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. 

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.

Exploits of Orwell and Pinter

During his Oxford days, Pinter was reckoned an ace oarsman and was a favourite of the boat-race team. One day he met up with his pal Orwell for a drink. As he rose to go to the bar, Orwell couldn’t help noticing that the seat of his trousers was sodden wet. Exercising the greatest possible tact, he pointed this out.

Pinter grimaced. “Ah, yes. We were out practicing, you see, and sprung a leak. A very small one, and so we kept on blithely rowing without noticing the water until it was almost at our ankles. Our fault, really, we’ve been putting the craft under too much strain lately.”

Orwell nodded agreement. “Actions have consequences, old boy. You seep as you row.”

Meanwhile, in the Dark Forest of the Slavic Soul...

So I was having a poke around in Slavonic Studies in the library today, as it feels sufficiently close to doing my Russian project to fool my guilty conscience, and I found the adapted-for-stage version of Bulgakov's The White Guard in the English translation by Glenny, the same chap who did the novel so well. I did not even know such a thing existed!

It's a great read. A lot more direct and in-your-face than the novel: in large part this is the nature of the form, and of course the hand of the Soviet censors is visible in places. The past - both of the characters and of their society - has been largely cut out, the subplots removed, and several characters merged. Everything has been made explicit that in the novel was mouthed suggestively, and of course we've lost the gorgeous dream-sequence history of the civil war in Ukraine. But the fierce, embattled humanity of these flawed and noble souls shines through just as clearly. The play makes up for what it can't do by putting the spotlight on what was only one feature of the novel, the sheer energy and sometimes fun of the characters interacting: Alexei and Nikolka discharge much the same roles as in the novel, but Elena has considerably more crap not to take because she doesn't take any crap, and Myshlaevsky gets even more zingers. You have to love Myshlaevsky. He knows he's trapped in The Tragedy Of A Nation and he's not going to let it spoil his fun.

I want to see it now! (In a clear demonstration of the basic rottenness of our capitalist system, it was on in Edinburgh about two years before I'd ever heard of Bulgakov.) But here is a thought. In Shakespeare's day it seems to have been customary on the English stage to represent two separate nations by giving one lot the broad Scots accents just made familiar by King James. In the particular historical context Scots as Ukrainian seems to me spot-on: a language or dialect with its own history and literature but considered by educated society to be slightly ridiculous in the mouths of anyone but the Unwashed Masses. And of course the prospect of watching fuzzy-hatted cossacks striding about the stage shouting in Taysidese is its own attraction.

Surely this means that our White Guards, who disguise their Ukrainian origins and connections by adopting authorised Russian elite culture more fervently than any mere Russian, can only possibly be played with southern Edinburgh accents as thick as treacle? The fact is, our tribe need more cultural exposure. I have the greatest possible admiration for both The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Maisie MacKenzie the Morningside cat; but we need to be cast out of type, and a setting so soaked in blood, vodka, and white wine is about as far from type as you could get without losing the things so essential to our brand: black comedy and acute bourgeois neurosis.

So how about it, then, lads?


(No fiction? No. I had a vague idea of creating Maisie Comes to Kiev, in which our young feline heroine goes to stay with her cousins the Purrbins and their friends such as Meowshlaevsky and Whiskervinsky, fighting against the Ukrainian nationalist forces of Petlyura, who history has already furnished with an absurd cat pun. But I couldn't make myself do it. I too had a childhood, you know,)

Meanwhile, in the 1930s...

I have had great fun reading Orlando and have felt for some time an urge to give it the sort of affectionate parody that I gave Jane Eyre. The problem is, a parody of Orlando would be Orlando only not as good.

Here's something, however. One of my favourite bits of the novel is the stuff about The Spirit of the Age, so I decided to create a scene in which the Age it helped to define gives way to a new one.


The scene was a moderately-sized country residence amidst its grounds. Autumn was coming: the landscape of that well-known but elusive place, which has had libraries written about it but cannot be found on an OS map, Rural England, looked dignified but weary. Everything was at its most achingly beautiful and also its most painfully transitory. Birds sang about mortality. Petals fell from roses with exaggerated slowness.

