About this time 23 years ago, Alison and I were preparing for our wedding. We were to be married in the Registry Office in Edinburgh’s Victoria Street. “Bring some music with you on the day,” said the lady at the Registry Office when we saw her about the arrangements. “A couple of cassettes. We’ll play them before and after the ceremony.” After we left Victoria Street, we went into a bookshop on South Bridge, looking for music. Alison chose a Strauss cassette, while I opted for some traditional Irish fiddle tunes, both good background music in their different ways. While we were there, we also selected a few of those new-fangled Compact Discs: more Strauss and a Mozart one for Alison, and a Great Irish Tenors one for me. We didn’t have a CD player at the time, but we resolved to buy one at the next opportunity. The sniffy assistant in the shop sniffed loudly when she realised that two oiks were actually going to purchase some of those rather expensive Compact Discs. She sniffed even louder and sneered when she saw the classical music choices. Anyway, come the big day at the Registry Office, sure enough the Strauss cassette was played while our guests (and there were a lot of them) seated themselves in the appointed room. I stood at the top of the room, waiting for Alison and the Registrar to appear. I waited. And waited. And waited. Strauss came to an end and the fiddle music began, by which time our guests, who had been chatty and cheerful to begin with, had grown sullen and impatient. So to entertain them I performed a little Irish jig – and that was long before Michael Flatley became famous!
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I was watching the latest episode of the 1960’s-set series Endeavour last night when I suddenly remembered an incident in Edinburgh from the same era. At that time, the Caledonian Railway Hotel (now the Waldorf Astoria Edinburgh) and Princes Street Station occupied the same building at the west end of Princes Street. About halfway along the Lothian Road side of the building, there used to be a side-door that gave access to the station, but was almost always shut. It must have been about 10 o’clock one night when I was hurrying down Lothian Road to catch the bus home to the Ferry, having sneaked into Edinburgh to go to the pictures. I was fourteen or fifteen. Unusually, the side-door happened to be open, so I had a quick peek into the station. I could see an old porter sweeping the concourse and a gaggle of young women heading for the main exit. All the girls wore those white go-go boots and had their hair piled up, beehive fashion. “Come away, girls,” the porter shouted as they approached him. Spontaneously, the girls linked arms and danced across the concourse in a line, singing, “Come away, come away with William Tell/Come away to the land he loved so well/What a day, what a day when the apple fell/For Tell and Switzerland.” It was, of course, the theme song from the then popular TV series The Adventures of William Tell.
Princes Street Station closed forever in 1965. But the vision of those girls on the concourse has never left me. A flash of those small, pearly white teeth. A glance from those blue-green eyes. That’s all it took wherever we went – Spain, Italy, France, further abroad, it didn’t matter – and the men were besotted by Alison, while simultaneously despising me. And it was no different that morning somewhere in Spain when Alison decided that we should go horse riding. Inevitably, the besotted instructor helped Alison to mount a small, dainty, docile mare and then handed me the reins of El Bruto – the oldest, biggest and fiercest horse in his stable. “Okay, Cowboy,” he said in English as he watched me struggling to climb up into the saddle. When the line of horses and riders set off, Cowboy, with no input from me, decided that we should take up the rear. Naturally, Alison, with El Instructor by her side, was at the front of the line. Not long into the ride, Cowboy slowed down and then came to a stop. Nothing I did – shouting its name, pulling the reins this way and that, digging my stirrups into its side – would make it budge. We were in the middle of a parched wasteland, the sun was growing hotter and the other riders were specks in the distance. Then, just like in the movies, one of the specks turned into a cloud of dust, which grew bigger as it travelled at speed towards me. It was El Instructor, of course, grinning widely. “A problem, Cowboy?” he asked before patting the horse’s neck, speaking into its ear and giving it a lump of sugar. “Bueno, Paco,” I heard him whisper. It was only then that I realised Cowboy was the sarcastic name he had chosen to call me. And it was on the ride back to re-join the line when it dawned on me that old Paco probably performed the same trick on a regular basis whenever El Instructor wanted to ridicule and belittle a gringo husband or boyfriend. If I hadn’t been on holiday with Alison, I would have nutted the prick.
