More impressionistic stuff

Take me out and shoot me. But anyway, there is a phrase I keep coming back to (which is to say, plagiarising) from The Riddle of the Sands. It doesn't have to do with the book's actual subject, being instead one of many evocative but glancing descriptions of the maritime setting: 'stars above and stars below'. I don't know, something just does it for me. It refers to the night sky reflected in a still sea, but I often think of it when looking at city lights.

So, something arisen from the insane and unhealthy hours I am keeping for some reason, combined with a wanton and uncontollable habit of cycle-trips.

Observatory

Blackford Hill:
A little after midnight, a little south of the midnight sun,
It's night above my head and dawn on the horizon.
The observatory's idle, the sky empty but for bird-song;
But a starry night rolls out below my feet
With myths picked out in white and yellow lights,
With a milky ribbon of its own,
And distant galaxies beyond.

Meanwhile, back in the 1800s

After a long period of firing off fragmentary and impressionistic things brought on by what I thought about that day (and, yes, an almost equally long period of complete bunking off) I'm feeling once again the urge to write novelistically. And so I've followed my instincts and dived back into the 19^th century, which is packed already with stories that would hardly be believable if not for being true. In the best traditions of 19^th century writing, I have only the vaguest idea where this serial is going, but here goes.

Prologue: The Berezina-song

The endless sky of Russia was dirty grey that winter's day - except for a red stain on the eastern horizon, made by the campfires of the cossacks.

Unsupported by the mountains of home, it weighed heavy and cold on the forests and marshes; on the fields, the shallow scratches of human habitation that had to be reclaimed from the wilderness year on year; and on the town of Borisov, a wretched place in that year 1812, abandoned by its whole population – well, almost – and yet, for a few short desperate days, more crowded than it had ever been or would ever be again.

Such was the prospect that greeted the 4^th Line Regiment of the Kingdom of Italy, such as were left, when they arrived in the early evening. They trudged down the road with a tired, mechanical gait. At their head a tattered standard fluttered sadly in the snow; below it, his face telling the same story of wounded but still living pride, Captain Giacomo Balducci was carried between two of his men, slung on a musket that had been wrapped in rags to prevent it from freezing to his skin. In spite of the cold he still wore only his uniform - where the soldiers who tramped behind him were a grim carnival of warm ladies' pelisses and bejewelled Orthodox vestments rescued by theft from the fire at Moscow. His absurd little glasses magnified his deep blue eyes.

Such was the prospect; and then the river Berezina, laughing derisively, splashing white with foam and jagged lumps of ice; and beyond, on the far steep bank, a single cossack, silhouetted against the snow like one of the charcoal-sketches that filled the captain's diary. He sat in the saddle so motionless that snow was piling up on his cap, staring thoughtfully at the river as if he had put it there, painted it onto the broad white canvas, and was now wondering if he had placed it quite right.

The 4^th Line Regiment had been on the deathly field of Borodino, had seen the Russian cavalry flooding downhill with oddly high-pitched whoops, as if their whirling sabres were slicing up the very air. But all that was not so terrible as this single silent sentry.

-

Captain Balducci did indeed make a sketch of the scene before he died.

He spent his last hours wrapped in a shroud of those same pelisses and vestments, tucked on the ledge above the stove in what had been someone's pleasant townhouse. His rank hardly entitled him to such a spot, of course, and he would never have consented to it, or to the blanket his men had made him from their warm clothes, if he had had the strength to object. But he was no longer altogether conscious, and had smiled vacantly as his men chased out a band of fat Swiss, looking like Englishmen in their shiny red coats, and installed him in their commander's place.

So there he lay with two soldiers for company, delegates of the men he had dismissed downstairs to eat their miserable supper and catch a proper sleep. They were the two who he, a naturally quiet man, had most often talked to: Antonio Farina, the Florentine pasta-maker who could write; and Neri Burroni, the young peasant whose village had appointed him philosopher and herdsman due to his habit of staring protractedly at nothing much, which the captain shared.

Balducci sketched the scene until his hand failed, and then dictated to Farina his final testament. Then he lay still, except for the hand that kept rubbing his wounded leg. The two men peered out of the window. In the last light of the day, the lone cossack picket rode away.

'Do you remember, Neri, in Poland, when Mattia told us we were going to march through Russia and invade England?,' said Farina with a faint smile.

'I do, sergeant. I think, sergeant, that he had England and India mixed up.'

'Some difference it makes now.'

'Yes, sergeant.'

'I wonder what there is, though, beyond Russia. Besides more poxy Russia.'

'Home, sergeant, the way we're going.'

'Good answer. Good bloody answer to a stupid question. I was a happy man when I kept myself to wondering what was over the mountains and not finding out.'

'Yes, sergeant.'

Then there was a long silence, which was broken after a time by the strains of a badly-played accordion, and a sharp young tenor rising from the yard where the defeated Swiss had made their camp:

Unser Leben gleicht der Reise
Eines Wandrers in der Nacht;
Jeder hat in seinem Gleise
Etwas, das ihm Kummer macht...

For reasons he never understood any better than he understood German, which was not at all, the melody stayed with Farina for the remainder of his life. No doubt it had something to do with the noise which followed the end of the song, which was the mewling of an infant from the room across the hall.

The men glanced at each-other. Farina had heard stories like this one from other regiments. Nobody knew where the children came from; whether they had been forgotten by the fleeing Russians, or born in a rolling wagon to one of the canteen-women and left behind in the hope that somebody would stumble across them. And so people did. A few were now trundling along with the retreating arm in those same suttlers' carts, learning their first words in the Grand Army's language of violent blasphemy from across half Europe; others were not. An Italian officer who was on a general's staff had confessed to Farina one night under the stars, blind drunk, that he had drowned triplets that had kept him awake in Smolensk, breaking the ice on a barrel of water with his own hands. He had seemed particularly upset about that ice. Farina had tentatively assured him that if they were to have grown up as little soldiers and marched with the Grand Army on another such campaign, then it made as much difference as England and India. And he had gotten to half-believing it, but... well, in the morning he would see if there was space on a cart. He nodded to Burroni and stood up.

'Bring the child in here, would you please?,' said the cracked voice of Balducci. The two men stared, although for Burroni this involved only a change of direction. The captain had pushed himself up on one arm with the feeble struggling motion of an upturned beetle.

'...Yes sir!,' said Farina, and hurried out.

He found the boy in a lady's bedroom, nestled in covers pulled from the plump-looking bed. The room had been well-appointed once but now showed the signs of a hasty ransacking. In any other circumstances Farina would have put it down to looters from one army or another, or the Jews; but some latent romantic inclination, a kind of substitute compassion in a world intolerant of the real thing, made him imagine a Polish princess tearing out her drawers in search of prized possessions, hurrying away at the last moment as the first shots sounded...

It was a naked screaming child; it could have been Polish; it could have been a prince. Who knew? So he made it one with a thought, a promisory note for the warmth and safety he couldn't give.

He presented him to his captain with trembling hands – his working man's fear of the delicate, his father's panic at holding a child, his soldier's terror of manhandling a superior's ill-understood possessions all combined. Balducci shook his head. 'I couldn't hold him, Antonio. Put him by the stove. Give him one of the blankets. Give him all the blankets. I don't need them, Antonio. I'll die in my uniform.'

'I thought,' he continued as Farina busied himself, 'When I put it on, that this was a shameful uniform, covered in the braid of kings and paid for by plunder. I'm proud to wear it now. You men have made me proud to wear it as you do.'

The soldiers said nothing; neither Farina, nor Burroni, nor the others, roused by the baby's crying, who filed quietly into the room.

'I regret,' said Balducci, his old lecturing-voice – none too loud, but with an odd penetrating quality that demanded to be heard – somehow returning under his wheezy breath, 'That the campaign has unfolded as it has, and I feel sorry for the poor people in Poland, and in France, who are undoubtedly going to be put under the tsar and the cossacks-'

There was a stir in the hot, muggy air enclosed by the crowding soldiers; Mattia's cry of denial and defiance died on his tongue.

'-But more than that I regret that we fought it at all, in the way we did, against and not for the wretched people in this country, which has surely given rise to our defeat. And I would very much have preferred to have died for the freedom and independence of our Italy,' he went on, his bemused tone of voice and his turn of phrase just as when he had told them, long ago in Poland, that he would very much prefer them not to use foul language.