Inside the house, some of the rising and established stars of English literature had gathered for tea and debate. It was impressive to hear: with only their words, they dismantled centuries of literary heritage and re-assembled it in new and exciting shapes. They were very keen, indeed, on the new and exciting. There was little of it to be found occurring naturally on their snoozing amber island, forcing them into more and more extreme experimentation: they ripped up the boundaries of class, race, gender, time, and space.

Were one in a position to listen quietly in at the breakfast table on a particular September morning, one could here all of the following: the renowned critic Scratching demonstrating that Donne had been the first modernist; Euphrosinia Plum-Duff proving that being a man and being a woman were both equally impossible; a recitation by the avant-garde poet Smealley in which the motor-car was hymned as the lily of the 20th century; a discussion of the latest piece by Schotterboldt, ‘Man in blackface coughing repeatedly on the piano keys’; and a lot of really quite good homoerotic stuff.

Young David Oats, who had been proclaimed the proletarian Blake of the 20th century by Scratching, speared himself a fried egg with a sense of vague unease. It is true that any proper socialist feels uneasy after his fourth fried egg, but he had long since convinced himself that socialism did not mean that nobody would have four fried eggs for breakfast: it meant that everybody would, and so for a son of the mines to enjoy them in a country house amongst the finest intellectuals of the age was no doubt a step in the right direction. The left direction, that is.

But still, he felt troubled. He took advantage of a lull in the conversation to get up and go over to the French window. From this admirable vantage point, he witnessed one of the decisive moments in history. (It is true that nothing really decisive had ever happened at Tanglethorn Hall per se. But a look out of the French windows revealed a general world phenomenon.)

Storm clouds gathered, fat, black, and bombastic. Then they broke. Then they gathered again. Then they broke again. Then they gathered again. Then they broke again. It was clear that this process would continue for some time.

The rains they poured down instantly sent the entire world into a grim, soggy, demoralizing winter. All sorts of extra-ordinary things took place. In China, the piercing claws of a small, agile dragon in an awful pince-nez stirred a far larger, older, craggier dragon from its ancient slumber (although this all took place in conditions of immense inscrutability). In America, the party was declared over and the drunken guests were fished out of the swimming-pool and driven home, where to their horror they discovered that most people in America weren’t obscenely rich. In Russia, muscular heroes of labour were sent to sink a mine-shaft into the unexplored and surpassingly deep depths of the Slavic Soul. In Germany, a magnificent cabaret about the end of civilization had to be suspended in the middle of the second act when the theatre ran out of money and the producer was sent to a concentration camp. India, which up to then had been all adventurous Afghan frontier until you got to the temples of lost civilizations, turned out to be miles and miles of bloody India, full of coolies joining trade-unions and political parties. Africa was shown to exist for the first time.

Weighed down by heavy thoughts (and possibly also fried egg, we must confess) Oats returned to the breakfast table, listening to the rain patter on the roof like the machine-guns of aircraft in the coming war, which everybody had just realized was inevitable.

The atmosphere had changed in his absence. Scratching had joined the Communist Party and was now showing that Donne had been a pioneering Marxist. Euphrosynia Plum-Duff was trying to prevent the war by sponsoring seminars; everybody of course knew that the war was inevitable, but this only made them feel even more urgently the need for seminars. Smealey had gone off to Tuscany on invitation from Mussolini, but the company had been made up again by Schotterboldt, who had had to flee into exile.

Breakfast was allowed to go stale as everybody chewed on the world crisis. The servants came in to clear it away, and several people felt intense existential guilt about their existence.

Oats, who was particularly so affected, went outside to watch the drizzle on the hillsides. He lit a soggy fag and puffed at it, discontentedly. Standing in the doorway, we has suddenly jostled aside by the Scotsman Robert Wilson, who was on his way to catch a train.

Not much has been seen of Wilson at Tanglethorn that Summer except at dinner-time: he had been invited to replace a whole succession of Irishmen, all of whom had succumbed to the urge to travel to Paris which affects the men of Eirinn so strongly for some reason, as a provider of Celticism; but when it turned out that his brand involved no Lillies of the 20th century but only the potatoes, rain, poverty, and Calvinism of the 20th century he had fallen out of favour. These were the things literature was supposed to help abolish, people felt, or at any rate successfully ignore.

