Obiter Dicta

20th September 2011

Much has happened since last I scattered my thoughts in this little thought-bed. I reached my  sixtieth birthday and spent a great deal of extremely pleasurable time in the company of my family. As a consequence of my 60^th, I now possess a Kindle, which makes me feel like Captain Spock. I intend to beam myself aboard several literary starships before too long. My first purchases for it were The Complete Works of Shakespeare, the ditto of Charles Dickens, ‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce and the Booker shortlisted Julian Barnes one, ‘The Sense of an Ending’. The first three selections I cannot be without, especially the Shakespeare and the Joyce; the last I intend to read when I am in Bath next month, voicing The Locked Ward for BBC Audio Books.

I am looking forward to Bath very much. It is a city I love and I relish the prospect of being back in it. I will be staying at a hotel very near the Crescent and I will drink in the beauty of the architecture at every opportunity. I may even pretend I am Captain Wentworth in the evenings and see how many Annes I can find.

As to the reading of my book – I am uncommonly excited about that prospect too. It’s time my manly Caledonian tones were heard ringing out in living-rooms and cars around the country, not to mention the fact that it will provide another audience for the book. And there are a hundred characters I’ll enjoy voicing – accents, dialects, moods … Who knows, if I do this well, I may get the gig for other Scottish works.

I have been working on short stories mainly this week. Three of them were submitted for the Manchester Metropolitan University Prize: ‘Night, the Beloved’, ‘The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife’ and my favourite, ‘Grand Guignol’. A fourth was entered for the Bridport: ‘The End of Things’. They form part of a collection I am putting together on the theme of night and nightmare. This week’s work has been a long piece, tentatively entitled ‘The Dreamtown Sex Play’, but most likely to be renamed before it is finished. It is a swirling dream piece, in the style of Flaubert’s ‘Temptation of St. Antony’ and Joyce’s ‘Circe’. I have great hopes for it.

I have been looking at some philosophy in the last few days, the result of a Twitter friendship with a guy called Roman Tsivkin, who is deeply interested in matters philosophical. To my delight, I found a piece I had written many years ago ( ), in which I reflected on my experience of Philosophy at university. And here it is:

Wittgenstein said “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Unlike many philosophical gems, this is a sound apothegm, and one that the good burghers of my home town have taken to heart and use as an everyday watchword. Except they translate the original German as “Shut yer face an’ nae cunt’ll ken yer daft.”…

Philosophers know what they can do with their Logic, Ethics and Metaphysics, with their Epistemology and their Ontology; with their a priori reasoning (argument from cause to effect) and their a posteriori (talking out of their arses.) It has never helped me understand what anything is about…

One good thing about philosophers, though, is that some of them have died in spectacularly silly ways.

Heraclitus, for example, was eaten by dogs because he was covered in dung – something he had considered was a good way of treating his dropsy. Epicurus died on the loo. (Mother was right – don’t push too hard on the john, or you’ll do yourself a mischief.) Empedocles died by jumping into Mount Etna to prove he was a god. He wasn’t. Socrates poisoned himself with hemlock; Pythagoras died because he was a vegetarian. Pursued by an angry mob into a beanfield, he stopped running, not wanting to harm the beans, and was battered to death by the crowd. Diogenes (who, like Huck Finn, sometimes lived in a barrel) died of eating raw octopus and St. Thomas Aquinas died on the pan, like Epicurus. Perhaps his last thought was “It’s all a load of shite.”

And so, finally …

This is what it’s all about, my friends, and say I said it: You’re born; you grow old; you die. The time in between birth and death might be bonecreakingly long or heartbreakingly brief, but that’s it, all the same: you’re born; you grow old; you die. Spend as much time as you can with the people you love before you go, or before they do. Try to pass on any wisdom you may have acquired. And always check over your answers before you hand in the paper.