'Most of all I regret the part I've had, however small, in leading you all into this really frightful war, and how I'm now leaving you to get out of it without whatever help I might have given you. I regret a good many things. But I think I'm just coming to realise that if Destiny doesn't equip us to make large and historic gestures then we should attach as much importance to the small ones that are in our power, and so I should say that in the end I've not made the worst use of my life.'

Silence again, of a new and less restful kind: not a blank like the snowy fields, but an awful hole like the captain's wound.

'I don't subscribe to the beliefs of the priests, or of Russians, Jews, Turks, or Englishmen, however I know some of you will take comfort in praying for me and for my part I will be glad to have my comrades thoughts rest on me for a little while. After long consideration, however, I think there is probably a governing power in this republic of our universe, and even if there isn't then that is no excuse to retreat from my responsibility to do good works and to try and mend my bad ones so that I will have been a little force for bettering humanity. I'd like you, Antonio, to take a letter which is on my person to the addressee in Italy, and to look after the child and take it to her as well.'

'...Yes, sir,' said Farina for the final time, and Balducci nodded and died. The silence, this time, was as loud as all the emperor's artillery, and the tsar's too.

'We could put the boy on the sutlers' carts,' said Mattia eventually.

'The captain was very clear,' said Burroni. 'But since we all need to eat, and I'm younger and littler than the sergeant, I think it should be me who looks after the child. When we get home I will come and visit him to find out about the adress and take the child there. After all he has a family and a trade. I've got nothing to come back to. And anyway it would only be good to visit eachother after we get home.'

They all thought for a moment of Moscow, of the jewels they had taken from dressing-tables, and of how they had laughed at the men who had stuffed their sacks with rye-flour and searched high and low for a frying-pan; and then, led by Farina, they gave a murmured consent.

'I wonder what being dead is like,' said Mattia.

'Don't,' said Farina.

-

From that moment on, Farina's memories of Russia dissolved like frightening dreams, and only a few clear images remained – many of them irrelevant and bathetic. Only one scene need come to our attention.

There are the guns roaring on the heights, and their ragged, hoarse, explosive cry is echoed by the 'Ura!' of the Russian infantry. There are the fat Swiss, food for the cannons just like the thinner men. There are the soldiers of the 4^th scrambling up from they had been finishing their crusts of bread, taking their places in the column, losing themselves to a greater moving mass as if climbing aboard a vehicle. There is Mattia throwing off the lady's fur coat which he had claimed was for a mistress and which everybody knew he meant to sell, declaring that he'll die like a soldier of the emperor's army. There he is, promptly getting his wish. There is the red blood on Burroni's shirt – all too vivid, Farina feels: he has after all seen plenty of blood on the campaign, some of it his, and by now he thinks he knows its ugly brown colour. But now it blooms like roses on the linen, the snow, the paling skin. And there is the boy crying in the dead man's knapsack.

Writing about music

They are making a movie of Les Mis - that is, a film of the show of the book, not a film of the book. Russell Crowe is in it. I don't care what anyone says, this is a positive development for the revolution. If we English-speaking peoples can only write good political songs if they're being sung by fictitious French people who are immediately shot for their trouble, oh well, we have to get them from somewhere.

I speak facetiously, mind: there are lots of good political songs even in English; and besides them so many, in all languages and some more, which are not 'political' in the narrow sense but which get at the basic facts of human life, the final issue in political struggles. I sometimes feel, as someone who feels compelled to try and fumble towards the outlines of this stuff in writing, that what I do is as pigeon-shit to their monument.  Did somebody not say that writing about music is like dancing about architecture? Ah well, worth a shot.

Writing about music

Where we puzzled for hours

Over theories and figures, seeking our answer,

They scrawled an equation in the margin

That answered answers and questioned questions.

Where we pinned the world down

Like a butterfly, with carefully chosen words,

They plucked it alive from the air

And let it go again.

Edinburgh again

Driech and haary; theatre doing Gulliver's Travels in the original Romanian; no trams. Edinburgh much as I left it.

Having left it, I could count its flaws and failings all along my fingers and end up on my toes, of course. But most of what I dislike about Edinburgh as against Glasgow - things as diverse as quotation marks around Scots words in pub-signage, the lack of buskers not playing the pipes in full-kilt, the brazen hypocrisy of all those 'saunas' and 'massage salons' ranked up alongside the Temples of High Culture, the circle of outlying schemes kept away from the centre like the tarnish around a brass tap - springs from pretence and concealment. That, or a sense of privacy inflated to take in whole grand dead-ends sheltering behind their 'Keep out!' signs.

But there are things about Edinburgh, as my home-town, which can be neither concealed nor fenced off.


I never missed home.
Why miss what's waiting, just as you left it?
I fit into old memories as if into old gloves
Stored safely in some bottom-drawer of the mind.

'Home, where the air smells like air and the sky's the right height...'
The sky hangs low and damp on crags and hills.
The air smells of suggested rain, never quite falling but
Filling the air, tickling my cheek;
Of trees, and of the history of things.

Night-time

I stand by the quiet canal,

Dug out by humans hands,

Under the eerie street-lamps,

Devised by human minds.

In the water dance the orange lights.

In the distance roar the cars, constant as the sea.

In the night, the tower-blocks light up:

Illuminated stairwells mark them out,

For concrete blends with sky,

And flats – who’s up this late?! – out-shine the stars.

Behind me steals a stealthy night-time ghost.

He shivers up my spine: as if to say

The world of Newton, Marx, and Einstein he will share

Until the dawn – and while I stay awake. 

It being 2012...

...the end of the world. We're a mite stuck on it, I noticed in conversation this evening. So I thought to myself: how does a Marxist write about the end of the world?  

The answer is that he does a year of English and History at Glasgow University and, by the end of it, Donne and his round Earth's imagined corners have gotten mixed up with Hobsbawm and his history that never 'reaches the turning point and fails to turn', it just turns in unexpected or undesired directions. And then he writes a poem, yo.

The end of the world (as we know it)

We’re terribly fond of the end of the world.

We didn’t need a theory of tectonics

To set the mountains crumbling with our words;

We didn’t need a Hubble telescope

To watch the stars explode, or tumble down;

And we saw seas of blood in feverish dreams

Before we ever woke to find them true.

The end of the world has troubled our sleep

From the beginning.

But where do ends begin, beginnings end?

They’re like that Nordic serpent who devours

His tail – until, hoho!, he ends the world;

But afterwards the world begins again.

Until another god has has his day:

Another final battle, another new world born,

Another war is fought to end all war.

Perhaps the end has come and gone?

Perhaps a mountain that will crumble

Has been eaten through by worms?

Perhaps the stars will only tumble

When their lights have all but burned?

Perhaps the end will come and go?

And when brazen trumpets have sounded,

And when mountains and stars are gone,

Perhaps the world ends in the silence

That lets thought echo loud and long?

Arise! Arise! At the round Earth’s imagined corners – turn.

More magic and Marxism

Further miscellanious fragments of my Terribly Serious Story; still no names!


The day, which later on turned out to have been Memorable in History, dawned much as others did: in a flood of white light over the horizon, over the crests of the grey waves.

Much, indeed, seemed familiar on this day of change in the world: the salt-edged wind; the raucous cawing of sea-birds; the whole prospect of his native shore, the white beach, the villages, fields, and house-trees looking tiny and impermanent in the shadow of heath, forest, and mountain; all these things were painfully familiar. And the word 'memorable' is surely meaningless, applied to things that, try as we might, we can't forget?

What he remembered were the ships. His own people built ships, of course, and sailed them and were buried in them; and in doing this they hacked a a rough beauty out of oak trunks. But nothing like these ships: in his life up to that point, he had seen nothing so huge made by human hands; and so he half-thought to himself that these things must come finished into the world, in that great graceful shape, gliding along without oars under those huge spreads of canvas - so utterly white, like the foam on the bows! The illusion lasted until three ant-sized sailors dropped from the rigging and died.

Two drowned - a good many of the sailors on such magnificent vessels, he found out, could not swim - and one hit the deck and broke his neck. They'd fallen in their hurry not to be the last down as the shore-muster was called, for which they would have flogged with tarred and knotted ropes. He found this out by insistent questioning of the ship's officers: people become very frank, when they wish to end a subject so awkward that it's keeping them from dinner.

He solemnly acted on his resolve to remember things, and remembered this, in a crude and methodical pencilled hand. He could not help marvelling at his new power of creating words, even such words as these.

[Our protagonist takes leave of his old country and illiteracy.]


