. Thanks to the bitter lessons learnt then, modern Scotland fans have dumped any belligerent, nationalistic sense of expectation and have gone about the (often thankless) task of supporting Scotland with humour, irony, self-deprecation and a determination to have a good time no matter how bad the results. As a result, they’re now one of the most popular sets of fans in the world.

Actually, when Scotland played England several years ago at Wembley, I saw a picture of some Scottish fans posing in Trafalgar Square with a life-sized cut-out of Ally MacLeod they’d brought along. That made me smile. With his erratic management skills and over-exuberant PR skills, the daft bugger put us through the wringer in 1978. But it’s nice to know his spirit still gets invited to the party.

From the Guardian / © Dan Kitwood, Getty Images

© Daily Record

March 15, 2022March 18, 2022

Mountfield, mermaids and mindless violence

© Thurston Howl Publications

Mermaid Fair, a short story I wrote under the pseudonym Jim Mountfield, is featured in the recent anthology Fearful Fun from Thurston Howl Publications. The stories in Fearful Fun are all set in fairgrounds, carnivals, amusement parks, circuses, Halloween haunted-house attractions and the like but, as the word ‘fearful’ in the anthology’s title implies, their protagonists encounter dark and macabre goings-on at these supposedly ‘fun’ places. In fact, ‘creepy fairground’ stories have constituted a popular sub-genre of horror fiction and cinema. Its most famous examples include the 1932 Tod Browning movie Freaks, the 1962 Herk Harvey movie Carnival of Souls and, published the same year that Carnival was released, the Ray Bradbury novel Something Wicked This Way Comes.

In part, Mermaid Fair was inspired by a practice in the 19th century whereby carnival-sideshow operators would graft together pieces of stuffed fish and stuffed apes and pass them off to gullible punters as ‘mermaids’. Obviously, these looked nothing like the mermaids of folklore and popular culture, the luscious, long-haired, bare-breasted young ladies with fishes’ tail who’d sit alluringly on remote ocean rocks. Fake though they are, I’ve always found pictures of the sideshow mermaids creepy and grotesque – especially now that the passage of time has left the things more than slightly decayed.

From emilyjessicaturner.com

© The Trustees of the British Museum

A rather different source of inspiration for Mermaid Fair was ‘the Shows’, a motley assortment of fairground rides, stalls and amusement arcades that would come – and still do come, as far as I know – to my Scottish hometown of Peebles every June while it was staging its annual Beltane Festival. When I was a kid, the Shows were great fun, surely the highlight of my Peebles year. By the early 1980s, however, when I was a bit older and in my mid-to-late teens, I was more trepidant when I ventured into the Shows. This was because they’d become an arena where gangs of youths from Peebles, and from neighbouring country towns like Biggar and Galashiels, would try to batter the crap out of each other, and I didn’t want to get caught in the crossfire. Yes, lots of hormonally-charged young men lived in the region’s small towns, which admittedly didn’t have a great deal to offer them socially. Desperate for ways to banish their boredom, vent their frustrations and release their energies, they adopted the custom of battling each other at popular public gatherings such as the Shows.

I have to say, 40 years on, I find it amusing when I see Peebles blokes of a certain age complaining on Internet forums about anti-social behaviour by young people. Hold on, I think. Don’t you remember what you were getting up to at 17 or 18?

Thus, Mermaid Fair has gangs of young men, from rival towns, descending on a travelling fair to stage a good old-fashioned barney, and also has a fairground exhibit featuring some alleged mermaids. I hope the two plot-strands come together convincingly at the story’s end. Rather than set it in the south of Scotland, where Peebles is, I set it in the East Anglia region of England, another part of the world I know well. Indeed, it references a well-known piece of East Anglian folklore, the Wild Man of Orford – which, despite the name, isn’t about a ‘wild man’ but about a mer-creature.

Mermaid Fair, incidentally, is a reprint, not a story I wrote originally for Fearful Fun. Previously, in 2010, it’d appeared in an edition of the now-defunct webzine Death Head’s Grin. But I’d written it several years before that, in 2005, and back then I’d submitted it to the editors of another anthology that was going to feature stories about fairgrounds, carnivals and the like. The anthology’s editors not only rejected the story, but returned it to me with five paragraphs of brutal comments. They dissed the opening (“…too long, convoluted, difficult to understand… I ALMOST stopped reading there…”), the general prose (“…lost its flavour…”), the ending (“…didn’t have much punch and didn’t answer the big question…”) and the amount of violence (“What’s the term they use nowadays? Gratuitous violence? Gratuitous…”). I felt so deflated that I set aside Mermaid Fair and almost never looked at it again, convinced it was terrible.

I don’t know why I dusted it down for Death’s Head Grin, but I’m glad that I did. And to be fair to the editors of that 2005 anthology, I did try to amend a few things in the story that they’d objected to, before submitting it again. This included toning down the violence, which I suppose had been somewhat over-the-top in the original version. Nonetheless, I didn’t appreciate their tone…

Anyway, in 2022, Mermaid Fair has been published again and – hurrah! – this time I’ve been paid for it. I guess the story’s history holds two lessons for aspiring writers. When you receive a rejection message from an editor with some comments included, you should: (1) yes, pay attention to the editor’s opinions about what could or should be improved; but (2) if he or she’s been snarky or condescending, no, don’t let it get to you.

