Obiter Dicta

Monday, October 17, 2011.

Returned on Friday from  my week in Bath. Not my week in the bath, fragrant though some may think me, but in beautiful, Georgian, Gainsborough-Sheridan-and-Austen Aquae Sulis whose water, according to Sam Weller, has "a very strong flavour o' warm flat irons."  And not only the water in the spa – which I didn’t visit on this occasion. The tap water tastes of old feet too. Tip – drink bottled water. The local aqua is too sulis for my palate.

I got there via Bristol, which is not a lovely city. Forgive me, Bristolians, I am prepared to believe that there may be beautiful sections of it. They just don’t include the centre. The Bristol blitz did you no favours. Beirut on the Avon. Although, to be scrupulously fair, I did see a massively impressive church, which might or might not have been called St. Mary Redcliffe.

To get to Bristol, I had to fly. I am not alone in my fear of flying, I know, but I may well be alone in my detestation of it as a combination of simultaneously the most terrifying, and yet the most skull-crushingly tedious, experience known to haunt the soul of sensitive man. Can anything be more dull, irritating or fatuous than an airport? I looked around me as I queued at the Departure gate  at 7.30 that morning and thought to myself, ‘If I have to die this morning, do I really want these people to be the ones I go through my last agonies with? These laptop lapdogs? These irksome yelps who have to be on their mobile phones at all times, to impress upon us lesser mortals: I AM IMPORTANT. (No, you’re not, mate. You’re a paid lackey like the rest of us. Nobody’s asking you if they should sell Rio Tinto Zinc; or whether you will change your flight, head instead to Damascus and make sure a peace agreement is signed. They’re telling you to get your arse in gear and get those invoices up to Head Office at once.) Better than that, though, I had a whistler right behind me. Not a painter of moody impressionistic night scenes, either. One of those fatheads who whistle snatches of melody at random intervals, as a substitute for thinking. It’s always guys, I’ve noticed. Women are rarely that irritating. I turned round and gave him the glare once or twice. But these folk never twig. He whistled on. And on and on. Oh, the temptation to push his  teeth down his throat and say, ‘Whistle now, ya bastard! Give us a few staves of the Minute Waltz, why don’t you.’

(You can maybe tell by now that I was a little stressed.)

Flying didn’t alleviate it. I had a window seat (hate them; have no desire to see clouds or the land that far below me). The other seats were taken up by two callow younglings from Fife, on their way to study grease-monkery at some poly in Bristol. They talked about cars the whole flight. When they weren’t flicking through ‘Nuts’ magazine. At one point, I did seriously consider leaning over from reading ‘The Sense of an Ending’ and whispering, ‘If you’re that desperate for a wank, there are far better magazines available.’ I didn’t, of course. I’m too much of  a gentleman.

A ten minute train journey from Bristol brought me to the city of Bath, its golden buildings of Bath stone shimmering, even though the morning was grey. The guest house I stayed in, the Dorian, was quiet and refined, with taped cello music. Just the ticket for a boy like me!

The actual recording of the audio book of The Locked Ward was fun. And interesting. Just me and my text on a lectern between two reading lights in a dark studio. I was booked in for four days but completed it in three. Don’t know if that’s good or not. My producer, a lovely guy called David Bell, something of an aging hippy like myself, was very complimentary and said that I was ‘very professional’ in my attitude to fluffs. Just stopped, took a breath and started from the fuck-up point. It annoyed me whenever I did it, so I tried to keep such screw-ups to a minimum. Always worse after lunch for some reason. (And no, it wasn’t a liquid one.)

Interesting that everyone else there to read that week was an actor. They thought it deuced rum that I was reading my own book. They were all very engaging people, and very pleasant towards the wee Scottish interloper but they did give me something of a complex, briefly. There they all were, E-N-U-N-C-I-A-T-I-N-G; and INTONING; and inflecting like fuckers, while I read my wee book in  my gravelly West Lothian accent. I did, I think, read with some expression. But I always hate to hear my voice on playback. A voice an octave lower than a coo’s. David was very nice and said that it was ‘rich’. Besides, he liked what he called my ‘broad Scots’.  Oh no, David! If you think I’m broad Scots, you should visit the boozer on a Friday night. In comparison to these guys, I modulate like Alvar Liddell.

Anyway, my voice is what it is. One can only be oneself, so long as one always endeavours to be the best self one can. And, if nothing else, my rich tones are there for the descendants!

The rest of my stay in bath was enjoyable. I do love the city. And I bought a copy of Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘The Bees’. Ah, man! I never thought I’d see a poet overtake Seamus Heaney in my estimation as the finest poet of the times. But Ms. Duffy has. I’ve always liked her stuff, to be sure, from my first reading of ‘Standing Female Nude’. But she has grown and developed and progressed so much that I’d now give her the palm. After having wrested it from the hands of famous Seamus, of course. Like I tweeted when I got back: She’s the Poet Laureate, she’s Scottish, she’s female and she’s gay. About as good as it gets after centuries of middle-class English males. Do yourself a favour and read ‘The Bees’. The poem Last Post, written after the last survivors of World War I died, is a stunning achievement. The notion of time run backwards is not a new one, but what she does with it will break your heart. A genius takes existing techniques and makes them her own.

Whilst languishing in my lonely little guest house bed in Bath, I read Julian Barnes’s ‘The Sense of an Ending’ on my Kindle. (Hey! Mr. Gizmo, or what?) Oh, you have to read that too. If it doesn’t win the Booker, it’ll be a travesty. It starts off like a rites of passage romance. Ends up with the biff of a Greek tragedy. Mightily impressive.

And now my typing finger has the bends after so much work in so short a space of time. I’m off to immerse it in an iced vodka and pomegranate juice.

Here’s to the next time. (And buy The Locked Ward, in all its various guises, when it comes oot!)

Toujours gai.