April in Paris in the early Seventies. It’s our first time in the city. Its magic makes us feel heady. We’re strolling hand-in-hand down Les Champs-Élysées on a beautiful sunny morning. She is wearing a pair of skimpy hot-pants and a halter-neck, the nipples of her small breasts visible through the flimsy material. Slim and elegant, she looks like a fashion model straight from Carnaby Street in London. As we pass the tables outside the first café, the wolf-whistling begins. It continues all the way down the boulevard, coming from café after café, and even from across the street. She looks at me and smiles. Two rows of small, pearly white teeth. She’s not daunted by the whistling. Just the opposite. The whistles are endorsements. Compliments. Frenchmen are so expressive. It’s what they do, isn’t it?
This wee memoir was prompted by the news that men in France will soon be liable for on-the-spot fines if they are caught wolf-whistling at women.
April in Paris in the early Seventies. It’s our first time in the city. Its magic makes us feel heady. We’re strolling hand-in-hand down Les Champs-Élysées on a beautiful sunny morning. She is wearing a pair of skimpy hot-pants and a halter-neck, the nipples of her small breasts visible through the flimsy material. Slim and elegant, she looks like a fashion model straight from Carnaby Street in London. As we pass the tables outside the first café, the wolf-whistling begins. It continues all the way down the boulevard, coming from café after café, and even from across the street. She looks at me and smiles. Two rows of small, pearly white teeth. She’s not daunted by the whistling. Just the opposite. The whistles are endorsements. Compliments. Frenchmen are so expressive. It’s what they do, isn’t it?
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Back at the turn of the century (I just love that phrase!), Alison and I spent some time in Singapore. In fact, we spent twelve whole days there, staying at the world-famous Raffles Hotel. Since virtually all of Raffles’ guests used the hotel as a stopover for only one or two nights, we were pretty unique. Known by the staff as The Twelve-Dayers, we were treated like royalty. And that’s a photo of Princess Alison outside the front of the hotel.
During those twelve days in Singapore, we saw and did many wonderful things. But my abiding memory of our visit is of Mr Leslie Danker. At that time, Mr Danker was the Guest Relations Manager of Raffles. A Singaporean of Indian descent, who had worked at the hotel from an early age, he was the most pleasant, courteous and gentle man you would ever want to meet, someone you would want to call your friend. He gave us a guided tour of Raffles, treated us to high tea, regaled us with tales of the hotel’s history, introduced us to the sniffy American General Manager, and generally looked after us throughout our stay. On the morning of our departure, he even mustered as many staff as he could find to come out front and wave to The Twelve-Dayers as our taxi drove off. And not long after our return to Edinburgh, he sent us a bottle of wine all the way from Singapore! Mr Danker still works at Raffles, by the way. Approaching 80, with no sign of him retiring, he has quite correctly been appointed as the official historian of Raffles. But back when he was Guest Relations Manager here he is greeting some other “special” guests. That night we had dined in one of the Hilton Cairo’s restaurants, sitting on low cushions and eating mezze while being entertained by Egyptian music, singing and belly-dancing (photo courtesy of Alison). To round off a wonderful time, we took the lift up to the hotel’s 36th floor, where there was a small cocktail bar with breathtaking views across the city and the Nile. We found an empty table at one of the windows and decided to share a bottle of champagne. The waiter we gave our order to performed the usual champagne ritual – bringing an ice bucket and two flute glasses to the table, then bringing the bottle I had selected for me to approve, leaving the bottle in the ice bucket for a while, and finally returning to open the bottle. It was when he was carrying out the last task that he asked, “Excuse me, sir and madam, but are you celebrating something special tonight? Your anniversary, perhaps?” I was quick to reply. “Naw, naw,” I smiled, “we’re just enjoying the view, thank you.” After the waiter opened the bottle, poured the champagne and left, Alison and I looked at each other questioningly. Something was dawning on us. “What date is it?” asked Alison. I thought for a moment. “Twenty-second of April,” I said. We both raised our glasses. “Happy Anniversary!” we laughed together.
It was our seventh wedding anniversary. Next week would have been our twenty-third. The chap standing on the right in this photo is my Dad in the Ex-Servicemen’s Club in the Ferry. The photo must have been taken not long before he died in 1965, because he has that hunted look on his face and his clothes are hanging on him. I remember round about that time a neighbour saying to him: “Christ, Derry, you’re like somebody just oot o’ Belsen.” Having helped to liberate that camp, the neighbour knew what he was talking about. I also remember Mum laughing about an earlier time in the Club when Dad went there with his best pal, Jock Bell. At the end of the night when the National Anthem was played and everyone was expected to stand, Dad and Jock decided to stage a two-man protest by keeping to their seats. They were barred from the Club for that sacrilege, of course, but, the Ferry being the Ferry, the ban didn’t last very long. Dad was such a gentle and easy-going man, I don’t know what would have got into him that night. A skinful of whisky, perhaps. And if the same incident were to occur today, I wonder how many others would join the protest. Saor Alba.