Copies of Fearful Fun can be ordered here.

July 16, 2021July 23, 2022

Still ruled by the Queen

© EMI / Elektra Records

Back in 2018, I found myself in a Colombo pub one evening having a blether with Suresh De Silva, the vocalist and co-founder of the Sri Lankan heavy metal band Stigmata. Within seconds of the start of our conversation De Silva had asked me if I’d seen Bohemian Rhapsody, the movie biopic of the 1970s / 1980s rock band Queen, which’d been released in Colombo cinemas a few weeks earlier. The unexpectedness of the question threw me a little. It also reminded me of the hugeness of the phenomenon that is Queen.

It’s a phenomenon that transcends place. National boundaries seem not to matter when it comes to liking Queen. Meeting a Sri Lankan heavy metaller in 2018 who wanted to talk about the band wasn’t my first experience of this. I remember working long ago at a language school in the UK that had weekend discos for its kids. At one point there were a lot of self-consciously trendy and streetwise teenagers from Milan at the school and the DJ who oversaw that weekend’s disco thought he’d please his audience by playing then-modish big beat, drums and bass, UK garage and hard trance tunes. But he ended up nearly causing a riot. What did those trendy Italian teens want him to play? I Want to Break Free by Queen. All bloody evening.

Their popularity also transcends time. They remain fabulously popular today even though they’ve been creatively inert since 1991, when their singer Freddie Mercury passed away from AIDS.

I find this interesting because back in the days when they were a properly functioning band, friends of mine who considered themselves serious and knowledgeable connoisseurs of music would tell me that though they tried to be broad-minded, they just couldn’t stomach bloody Queen, whom they saw as purveyors of bloated, corny, stomp-along, guitar-twiddling shite. Meanwhile, other folk, who bought at most three CDs a year and barely knew the difference between Elvis Costello, Elvis Presley and Reg Presley – the majority of the British population in other words – believed Queen were the absolute bees’ knees.

Incidentally, it seemed ironic to me how popular Queen were in the 1970s and 1980s among guys who were unreconstructed, macho and laddish and who, in all likelihood, were pretty homophobic too. They were liable to punch you in the face if you suggested they were into anything that might be classified as ‘gay’ culture. But after a few moments of hearing the unashamedly camp Freddie Mercury crooning, “Oooh, you make me live… / Oooh, you’re my best friend!”, they’d be hugging each other, shedding sentimental tears and singing along in emotion-cracked voices.

© 20^th Century Fox / Regency Enterprises / GK Films

I wasn’t greatly impressed by Bohemian Rhapsody when I caught up with it, sometime after speaking to Suresh De Silva. It takes many liberties with the truth. For example, the band weren’t on the wane before their barnstorming appearance at the 1985 Live Aid concert at Wembley Stadium, which the film claims pulled them back from the brink. On the contrary, during the previous year and following the release of their 1984 album The Works, I remember them being as popular and prominent as ever. And there was no big emotional moment before they took the Wembley stage when Freddie told his bandmates he was HIV positive. In reality, he didn’t know this until 1987.

Meanwhile the film airbrushes away the band’s real-life moral warts and carbuncles. We get nothing about, for instance, their misguided and money-fuelled decision to play at the Sun City Super Bowl in Bophuthatswana, South Africa, at the height of the apartheid era. This act of unprincipled greed earned them a ban by the British Musicians’ Union. Also doused in a tankerload of whitewash is the issue of Freddie’s promiscuity. In 1984, the real Freddie bragged to the DJ Paul Gambaccini with hedonistic and, considering the times, reckless abandon: “Darling, my attitude is ‘f**k it’. I’m doing everything with everybody.” But in Bohemian Rhapsody he’s presented as a victim, insecure about his sexuality and led astray by his personal manager Paul Prenter, who introduces him to a world of partying, orgy-ing and general dissolution.

Still, the sequence in the film with Mike Myers as a (fictional) record executive called Ray Foster, who’s aghast at the idea that Bohemian Rhapsody-the-song should be released as a single, is funny. “It goes on forever. Six bloody minutes!” To which Freddie retorts: “I pity your wife if you think six minutes is forever.”

Personally, I thought 1970s Queen were great. They produced albums like Sheer Heart Attack (1974), A Night at the Opera (1975), A Day at the Races (1976) and News of the World (1977) that were studded with classic songs and, though they sometimes felt all over the place stylistically, were admirable for trying to explore a wide range of musical genres, everything from music-hall singalongs and salsa-y Spanish guitar workouts to blues and jazz and even, with 1974’s Stone Cold Crazy, nascent speed metal. The rip-roaring Death on Two Legs, which kicks off A Night at the Opera, is one of my favourite songs ever.

