Roanaby

Cog

Bicycle

This is in a World War II coastal battery at Rerwick Head, Tankerness, Orkney. I thought it looked old enough to have belonged to some army sergeant. Then I noticed that it is a woman's bike. Obviously, there were lots of women in the forces then, but I'm not sure there were any female personnel at these batteries. I must look into it.

Drinking

I might start off in the Bow Bar. That’s on Victoria Street. Victoria Street in Edinburgh. Better say that because you were probably thinking there’s no Bow Bar on Victoria Street. No doubt there’s at least one Victoria Street in every British city, one result of holding onto your throne for, what was it, sixty years? So, the Bow Bar, Victoria Street, Edinburgh. At least I think it’s on Victoria Street.
Not as old as it looks from the inside. Fake, you’d call it, I’d suppose, only you’d probably forgive them once you’d had a couple. I know I always did. Not fake either in looking like the fittings came from a catalogue, though if you know that they did, I’d appreciate it if you kept it to yourself.
The beer is good. Good range, well kept and served by people who seem to know what they’re doing, not just some overcool youth or eye candy. Don’t know why I used that stupid phrase. Eye candy. Makes me think of someone with a stick of rock stuck in their eye. Edinburgh rock. Like that old film from 1899 or sometime, the moon with the rocket stuck in its eye. Lumiere Brothers, was it?
So I’d sit with the Guardian and do the cryptic over a nice pint in one of the window seats. Of course, you had to try and finish it quick, because you’d know that after several beers, you analytical strength would ebb and, conveniently, you would also begin to not give a toss what fourteen across was. Sometimes I’d get so far and then tear it out and cram it into a pocket, finish it tomorrow. Never would, even if I did find it again. The glamour of it, the mystery of the unsolved clues would have seeped away into the lining of my jacket. ‘Lights’ they’re called, the unfilled boxes. Lights. And the glass inserts you sometimes walk over in a pavement are called borrowed light. I like that, as if the people who built the cellar one or two hundred years before will come back at some point and return all the light that the cellar has used.
So, after a couple of pints It’s out the door. Never one to linger in the same place too long. Down the street and into the Grassmarket. I remember telling two slightly disorientated American tourists late one night how the gallows would be set up here. In the middle of the night a wagon would draw up and the scaffold be erected. There for the populace to see when they awoke, as if it had just appeared. After the hanging it would be removed by the same crew in the middle of the night. Gone in the morning as if it just disappeared. Another element in keeping the mob fearful. The pub at the corner is The Last Drop, but all the Grassmarket pubs are wholesale tourist processors.
Cut across and stop at the cash machine in the ugly modern bank, there are few machines where I’m going. Makes it sound sinister but it isn’t; there are just few cash machines where I’m going.
Head to the corner of the market and toward West Port. A pub on the right, good jukebox. The one on the left, old fire-station tarted-up in a predictable fashion. But one evening I sat in there over a pint and watched the snow begin to fall beyond the window. Slow and silent, it drifted down, orange in the streetlight. Lots of second-hand bookshops along there too. The problem is you go in and are tempted to buy some fat tome you’ll need to lug about for the rest of the day and evening. And you’ll regret the beer you could have bought with the money, tell yourself that you could easily have borrowed the book from the library. Or worst of all, spend the money, buy the book, lug it around from pub to pub before you lose it somewhere. Poor French classic or American collected poems lost, drifting around the city with no shelf to lay its weary spine.
Up to the pub with the woman’s name. ‘Kay Kendall’s‘? No, that’s some old actress. I mean an actress of some time ago, not an actress who was always old, like Margaret Rutherford. Well, of course, she couldn’t have been old always, she just gave that impression. Decent pint, old guys watching the horse-racing and little groups of art students from the college round the corner. I mean that the old guys are watching the races and that there are also some art students there, not that the old men are watching them in-between the three o’clock from Kempton Park and the three-fifteen from Aintree. There may be no such races, I don’t know, I’m too busy watching the art students. The girl ones, that is, in their polka-dots and outré hairstyles. Sweet. Out into the greyness of the late afternoon. Bookshops shutting soon, temptation resisted. Head on west past the sleazy little strip bars. Went in one one day and saw the expressions on the faces of the men watching the woman get naked. Vicious.
Along here I think of grave robbers. I was at a play one night,. The Anatomist, about Burke and Hare and the doctor who bought the bodies they brought for dissection. Me and the girl I was with came back this way, passing one of the murder sites of the villains. It was a clear night sky with a full moon and I had her in a certain amount of trepidation, but not enough to take refuge in my safe embrace.