Oats had thought he might have stayed around to gloat now that the march of history had so eloquently proved him right, but as he explained, he suddenly felt an irresistible calling to alight on his native moors, there to brood more satisfactorily. Unfortunately Oats didn’t understand much of this, as Wilson said it in a new form of broad Scots which he had just invented.

Oats wished he had a native moor: he could do with a bit of brooding-room. He scanned the rainy grey horizon of Rural England. In a rush its oldness, its grayness, the endearing mediocrity of its landscape suddenly overcame him in a way that would have been quite impossible when it was the centre of the world, the sun never set on it, and its roses never wilted. Wilted roses, dead trees, and slag-heaps seemed suddenly to find their voices and join in a chorus of forgotten hymns.

Thunder rumbled in the distance, and the rain intensified. Oats sighed significantly.

Well, he said in the privacy of his mind, there’s nothing else for it. I shall have to fight fascism.

Pint-sized essays

I've recovered my camera from the dark and noisome confines (I don't know what 'noisome' means, but I gather that it's not 'noisy' and that it is a common attribute of confines which happen also to be dark) of a discarded pair of trousers. Alas!: a day too late to record my rather delicious salmon-and-dill pasta. And you know what salmon costs, so some time this week you will be treated to the cheapest thing on our menu: the word-kitchen's Very Simple Pizza (Which Isn't, Strictly Speaking, Pizza). Think of it as the credit-crunch to my subprime-whatever boom. For now, though, I've got to rush off to see a show. Latecomers, my ticket informs me without any ambiguity whatever, Will Not Be Admitted.

So I'll skip on to the writing, which I prepared earlier. A new policy update had reached me from the powers that be here in Glasgow Uni. Apparently it has been determined that 1500 words including footnotes and bibliography is far too lenient a length for history essays; some students are still proving able to squeeze worthwhile analysis into a space which seedy internet dating services would consider insufficient and this will not do, it will not do at all. Therefore from now on all essays are to be submitted in strict haiku form.

Ah well: I must make the best of a bad situation. Here, then, are some prospective essays for the various questions according to the new rules. They can be purchased from me for £20 apiece.

Revolt and revolution


1. In what circumstance might common disturbances turn into violent revolt in Europe before 1850?

Customs violated;
Incorrect Christology;
Folk starving to death.

2. To what degree did the revolutionary movements in France between 1785 and 1871 share common grievances?

Lots; France was full of
Injustice; also, peace not
All that exciting.

3. ‘In the major European revolutions, violent repression by the authorities never worked as intended.’ Discuss with reference to at least two revolutions.

For the last bloody
Time: first you shoot and then you
Revoke civil rights.

Gender

1. ‘The Enlightenment created ideals of equality and individual rights.’ Why did it take so long for these ideals to be extended to include women?

How can I put this:
Well, recent research suggests
Men are huge bastards.

2. To what extent have concepts of masculinity gradually become more ‘civilised’ during the period 1500 and 2000?

I reject the term
‘Civilisation’; it’s a
Cultural construct.

3. In what respects did feminists of the ‘first wave’ (late 19th – early 20th Century) differ in approach from those of the ‘second wave’ (1960s-1970s)? You may focus on one or two countries.

Suffrage, good idea;
Equal pay, better; but best?
Essays on Jane Eyre.

The changing urban environment


1. How effective were the practical responses to the problems (social, administrative, environmental) created by urban growth EITHER in the period before 1800, OR after 1800?

Alcohol, smog, stench,
Child labour, overcrowding –
Glasgow’s not so bad!

2. Did the growth of cities enhance the opportunities for women in society?

Depends what’s meant by
‘Opportunities’, I guess.
(History’s like that.)

3. Why did urbanisation so often seem to make social inequality worse? Your answer should make specific reference to at least two cities.

The rich/the poor should
Have the decency to be
Rich/poor out of sight!

State-formation


1. Was absolute monarchy (before 1789) ever anything more than government by the elite, for the elite?

No, but then neither
Was anything else since then.
(Extra marks for Marx!)

2. ‘The transformation of “subjects” into “citizens” neatly represents the emergence of the modern state. Discuss with reference to at least two different parts of Europe.