But for me they seemed to lose their creative mojo at the beginning of the 1980s. The last song by them that I liked was probably their 1981 duet with David Bowie, Under Pressure. Actually, I didn’t think much of Under Pressure at the time, but it’s grown on me since then. It’s certainly a zillion times better than Vanilla Ice’s dire 1990 single Ice Ice Baby, which appropriated Under Pressure’s memorably nagging bassline. (I remember being at a Saturday-night disco in my hometown in Scotland – the clubhouse of Peebles Rugby Club to be precise – when the DJ put on Ice Ice Baby. The bassline started and everyone cheered and hurried onto the dance floor, thinking it was Queen and David Bowie. Then the lyrics started: “Yo! Let’s kick it! Ice, ice baby…” Everyone threw up their hands in horror and shouted, “Och, shite! It’s Vanilla Ice!” The dance floor immediately cleared again.)

Anyway, a few days ago, taking advantage of the fact that Sri Lanka’s most recent Covid-19 lockdown has been lifted, I went for a walk and ended up at the area where Colombo’s Dehiwala Canal meets with the Indian Ocean. It’s a pleasantly grassy and leafy neighbourhood although, thanks to the condition of the water in the canal, it’s a bit smelly too. And lo and behold, on a wall standing at the canal’s southern bank, I saw further evidence of the global love for Queen.

Yes, it was a mural of Freddie Mercury in his moustached, short-haired, white-vested Live Aid incarnation, which presumably someone had painted after seeing Bohemian Rhapsody in 2018.

As I’ve suggested in this post, I have mixed feelings about Queen overall. But the fact that in the 21^st century a Sri Lankan graffiti artist was inspired to paint their iconic vocalist and master showman on an out-of-the-way, canal-side wall makes me feel strangely happy.

March 9, 2021April 4, 2021

The holiest relic in Peebles

I’ve not had time to write much on this blog recently because of my current work commitments. Unfortunately, in this era of Covid-19-imposed confinement, none of this work involves me moving away from the laptop on the desk in a corner of my bedroom. Moreover, because I’ve had quite a few short stories published recently under the pseudonyms of Jim Mountfield and Rab Foster, I’m also trying to keep momentum going with those and am devoting additional time to writing, revising and submitting short fiction.

In the meantime, in the absence of new blog entries, here’s a reposting of something I wrote for this blog in 2014. It seemed to get an enthusiastic response at the time and, indeed, I think someone made the entry into a poster that was put on the wall of – where else? – the Pub in Valetta. Alas, since this was written, Peter Cassidy, the then-owner of the Crown Hotel, has passed away. Meanwhile, I assume that the chair is still there.

Certain towns and cities around the world can boast of having ancient and holy relics. In the Christian world, for example, Sienna has the mummified head of Saint Catherine in its Basilica Cateriniana San Domenico. Paris has what is alleged to be the crown of thorns worn by Christ at his crucifixion in its Notre Dame Cathedral. And in Rome’s Basilica di Santa Croce, you can see part of the index finger of Saint Thomas, the finger that as a sceptical disciple he poked into the wound in the side of the resurrected Christ to check if it was real. Some places have relics so special that they are said to have healing or protective powers. Naples, for instance, is lucky enough to have in its city cathedral the dried blood of St Januarius, which protects it from disasters like earthquakes and plagues.

However, my hometown of Peebles in the south of Scotland contains surely the most powerful holy relic of all. Because in the public bar of the Crown Hotel on Peebles High Street you’ll find the armchair of Oliver Reed.

This hallowed item of furniture, on which the legendary hell-raising star of movies such as Hannibal Brooks (1969), Women in Love (1969), The Devils (1971), The Three and Four Musketeers (1973-74) and Tommy (1975) once rested his butt, is rumoured to have healing powers too. A pilgrim who reposes against its upholstery will, with time, be cured of certain pernicious ailments. He or she will be cured of sobriety, for instance. And common sense. And dignity.

The story behind the chair is that, in the middle of the 1990s, Oliver Reed found himself staying in Peebles whilst doing some location filming for a Scottish movie called The Bruce (1996), a quick, cheap cash-in on Mel Gibson’s Braveheart (1995), which had recently been cleaning up at the box office. I’ve never seen The Bruce, but from all accounts it’s terrible. Reed being Reed, of course, he soon managed to sniff out the pub in town containing the biggest number of what are euphemistically known as ‘local characters’, which was the Crown’s public bar. He then set up camp there for several days, much to the joy of the Scottish tabloid press.

At one point, the Scottish edition of the Sun published on its front page a photo of an inebriated Reed passed out against the inside of the Crown’s entrance door, while someone outside tried to push his way in. No doubt he was thinking, “What the hell’s blocking the door…? Oh… It’s Oliver Reed.” For some reason Reed was clutching a toy sheep at the time so the Sun’s headline was, inevitably, SHAME ON EWE.

During his sojourn in the Crown, Reed complained to the hotel owner Peter Cassidy about the hardness of his seats and then thrust a bundle of notes into the hand of a regular called Davie Lees and ordered him to go to the local furniture store, the Castle Warehouse, and buy the pub a properly upholstered, properly comfortable armchair. Davie obliged, and the armchair now resides against a back wall of the public bar, under a framed photo of a well-refreshed Reed posing with Cassidy outside the hotel.

