St Dymphna's Day

It is May again and what a pleasure it is to see the peasant women in their pastel coloured dresses scouring the mudflats in the Nith Valley for molluscs to bake in the traditional Holiday Snail Pudding. Tomorrow is St Dymphna's Day where an effigy of the blessed Lady is carried all the way over the mountain pass from Penpont to Sanquar and back on a floral float dragged by twelve specially chosen local simpletons. At night after the bonfire there is an orgy, with late bar.

Archie Gemmell and Bananas

Leafing through my mail this morning I come across a letter from an old friend of mine in Regensburg. He tells me of a recent conversation held through the window of a hostel with a drunken Albanian. This conversation went something like "Scotland Archie Gemmell Hugh Shug Bananas". On reading this, my blood ran cold. Surely this cannot have been the same Albanian who terrorised my railway carriage on a long rail journey through Northern Yugoslavia in the middle of the 1978 world Cup? He spent much of the journey tossing bananas onto the floor of ther carriage then jumping on them with a blood curdling cry of "SKARABUJID BANANA!" When, after all this foreplay, he leaped like a monkey on the girl sitting next to me, I was forced to flee. I don't remember if I told him my name but in the heat of the moment, with all these bananas, who can tell?

In ordinary circumstances this would have set my mind racing about the strange power of coincidence, but the answer of course is much more simple. The fact is my friend, Stephen Kirk, writing from Regensberg, is a complete liar, and always has been. So you see, things are seldom what they seem. This was proved to me once in a small Scottish country town called Biggar. I once met there with a woman who I was trying to persuade to commission me to write a book. We were searching, a I recall, for a quiet enough locale to conduct our business and chanced on a small hotel. Looking through the window I saw what appeared to be an ideal venue, a sparsely populated establishment warmly lit by a coal fire with a few old regulars sitting at the bar and a well dressed member of the bar staff leaning over the counter. "Come on" I said cheerily, "this will do fine." Imagine my horror when we entered and saw the barman was trying to stem the blood from a broken nose. "Woops" I said, whereupon one old worthy turned from the Natural History programme he had been watching and cried "Jesus Christ, hen, would you look at the size of that pygmy's cock!"
Such surprises are denied other nationalities, I suspect. For which they must be profoundly grateful.

Mean Mile

As we butt into the countryside,
our snub-nosed bus sounds more annoyed;
it grinds through swamps and ruts,
between dykes and crippled hedges,
down miles of wet tarmac,
from one telegraph pole to another,
from one five bar gate to another,
from one muddy bunkered cottage to another,
criss-crossing land dank and paralysed
below an oatmeal sky.
There seem hudreds of miles,
thousands, but it's the same mean mile
circling, taking us back where we didn't want
to come from, where we didn't want to leave.