Impressions careened along like the horses themselves, wild and unstoppable. Sounds: the whoops of the troopers, bizarrely high, sounding like predatory birds; the rhythmic pounding of hooves, which made his ears search vainly for rhythm in the sounds of gunfire and cannon-shot. And sights!

Swords, everywhere, whirled overhead so that they could hardly be seen until the sun caught their sharpness; horses shot out from under their riders, tumbling to the ground with no slowing of forward motion; men crushed under horses, and unhorsed men rolling to their feet and carrying on with inhuman speed, barely distinguishable from those they pursued, their sabres looking suddenly far too large for them. And the fleeing men; the lances sticking out of their backs at perfect right-angles; the astonishment on the faces of those who had been shot and staggered for a moment, unable to realise quite what had happened as blood spread over their shirts; and those overtaken and hacked down, throwing up their hands in their last moments and clutching despairingly at their bloodied heads, in resignation, or pathetic self-defence, or to keep them on.

[This cavalry-charge paragraph happened by itself, in an attempt to get across the horrible messiness and unreality I've seen communicated by a few good films, and which can get lost under the temptation to chivalrise. But a story like this needs some big ghastly battles so in it goes. This stuff is all sketches anyway.]


In the end he fall on the dusty floor and slept there, in his clogs and rough woollen cap. He slept the incomparable sleep of the profoundly exhausted; and at last he was left alone by dreams. They left him there, deterred from waking him by a mixture of fear and sympathy - although some kind soul cleaned and righted his glasses.

Interview at the Maryhill Tesco

I've had a rather irritating encounter with the surveillance culture. Apparently, if the CCTV spots you putting things into your own bag, they have to send someone after you on the suspicion that you're a shoplifter with a bourgeois taste in cheese - even if this person only catches up with you as you're paying for your purchases and is hence a bit sheepish about the whole thing. Bah. If I'm going to be gratuitously hassles about the contents of my bag, I'd rather the Marxist tracts than the cheese, thanks.

But anyway, it gave me a thought.


S'it a guid job? Aye, wiel, s'indoors oot ae the weather an naw heavy liftin, cannae argue wi tha'. Thare's worse jobs gaun, A can tell ye. A s'pose A cud hae bin on the roads, mebbe, or some shite like tha'. Ye knaw. Bluidy rainin oan ye hauf the time, an the noise, ohh, A couldna bear it, ye'd niver get tae sleep for five minutes. An wee shites chuckin footbaws at ye day in day oot, and the spray-paint, ye ken? Tha's naw life.

Mind, cud be a bit more excitin' nor it is here, A s'pose. Wi chases an tha'? Mebbe a twelve-car pileup noo an again? Actually, mind, while A'm day-dreamin A'd rether be in the films. Ye'd have aw chases and pile-ups gaun on in front o ye aw the time, an wi'oot the rain an the wee shites wi footbaws. An actress lassies an so oan.

But s'niver a bad job, tell the truth. A'm naw badly aff, an a widn't be paid ony more for bein a movie-camera or whatnot, either. Efter ye're inside it's the same all ower, really, this kind o work. Ye get to thinkin aboot the wee things in yer position. A mean, A've plenty o time for thinkin.

Course A'm no vera popular wi ma colleagues. They say A breath doon everbody's necks. Say it in front o me as wiel, which A think is rether tactless. While A'm listening, ye ken? Disna make ye feel great. If A wis in a bank-vault people wid mebbe show some respect - but that'd be dull as fuck. An a ken a thing or two aboot dull.

Cud esk for a better view. Cud esk for more action, too. A've actually taken to just watchin folk. Thare's people, ye knaw, who buy the exact same stuff iver week? Seems bluidy stupit tae me. If A cud walk aboot the place A widn't be gaun the same way aw the time. But thare's ither stuff. Drunks are a laugh. They're awmost the awnly yins that try shopliftin as wiel. An folk buyin things tae startle the check-oot lassies. Ye knaw? Like a condom an a cucumber.

An somebody daes lift somethin noo an again. A'm kind o hopin they'll get awa, actually. S'naw ma problem, A've daen ma bit. An it's a change.

A s'pose a wonder what they're gonnae dae wi it, whativer they nick, A mean. Oot thare.

Onyway, carry oan. Niver mind me. If ye mind me, A'm daen a bad job.                

Improv 2

Something very different: a portrait of a very nasty man. I was thinking in a vague way about the Argentine and Chilean colonels, but really I was just putting together everything that makes me shiver.


The interesting and, it has in retrospective to be admitted, the problematic thing about him was his hat. The rest of him, boots to shaven lip, bore the stamp of a good old-fashioned military education  - an appropriate metaphor, since he was very much to factory standards. His cheeks were pink, his hair was sleek. Many of the young women he seduced, as officers at his prestigious academy did in those days, swore when I interviewed them that he had singularly memorable eyes; but no two of them agreed exactly why. Were they frank and clear, or clouded and brooding? The photographs, of course, have no conclusive answer: he's always looking boldly at something outside the frame, never quite at the camera. All careful staged, of course, except the last few. And they're gruesome.

But yes, his hat. It was as neat and shiny as the rest of the ensemble, but there was something subtly off about the proportion. Where everything else was precisely to regulations, the high naval cap was a bit too high; the gold braid was rather too gold - blindingly so, when the southern sun was over the parade-ground. If he actually had it modified or done to commission - and there was nothing illegal about that, many officers did, mostly from wealthier families than his, of course  - he was very fastidious in destroying the evidence later on. Perhaps it simply began to stretch and shine when it was placed on his head - but such metaphysical speculation is not the job of the historian. The hat, in short, smacked of a wealthy industrialist's daughter who intends to end a duchess if she has to strangle somebody. It was a hat that thought itself born to be a crown.

Later, of course, he was officially entitled to a great many hats. But I talked to a man, the nearest thing he had to a confidante - who frankly deserves to be strung up slowly, but I won't deny that his testimony was very fascinating - who attests that his academy uniform was always his favourite. He wore it when seducing people - well, I suppose we can put that down to nostalgic sentiment - and, more significantly, when he rehearsed his speeches. He seems to have loved to cultivate an image of youth: a reverse side of his neurotic obsession with mortality.

He was a very eloquent speaker, there's no doubt about it: look at the films. They don't lose anything in recording: the whole thing was theatre, very carefully constructed, his language most of all. He approached his native language like a keen student of biology approached a frog, and no doubt he ended up quite an expert on it.

Improv part the first

At last: improv 1! My usual cheerful stuff.


The interesting and, it has in retrospect to be admitted, the problematic thing about him was his hat. It was too interesting. Its wobbly edifice appeared to have been assembled from pieces of what was fashionable at 20-year intervals over the last 200 years, plus a couple of military uniforms and tribal headdresses, all held together by string, spit, and baseless hope. People were too busy marvelling at it to notice anything else about the man.

It is true, of course, that most of us take great care not to notice or remember much about beggars and vagrants; but when prompted (by a serious-looking police sergeant, say) we can, some better than others, recall a few details like fragments of a fading, unpleasant dream. Height; the colour of eyes, hair, and teeth; the amount of these things: this much can generally be worked out.

But as for the man in the hat, well, after cross-examining all known witnesses and holding a conference of detectives, the police concluded that 1) he wasn't too tall, since the hat was always at eye-level and 2) he was probably a man. If not, she was a pretty manly sort of woman. Anyway, he definitely had a hat. But were he to take it off - well, he could be anyone making a racket at a street-corner.

Feeling that 'short stature, likely male, may be wearing unusual hat' didn't quite cut it, Sergeant Silkie added 'or concealing same about person' to the official description. But then, he was apparently concealing a casket's worth of jewels, a Rembrandt, and a missing person about his person - all of which ought perhaps to have been more immediately visible than the hat, magnificently visible as it was.

The description was duly transmitted through all channels, across the country and to all foreign police forces, even the ones we don't particularly like. Frankly it was unnecessary to make such a fuss. Their man (he was a man) was in the city, to be sure. He was dining out, actually. Funny place, the universe: it was precisely as Sergeant Silkie added the bit about the hat that he removed it.

He drew a can of Diet Irn Bru from a cavernous pocket and filled his wine-glass.

'Five-thousand pound,' he said levelly to the person opposite him. This was pushing it, since they were already paying for the meal. But he'd made a career of pushing it - as so many admirable, respectable, important or at the last resort at least memorable people do.