Reed departed for the great pub in the sky back in 1999, when he expired during the filming of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (1999) in Malta. He keeled over and breathed his last in, appropriately enough, a Valetta bar called the Pub, after he’d taken on a squad of British sailors in a series of drinking and arm-wrestling contests. However, I have a feeling that the great man’s psychic residue lives on in that armchair in the Crown.

Just a few days ago, I’d arranged to meet my Dad for a meal in the Crown’s restaurant. As the Oliver Reed armchair is aligned with the pub’s front door, I sat down in it so that I could watch the door and spot my Dad as soon as he walked in.

Immediately after sitting down, I found myself possessed by strange urges – to drink 104 pints in one sitting and then climb up the nearest chimneystack naked whilst roaring, “I’m Santa Claus!”; to indulge in a nude fireside wrestling match with Alan Bates; to vomit over Steve McQueen; to smuggle an elephant over the Alps; to take the local rugby club on a drinking spree and then organise a naked cross-country run with them through the surrounding moonlit fields; to film a Musketeers movie and stab several stunt-swordsmen during the fight scenes; to insult Jack Nicholson about his height, Richard Harris about his toupee and Raquel Welch about the thickness of her ankles; to arrive drunk at Galway Airport lying on the baggage conveyor; to chase ace snooker player Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins around a house with an axe; and to get a bird-claw tattoo done on my willie, which I’d subsequently threaten to whip out and display to the cameras every time I did a TV chat-show interview.

But then my Dad came into the hotel, I rose from the seat and the strange spell was broken. So instead I ordered a half-pint of lager shandy and a plate of supreme-of-chicken with honey-and-mustard sauce, and later washed everything down with a nice cup of coffee. And then went home to my bed.

© 20^th Century Fox

February 25, 2021

The big Gray man

From pinterest.co.uk

Today, January 25^th, 2021, has been designated ‘Gray Day’ on Scottish social media in honour of the celebrated Glaswegian polymath Alasdair Gray, who died in December 2019. As my way of marking the occasion, here’s a reposting of a blog entry I wrote shortly after the great man’s death.

Much has been written about Alasdair Gray, the Scottish novelist, poet, playwright, artist, illustrator, academic and polemicist who passed away on December 29^th, 2019. I doubt if my own reflections on Gray will offer any new insights on the man or his works. But he was a huge influence on me, so I’m going to give my tuppence-worth anyway.

In 1980s Scotland, to a youth like myself, in love with books and writing, Gray seemed a titanic cultural presence. Actually, ‘titanic’ is an ironic adjective to use to describe Gray as physically he was anything but. Bearded and often dishevelled, Gray resembled an eccentric scientist from the supporting cast of a 1950s sci-fi ‘B’ movie. He once memorably described himself as ‘a fat, spectacled, balding, increasingly old Glaswegian pedestrian’.

He was also a presence that seemed to suddenly loom out of nowhere. The moment when Gray became famous was in 1981 when his first novel Lanark was published. I remember being in high school that year when my English teacher Iain Jenkins urged me to get hold of a copy and read it. I still hadn’t read Lanark by 1983 when I started college in Aberdeen, but I remember joining the campus Creative Writing Society and hearing its members enthuse about it. These included a young Kenny Farquharson (now a columnist with the Scottish edition of the Times) explaining to someone the novel’s admirably weird structure, whereby it consisted of four ‘books’ but with Book Three coming first, then Books One and Two and finally Book Four. And an equally young Ali Smith recalling meeting Gray and speaking fondly of how eccentric he was.

In fact, I didn’t read Lanark until the following summer when I’d secured a three-month job as a night-porter in a hotel high up in the Swiss Alps. In the early hours of the morning, after I’d done my rounds and finished my chores and all the guests had gone to bed, I’d sit behind the reception desk and read. It took me about a week of those nightshifts to get through Lanark. I lapped up its tale of Duncan Thaw, the young, doomed protagonist of what was basically a 1950s Glaswegian version of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which constituted Books One and Two; and I similarly lapped up its alternating tale of the title character (mysteriously linked to Thaw) in the grimly fabulist city of Unthank, which constituted Books Three and Four. A quote by sci-fi author Brian Aldiss on the cover neatly described Unthank as ‘a city where reality is about as reliable as a Salvador Dali watch’.

© Canongate

That same summer I read The Penguin Complete Short Stories of Franz Kafka (1983) and the fantastical half of Lanark struck me as reminiscent of the great Bohemian writer. Gray himself acknowledged that Kafka’s The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926) and Amerika (1927) had inspired him: “The cities in them seemed very like 1950s Glasgow, an old industrial city with a smoke-laden grey sky that often seemed to rest like a lid on the north and south ranges of hills and shut out the stars at night.”

The result was an astonishing book that combines gritty autobiographical realism with fanciful magical realism. Fanciful and magical in a sombre, Scottish sense, obviously.