On the first full day of our visit to Cairo in April 2002, we hired a taxi to take us to and from the Khan el-Khalili bazaar, which Alison had been itching to wander through. The taxi driver’s name was Abdul. We liked him so much that he became our personal driver for the duration of our visit, waiting outside the hotel for us in the morning and bringing us back later in the day. Abdul was a quiet, dignified, silver-haired chap with a dry sense of humour. Much more than a driver, he was our guide, our minder and our companion in that vast metropolis of eight million people. Alison snapped this brilliant photo of him waiting patiently behind a string of camels in downtown Cairo. On the morning that he took us out to Giza to see the Sphinx and the Pyramids, a camel, its driver clad in full Arab headdress and robes, came thundering towards us on the long, dusty approach road through the desert. “Wotcha, Abdul!” the driver shouted in a thick Mancunian accent as the camel galloped past the taxi. Alison was incredulous. “Do you know him, Abdul?” she asked. “Who is he?” Abdul gave a wry smile. “Just a Bedouin,” he replied.
Going through old photos tonight, as one does on the eve of one’s birthday. I must have been only two-years-old in this one. I still have the small black-and-white original of it. It was taken in a photograph studio in Albany Street in Edinburgh. The date stamp says March 22nd, my birthday! Years later, my Mum has scribbled in pencil on the back of it the instructions for it to be enlarged and coloured by a family friend. The latter instructions read: “Eyes – brown. Hair – black. Compl – fair. Jersey – red, blue & white (fairisle). Trousers – pale blue. Socks – white. Shoes – pale blue.” I have to hand it to Mum. She would have had two toddlers and a baby to contend with by that time and been heavily pregnant with a fourth child. We all lived in a tenement in Clark Place in the Ferry, which she often described as “a rat-infested slum”. And her and Dad wouldn’t have had two ha’pennies to rub together. But she made damn sure that her wee boy was all dressed up to get his birthday photie taken in the Toon.
That summer, when the young people were rioting on the streets of Paris, when Civil Rights protests in Northern Ireland were on the verge of triggering a 30-year internecine war, and when a much larger conflagration was raging in Vietnam, the talk in the Ferry was of the US Navy sailing up the Forth. Suddenly, the town was awash with Yankee sailors. My wee sister Helena invited one of those sailors to come to our house for tea. In typical country Irish fashion, my Mum pulled out the leaves of the dining table in the living room, got out her best tablecloth and cutlery, prepared a spread that could compete with Christmas Day, and summoned the rest of us to attend the momentous event. The sailor was a fair-haired, blue-eyed, good-looking and well-mannered American boy. His ship had recently returned from Vietnam, where it had been stationed off the coast for some months in support of the air and ground forces. Inevitably, the conversation at the dining table was dominated by the Vietnam War. Shortly before she passed away, when she was looking back at her life, Helena spoke to me about the American boy. She said she often wondered what had happened to him. If he has survived, I wonder, too, if he still remembers not only Helena, but also the kind and generous Irish lady who gave him such a warm welcome to our little town in that troubled time.
The nuns who taught my Mum over in Ireland spent more time drumming the Catechism into her than on the reading and writing business. So it was little wonder that in her adult life she often got things wrong. The shopping lists she wrote out were always full of spelling errors, much to the mirth of us kids. And she would say things like "giraffical maps" or "TV serious", again much to our mirth. The thing is, though, that we would be laughing with her and never at her. One day during the summer holidays, round about teatime, I was hanging about at the open back door with a pal from just along the road. The pal’s father was a rep who wore a suit to work and drove a company car and who thought he, his wife and their two children were a cut above the rest of us. My siblings, all five of them, were in the kitchen at that time, sitting round the big table and, as ever, making a hell of a racket. My Mum must have swept into the kitchen from elsewhere in the house, because my pal and I heard her shouting, “Get off the table, your tea’s not ready yet!” I knew she meant “Get away from the table”, of course, but my pal burst out in a fit of laughing at the vision of a chimps’ tea-party that my Mum’s Irishism had conjured up. I knew also that at the first opportunity he would be relating the incident to anyone who would listen, the story of the Gisby monkeys. He wasn’t my friend any more. And don’t you be worrying, Mum, spelling errors or not, Irishisms or not, you did us all proud.