Improv: a short notice

Inspired by Glasgow Uni's incomparable Improv Teatime (now available on a stage! Tea sold separately) I am going to play the three-scenes game. So today I wrote a first line that popped into my head:

'The interesting and, it has in retrospect to be admitted, the problematic thing about him was his hat.'

Over the next wee while I shall try and continue this story into various different genres.

Sketch, Glasgow, Summer(ish)

Even under a clear sky and a warm sun, the river is all white foam and black water, so fast does is flow. Trees lean over it, testing it with tentative twigs; a few have drooped all the way in, and in winter you might suppose them to have fallen; but now they’re alive with leaves.

Perched above the river are crowded back-gardens crowded closely together; a terrace with a beer-garden; a red-brick factory, long shut up, and much higher from the rear than the street; and of course Glasgow University, soaring up to that airy spire through which the sky can be seen, as if it were made of ideas.

In the park, people are walking: some chattering, some in contented silence; some in bitter argument, some in contented argument. Kids are doing skateboard-tricks.

Unusually for Glasgow, the sound of pipes and drums is drifting across from somewhere over the river. They sound like fire-drums, and warning sirens.

Tenement stories

We regret yesterday's interruption to the great work of socialist construction; the responsible parties have been dealt with appropriately. But now, we return to the struggle and will - you bloody well guessed it - redouble our efforts.

The evening sky is still a gentle blue even now that the sun has gone his way, with only a few plump clouds drifting aimlessly across it; but gradually, too gradually to notice until the dark has settled, the colour is draining from it, and from the red and yellow tenements.

Here and there, windows are lighting up: the facades look like half-finished jigsaws or mosaics.

Stories lurk in the shadows of a fading day. There are stories hidden in the ornamental pots on front-steps, so heaving with black soil and flowers of every colour that it’s hard to tell where one bunch ends and another begins. Another story spreads over the front of a fanciful sandstone frontage along with a huge growth of creepers, wrapping its fingers round the very stones and drainpipes, but trimmed neatly away from all the windows.

The flags and ranks of ornaments loudly vie for the attention of the scant audience passing in the streets below, or above the stoops. Books, tucked on their shelves at the back of the lighted rooms, are sniffily above it all: the few switched-on televisions are surely beneath their contempt.

The young man hunched over his desk is surely telling a story, whether or not he’s writing one. Stories intersect and tangle: at drunken parties, or with two people sharing a room in silence. Stories wink at you, as the lights go out.

Stroganov and murder

So, jogging down the up-people-conveyor at Glasgow Queen Street's subway connection (there was nobody on it: some opportunities in life can't be missed), I looked at the posters, to avoid looking at the withering disapproval of the people on the down-conveyor. Your fault for taking up the whole width of it, you bastards. 

A new one advertised a book called 'The Love and Death of Caterina'. (The subtitle contained some of these words: passion, betrayal, lust, seduction, shocking, devastating. All of them even, maybe.) Thing is, it was hard to make out from a way off - especially the conjunctions in much smaller print. So at first I read it as 'Love, Death, and Catering.'

I ask you, comrades: doesn't that sound like a much more interesting book?

The beef-stroganov hissed on the hob: a sound like ugly rumours. It was almost as sizzling as Paolo, the hyper-libidinous Mediterranean sous-chef –  as he had been, anyway, before his corpse had splattered its blood over the virginal flour-sacks in the scullery, its face twisted in the final throes of passion.

Caterina turned over the meat and flavoured it with a few quiet tears, and more paprika than was strictly necessary. 

Who said I couldn't do brevity? 72 words, and it smells to me like some hot Hollywood property. Any rising young producers in the audience?

The Seven-Day Plan in the nick of time

It is still the 5th of May here (although possibly not in France). It's not dark yet in Thurso. There's time, comrades, time.

Empty spaces, everywhere: canvasses, dirty but resolutely blank, are stretched along the ends of tenements and up the sides of tower-blocks. Here and there windows pierce them, looking terribly small amidst the white – like timid, suspicious eyes peering through a chink in curtains drawn tightly against the world and the sun.

The murals here are in the underpasses, or along the brick walls of abandoned places. Every artist signs his name, and each is just as anonymous as the next. It it you, sitting next to me in the bus-stop with your track-suit and weary face, whose mind is full of difficult questions asked in dazzling colours?

And from the ends of the bus-stop, or the hoardings, other eyes are silently observing: the inhabitants are all stuck buying razors and make-up and using them to look sternly attractive, day and night without a rest. Look carefully into those eyes. It's driving them crazy!

If it were up to me, the mural-painters would be clambering on scaffolding, daubing those blank canvases with essays and poems. And the people in the bus-stop ends and hoardings could take a well-earned day off. For once, they could get up and make breakfast without first getting their hair perfectly arranged. For once they could smile.

The Seven-Day Plan 3: Revenge of the Return of the Son of Seven-Day Plan

Here is a tribute to one of Glasgow Uni's greatest resources: the Level Six Annexe of noble fame, treasure-trove of eastern European culture and history and site of almost untapped reserves of Slavic Soul. Reflect, comrades, that even as I write this another nameless soldier lies dying, conscripted by the hand of history into the battle against world fascism. As his final breath escapes him on some lonely shell-ploughed field, he thinks, with a serene expression on his face, 'I die, alone and unremembered... but while, because we fight and die... the level six annexe will live on...'

(Okay possibly I am exaggerating. It's a really good annexe, okay? One of the best.)

The sound of my every step falls heavily on the carpeted floor and on the silence; the jingle of keys from my pocket seems a clashing tambourine; the kick-stand moans and screeches over the floor as if in protest. Then I stop to run my hand along a shelf of books, and the silence returns, still more complete than before.

I feel I might be far below the Earth: the slight chill furthers the illusion, as does the dusty sunlight, filtered through windows that slope like skylights.

I savour a few quiet moments, snatched and hidden from the world at large. But should it really be so quiet here, with all these words squeezed spine-by-spine together - close enough for the ghosts between the covers to wander along the shelves, greeting old friends, sneering at enemies, arguing in different languages, shaking their heads at the turn of history?

They’re here, I feel sure, but they keep quiet. At least, until I take a book; and one ghost hurries back along the row to resume its station before I can open it, and hear their voice.

A 208-word story

No jury on Earth would convict me.

So, I hope to be at the big Marxist derring-do in London this June. One of the people headlining is the excellent David Harvey. I have been reading his book about the ongoing crisis (I had to go into the Adam Smith building to get it, ironically: it seems the craven enemies who dwell there have seized not only all the Marxist books but also all the squashy chairs, damn them!) and I was struck by some of the things he, coming from a background as a geographer, says about cities, nature, and humankind.

The thrust is that a place like Glasgow is as 'natural' as an ant-hill, a bird's nest, a beaver-dam - or indeed any part of Earth between the poles, since it's all been pretty dramatically changed by humans. Species changing their environment is natural. The point is that if we've changed ours in a way that we're both wrecking it for the other species on which we depend, and creating a kind of life that feels 'unnatural' - grim, ugly, and lonely - for ourselves, we can change it again in another way. And that means, among many other things, taking on the city as a space and an idea and seizing it on behalf of the public.

Also, it's an uncommonly nice day in Glasgow. Result: the following.

I walked through the city, as the sun spilled its light on sandstone and slate. In the parks, flowers bloomed and each tree’s shadow told the time on the grass. The river flashed and the canal was a mirror. The tower-blocks stuck up, obscene fingers cursing a clear-blue sky.

I walked through the city one misty afternoon. The river laughed nastily, and coiled up in wisps out of his dale. Streetlamps turned into orange eyes, and made me cast too many shadows.

I walked through the city one warm purple evening. Steeples and the first stars pierced the piled clouds. The moon was a silvery smudge. The wind murmured; a fox screeched; there was a whispering of lives, close-by, unseen.

I walked through the city on a blustery day. The wind swept everything clean and I could see for miles. The bare moors rolled away, like waves before the gust.

I walked through the city at night, and out on to the moors, and looked back: blue stars spread out above, and yellow stars below. It wasn’t quite silent: cars were grumbling in the dark. The city dozed, dreaming drunken dreams.

If night and day and sun and fog can build new cities here, then why not me? 

200-word stories

Comrade Readers, the defence of my blog - by which I of course mean our blog - demands unfaltering endeavour, boundless faith, constant watchfulness. Yes, it is time to redouble our efforts once again. It is time for a new Seven-Day Plan.