With hindsight, Lanark was the most important book in Scottish literature since Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair trilogy (1932-34). By an odd coincidence I read A Scots Quair four years later when I was working – again – as a night-porter in a hotel in the Swiss Alps. So my encounters with the greatest two works of 20^th century Scottish literature are indelibly linked in my mind with nightshifts in hotels decorated with Alpine horns and antique ski equipment and surrounded by soaring, jagged mountains.

Lanark also appeared at a significant time. Three years before its publication, the referendum on establishing a devolved Scottish parliament had ended in an undemocratic farce. Two years before it, Margaret Thatcher had started her reign as British prime minister. During this reign, Scotland would be governed unsympathetically, like a colonial property, a testing ground, an afterthought. So Lanark was important in that it helped give Scotland a cultural identity at a time when politically it was allowed no identity at all.

Whilst telling me about Lanark, Iain Jenkins mentioned ruefully that he didn’t think Gray would ever produce anything as spectacular again. Not only did it seem a once-in-a-lifetime achievement but it’d taken up half of a lifetime, for Gray had been beavering away at it since the 1950s. He once mused of the undertaking: “Spending half a lifetime turning your soul into printer’s ink is a queer way to live… but I would have done more harm if I’d been a banker, broker, advertising agent, arms manufacturer or drug dealer.”

© Canongate

However, two books he produced afterwards, 1982, Janine (1984) and Poor Things (1992), are excellent works in their own rights even if they didn’t create the buzz that Lanark did.

Janine takes place inside the head of a lonely middle-aged man while he reflects on a life of emotional, professional and political disappointments, and masturbates, and finally attempts suicide whilst staying in a hotel room in a Scottish country town that’s either Selkirk or my hometown, Peebles. (Yes, Peebles’ two claims to literary fame are that John Buchan once practised law there and the guy in 1982, Janine might have had a wank there.) The protagonist’s musings include some elaborate sadomasochistic fantasies, which put many people off, including Anthony Burgess, who’d thought highly of Lanark but was less enthusiastic about Janine. However, it seems to me a bold meditation on Scotland in general and on the strained, often hopeless relationship between traditional, Presbyterian-conditioned Scottish males and the opposite sex in particular.

Poor Things, a retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) set in Victorian Glasgow, initially seems very different from Janine but in fact it tackles similar themes. The narrator, Archibald McCandless, relates how his scientist colleague Godwin Baxter creates a young woman, Bella, out of dead flesh just as Frankenstein did with his creature. McCandless soon falls in love with her. There follows a highly entertaining mishmash of sci-fi story, horror story, adventure, romance and comedy, but near the end things are turned on their heads because Bella takes over as storyteller. She denounces McCandless’s version of events as a witless fantasy and portrays herself not as Frankenstein-type creation but a normal woman, albeit one ahead of her time in her views about feminism and social justice. Again, the book is a rebuke of male attitudes towards women, especially insecure Scottish ones that are partly possessive and partly, madly over-romanticised.

© Canongate

Gray’s other post-Lanark novels are entertaining, if less ambitious, and they’re never about what you expect them to be about. The Fall of Kelvin Walker (1985) looks like it’s going to be a comic tale of a Scottish lad-o’-pairts on his way up and then on his way down in London, but it turns into a caustic commentary on the loveless nature of Scottish Calvinism. Something Leather (1990), which is really a series of connected short stories and again features much sadomasochism, isn’t so much about kinkiness as about Gray’s disgust at the politicians and officials who oversaw Glasgow being European City of Culture 1990, something he regarded as a huge, missed opportunity. A History Maker (1994), a science-fiction novel described by the Daily Telegraph as ‘Sir Walter Scott meets Rollerball’, isn’t an absurdist sci-fi romp at all but a pessimistic account of how humanity can never achieve peaceful harmony with nature. And Old Men in Love (2007) promises to be a geriatric version of 1982, Janine, but is really an oddity whose ingredients include, among other things, ancient Athens, Fra Lippo Lippi and the Agapemonites.

Gray was also a prolific short-story writer. He produced three collections of them, Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983), Ten Tales Tall and True (1993) and The Ends of out Tethers: 13 Sorry Stories and had several more stories published in Lean Tales (1985), alongside contributions from James Kelman and Agnes Owens. I find the quality of his short fiction variable, with some items a bit too anecdotal or oblique for my tastes. But many are excellent and Ten Tales Tall and True is one of my favourite short-story collections ever.

The fact that Gray was also an artist meant that his books, with their handsome covers and finely detailed illustrations, made decorous additions to anyone’s bookcases. The illustration by Gray I like best is probably the one he provided for his story The Star in Unlikely Stories, Mostly.

© Canongate

He also liked to make mischief with the conventions of how books are organised, with their back-cover blurbs, review quotes, prefaces, dedications, footnotes, appendices and so on. For example, he wasn’t averse to adorning his books with negative reviews (Victoria Glendinning describing Something Leather as ‘a confection of self-indulgent tripe’) or imaginary ones (an organ called Private Nose applauding Poor Things for its ‘gallery of believably grotesque foreigners – Scottish, Russian, American and French.’)

