Will think about other changes I have seen in Hillhead streets.
After Zoe left on her mysterious businesses this morning I stayed in, brooding brooding brooding on which avenue of research to explore in the library, then grew aware of distant crowd susurrations punctuated by erratic music. The West End Festival had started.58 Don’t know who organizes this which has happened for several years, closing upper Byres Road to motor traffic, replacing it with funfair stalls, a bouncy castle, musicians on platforms, and filling the street wall to wall with mobile citizens. Have avoided it hitherto but today was strangely attracted. Wandered there and among the huge undisciplined genial crowd, bathing in it, enjoying I suppose the mild communal ecstasy Walt Whitman enjoyed in 19th century Manhattan. I lunched at a table outside the Antipasti, pondering the great changes in people’s clothing for the Byres Road history.
Before the 1970s I think nearly half of all women over thirty-five in Hillhead wore skirts or dresses. Now only a minority of young women do, mostly girls in the brown or green skirts that are the Notre Dame and Laurelbank school uniforms. I believe women’s trouser suits became fashionable in the 1960s and miniskirts in the 1970s, and when I first saw each I was amused, thinking them not at all sexually attractive, but in a few days they started exciting me as I suppose any eye-catching women’s fashion always will. I was glad when the Turkish bare midriff became fashionable before the 20th century ended. I have always liked women’s stomachs, perhaps because as a child I believed sexual intercourse was through the navel. At the same time young folk, not all of them women, began sporting tattoos, also studs and rings through parts of their faces. Though used to earrings I hate seeing that. I cannot help thinking it painful. Hey ho. But the main fashion change is in pockets.
These were once only seen in army uniforms and workers’ overalls. Professional folk and people at leisure wore trousers, jackets and blazers with pockets sewn within the linings to interrupt, as little as possible, the body’s outline. A single breast pocket in jackets was sometimes made noticeable by a protruding fountain pen or, on formal occasions the triangular corner of a neatly folded white handkerchief. Women’s dresses and skirts had no pockets, so they carried handbags. It is now not fashionable to look suave and neat in modern Britain so every garment I saw from my pavement table had external pockets of the workmen or military kind. On baggy jeans several looked as big as buckets. Some big pockets had small ones on top. There were jeans with four or five pairs of pockets, some at ankle level. Miniskirts also had them. They were fastened by a variety of buttons, buckles, studs and zips. Girls in slim jeans only had them on hip pockets where, seen in motion from behind, they pleasantly emphasized the changing balance of the buttocks, but baggier trousers were more frequent, often made tougher-looking by conspicuous seams. Some women’s jeans have the oblique canvas strip at the side for tradesmen to sling their hammers, and I saw a skirt with that too. Nearly all clothing suggest the wearers are ready for hard work, while some were deliberately torn to suggest they had suffered rough treatment, why? Saw one slim, attractive girl with huge ragged holes through which were visible expensive stockings with a delicate openwork pattern of leaves and fruit. And amidst the brightly coloured stalls, bouncy castle, balloons and candyfloss most clothes were black, khaki or blue-grey.
But police clothing has changed most between 20 or 30 years ago and now. The police uniform of Victorian days were intended to be quite unlike police on the European continent, most of whom wore a military style of uniform, and carried visble weapons. The dark uniform of the London Bobby did not attract the eye; his helmet was comic rather than martial; his weapon was a wooden baton carried out of sight within his uniform, unless violence erupted. This was the policy of governments who thought threatening displays would make British policemen unpopular. Nowadays our police have been re-styled on the American cop pattern with highly visible jackets in fluorescent colour and waist belts from which dangle handcuffs, radios and blunt instruments that can probably gas or stun people. While worn thus to be more rapidly used if needed, they have the effect of being flaunted. We know some carry guns but not how many, as these are probably worn out of sight, like the old batons.
After 2 p.m. the centre of Byres Road was cleared for a colourful parade emerging from the Botanic Garden gates. It was led by a band of carnival drummers and musicians followed by groups of children from local schools dressed like butterflies or wearing elephant masks or equally droll disguizes; then came gyrating belly-dancers and bicycles supporting fantastic frames resembling dragons, the Loch Ness Monster, King Kong and Marilyn Monroe; also stilt-stalking tall Mexican-Day-of-the-Dead skeletons with wreaths on their skulls and flowers in their ribcages. I was so enraptured by this procession that I was tempted to join in behind some ten-year-olds in the costume of a martial arts club who marched along striking martial postures, but eventually joined some older people carrying the banners of the Green Movement. We all processed down to Dumbarton Road then turned left past the old Andersonian College to finally enter Kelvingrove Park behind the Art Galleries. Here we mingled with the Mela Festival, a big gathering of Glasgow Asians that had been running all day. Wearing the brightest dresses and costumes of their original homelands they were cooking, serving and eating their national foodstuffs to the music of their own bands and singers. Almost intoxicated by this abundance of new colour I wandered back home. No wonder those who bathe daily in sensual experience are incapable of historical thinking. End of modern social history lesson.