Into the Blue Blazer. Couple here. Talked to an old American guy. Got onto world war two. He’d been in the Pacific; navy. Impressed by the amount I knew of the Americans in the Pacific in world war two. Bought me a pint, but I think I bought him one back, so no reparations needed there. This pub belongs to a chain. Wooden floors and fittings the same in every one you go into, but it’s a good location. You can head onto Lothian Road and south, or, getting a second wind, north and into the west end of the city centre. Maybe into Mathers West End. One evening there I sat across from an old man reading Berlin Alexanderplatz in the German, a little dictionary on the table by his pint. Read a little, sup a little, check the dictionary quite a lot. Good on you. The pub was pretty Alexanderplatish itself. Maybe it helped bring the story alive. Not that you’d really want that, not that story. Maybe go along a little side-street and into Bert’s Bar. One night I heard two people arguing further along the bar…Judas Iscariot…I don’t know what Iscariot means…I did…it means, I told them, Iscariot means ‘red-headed.’ Trust him to know they said, and I hadn’t even realised they knew me at all. And now I’m not even sure I was right.
This one evening, and the afternoon has indeed become evening, I ignore the city centre. I pass the crossing where a pretty girl called me a bloody fool when I stepped in front of a racing ambulance. My excuse is that I’d had a couple of glasses of punch in someone’s flat- it was Christmastime, and I confused the siren of a passing fire-engine with that of a speeding ambulance. I suppose they were on their way to the same drama, when I stepped in front of the ambulance part of the scene. Bloody fool, she said, not fondly, as I was just missed. Close thing. The ignominy of being run down by an ambulance only balanced by the fact that it is an ambulance and you won’t have to lie on the cold winter road waiting for one. And the driver knows the fastest way back to the hospital he has just left and will be able to drop you off and go for a cup of tea in the canteen and say ’you’ll never guess…’
I consider planting a punch in the face of the pretty girl’s boyfriend to teach her some manners, but can’t be bothered, it’s probably a lost cause.
I hurry past the crossing and along the road to the arthouse cinema. No film-going, just into the bar. Buy a drink and study the details of what‘s coming, make a note of seeing this one or that one and miss it when it comes around. And maybe regret not missing the ones that I didn’t manage to forget. After my cameo appearance there I head South and round the corner to a church and go in.
Only, it isn’t a church anymore, I’m no more here to pray than I wanted to watch a film in the cinema. It’s a pub because there are more drinkers now than prayers and that’s the cause of all our troubles. Sure. And I mean those who pray by prayers rather than the beseeching words, the begging, the entreaties, the final demands. Anyway, once deconsecrated it is no longer a holy place. And, in my view, never was. Now where’s the bar? Wish they’d pull out the pews though, reminds me too much of uncomfortable childhood Sundays. No food was taken, though by now I had consumed several newspapers. Notes had been taken when my ire was especially raised at some editorial or article. I’ll show them, wait till they read the letter I’ll send, just print that my lad and we’ll see what happens. No letters were ever written.
Further South and it’s the blasted heath that is the Meadows. A golf pub on one side. A Golf Pub! Across the darkness of the meadows just daring inwardly any mugger to try it on. I’m no local, I’m Glasgow! See if you can see any stars, then out the other side and half-guess If this is the right road for another pub. The Duke of Something. The Laird of Wherever. The Up Against the Wall Ya Parasitic Swine of Someday, Oneday, Maybe Tomorrow. The hardened revolutionary in his cups. It’s on a corner. Getting in the door I look round for a seat with a view of the road. I often do. Go into the pub, look for a view of the street I’ve just left. If I like it so much, why don’t I just stay out there? Another reasonably good jukebox, but the place is always busy with jukebox-playing types, playing not quite the records one wishes to hear at that precise moment of time and drunkenness. A couple three four here and it’s time, finally, for home. The only problem being the fact that the Duke has been transported to some other city I’ve never visited, or even imagined existed. As I walk the streets of towering, handsome tenements, I look up at the lighted windows, at the lamps hanging like personal moons in each living-room. What face do they shine down upon? Whose faces? They are just faces before they are someone’s faces. But no-one ever seems to near the window.
After a while I get the impression that I am edging too far south, soon I will be in suburbia, the bleak wastelands of bungalow and spaniel. I turn East. No-on else walks. Few vehicles pass.
The scene is of a piece. Pavement and garden walls and hanging shrubberies and streetlamp standards, hard-edged deep-dyed shadows cast by blue-white lamplight. It’s like walking through a woodcut.
Giving up my wandering I enter a phone-box. Directory of enquiries put me through to a taxi company. The girl tells me, as I don’t know where I am, to read out the location on the box printed on the notice in front of me. Five minutes later a taxi takes me home. Such service for a wastrel!