In the spirit of socialism, I have cheerfully ignored intellectual-property claims and pinched the idea for this one from the Comrade Blogger at zum Glänzen bringen: 100-word stories. Only I have added an extra hundred. If I am making an effort to get better at brevity, is this a redoubling of effort?

But skipping philosophical questions, here is our first story. Continuing with our Russian theme (it's not like we ever really stopped), it's inspired by listening to lots of Cossack songs like this one. I must warn those unfamiliar with the  Slavic Soul, in all its uncommon depth, soulfulness, Slavicity etcetera that in Cossack songs, people die. A lot. But don't worry, they're Cossacks so they're pretty chill about it.

So: a 199-word stab at a dying man. (Note to self: could have phrased that with more tact.)

There was something unreal about the scene. He did not know whether he was seeing things as they truly were for the first and only time, or whether it was just his own rapid loss of blood; but for whatever reason, everything seemed too stark, too clear, too simple, like a preliminary sketch.

The snow on the slopes was too smooth, white, and unbroken. The forest was too silent, too dark, too regular: the pines stood in their rows, straight and plain as matchsticks, and only sprouted braches half-way up. And the sky was empty, and so blue that it made his eyes smart.

A layer of blue, a layer of green, a layer of black, a layer of white. And, oh dear, a layer of red. With his last coherent thoughts, he reflected that blood was surely an unpleasant muddy-brown sort of colour? After all, he’d seen it often enough, plenty of it his own. But now he watched it dribbling onto the snow and blooming like roses.

With one hand he scrabbled in that same red snow, as if trying to find purchase and prevent a fall. In a moment, all his memories dissolved like frightening dreams.

Theatre of Disillusions 2: This Time, It's Versical

I have redone the prologue as verse, to see what would happen. What has happened is that it has become rather more explicit and didactic. The ghost of Brecht peered critically over my shoulder while I was at it. I think it's certainly more striking and interesting, but then the form suggests a rather grand idiom when this is all supposed to be deliberately sordid. Well, here it is: since both end by saying that everything is up to the audience, I had better leave it to you to decide which you prefer.

Theatre of Disillusions: a burlesque show in X acts

Prologue

Lights up. Stage empty but for the Master of Ceremonies, a tall, athletic man, very good-looking in a chiselled masculine way, dressed immaculately in Edwardian fashion. Young, but old enough for stubble. Could be a bit ethnic, but only a bit. Energetic and active: strides about and accompanies his words with expansive gestures. Distinctive voice: histrionic, but with a slightly tinny, grating, artificial note – as if heard through a loudspeaker.

Master of Ceremonies: My friends! I bid you welcome to our play,

Beneath whose powerful hypnotic sway

No thing upon the stage is what it seems:

Our International Theatre of Dreams!

In this, the planet’s greatest magic-show

We mean to upturn all you think you know!

In earlier ages, primitive and poor,

Beset by famines, plagues, and deadly war,

Illusion’s art was greatly in demand

From all the greatest powers in the land:

Without our magic-tricks, the masses might

Have asked about the reasons for their plight.

But what a simple stumbling display

These early efforts seem to us today!

On viewing them, we jaded moderns smirk:

How can a priest do a magician’s work?

Then came old Shakespeare, reckoned in his time

A crafty wizard: he could spin a rhyme,

I grant you, and his rhymes could make a king

Into a noble or a monstrous thing

Just as he pleased. But, well, these words recall:

[Quoting in a melodramatic Victorian voice]‘Suppose within the girdle of these walls

Are now confined two mighty monarchies.’

Such simple, humble, quaint effects as these!

To gamble all his labours of creation

Upon his audience’ imagination!

Good God! This was of all his several flaws

The worst: that he would bid the audience pause

And think! [this word to be enunciated much as a camp pantomime villain would the word ‘children’] A thought will make illusion flee

And leave exposed the grim reality,

More naked yet, once robbed of its disguise

Than if it had been plain before our eyes.

But never fear! Such thought-provoking feats,

Our modern methods render obsolete.

Imagination, now, has had his day:

He slowly starves to death for want of pay.

His job has gone to us, dear friends, who can

Turn strings of simple numbers into man,

And what is more, can likewise reduce man

To numbers in our simple formulae:

Such miracles we practice every day!

Our theatres to temples we can turn,

And temples as mere theatres we spurn!

It’s true, dear friends: the world will never know

So marvellously intricate a show

As ours; and yet all that would be for naught

Without a public free from loathsome thought.

All that we do is meant to entertain

You! [sinks imploringly to his knees], audience, and all would be in vain

If ever you should you should raise a heckling voice:

All our success, or failure, is your choice.

You are the kings and queens at whose fine court

We are but jesters who must sing and sport.

You are stern Caesars, who, with one raised hand

Can life and fame, or shameful death, command

For we who strain and struggle at your feet.

You are the gods whose favour we entreat

When every night we build and sacrifice

A new-made miracle of rare device:

A whole world put together in a day

Presented to you, juggled, thrown away!

And so, like Shakespeare, we must humbly pray

That you will kindly judge our little play. 

Curtain down. 

Theatre of Disillusions

STAG elections are a-coming, and spurred by this I am beginning to write a play, although not one particularly meant to be performed with the humble (hence, we would remind you, honest, noble, genuine etc.) resources of Glasgow, or at all. The feel of it owes a great deal to a short excerpt of The Last Days of Mankind by Karl Kraus which featured on a radio interview I heard. There doesn't seem to be any readily available English translation, boo! But even the short section of prologue struck me to the bone. It was a hysterical and darkly hilarious blurring of the line between reality and fiction - which, come to think of it, is an alright description of the official world culture of the 21st century. So I've decided to start writing something inspired by it and by Hollywood, entitled, ekhem:

Theatre of Disillusion: being a burlesque show in X Acts.


Prologue.

Lights up. Stage empty but for the Master of Ceremonies, a tall, athletic man, very good-looking in a chiselled masculine way, dressed immaculately in Edwardian fashion. Young, but old enough for stubble. Could be a bit ethnic, but only a bit. Energetic and active: strides about and accompanies his words with expansive gestures. Distinctive voice: histrionic, but with a slightly tinny, grating, artificial note – as if heard through a loudspeaker.

Master of Ceremonies: Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, welcome, welcome, welcome to the International Theatre of Dreams and Illusions, the greatest magic-show on Earth! And those of you who have witnesses our earlier performances this season will know that this is no empty boast.

With us you have been transported, without ever leaving your seats, to every part of the globe and to all the extremes of human emotion! Not only have we made you, as that no-good amateur Shakespeare said, ‘Suppose within the girdle of these walls / Are now confined two mighty monarchies,’ but we have also made you believe that they both look astonishingly like southern California! These and other marvels are accomplished by our mastery of hypnosis. Any C-list hypnotist can send a theatre of intelligent adults to sleep, but only we can send them into fits of laughter or floods of tears! Not content with such trifles, we have altered the past and the future! Through the miracle of modern science, we have turned strings of numbers into human beings, and human beings into strings of numbers in our formulae! In your minds we have elevated this theatre into a temple, and reduced temples to so many theatres!

And tonight, tonight, tonight we will demonstrate and expose the greatest, most audacious illusion of them all! For you, who have marvelled at our seemingly limitless power over your very minds, do not realise that compared with you we are as nothing. You are the kings and queens before whose hundreds of rather cramped thrones we poor jesters caper! You are the stern Caesars whose raised or lowered thumbs decide the fate of we gladiators – and where the primitive Romans fought with swords, we nightly bludgeon each-other to death with Love, Adventure, Comedy, Tragedy. What! [Falls to knees, head in hands.] Kings? Emperors?! What a tasteless and inferior bunch, compared to you! Ladies and gentlemen [Springs smoothly back to feet], you are the gods for whom we ministering angels nightly create new worlds! And tonight, tonight, TONIGHT we will reveal how each of these worlds which we construct, juggle for your amusement, and toss over our shoulders in fact owes its origin to you!

Ladies and gentlemen, will you please applaud… yourselves!

Curtain down.

I aim to go on to chart the creation of a Hollywood film in a sort of surreal allegorical music-hall fashion. My Big Idea is that at the end, the rather grotesque finished product is presented to the audience and they are, once again invited to give it their applause - begged, even, with great stress on how without their approval the whole edifice will crumble. The ending is left up to them. 

Bandits! part the second and last

Your eyes do not deceive you: I have finished a work of prose fiction! Now that the exam-wave has crested I have a lot of time on my hands, so I'll have to be careful not to make it a habit. To guard against this contingency I am making myself proper dinners and finding other inventive ways to waste my time. Witness the results!