As an artist, Gray was good enough to be made Glasgow’s official artist-recorder in the late 1970s and to enjoy a retrospective exhibition, Alasdair Gray: From the Personal to the Universal, at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in 2014-15. His artwork included a number of murals on the walls of Glasgow and it’s a tragedy that some have been lost over the years. Among those that survive, perhaps the most famous is at Hillhead Underground Station. It contains the memorable and salient verse: “Do not let daily to-ing and fro-ing / To earn what we need to keep going / Prevent what you once felt when wee / Hopeful and free.” Also worth seeing is the mural he painted, Michelangelo-style, on the ceiling of the Òran Mór restaurant, bar and music venue on Glasgow’s Byres Road. It looks gorgeous in the photos I’ve seen of it, although regrettably when I went there with my brother a few years ago to attend a Bob Mould gig, I was already well-refreshed with several pints of beer… and forgot to look upwards.

I never got to meet the great man, though I’m pretty sure I saw him one night in the late 1980s in Edinburgh’s Hebrides Bar, talking with huge animation to a group of friends and admirers. I was, however, too shy to go over and introduce myself.

One writer in whose company I did end up during the late 1980s, though, was Iain Banks, whom I got to interview for a student publication and who then invited me on an afternoon pub crawl across central Edinburgh. Banks was delighted when I told him that his recently published novel The Bridge (1986) reminded me a wee bit of Lanark. “I think Lanark’s the best thing published in Scotland in years!” he gushed. Come to think of it, it was probably the favourable comparison to Gray that prompted Banks to take me on a session.

From austinkleon.com

January 25, 2021

Favourite Scots words, D-F

From en.wikipedia.org

This evening is Burns Night, marking the 261^st anniversary of the birth of Scotland’s greatest poet, and one-time ploughman, Robert Burns.

In a normal, pandemic-free year, children in schools the length and breadth of Scotland would have spent the past few days standing in front of their classmates and teachers reciting Burns’ poems. Those poems, of course, were written in the Scots language; so this must be the only time in the year when kids can come out with certain Scots words in the classroom without their teachers correcting them: “Actually, that’s not what we say in proper English…”

In fact, lately, Scots has been getting attention that has nothing to do with tonight being Burns night. Scots-language poetess Miss PunnyPennie has won herself tens of thousands of fans in recent months with her tweets and YouTube videos, in which she recites her poems and discusses a different Scots word each day. Those fans include author Neil Gaiman, comedienne Janey Godley and actor Michael Sheen.

Unfortunately, she’s also had to put up with a lot of negativity. She was the subject of a condescending and mocking piece published recently in the Sunday Times, which added insult to injury by calling her a blatherskite (‘ill-informed loudmouth’) in its headline. More seriously, she’s received much trolling on twitter. For instance, political ūber-chancer George Galloway – currently trying to reinvent himself as a diehard British nationalist in a bid to get elected to the Scottish parliament – tweeted something derogatory about her, in the process exposing her to potential abuse from his nutjob twitter followers.

Actually, Scots seems to have become part of the culture wars being waged in Scotland at the moment. Pro-United Kingdom, anti-Scottish independence zealots like Galloway hate the idea that Scottish people might have their own language because it contradicts their narrative that everyone on the island of Great Britain is one people and culturally the same. Hence, much online protestation (by people whose profiles are slathered with Union Jacks) that Scots is just ‘an accent’ or ‘slang’ or ‘a made-up language’ or ‘normal English with spelling mistakes’.

From cheezburger.com

Anyhow, as promised, here’s my next selection of favourite Scots words, those starting with the letters ‘D’, ‘E’ and ‘F’.

Dander (n/v) – stroll. Over the centuries, a lot of Scots words made their way across the Irish Sea to the north of Ireland, where I spent the first 11 years of my life, and the delightful word dander is one of them. I heard as many Northern Irish folk announce that they were ‘goin’ fir a dander’ as I heard Scottish folk announce it later, after my family had moved to Scotland.

Deasil (adv) – a Gaelic-derived word that means ‘clockwise’. It’s a less well-known counterpart to the Scots word widdershins, meaning ‘anti-clockwise’. I suspect the latter word is better known because it figures heavily in witchcraft and there’s been at least one journal of ‘Magick, ancient and modern’ with ‘Widdershins’ as its title.

Deave (v) – to bore and sicken someone with endless blather. For example, “Thon Belfast singer-songwriter fellah Van Morrison is fair deavin’ me wi his coronavirus conspiracies.”

Dicht (n/v) – wipe. Many a dirty-faced youngster, or clarty-faced bairn, in Scotland has heard their mother order them, ‘Gie yer a face a dicht’.

Doonhamer (n) – a person from Dumfries, the main town in southwest Scotland. For many years, I had only ever seen this word in print, not heard anyone say it, and I’d always misread it as ‘Doom-hammer’, which made me think Dumfries’ inhabitants must be the most heavy-metal people on the planet. But then, disappointingly, I realised how the word was properly spelt. Also, I discovered that the word comes from how Dumfries folk refer to their hometown whilst in the more populous parts of Scotland up north, for example, in the cities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Dundee. They call it doon hame, i.e. ‘down home’.