That February, it was unusually cold in Paris, with freezing temperatures much like those we’ve been experiencing here recently, but thankfully without the snow to accompany them. It wasn’t the best time to take Alison on her first visit to the city. It was going to be too cold to linger outside for any length of time. But I knew the Metro system like the back of myhand, so we purchased a couple of carnets and used the Metro to travel across the city to the main attractions, popping up for a short while at each location and then retreating back down into the warmth of the underground. One evening, we were on the train to Blanche Metro station in Montmartre. With Alison dressed in her finery and me in my tux, bowtie and long Italian overcoat, looking like a Mafia don, we felt conspicuous among the other passengers, most of whom were workers making their way home. When we left the train, we headed for the stairs that would take us up to the hookers and sex shops of Pigalle and onwards to the Moulin Rouge. As we walked along the platform, I noticed that all the seats on our right were occupied by what I guessed were homeless men seeking shelter from the cold. Suddenly, one of the men stood up, swayed, fixed his eyes on a still open door of the train we had just left, and then charged headlong towards the door. Clearly very drunk, he stumbled and fell flat on his face before he could reach the door, his head almost lodged in the gap between the train and the platform. He was now in danger of being seriously injured when the train moved off, but none of the passengers inside nor any of those on the platform seemed interested. I rushed over to help the drunk. I was struggling to move his deadweight when another man came to help. Together, the stranger and I lifted him up by the arms and dragged him back to the seat he had vacated. He was moaning softly and his forehead was bloodied, but otherwise he seemed to have survived the fall. “Merci beaucoup,” I said to the stranger. The stranger nodded. He was Moroccan, a foreigner like us.
Back in my early teens, not long before I un-found God, I used to go to Chapel in the Ferry every Sunday. On one occasion, just before Mass began, two young men squeezed into the end of the pew I was sitting on. Their hair was slicked back with Brylcreem, their cheeks were red, as if their faces had just had a good scrub, and they were wearing what looked like brand new suits – those tight-fitting, pastel-coloured suits that were popular in the Sixties. It was tattie howking season and there was a farm close by, so it didn’t take much brainwork to figure that the pair were tattie howkers over from Ireland for the season. While both acted nervously, it became clear very quickly that one of them had never been in a Chapel before. As soon as Mass got underway, the latter sat back, seeming to relax a little. Then he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a packet of cigarettes and a box of matches. An urgent gesture from his companion told him that smoking in the Chapel was forbidden, so back went the cigarettes and matches. Later in the service, the collection plate was passed along our pew, starting from the end opposite where the tattie howkers sat. When the plate arrived at the novice, he reached into it, grabbed a handful of coins and stuffed them into his pocket. “Fock sake!” his companion hissed. “Would you put those back, Michael?” As a laddie who had helped his Dad scavenge for coins under the Forth Bridge, I remember thinking that an awful lot of well-fed faces came to Mass on a Sunday and that maybe Michael had the right idea.
In the words of Robert Burns: An’ ye had been where I hae been/On the braes o' Killiecrankie-o.
Back in the 1980’s, I persuaded Alison to go on a hitchhiking tour of the Highlands with me. I suppose I was trying to re-create my epic lone journey round the region some fifteen years earlier. Alison bought herself a dainty wee rucksack for the trip. I already had a big one from the Army Surplus Store. Alison insisted on taking stuff she could change into at night – shoes, jeans, jerseys and so on, not to mention her hairdryer. The problem was that all the stuff wouldn’t fit into her rucksack. So, being a gentleman, I carried it in mine. My rucksack was rather heavy as a result. But it was fine once it was strapped on my back. I could even clip the straps at the front onto my belt to help distribute the load more evenly. Very cushty. Well, it was until we took the Killiecrankie Walk, an eight-mile trail through the woodlands between Pitlochry and Killiecrankie. At one point during the walk, Alison strode up a steep slope. I attempted to follow her, but halfway up the weight of my rucksack pulled me backwards and, being clipped to my belt, actually toppled me over and had me doing backward somersaults back down the slope. I think the photo was taken shortly afterwards. Note the comparative sizes of the rucksacks. Note also the bagpipe legs, which are the subject of a whole other story. 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!
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.
Gomorrah returns to Sky Atlantic tonight for its third season. A tremendous series set in Naples, it always reminds me of the time Alison and I were on holiday in the city. We went out one evening for a meal, me wearing a t-shirt and my Rolex. The doorman at the hotel was always nipping at me not to wear the watch outside, but I shrugged off his advice, thinking he was a big gub. Anyway, we ate and drank down at the waterside, from where we took a taxi back to the hotel. We didn’t know it, but two guys on a moped followed the taxi up the hill. When the taxi stopped outside the hotel, so did the moped. Before I could open it myself, the door on my side of the taxi was opened by an impassive-faced, shaven-headed guy who was built like a brick shithouse. While he held my right wrist in an iron-like grip with one hand, he calmly set about unclasping the Rolex watch band with the other. It didn’t matter how often and hard I punched him, the punches seemed to bounce off him. When he had undone the clasp, he slipped the watch up over my wrist and ran back to the waiting moped, which sped off. Later that night in the city centre police headquarters, where we had gone to report the theft, I was given a big book of mugshots to go through – aye, just like in the movies. Guess what, though? Every single one of the mugshots was of an impassive-faced, shaven-headed guy, built like a brick shithouse. Only in Naples!