I am weary of unending news about British political corruption. It has been steadily increasing along with crime at street level and accidental shooting of innocent folk by armed police. In the 1960s59
Several Tories were delighted and declared this was such a splendidly 18th century response to criticism
Then in the 90s Blair’s New Labour Party promised “an end of sleaze” – a friendly word for corruption. I hear today that
The Tory Party has always been funded by rich businessmen because it exists to represent them. The Labour Party was founded to represent the common workers, so funded by the trade unions. Since New Labour has rejected the unions and courted the rich, where else can poor Blair get all the money he needs?
Sick of these thoughts I tried to change my mind yesterday (which was Sunday and warm), by wandering around Whitmanizing as I had done in the West End Festival last year. How time flies. The old Kelvinside and Botanic Gardens Free Church of Scotland is now a pub with restaurants, theatre and concert hall.60 In the yard between pavement and front door I joined drinkers at tables under parasols. Bought half pint, edged towards empty table in far corner, noticed ———— crouched over cup of coffee, talking rapidly as usual into mobile phone. Hoped she had not seen me but had hardly settled down when she sat opposite saying, “For three years you’ve not answered my postcards and never phoned me, why?”
Explained I had been inspired to write a different book from the one we had discussed, but I had worked hard and recently finished it. She said, “Has another woman got hold of you?”
“Yes!” I said sternly, “And I will not say one word to you about her because she is an essential part of my private life.”
After staring hard at me ———— said, “And your public life? Have you abandoned writing about modern Scotland? Have you gone ostrich again?”
I told her that I was now a Pepys, a Boswell recording everyday life for the benefit of posterity. She said, “Then you should tell posterity the state of our refugees because the fucking Scots today don’t want to know,” and spoke of a Chinaman she was defending whose ancestors had cultivated a piece of land for centuries, even under the rule of Chairman Mao. But that government now deals with global capitalism so the Party sold his land, despite his protests, to a U.S.A. company that did not want him. He was promised a sum of money in compensation, but on going to collect was offered a third of that by a Party official who said legal expenses had consumed the rest. He therefore knocked the
official down with a mattock, fled from China and was briefly harboured in Scotland as an asylum seeker. Said ————, “We called them refugees when they were escaping from Fascist or old Communist regimes, but now they’re called asylum seekers, so no matter how long they live here their case can be reviewed and a legal loophole found to again shunt them out into homelessness, hopelessness, perhaps prison and death. Did you know that an Asiatic family of four was recently arrested here by the police at four o’clock in the morning? The Soviet police also arrested people at that hour to stop folk seeing their neighbours deported. This family were driven in a windowless van to London and questioned by immigration officials who discovered what had been officially recorded years ago: the parents had entered Scotland as subjects of The British Empire and the children had been born here! Well, they were returned to Glasgow but others born and taught in schools here, knowing no language but English, have been suddenly extradited with their parents on a small legal technicality without right of appeal! What do you think of that?”
Instead of answering I asked what became of the Chinaman. She said a legal tribunal had ruled that he had no right to political asylum here since he was obnoxious to the Chinese government over a matter of land owning, and that was not political! She spoke the last two words so intensely that folk nearby turned to look, then she said, “Ownership of land, theft of land, depriving folk of their birthplace is the world’s first and worst political crime! I appealed against that decision, and since my house is big enough I told a senior judge I would give him a residence in Scotland but no! Back to China he must go and be punished, perhaps executed for fighting injustice because Lord Kingarth says the Chinese Communist and American Capitalist theft of his land is not a political matter.”
At that moment I saw across the wall at my elbow Zoe passing along Great Western Road. As usual outside home we exchanged the slightest of glances so I was shocked when ———— said, “Is she your new woman?”
I got up and said, “I’m leaving if you say another word about her.” “Calm down ostrich,” said —————, “I’m going to get another coffee. Another lager?” I offered to get both if she would change the subject when I returned. I came back and she talked about Glasgow’s drug trade. The chiefs who invest in it and collect the profits are businessmen and property developers known to the police, but in no danger of arrest because they mix socially with local politicians who they also bribe, and never themselves handle smack, crack or other opium derivatives. Tougher criminals, also known to the police, control the source of the drug and also keep out of the public eye. The stuff is handled at street level by three classes of underling, the lowest and largest being ordinary users, many of them unemployed youngsters who often rob and mug people for money to buy it. From these the most desperate addicts are recruited to sell it in homes, pubs and lavatories. The careful and efficient among these distributors are also the least addicted, so can graduate to dealing with top suppliers and the police. The public and the press want frequent news of successful drug raids and arrests, so every week or two these smart distributors tell the drug squad where they can arrest their least useful underlings, after which they recruit others. “So Glasgow is like every other place where drugs are criminalized. Rich, secure bastards cream off the trade’s profits while exploiting and buggering the poorest. If drugs were freely sold as they were before the 1960s a third of British crime would stop, our jails be half emptied, a few addicts would continue to die annually of overdoses, a lot of fat cats would be poorer and the police free to concentrate on arresting thieves, frauds and other murderers. So in Britain and the U.S.A. the use of all drugs but alcohol and nicotine will be kept criminal despite Baroness Wooton’s government committee in the 1960s announcing that marijuana is safer.”