Dook (n/v) – the act of immersing yourself in water. Thus, the traditional Halloween game involving retrieving apples from a basin of water using your mouth, not your hands, is known in Scotland as dookin’ fir apples.

Douce (adj) – quiet, demure, civilised, prim. My hometown of Peebles is frequently described as douce. However, that’s by outsiders, short-term visitors and travellers passing through, who’ve never been inside the public bar of the Crown Hotel on Peebles High Street on a Saturday night.

Dreich (adj) – dreary or tedious, especially with regard to wet, dismal weather. A very Presbyterian-sounding adjective that, inevitably, is much used in Scotland.

Drookit (adj) – soaking wet. How children often are on Halloween after dookin’ fir apples.

Drouth (n) – a thirst. Many an epic drinking session has started when someone declared that they had a drouth and then herded the company into a pub to rectify matters. Its adjectival form is drouthy and Tam O’Shanter, perhaps Burns’ most famous poem, begins with an evocation of the boozing that happens when ‘drouthy neebors, neebors meet.’ Indeed, Drouthy Neebors has become a popular pub-name in Scotland and there are, or at least have been, Drouthy Neebors serving alcohol in Edinburgh, St Andrews, Stirling and Largs.

Dunt (n / v) – a heavy but dull-sounding blow. It figures in the old saying, “Words are but wind, but dunts are the devil,” which I guess is a version of “Sticks and stones will break your bones, but names will never hurt you.”

Dux (n) – the star pupil in a school.

Eejit (n) – idiot. Inevitably, in 2008, when Dundonian poet Matthew Fitt got around to translating Roald Dahl’s 1980 children’s book The Twits into Scots, he retitled it The Eejits. Actually, there’s a lot of other Scots words in the D-F category that mean ‘idiot’. See also dafty, diddy, doughball and dunderheid.

© Itchy Coo

Eeksie–peeksie (adj/adv) – equal, equally, evenly balanced. A quaint term that was recently the subject of one of Miss PunniePenny’s ‘Scots word of the day’ tweets.

Fankle (n/v) – tangle. I’ve heard the English plea to someone to calm down, “Don’t get your knickers in a twist!” rephrased in Scots as “Dinna get yer knickers in a fankle!”

Fantoosh (adj) – fancy, over-elaborate, a bit too glammed-up.

Fash (v) – to anger or annoy, commonly heard in the phrase “Dinna fash yerself”. Like a number of Scots words, this is derived from Old French, from the ancestor of the modern French verb ‘fâcher’.

Feart (adj) – scared. During my college days in Aberdeen in the 1980s, on more than one occasion, I had to walk away from a potential confrontation with Aberdeen Football Club soccer casuals. the juvenile designer football hooligans who seemed to infest the city at the time. And I’d have the scornful demand thrown after me: “Are ye feart tae fight?!” Meanwhile, a person who gets frightened easily is a feartie.

Fitba (n) – football.

Flit (n/v) – the act of moving, or to move, house. Commonly used in Scotland, this verb has had success in the English language generally, as is evidenced by the use of ‘moonlight flit’ to describe moving house swiftly and secretly to avoid paying overdue rent-money.

Flyte (v) – to trade insults in the form of verse. This combative literary tradition can be found in Norse and Anglo-Saxon cultures, but flyting was made an art-form in 15^th / 16^th-century Scotland by poets like William Dunbar, Walter Kennedy and Sir David Lyndsay. There’s a poetic account of one flyting contest between Dunbar and Kennedy that’s called, unsurprisingly, The Flyting of Dumbar and Kennedie and consists of 28 stanzas of anti-Kennedy abuse penned by Dunbar and another 41 stanzas of Kennedy sticking it back to Dunbar. According to Wikipedia, this work contains “the earliest recorded use of the word ‘shit’ as a personal insult.” Thus, flyting was the Scottish Middle-Ages literary equivalent of two rappers dissing each other in their ‘rhymes’; and Dunbar and Kennedy were the Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls of their day.

Footer (v) – to fumble clumsily. I remember reading a Scottish ‘coming of age’ story – though I can’t recall its title or author – in which the inexperienced hero footered haplessly with a young lady’s bra-clasp.

Favourite Scots words starting with ‘G’, ‘H’ and ‘I’ will be coming soon.

November 20, 2020November 20, 2020

Cinema Peebles-diso

I recently noticed a discussion about the Playhouse Cinema on the Facebook page Auld Peebles, which is a site devoted to pictures, information and simple nostalgic reminiscing about past times in Peebles, my hometown in the Scottish Borders. This inspired me to dig out the following entry, which I’d originally posted on this blog back in 2013. In it, I indulge in some nostalgic reminiscing of my own about my town’s old Art Deco cinema…

The photograph above this entry shows the Art Deco building at number 60 of the High Street in Peebles, my Scottish hometown. The building opened in 1932 as the Playhouse Cinema. Its architect was Alister G. MacDonald, a son of Ramsay MacDonald, who was Britain’s first Labour Party prime minister and served in office in 1924 and from 1929 to 1935. MacDonald Junior designed the cinema with a particularly wide auditorium and with stalls and a balcony that held a total of 802 seats. The name Playhouse was spelt out in a squiggle of neon along the top of its façade, although the roof behind was less glamorous, being made of corrugated iron.

