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.