Major-General (Retired) Ronnie Somerville, General Manager of the Scottish Special Housing Association in the Seventies, had planned the event with military precision. The Queen had been invited to open a new SSHA housing development in the East End of Glasgow. After the formal opening, she would tour the development and then visit one of the new houses, where she would pretend to enjoy hobnobbing with the hoi polloi by taking tea with the tenant and his family. Early on the morning of the opening, Ronnie set off in his car from his home in Edinburgh in plenty of time for a Press briefing which he had arranged to take place in the chosen house. But like all operations planned by ex-military types, this one contained a fatal flaw. He had forgotten that the roads leading to the housing development would be closed by the Police. He had to park his car miles from the place and walk (quickly) the rest of the way. When he arrived at the house, red-faced and out of breath, he barged through the front door, crying, “The Press! The Press!” On hearing this, the wee Glaswegian tenant immediately opened the door to the hall cupboard, and in rushed the Major-General. (In case you don’t know, a cupboard is also called a press in Scotland.)
Back in the Seventies, Major-General (Retired) Ronnie Somerville was in charge of the Scottish Special Housing Association. More affectionately known as the SSHA, the now defunct quango owned 100,000 homes throughout the length and breadth of Scotland at the time. (It also employed me as tea-boy rising to senior manager over the course of the two decades of the Seventies and Eighties.) Ronnie spent most of his time being chauffeur-driven round Scotland on what he called “site visits”. The rest of his time was spent dictating ridiculously detailed reports of the visits, in which he would wax lyrical about the tea and buns he scoffed in such-and-such a local office, before going on to praise the staff of another office for working “like Blacks” (I kid you not). On one site visit, he went walkabout in an SSHA housing scheme in Aberdeen. Spotting a tenant out hoeing his garden, he called out over the hedge, “Hello, I’m Major-General Somerville, General Manager of the SSHA.” The man he spoke to happened to be a particularly disgruntled tenant. His garden had been repeatedly flooded by effluence from a broken sewage pipe, which none of the authorities, including the SSHA, would take responsibility for fixing. “Major-General Somerville, is it?” he said slowly, leaning on his hoe. “Mair like Major-General Fucking Disaster!”
The news the other day that Richard Branson is to convert the iconic India Buildings on Edinburgh’s Victoria Street into a Virgin hotel reminded me of the night I stayed at his very first Virgin hotel, a former country mansion in the heart of the New Forest. I arrived there, sticky and tired, in the late afternoon of a hot day in August. A cheerful young chap took my bag and showed me to my ground floor room, which looked out onto the manicured lawn and the forest fringe at the rear of the building. Thankfully, the room’s two windows were wide open, their frames having been swung out and latched over the lawn. But a large, fat, hairy, stuffed cat occupied the middle of the bed. “This is Fluffy,” said the chap in as serious a voice as he could muster. “Instead of hanging a notice on the door to indicate that you don’t want to be disturbed, just put Fluffy out in the corridor instead. One of Richard’s ideas for a different hotel experience,” he added. I couldn’t help it; I sighed audibly. “Another thing to point out,” the chap went on quickly. “You’ll see notepads and pencils placed at strategic points round the room, as well as in the.. um… bathroom. They’re there in case you have any thoughts that you want to jot down immediately.” I tried to smile, but I ended up sighing again, louder than before. “Another of Richard’s ideas,” the chap explained with a poker face. “Apparently, he has notepads and pencils all over his home for that purpose.” That evening, I dined on my own in the Alhambra Room, so called because, as a gift to his lady, the original owner of the mansion had the room re-modelled in beaten gold to resemble part of the famous Alhambra Palace in Granada. It was an unnerving experience, though, like eating inside a glitter-ball, and I was glad to return to my room. Before retiring, I left the windows open, but I took Fluffy by the tail and lobbed it into the corridor. Some hours later, in the deep of night, I was suddenly roused from my sleep by a very loud bang close to me. It took me a few moments to realise that someone or something outside had collided with one of the window frames. I knew the something was a deer, of course, but I was secretly hoping it had been Richard’s head.
That afternoon, laden with her purchases in Edinburgh’s city centre, Alison took the Number 23 bus from Hanover Street to the start of Fettes Row, where she lived. Her destination was only a few stops away, so she sat on one of the pair of benches at the front of the bus, next to the door. Two fur-clad ladies of a certain age were the only other passengers up there. Probably having lunched up-town and now returning home to Inverleith or Trinity or some other poshland, they were sitting in the middle of each bench, engaged in a conversation across the aisle. The conversation stopped abruptly when Alison arrived on the scene. Without budging an inch to give Alison and her bags more room, the lady she sat down beside gave a dismissive wave towards the rear of the bus. “There are plenty of empty seats up there,” she said in what Muriel Spark often described as “the Edinburgh accent”. It’s the accent of strangulated vowels that drips all-girls’ schools and middle-class privilege, the one that Muriel yearned to hear when she was abroad, the one that she herself spoke with. Ever the mimic, Alison returned the Edinburgh accent. “So there are,” she smiled. “Off you pop, then.” And she, too, gave a dismissive wave in the direction of the empty seats.
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