The Playhouse showed films for the next 45 years and for a time, in modest-sized Peebles, it wasn’t even the only cinema. It had to compete against the Empire Cinema on the Bridgegate and the Burgh Hall, further up the High Street, which also showed films. By the 1970s, however, with just about every home in Peebles possessing a television set, only the Playhouse was left and it was struggling, to the point where it’d introduced bingo a couple of nights a week as a way of attracting extra custom.

I became acquainted with the Playhouse at a very late stage in its life. In 1977, when I was eleven, my family moved to a new home just beyond the outskirts of Peebles. The town centre was only 30 minutes’ walk away. Previously we’d lived in a rural part of Northern Ireland and if I wanted to visit a cinema there, I had to talk my parents into driving me several miles to the nearest one and then returning to collect me afterwards. I was movie-crazy and having a cinema on my doorstep, as it seemed at the time, was a wonderful new luxury.

I didn’t see any masterpieces in the Playhouse, but every film I did see seems to be engraved on my memory just because I’d seen it there. For example, there was Earthquake (1974), the big, rumbly disaster movie starring Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, Lorne Greene and George Kennedy. George Kennedy was a portent of doom in 1970s movies, having already appeared in two of the Airport movies (1970 and 75). If his craggy face appeared onscreen, you just knew a destructive earth tremor was going to strike the city or a Boeing 747 was going to fall out of the sky.

It was also in the Playhouse that I had my most disappointing cinematic experience ever, which was seeing Dino De Laurentiis’s 1976 remake of King Kong. I’d really been looking forward to this, as I’d watched the original movie on TV and was desperate to see how they’d update all the fights that King Kong had with the dinosaurs on Skull Island. To my horror, there weren’t any dinosaurs on the 1976 Skull Island, so Kong didn’t have any fights with them. The only battle was an altercation between Kong (played by Rick Baker in a gorilla-costume) and a crap-looking rubbery giant snake. I’d like to think that a young Peter Jackson saw the same movie and shared my feelings of profound disappointment. For that reason, when he remade King Kong in 2005, he made sure his film was choc-a-bloc with dinosaurs.

Sometimes at the Playhouse you got to see a familiar feature of 1970s movie-going, which was a cinematic double bill. Among the two-for-the-price-of-one marvels I was treated to were Carquake (1976) combined with The Giant Spider Invasion (1975). Carquake was little more than a montage of car chases and car crashes and I suspect that the filmmakers had cast David Carradine in the lead role only because his surname started with the word ‘car’. Nonetheless, it seemed like a masterpiece compared with its partner. In The Giant Spider Invasion, the invading giant spiders were played by real-life tarantulas when they were babies, and played by giant wobbly-legged blobs of paper-maché mounted on top of cars when they were adults. One scene showed a tarantula clamber unnoticed into a kitchen blender. Then a character unwittingly blended it with some fruit and took a massive swig from the resulting Vitamin C / pulped-hairy-spider concoction. That was about the most revolting thing I saw in a film until Hugh Grant started making romantic comedies.

But I had barely seven months to enjoy the Playhouse, for on September 10^th, 1977, it went out of business. It would’ve been fitting if the final end-credits to scroll up the Playhouse’s screen had belonged to a film that was memorable – Star Wars (1977), say, which was breaking box-office records at the time. However, the last film shown there was another one about cars, an unremarkable horror film simply entitled The Car (1977). This starred James Brolin and was about a rural American community being terrorised by a deadly, driver-less and demonically possessed automobile. In his non-fiction book Danse Macabre (1981), Stephen King described it as “the sort of movie where you can safely go out for a popcorn refill at certain intervals because you know the car isn’t going to strike again for 10 minutes or so”.

Thereafter the Playhouse was derelict for a time. I seem to remember a report in the local newspaper at one point about it being broken into and vandalised. Then its foyer was converted into a shopping area and it became another High Street retailer. For a while, it served as the premises for Visionhire, a TV shop, which meant that films were being shown on its premises again (at least, when one of the televisions on display was switched on and tuned into a channel broadcasting a film). These days it houses an outlet for the cut-price chemist’s chain, Semi-Chem. Thanks to Alister MacDonald’s Art Deco design, it’s now a listed building and has been given a Grade C status by Historic Scotland. Incidentally, I’m only talking about the building’s front part. As far as I know, most of its back part, containing the 802-seat auditorium, was demolished to make way for a housing development.

Losing the Playhouse in 1977 was a blow for Peebles film-lovers because video cassettes and VCRs were still things of the future. If you didn’t have transport to get to a cinema in another town to see a film on its first release, your only option was to wait a couple of years until it turned up on TV. However, you still had a chance to see films, old and not so old, on a big screen if you were a pupil at Peebles High School. In the wake of the Playhouse’s demise, a teacher there, Dr Mike Kellaway, started up a Film Club and showed movies one evening each week with the school’s assembly hall acting as an auditorium. But Peebles High School’s Film Club is a story for another blog-entry.