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. 

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?

Eat yer parritch and wait for juistice!

Still lacking a camera, and worried lest my wide-eyed 1850s adolescents should get it into their heads that they own this place, I have produced something different, which happens to cover much of this blog's subject matter in a oner.

Recipe sonnet: a Scottish literary breakfast treat, as made in Scotland according to the traditional and sustainable method by craftsmen who care

A gnawing sense of guilt you can’t explain;
A mind tied up in dualistic twists;
Ancestral homes forever lost in mists;
A Gaelic air on lovers, drowning, pain;
Some nettle-water; tot of whisky; peat
Fresh taken from some Covenanter’s marsh,
A wild-eyed fear of Heaven’s judgment (harsh…).
Mix these ingredients on a medium heat
In equal parts, however much you need -
In this (one!) case, you needn’t be exact -
The oats must go in gradually, throughout.
Best sert wi sapsie Lallans bittocks, dried,
And with a jar of firm, grim faith in fact
(For best effect, include a nagging doubt).


This sonnet produced on behalf of VisitScotland with funds from the Scottish government. They paid for me to attend university, and as you can clearly see it was an obviously worthwhile investment.

The word-kitchen

'Word-smith': not a brilliant metaphor, is it, when you think about it? 'Play-wright' is good: although it apparently began as an insult, it seems to me to capture the intricacy of writing for the stage, the requirement that everything precisely fit together; and of course it's also rather a good pun. But while 'word-smith' expresses an appropriate combination of heat and violence with creative skill, it doesn't ring true technically. Smiths turn one lump of metal into a finished piece of work, whereas writing is an act of assembly. But how about a chef? He combines things from all over the world, with care, craftsmanship, and an experimental spirit; and he also mutilates them in various ways before and after he does. This seems a very good analogy.

So it shall be the title of my official writing blog. Which may also from time to time show off the produce of my regular kitchen. Funny how these things just come together, isn't it?

My goals are several. In this one place I can bring together such of my existing work as is worth it; in this space I can think aloud and comment on it; and hopefully the existence of this blog will, by some combination of duty with vanity, induce me to get off my bum and actually do some writing now and again.

As I have today! This piece came about by two stages. I got the idea and much of the imagery looking out of the window as my train crossed Scotland from Edinburgh to Glasgow this morning; and scribbled it down for something to do, primarily as an exercise in pentameter. I wasn't very satisfied, so I thought no more about it. But this evening, at Glasgow Uni's Literary Society or, to use its marvellously Soviet-sounding shorthand, LitSoc, I and others got into a long chat with our speaker, Alan Riach. He is the chair of Scottish Literature (yes, the chair - for the WORLD) and we spoke about, among other things, the Scots language. I felt suddenly that my scribbling of earlier wanted to be put into Lallans: that would give it life, somehow. And indeed as soon as I got started I found not only that a dialect voice made the thing meatier and more vivid: it also furnished it, out of nowhere I knew of consciously, with a piece of folk-song for its central image to interact with and with a nicely ambiguous ending depending on the colloquial Scots confusion of 1st person singular and plural.

So here, to start us off (see what I did there?), it is:


‘Frae the laund o the gowden an green’

Sae gangs some auld ill-myndit sang; but nou
A see the laund o black an frostit white:
Snaw mizzlin aff yon mirk an riekie braes;
An scuddie trees; an empie furrit fields.
Aye, empie; but the wintry licht, sae cauld
An snell the sel o it, in leamin doun
Haes made the broun yirt juist sae wairm an bien
As gowd coud iver be. Ach, gowd! Whit’s gowd?
It’s trumphery an whirligig is aw!
Ay but thare’s mair o walth in gowden fields
O wheat an aits, nor in yer pailaces
An temples; still an on thare’s mair again
In snell an gowden licht that shiens an kythes
Whaur yon daurk nakit fields will growe again,
An growe again. Thare’s gowd eneuch tae mak
The hail warld rich an fouthie; gowd eneuch
For us.