I don’t go into pubs anymore. Don’t drink at all. Read less of the news and fail to get furious at the articles I can barely be bothered to read. Do the crossword but with little zest, though more success. And fragments of little, never to be written stories no longer sway and hobble through the pages of my notebooks, they are full, instead, of sensible reminders of bills to be paid. And it never feels, in my head, the way it used to do after the first pint, when colours seemed to sweep around the inside surface of my skull like Northern Lights. Though I wonder if I have emigrated to a teetotalitarian state. Sometimes I dream that I am drinking. Last night I was in a pub I used to frequent. It was pretty dark and full and not quite how it used to be as if renovated in the years since I was last there. I turned from the bar to see a woman pass, a woman I used to know and care for. She didn’t see me, had just met another person who, it appeared, had not, just like me, seen her for years and was delighted at his luck. She smiled at him and I did not want to break the line of their gaze. They turned and went into a room at the back. I glanced in, saw that they had joined others I recognised, all those art school types. I told myself that I was not there, drinking and looking at this woman I used to, still, cared for, but home in bed in a house far to the north on an island swept by snow, but I didn’t believe myself. I even managed to persuade myself that I had merely dreamt living there and not being a bar-fly anymore, then thought that I would be better off there and not here and was sad and resigned when I awoke in the room of reflected white light.