This is my newest craze, Balkan spaghetti. You simply fry a couple of chopped garlic cloves in a big splodge of tomato-paste, spoon on, and mix with lots of yogurt.

And this is how I have spent a thoroughly productive day:

I've had these rather fine measuring-matryoshki since Christmas (cheers, folks!) but they now appear for the first time in glorious technicolour, in the national blazons of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. It goes without saying that the whole thing is unbelievably rich in symbolic significance, possibly.

Should a newly-minted adult citizen be this pleased with himself about anything accomplished using Crayola paint-pots? Do I care?

And now, Bandits!: the not-so-thrilling conclusion.

Nebless Tom was selected, by the rough and silent democracy of cattle-rustlers, to represent the suit. As the planner of the raid and distributor of the loot, he could rely on his comrades to keep their eyes trained on each-other even while he exposed his back for some seconds together. And of course if there turned out to be some hitch in his plan waiting beyond the locked door, it was only fair that he should be the first to know.

The door, designed for a civilised modern age in which it is possible to fortify your tower with so many interlocking bastions of glamour, distraction, and deceit that actual fortification can be all but done away with, yielded to one determined boot. In strode Tom – and behind him the other chieftains (Watt was one of the few people in history to master the striding limp), squeezing through the door together before Tom was left alone with the loot for too long. 

‘Intae the neuk thare, you!,’ cried Skellit Harry, brandishing his pistol with a motion so expansive as to permit no doubt that the unfortunate ‘you’ might be any of the men around the conference table. (I regret to say that this sample of executives and officials were all indeed men; but in fairness to them so were all of there 16^th century adversaries, so you can’t say fairer than that then.) But for some lengthy seconds there was no exodus into the corner, or any other movement at all. In hindsight, of course, we can call this dangerously stupid; but then the whole point of hindsight is that it makes everything clearer, no?

In any case they all jumped to it after Jack Pott shot the windows out – which was his normal method of expressing agreement, disagreement, approval, disapproval, anger, jubiliation, surprise, and sundry other emotions.

‘Richt!,’ said Tom, slapping his gauntleted hands in satisfaction. ‘We’re gey sorrae it haed tae be denner-time whan we cawed, but juist haun’ ower the clink an we’ll be aff.’ 

This request, succinct and gentlemanlike though it certainly was, didn’t have quite the desired effect. The Bolivian chap, and many others besides, appeared to take it as some sort of mortal threat. The mass of neat suits containing the conference-goers shivered as if it had been one being.

‘Thare’s naw muckle a body can say for hou thay eat here,’ said Watt, surveying the supper of papers and Blackberries on the conference-table. This was interpreted as further elaboration of a cruel and unusual death.

It dawned on Peter Laidlaw that he was almost alone in understanding what had just been said. He cleared this throat. Whether he was a coward or not, or whether it was at this moment that he ceased to be one, are questions that need not detain us here. Suffice it to say that he found a quavering voice.

‘…What do you want?...’ His words hung uncomfortably in the air, demanding in the next few moments a dramatic resolution, one way or the other. (Rather like what kept happening to Jack Pott.)

‘The clink, ye gawkie,’ said Tom generously. ‘The siller. The money.’

There was a rippling of suits as frightened and quizzical glances were exchanged. The rievers had enough career experience to tell the fear of being robbed from the fear of being shot: it was clear enough that there was no money to hand.

Nebless Tom and Peter Laidlaw looked intently through each-other in the hush that followed, both rather surprised that nobody had deigned to shoot them yet.

‘We haed an ettlin,’ said Tom cautiously, his tongue weighing each new word much as his hands weighed the pistol and sabre at his belt, ‘That a guid severals hunder-thousand pound waur passin haunds the evening.”

Strictly, the conference-goers had to admit to themselves (for even the Bolivian chappie was able to follow the outline of this remark, thanks to that powerful thing, the survival-instinct), that was true. That was the purpose of the deal. What kind of a world would it be if people made efficiency savings purely for efficiency’s sake? But you didn’t say it! Men in steel bonnets didn’t burst in on meetings, either, but that at least was something you could by virtue of its clear impossibility avoid thinking about, when it wasn’t happening. No, it was the shocks that hovered over you waiting for their moment that were the worst.

‘Sae thare’s naw ony clink,’ said Watt philosophically. ‘Let’s awa. We’re still naw ony iller aff, whilk’s better nor some raids hae endit, aye, Harry?’ He was actually better-off, by several surreptitiously lifted Blackberries.

Harry nodded disappointedly, as did a relieved Tom. The three of them moved with a measured gait towards the door – measured once again so that they would all pass through it together. It was when this proved less of a squeeze than you might have thought that they realised Jack Pott had stayed perfectly still.

‘This is nae denner,’ he said slowly, like a man caught up in calculations. 'Thare’s money in this, a maiter gin it’s here for takin or naw. Wha’s is that, then? Yours, or yours?’

He gestured violently at the suits with his hand. You would almost have preferred it to be his sword; at least you know precisely why you were frightened to death of swords.

‘D’ye mind whan ye stealt thae hunder kyne aff o ma faither, Harry?,’ he said suddenly, almost conversationally. Skellit Harry tried to suppress a look of profound self-satisfaction. ‘A mind, aye,’ he said with masterful self-control.

‘But A cud aye hae liftit thaim back again…’ In fact he had; but Harry might have thought better of mentioning this even had Jack not sounded as if he expected no answer.

‘Gin we’re gangin, we maun gang,’ said Tom, looking nervously out of the broken window at the silvery smudge of the rising moon. But Watt hirpled back across the threshold with a bemused look on his face. 

‘We sud tak some wee thingum, ye’re sayin, aye, Jack? Something mebbe that’s haird for tae buy back?’

Jack nodded.

‘…Forby thae wee black things we waur liftin juist than, Watt?,’ said Harry. ‘Och, daed ye think a daedna see? A waes myndin tae git ma skare efterhaund.’

‘A’v a queesitive naitur,’ said Watt smoothly, tossing him a Blackberry. After a pointed cough, Tom received one of his own, after which he went over to the window, to signal to the men holding the horses far below. But Jack, though offered his portion, was still far away.

‘Something thay canna buy back…’

The papers were all full of it the next day, of course: perhaps it wasn’t a very weighty story, and perhaps they had received some hints that it should certainly be handled lightly from important quarters; but journalists, too, are human. Each was once a smiling child, hard as it may be to imagine. And there is such a thing as good old-fashioned fun. Some of the papers made rather good puns.

The men were found naked and bound in various skips and wheelie-bins south of the Clyde; their clothes eventually washed up in County Antrim; their documentation and their Blackberries were nowhere to be found. The consequences of this development for Bolivia turned out to be quite momentous; but why should I trouble myself about Bolivia? Hardly anybody did. LifeSunTechGrow and the World Bank never had. The papers promptly forgot about it – in spite of the best efforts of one Peter Laidlaw, who left his job and went to live there as a legal advisor to the peasants and who wrote several pretty good books about his experiences, the first of which was called ‘21^st-century Bandits’ and was rather confessional in nature.

And what of the men receding, in a clatter of pistols and sabres and Blackberries, over the brow of the purple hills and into the famous Mists of History? I can’t honestly say that they even knew where Bolivia was. They just knew fair when they saw it and – what is much more important – when they didn’t. 

Glasgow Rose

Work on 'Bandits!' will, I hope, continue but the central image for this came to me just now and I needed to get it out of my head. It's another Glasgow poem. Possibly I should put a day in the diary for the writing of an Edinburgh poem, before I lose my ability to say 'dearrrrrrr' and forget that sex is what potatoes come in.

Glasgow Rose

Glasgow bears its backside along the old canal -
Rough and red, and bruised with open windows -
And fills it with its slurry and its waste.
Drunkards with heavy eyes go stumbling past,
Or stand and stare down urine-coloured swans.
Crushed cans lie in the beds of yellow reeds:
'Coca-cola', they lament,
And 'Tesco' say the flapping shopping bags;
And silently they argue with graffiti on the walls.

The mural seems like more graffiti, at first glance,
On its brick wall among the gutted warehouses,
The factories forever shut, their windows ever-open.
In the mural the canal is blue,
The factories are busy with black smoke;
But there are red flecks where the paint is chipped,
And I can hardly read the legend:
'Our Canal. Our Future.'