My ould Irish mother was a big admirer of Rabbie Burns and his work. She once swore to me that Rabbie had written a poem about Dalmeny. If you don’t know Dalmeny, it’s a wee village a short distance from South Queensferry, my hometown. Back in Burns’ day, it would have consisted of a few cottages clustered round a largish village green. But its most notable feature was the pretty Norman church in the photo. Burns would have passed through the village on his way back and forth between Edinburgh and the Queensferry passage. Anyway, here on his birthday is that poem, as related to me:
Dalmeny, a village with a green, A church without a steeple, A pail o’ shite at every door And most o’ it on the people. Sorry, Dalmeny! Blame my mother. School holidays. You’re out on your bike again. It’s an old black one your Dad brought home from the dockyard. It has no gears, no lights, front brakes only and a bell that doesn’t work. It’s not the birthday present you prayed to Jesus for, but it’s the only one you have. You do the usual circuit first: speeding up along Rosebery Avenue so that you can climb the steep hill at Arrol Place, turning sharp left at the top of the hill, picking up speed again along Dundas Avenue, careering down the hill at its end, turning sharp left again and returning to where you started. Then you do the circuit again and again and again, always seeking to be faster than the last time. And all the time you’re careful not to apply the brakes lest you’re catapulted over the handlebars. Sometimes you’ll go the whole length of Rosebery Avenue, taking the hill at William Black Place. Other times you’ll make a detour round Lawson Crescent, pedalling as fast as the wind through Apache territory. Occasionally, when you feel really brave, you’ll venture down Queen Margaret Drive and along Station Road, where there’s always a lot of traffic, unlike the other streets. Those are the circuits you ride hour after hour, day after day. By the time you return to school after the holidays, you’ve developed enormous calf muscles that are clearly visible below your short trousers. So much so that the other boys call you Bagpipe Legs.
A dozen years ago, I used to sit at this window with my morning coffee. And every morning a dishevelled old man from the palazzo opposite would appear at a window just out of view on the left of the photo. Still in his dressing gown, he would be holding a feather in his hand and looking furtively behind him. Satisfied that he wasn’t being followed, he would lean out of the window and ever so carefully let go of the feather. Then he would watch the feather spinning and floating downward, and when it landed on the canal a triumphant grin would split his face. About that time, a lady dressed like a maid or a nurse of some sort would take him by the arm and gently lead him away. It was probably a game he played in the same palazzo many decades ago when he was a rich little boy. Now he was a rich old man, reverted to childhood.
There was a programme about James Joyce on BBC Four last night, narrated, strangely enough, by Angelica Huston. Anyway, I’ve gone all Joycean today:
I remembered this morning I used to sing in the shower and you used to stand outside the door listening and I always knew you were there so I sang more loudly as a result and I’d sing things like There may be trouble ahead because there was always trouble ahead but we’d always face the music and dance and we’d always pay the bill before they asked us to leave because we were always the last to leave and then we’d stroll home hand-in-hand with me crooning an old Irish ballad until we reached the old conifer at our door and I’d hug it and say I love you tree and you’d say to behave myself and we’d go inside and listen to the Dubliners or the Clancy Brothers and we’d sing and laugh and cry but the unholy bastards we sold the house to cut down the tree that was our landmark in the dark and then you were cut down as well and the music died and I stopped singing in the shower. So there I was last night watching the latest episode of Vera when I started thinking about Newcastle, where much of the series is filmed. I recalled Amen Corner, my favourite spot in the Toon. A path runs from there round the back of the Cathedral to the rear entrance of that wonderful old bank building on Dean Street, in which my office was located. And I recalled Amen Corner, the band, and Andy Fairweather Low and watching him pour his heart out singing Gin House. Then suddenly I came out of my reverie to see Vera setting off from Amen Corner along the Cathedral path. And seconds later she’s standing in the Victorian splendour of the top landing of the bank building, right next to the corridor that led to my office. Spooky. I needed a drink after that!
At secondary school, we had an art teacher by the name of Doherty, whom everyone referred to as John Dox. John Dox claimed to his pupils that he had been a member of the Special Boat Service (SBS) during the War. He often regaled us with tales of his time in the SBS. On one occasion, he told us how to kill an attacking dog. Apparently, you wait until the dog is almost upon you. Then you grab both its front legs and pull them apart until its heart bursts. On account of our working-class upbringing, we were all as cynical as fuck. “Aye, right,” was what we whispered to each other.
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