Shelf-space

This is a tragedy, but I’ll try to keep it light. I got a job. Not a tragedy in itself, but we will get to that. The job was in the north. The far north. Beyond the far north. The isles beyond the northern most tip of the mainland. I really just wanted out of the city so had been applying for jobs in the western islands, the highlands and, yes, the northern isles, and this was the only success. I was sure it said in the advert that relocation expenses would be met, so it was a real pain when they told me that there was no cash for someone to move to a job as lowly as the one I was taking. They didn’t put it like that, obviously. So, if you were rolling in money and taking a job up there where you might be rolling in even more money; they would pay your expenses. If you didn’t have two pennies to rub together, well, tough, pay your own way. The theory was that they should hire locally for the kind of job I’d be doing, but, then, if they could’ve, they would’ve. I mean that since they had been unable to get someone local, then they should have been willing to help me out with the move. That’s fair isn’t it? Not that I had much. Living in a rented, furnished flat, I wasn’t moving beds, Welsh dressers or ottomans or dining tables with six matching chairs. No absurdly large sofas, no big bits of technology. Sounds a little Spartan. I even had the landlady remove a two-seater sofa because it was more than I needed, she replaced with an armchair. A pink armchair.
The only real possessions I had were books. The hall was full, the living room and bedroom pretty much full too. I did have some other stuff: small television, CD player, bits and bobs. But books were the main thing. So I called up a movers and asked them how much to shift my stuff and nearly dropped the phone. What, are they using Rolls-Royces to shift people’s possessions? Porsche pantechnicons?
No way could I afford that. I don’t drive and didn’t know anyone who could hire a van and would put that much effort into driving all that way as a favour, even a paid favour, to me. Maybe should have socialized more instead of having my head stuck in a book all the time. But then I wouldn’t need someone to help me move all these books.
There were a few second-hand bookshops not far from the flat. I’d occasionally had to sell the odd book now and then when flat broke, though other times I made myself flat broke spending my last few pounds on a book. But this was going to be wholesale slaughter. Retail slaughter.
I thought that I could save the poetry, those slim volumes , you can get a lot of them in a suitcase. But the fiction would suffer a fate worse than verse.
I decided that I would sell all the books at one shop. It was bad enough having to sell them without hawking them around several places. It is a cruel and harsh world where a simple working man can’t even keep his books. I could just imagine a passer-by deriding the guy with the bag of books…’what good did they ever do you? Your head is full of tales and your pockets full of nothing‘. Ah, the old ‘do not read poems; read timetables’ line. Well they trashed the public transport systems anyway, a timetable now might as well have been written by Lear for all its realism, Edmund I mean, not King…I’d get an arm about his neck in a half-kidding, half-serious half-nelson and tell him that these books had changed who I was, had played their part in making me who I am, what I am…’yeah’, he’d say, ‘ someone who can’t afford to keep his books.’ I’d gracefully pick up the bag of books and go on my way, maybe quoting something appropriate under my breath. Remember to look something up that I can memorise easily.
I chose the likeliest shop, the one that sold the kind of thing I was selling. I filled a bag and made the first trip. It didn’t help that this shop was run by the glummest bunch you could meet. It always seemed strange to me, twenty years or so I’d been coming here and it was the same three or so people running it. How could a small second-hand bookshop provide a living for these three? And miserable like a wet afternoon on early-closing day in Dunoon. Do they still have early-closing days? Is there still a Dunoon?
On the way to the shop, I thought it was like the film the ‘March of the Penguins‘…the British with the Scotts, as usual, making up a large contingent, English and Irish, no Welsh, sorry, the French, including one very large miserable figure and half a dozen Parisian types who seemed to be marching in tight patent-leather shoes, a Knight of Spain, confused, the Russians, a mix of prince, pauper, radical and criminal, the Americans, some in trench-coats, some in jeans, even one with a wooden leg , and a couple of others with hats pulled low very camera-shy, you couldn’t see their faces at all, I think they liked it that way. There was non-fiction too. What an unpoetic term, I suppose that’s the idea. Most were reprints, histories of the second world war. I didn’t feel too bad about moving those along, after all, they were just about mass slaughter rather than the depths of souls. The war books went unbought, they weren’t interested in reprints. So they ended up in Oxfam, which was a bit ironic what with them being about aid for those countries we fight our wars in now so as to avoid destroying all our lovely European real estate, art galleries and all that. But the fiction they gobbled down. The staff usually hung around in a little sitting room area at the back of the shop, leather armchairs, standard lamp, there for staff only, none of this friendly nonsense of chain stores. I’d dump the bag and affect interest in the nearest shelves. Then, obviously, start seeing things I’d have to resist buying. Turn round and the rejects are at one side. I’d have taken this, he said, but the pages are loose. Damn, should’ve noticed that, glued it up. So The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution’, ends up Oxfambound. After a few selling trips over a week or two, the shop began to resemble my own flat before the clear-out began. I thought that maybe I could wander downstairs one day and hide somewhere, come out after closing and sit in one of those armchairs, read a few pages each of those books that were once mine. But with my luck, I would stumble into a sub-basement that would be part of a salt-mine. I’d be forced to work there with only the thought of the great novel I would write about my experience if I ever got free. I think salt-mines came to mind because the staff always seemed a bunch of old Stalinist types, the last leaves on a withered tree, who had set up the shop with the last monies in the kitty, before throwing in the towel against steroid suffused capitalism. The fat cats won out; they’d bought the judges.
At this point a sister or two…actual sisters, not like dames out of Hammett or Chandler, started saying that they would have stored books in their attics, but them broads! they waited until the books were gone before making the offer. Now the flat seemed twice as large and far smaller at the same time.
So now I’m far away in a practically bookshop-free town. I have one bookcase. One! there is a suitcase of books at dad’s which is divesting its contents on each visit, and purchases are slowly beginning to repopulate the shelves. Next time I might just rob a bank to keep the books with me.
This happened a year or so ago. They’ll all be gone now, the books I sold, they will have flown off the shelves like racing pigeons from coops at the start of the race. I should be glad, I suppose, that people are discovering some of those writers now, those novels, individual pages, single lines that change your life forever.