On a wet Spring evening,
Looking across the Forth-and-Clyde canal
I see a vision eloquent, complete,
Too perfect to change,
Too perfect to communicate.

Like the little white rose of Scotland.
And like that rose, too perfect yet to last.


For another poem, strike out the last line and write 'Too perfect to last' under 'Too perfect to change'. But that poem, that bit of no-good moony Romantic fatalism, could hardly be less like the call for change and struggle of my hard-edged Marxist pentameter. That other poem was written by a self-indulgent Edinburgh bourgeois, who I happen to know very well.

I suppose it's a Forth-and-Clyde poem by a person who has had a Forth-and-Clyde life, such of it as has transpired so far.

(PS: It has been observed by another Marxist poet that 'First comes grub and then the moral' and I know that I have of late been less regular in documenting my grub. But it's exam season so I am living on the same dish of Cauliflower Watsit for three nights in a row; probably silence is the best policy.)

Bandits!

I'm guiltily conscious that during the present lead-up to my exams I've been neglecting this blog to focus on procrastination. Here, then, is something I'm working on: not finished, as usual, but perhaps even as much as half-done.

Eric Hobsbawm, who is the best, was on the radio the other day and the interview set me after some books by him and others. At length (who even puts Eric Hobsbawm in psychology? Fortunately it was on the short-loan shelves so I didn't have to visit their floor; I mean, who knows what they keep up there?) I unearthed his classic study Primitive Rebels. He said of this in the interview that, although almost everybody in it now disagrees with him, he feels proud to have pretty much founded the history of how the anonymous masses of ordinary people thought about society, justice, resistance, and rebellion before the invention of modern politics.

One of the things he explores in the book is the noble or 'social' bandit. Every culture has got one of these and as one of the prototypes for all heroism, his shadow is everywhere. Humble-birth-foreign-war-return-family-wronged-blood-vengeange-outlaw-steals-rich-gives-poor-got-swagger-good-life-sense-humour-strong-drink-superhuman-skill-band-outlaws-huge-sidekick-jolly-priest-daring-escape-royal-pardon-betrayal-last-stand-but-escaped-disguise-and/or-sleeping-under-mountain; the English-speaking example is of course good old Robin Hood.

The narrative pattern is staring us in the face: the more controversial assertion of the book is that while you can't entertain any illusions about them - they certainly weren't revolutionaries, and they sometimes were really ruthless criminals who made a show of acting this way because of the power of the story - such people very often actually existed; until very recent times, in countries like Italy. They embodied an early kind of social protest: they were, arguably, a force for good.

This brought to my attention a bit of laxity in my thought and language. When roused to politics by my revolutionary chums I'm awfully fond of the word 'bandit' as a term of abuse towards the Parasite Exploiter Class; and yet as a good Marxist dedicated to the nationalisation of the boat-race, the abolition of Yorkshire pudding, and the overthrow of all that the Daily Mail holds dear I have rather a good opinion of actual bandits. Ho-hum.

So I did what any sensible person would and started to write a story about it.

I am rather pleased with ‘Langdreen’, which means, approximately, Longsuffering. It is located in Scottish Myth and Legend somewhere between Auchenfankle and Balwearie.

Nithsdale in the West March of Scotland, on a moor nearest to the farm-town of Langdreen. About 1570.
It was a day of fog, grey and cold as iron, piling up on the horizon until there was no horizon but only the ghosts of hills - perhaps low and close, or perhaps far away and towering. It was a wet, clammy day: the very air seemed to grope and grip. It was a short day: it fell at the soggy end of Winter, that grimmest season of the year when the snow has retreated to expose the black nakedness of the exhausted earth. To cap all this it was a day nearing its end.

Sunshine, then, for bandits!

Down the moors they went: pistols and sabers clattered like teeth shivering in the cold. They were stout little men on stout little nags: all gristle and bone, no fat to spare between them. The faces of the riders were drawn, silent, and alert under their steel bonnets; but below each face as it came out of the fog and briefly into view was the face of his weary, wild-eyed horse. They seemed made to contrast with one-another, like the masks of comedy and tragedy.

There were riders there from up and down the March country. They came from Scotland and from England, but then, those grand old names mattered little here. What mattered were the harsh, unwelcoming names of all the valleys with their old grudges, all the villages strung out along rushing rivers between the dark shoulders of the hills. What mattered were the names of the families, and the men. There were Laidlaws, Armstrongs, Hunters, Stampers. Grim old Hirplin Watt was there, and Skellit Harry who had sprung him out of the castle of Carlisle and, on another occasion under different circumstances, shot him through the knee (this being why he hirpled). Although the documents clearly show that he was at this time in Ireland, serving a life-sentence as a soldier as punishment for his crimes against the Queen’s Majesty, Nebless Tom was nevertheless there. So was Jack Pott the Bastard, who was in a similar condition except that it was the King’s Majesty and he’d been hanged.

There were no cattle with them, nor any torches lit: this was a raid, and on its way out.

Down the moors and up again: as the fog and the dark gathered and stirred thickly together, it became impossible to distinguish one ridge from the next. Down and up again went the riders; down and down went the sun. But just as vision grew useless it sent a few final rays over the horizon - like men laying an ambush where their raid has retreated – and showed in silhouette the rievers’ destination.

It was a tower: there were a lot of towers in the border-country, then, and this one was much like the rest. Stark, square, and black, it had no grace or beauty or even much in the way of showing-off. It proclaimed only this: that a man had had the wealth and power to have it built and that, come what would, he meant to keep them.

Swords were drawn, but without that satisfying ‘shing!’ noise which is actually, I believe, produced by cleaning a kitchen-knife with a damp flannel; without even so much as a steely glint, since polishing with sheep-grease had given the blades a dull bronze colour. After all, this was all clearly taking place long before the age of Hollywood. Clearly.

Finnieston, Glasgow, Scotland. About now.
The Crowne Plaza Hotel glowered across the Clyde. Stark, square, and black, it had no grace or beauty or even much in the way of showing-off. It proclaimed only this: that a man had had the wealth and power to have it built and that, come what would, he meant to keep them.

After all, the people able to stay there didn’t need it to be beautiful, because they didn’t have to look at it. They stayed in it, protected by its mirrored sides, and looked at the rest of the world: there was even a glass lift for this purpose. The appalling tower-blocks of Glasgow were being busily blown up so that they wouldn’t spoil the view for the people in the equally appalling high-rise hotels; they were to be replaced with more high-rise hotels.

In the function room, representatives of LifeSunTechGrowLife Private Equity were busy acquiring a controlling share in the utilities of Bolivia. Of course they didn’t look terribly busy: they sat around a table with representatives of that distant and beautiful country (one of whom, by an astonishing coincidence, was himself Bolivian!) and the World Bank; and listened to long speeches recited partly in numbers and partly in that special coded language known as advertising-copy. They could, in the conditions of complete privacy for which they had paid a good deal, have been frank about what they were doing - but habit is powerful. And the view from the windows, as the lights of the city winked on like eyes, would have made them uncomfortable.

Busy as they apparently were, at least one of them was profoundly bored. Peter Laidlaw was discreetly trying to build a tripod out of his fountain-pens, without success. It was the wretched rounded ends, he was sure of it. He was a great picker-up of fountain pens. He was probably a rich man these days – of course the thing about being rich is that, no matter how much money you receive on a monthly basis, there is always less after you’ve finished spending it – and still he refused to buy his own pens, instead picking them subtly off other people’s desks. Perhaps it was a kind of cosmic defense. Were he ever to confront his namesake saint at the celestial gate and be asked about his sins, he could cite his habit of stealing pens. This saved him from pondering just how he’d gotten his money, and whether it was possible to steal something from the other side of the world.

Outside the dark gathered, stirred thickly together with the fog from the Clyde.


A lone nag, shaggy and long-suffering and clearly wondering why it put up with his sort of thing, wondered into the car-park of the Crowne Plaza. It shook itself and whinnied irritably.

Hearing this in his booth, the duty guard looked up from his reading and stared. He was a Glasgow boy, and had never actually seen a border-nag in the flesh, never mind in the car-park. He regarded it as it was about to explode.

Jack Pott grimaced. A decent watchman who knew his part in the proceedings would have chosen this moment to run out into the dark to restrain the stray animal and been clouted neatly over the head. But clearly standards had declined.

He urged his own pony up to the barrier, drew a pistol from under his oily cloak, and fired it lazily in no particular direction.

‘Staun’ tae! Haunds ower yer hied!’