In Britain we’re all
Apparently still subjects;
Ah well, never mind.

3. Why was democracy so fragile in twentieth-century Europe?

Raving demagogues;
Vast forces clash like glaciers;
Really not much fun.

Race and nationality


1. Is racism within Europe the inevitable outcome of the creation of colonial empires by the European powers?

Likely. As a white
Bourgeois, I am troubled by
Existential guilt.

2. Does the history of racism and of nationalism suggest the two are inter-connected?

Only as much as
Alcohol and drunkenness.
I mean, honestly.

3. In what respects have European concepts of ethnic identity and race changed since 1945?

Well, where I live we’ve
Chucked John Knox for Mel Gibson.
Shit idea, really.

War and Peace


1. ‘War made the creation of a well-organised state essential’. Discuss with reference to at least two parts of Europe before 1815

Clearly, Britain needs a
Strong army to defend our
Fleet, and vice-versa.

2. How successful was the ‘balance of power’ resulting from the Congress of Vienna (1815)

A century’s quite
Good, when you look at things in
The big picture, eh?

3. Why has Europe been involved in no major-power war since 1945, but has been implicated in a large number of other conflicts?

Because the Yanks are
A bunch of bloody cowboys
If you’re asking me.

4. How can the battlefield archaeologist contribute to our traditional historical understanding of warfare in Europe? (You may choose to discuss a broad chronological overview, or look at one conflict in particular such as WWI).

I hear if you do
This course in Honours you can
Fire a cannon! Yeah.

Spiritual and Temporal Power


1. Did the divisions created by Protestantism strengthen or weaken Christianity?

What with all the blood,
I admit maybe Gibson
Did less harm than Knox.

2. How substantial was the conflict between reason and religious beliefs in European cultural and intellectual life between 1618 and 1789?

Probably not more
Than that between flavours of
Religious belief.

3. How might the historian explain the declining role of Christian worship in some parts of Europe since the late 18th century?

Which parts? My gosh, you
Want pint-size essays, you should
Set full-size questions!

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.

I said I wouldn't...

...But I did! There follows another incident from the increasingly improbable adventures of Orwell and Pinter.


Orwell and Pinter were both very fond of flowers and cultivated them in boxes on the windowsills of their London flat. They took to keeping bags of seeds about their persons and planting these in forgotten corners of soil - at road junctions, for instance. Many died, but occasionally they bloomed, and added a splash of joyous colour to the bleak prospects of the city.

They bought their seeds from the establishment of one Donald Armstrong. He was a Scotsman by birth: his family had been a great name among the Border-reivers, those dauntless cossacks of Great Britain. Once, they had terrorised the Marches and dined at the table of the kings of Scotland; but the wild days ended, and the family settled down and became respectable landowners and keen gardeners. So keen, in fact, that each succeeding Armstrong's landscaping of the family seat began to use up the money. Donald's grandfather Pertinax had in the end sold the estate to a wealthy American and set up a rightly-praised florist's shop in Galashiels, which was flourishing when Donald came into the ownership. With a riever-like disregard for frontiers where there was loot to be made, he decided to move operations to London, and there gained a great and similarly riever-like reputation for throwing feasts on behalf of various London Scots fraternities.

But though he now ranked as a prosperous businessman, he maintained a close personal interest in his produce and was famed in particular as a breeder of tulips. One experiment of his - prosaically called the Number 4 - was thought to be quite exquisite by all, and certainly by Orwell and Pinter. Though they would chat amiably on gardening matters, Armstrong would not reveal even to his favoured customers the jealously-guarded secret of the Number 4. But he always kept a few packets of seeds behind his desk just in case his friends should call.

One day, however, their call found him absent. A flustered sales assistant explained that he had gone to attend a binge commemorating the Battle of Flodden, where his ancestors had fought. Unfortunately, this same assistant, ignorant of his employer's customs, had sold off all the present batch of Number 4s.

"Ah, well," said Pinter stoically. But Orwell's response was theatrical in the extreme.

"Och, A'm wae!," he said, affecting Armstrong's broad Scots dialect. Pinter gave him a funny look. "The fowers of the florist are aw wede awa!"