This was more than I could stand. I am going to avoid ———— because she is trying to start a drug rehabilitation unit and wants me to help her! I hurried away under pretext of needing to pee and came home, terribly depressed.
Tonight there erupted into Tennants the historian Angus Calder who hailed the Mastermind, sat down and talked enthusiastically. He had come from a Glasgow meeting of Independence First group who want a referendum to find how many Scots want a truly independent parliament. Public opinion polls show a high likelihood of the Scot Nats having a majority at the Scottish Parliamentary Election next month. He said, “Next year is the 300th anniversary of the Anglo-Scottish Union of Parliaments and a major chance to show we do not want it – that we are sick of Scotland being used as a NATO military and nuclear missile base by the English government, and deprived of every industry that the Scots pioneered, and once made Scotland famous.”
Said Mastermind, “You seem in pursuit of an old-fashioned Scotland running on Owenite New Lanark lines, in fact a Scottish Socialist Co-operative Wholesale Republic. But Alex Salmond and others in that party are promising better investment opportunities to businessmen, and at least one is urging total privatisation of hospitals.”
“Every good government must encourage productive business, and have a right-wing and left-wing party. When a separate Scottish Parliament has signed a new, fairer peace treaty with England than the 1707 Treaty the Scottish National Party will vanish and I believe the new Scotland will make Norway its example, not the Channel Islands.”
“What if the London government refuses to sign a new treaty allowing an independent Scottish one?”
“With a majority of voters on our side we can appeal to the European Parliament.”
I was amused to hear this English Socialist from Edinburgh discussing Scotland’s future with an English Tory in Glasgow. Calder does not know me by sight so kindly old Mastermind interrupted his torrent of speech by bringing me into the conversation. When he mentioned my name Calder murmured, “Tunnock? John Tunnock?” and stared hard at me before asking sharply, “How’s your work going?”
“What work?”
“Your great historical triptych or trilogy about love, sex, money, art, politics and everything. It starts in Athens. I read several chapters in Chapman a few months ago.”
“A few years”, I told him.
“How’s it going?”
“Nowhere. You wrote a letter that destroyed my ambitions in that direction.”
“How can I possibly have done that?” he cried, astonished.
“You persuaded me that the historical fiction I planned was escapist fantasy. You urged me to write about Scotland instead. I tried that and failed.”
“I remember writing what I meant to be an encouraging letter because I liked the start of your novel. Most historical fiction is trash of course, because most of every kind of fiction is trash, but I am second to none in my admiration for Walter Scott at his best. He created, single-handed, a new kind of novel and a new school of social historians. Read what Carlyle, Thiers, Michelet and Ranke say about him as well as Pushkin, Balzac and Manzoni. I refuse to be found guilty of a crime I never committed. Those chapters you wrote about Periclean Athens were damned good.”
I explained the impossibility of describing The Clouds performance.
“Leave it out.”
I told him there was a worse problem: my story had to end with the trial of Socrates. Plato’s account showed a wholly good, wise man being condemned to death by a democratic court merely because he was too good for it. I too believed Socrates was wise and good. I also believed the democracy had a strong case against him that Plato had not acknowledged. I could only show the strength of the democracy’s case by bringing in witnesses who were dead or in exile at the time of the trial. How could I possibly do that? Calder said, “Do what Walter Scott did in Quentin Durward. Tell a historical story as well as you can and put notes at the end saying where you departed from the record but don’t blame me for your difficulties.”
He downed his drink, jumped up and rushed off.
“A precipitate fellow, but not unwise,” rumbled Mastermind.
It was far from closing time but I lef
t Tennants soon after, excited and buoyant. Leave out The Clouds chapter? What other chapters could I omit before tackling The Trial of Socrates, for which the others were mainly introductory? At home I emptied pigeonholes of my research notes for The Plague, Death of Pericles, The Sicilian Expedition, Victorious Sparta, The Tyranny of The Nine and laid them out in chronological order on desktop, sideboard, sofa and armchairs and mantelpiece. If Zoe brought people home tonight she would have to entertain them in the dining room downstairs. I was awed by the idea of condensing all these preparatory notes into a few sentences of The Trial. Was pleased when Zoe returned without horrible company and stood staring, never having seen me so enthusiastically at work before. She said, “Why are you buzzing about like a bee in a bottle?”
I explained why and pointed to the sideboard, suggesting we drink to celebrate the birth of a grand new idea that would let my original masterpiece – my life task! – be completed in two or three months instead of years. She poured me a big whisky and herself a small one, “You need a holiday.”
I denied that because from now on I would be working hard every day and evening. She said she was not suggesting a long holiday – just a night or weekend away. I said fine, where did she want us to go? She said it was me who needed the holiday, not her. I said, “I’m not taking a holiday by myself!”
She said, “Of course not. I’ll get somebody to go with you, what about Is? You’re keen on Is. She introduced us.”
Old Men in Love Page 26