Ah, good. At least they still understood the basics.


Peter Laidlaw’s mind was already on the way home, so it is hardly surprising that he was the first to hear the noise being made by the unexpected guests that it met on the way out. Like the unfortunate security guard now trussed to his swivelling chair, he for a while did nothing about it, since it almost certainly didn’t exist.


Hirplin Watt hirpled into the glass lift and glared suspiciously at the control panel.

‘Aicht,’ said Nebless Tom helpfully, and prodded the appropriate button with his pistol.

‘Why for thare’s no ony thriteen?,’ said Watt.

‘It’s ill-luckit,’ said Nebless Tom, who’s job it was to know this sort of thing.

Watt wrinkled his nose. ‘Are thay daft here?’

‘An anither thing,’ said Skellit Harry, attempting to work himself a corner, the iron sewn into his shirt clanking unpleasantly. ‘Gin this is the Crowne Plaza Hotel, whaur’s the Crowne Plaza?’

Nebless Tom sighed – causing an odd, unsettling noise to come from the hole where his nose had been. ‘We daed confabble anent this. It’s cried efter the fowk that awn it.’

There was a contemplative silence, broken by Jack Pott. ‘Crowne Plaza? Bluidy stupit name.’

On this, at least, there was general consensus, and the lift completed its journey in silence.


Peter Laidlaw had just succeeded in erecting his tripod. Most unfairly, the conference did not choose that moment to end. And now it’s droning was accompanied by an intensification of those odd noises from outside: clattering metal and harsh raised voices. Wasn’t this place supposed to be four-star?

The food that made an Empahr

The public houses of our island are festooned in banners celebrating 'the beer that made an Empire', and so for my first dinner back in the Second City of the said, Glasgow, I decided to join in this culinary festival. I made a dish of that traditional hale and hearty lumpy-mash-based stuff that sent Britain's sons exploring, conquering, and looting the four corners of the world. They crossed oceans in buckets, clambered mountains, marched beneath the cruel sun of Rajastan, battled the ferocious Naringi-Burbas of the Sudan; and for what? For riches? No! You should have seen what we paid the boys in red who gave us command of the riches of the world, it's a laugh. For glory? No! We threw our soldiers out of public houses and jeered them in the streets! For the good of humanity? Pshaw! *Slapping of thighs in merriment*

No, it was for a cause far more profound than such vanities: to find somewhere where they would never and could never be served old-fashioned British dinners. Three cheers for us!



Take three good-sized potatoes, wash, peel, cut into lumps and put on the boil. While they're boiling, slice up a decent-sized onion or most of a big one, and a pack of white mushrooms. Cut up a couple of back-rashers, and half a good handful of cherry tomatoes. (Tomatoes, it is true, aren't traditional British food. If you want to keep it authentic, get some South African or Nigerian ones, certified Unfair Trade. I mean, empire must have some perks, right?) Oil up a frying pan (at this point the potatoes should want another ten minutes or so) and start with the onions, adding the mushrooms, the bacon, and finally the tomatoes as you go.

When the potatoes slide off a knife, drain them, dice them up a bit finer, and mash thoroughly. Then chuck in the contents of the frying pan, season well, and stir together. This recipe is good for two or even three helpings: if after half of it you feel an urge to march on Khartoum, that means it's working.

Train-robbery

On my journeys to and from the Orkney islands by train and ferry I finished my books and then got writers' block; but anything can be produced artificially in the 21st century and that includes inspiration. First I chose my theme: train-robbery (the first thing that came to mind as something that could have enlivened my surroundings). Then I wrote a list of characters, roles, events, plot-twists, and other things of that nature, and gave them all sorts of designations – one, two, a, b, up, down, sideways, that sort of thing. Then I made little papers chits bearing the same symbols. Finally I sneezed on the whole assembly. The result: P.G Wodehouse meets The White Guard. The story so far is below: more to follow. For once I have actually come up with an ending and, what's more, written it. It's just the in-the-middle bits left to sort out.

(Yes I reused the bit about Autumn and mortality from 'Meanwhile, in the 1930s...'. I have to eat, you know.)


It was mid-afternoon on a pleasant estate in southeastern Ukraine, at the end of the long, troubled final summer of the Russian aristocracy. Autumn had arrived, bringing with it a revolution of such world-changing proportions that even the venerable landscaped woodlands had broken out in Bolshevik red and gold. This, combined with the birds singing elegies and the greatly exaggerated slowness with which petals fell from the dying flowers, made it clear to anyone with any knowledge of the Russian climate that a revolutionary front was incoming.

In the parlour of the manor-house it was afternoon tea. The beautiful young duchess (if you are young and a duchess beauty takes care of itself) Zina Panina, who had come into the ownership when Colonel Panin died in '17 of a venereal disease complicated by German shellfire, stared glumly out of the window at the insurgent forest.

On the one hand, of course, she was in favour of revolution as a necessary antidote to the sheer banality of everything, and the bloodier the better. The Bolsheviks only had their social theories to tell them that the upper classes should be shot and deprived of civil rights; she actually knew them. But on the other... well... a few years ago it had meant something to be a modernist poetess, famous bisexual, and semi-professional subject of scandal. (Zina was a well-educated, independent-minded woman and would never consent to be the direct or indirect object of anything.)

The other problem with the revolution was the deluge of Moscow refugees. Their factories, their diamonds, their command of Russian history they had all left to Comrade Lenin; but they had been sure to take their banality with them to Ukraine. Take her aunt Sofia, who knew as much about poetry as she did about bisexuality: that they were both probably virulent rashes of some kind. She was, as usual, asking the most ghastly questions.

'I meantersay, under Comrade Trotsky, who will serve the tea? Speaking of which... thankyou, Fedya.' Fedya, the aged, serf-born family retainer, had been a model of loyalty in every year which didn't have a social revolution (isn't statistical analysis a bitch?). Now he regarded his mistress with a look suggesting that it could well be her.

Zina turned away from the window and set down her teacup with a sound like the champing of teeth. 'Auntie. We are privileged to witness the emergence of the blazing red phoenix of chaos and change from the ashes of the old world. Can you not take your mind off the tea?'

Fedya and Sofia, united for once, gave her a look suggesting that it was very easy for a person with a cup of tea in hand to say this. The silence was broken by Bondaruk the village school-master. 'Ah, but it's all about who serves the tea and so on, isn't it? Marxism, I mean.'

'Marx!' Zina waved her hand, as if wiping away the forces of historical inevitability in exasperation. 'Marx no more leads the Reds than St. George leads the Whites. It is the end for all bearded prophets. That's the whole aesthetic merit of the revolution.'

'...Lenin's got a beard, doesn't he?'

'Auntie.'

'She's right, you know,' said Bondaruk. 'And Trotsky.'

'And Denikin,' said Father Grigoriy, who had been hurt by the dismissal of bearded prophets. He, too, needed to eat, after all.

'Kolchak was clean-shaven.'

'Is Kolchak dead?'

'Did Petlyura have a beard?'

'Is he dead?'

'You know, I always used to say the same thing to dear Vladimir when he was alive. Beards, I said-'

Zina put her head in her hands. Who knows what she would have done if not the the fortuitous bullet which at that moment shattered the window, smashed Father Grigoriy's teacup (had she been looking, Zina could have made rather a good poem out of the resulting black-and-white explosion; but she wasn't, and the old priest merely fainted), and buried itself in the stucco ceiling.

'Aw laun' tae the tylin masses!,' cried a voice from below in Ukrainian. (I have taken the liberty of a cultural-idiomatic translation.) 'Doun wi the pah-rasite explyter class!'

'What tiling masses?,' said Aunt Sofia. 'All the cottages round here are thatched. We can't keep that many tilers employed, surely.'

'Toiling, I think he was saying,' said Bondaruk discreetly: ten years spent trying to stop youngsters from speaking any Ukrainian in his classroom had given him a fair command of it.

Zina did not write in Ukrainian but had had a half-hearted affair or two with people who did, so it is probably just as well that she didn't hear this exchange. She was storming down to the garden; and it was a storm as portentous, as black and broiling and fertile with lightning-flashes, as that which had engulfed Russia generally at the start of the revolution. This really was too much.


To be continued! Thrill to tales of train-robbery! Gasp at the ruthlessness of psychotic White bandit Ataman Burbosh! Be flabbergasted by the cunning of People's Commissar Sholokhov! Witness Aunt Sofia confront and defeat the Red Army of Workers and Peasants! All this and more coming soon.