Obiter Dicta

Monday March 26^th.

De Faecibus Canorum

I take as my text today the report from the Guardian of February 2009, entitled ‘Dog Poo Britain’.

Six months ago, Herself and I moved house, from Blackburn, West Lothian, hometown of Subo, to the village where Herself grew up; indeed, to the house where she grew up. This is a quiet little bungalow, walled in its own garden, at the end of a quiet residential area, and on the very rim of the countryside. Walk out of the front gate, turn to the right, and five paces takes you into fields and trees along a quiet country road that leads up a hill. The view from the eminence at the top of this hill is panoramic and beautiful. The people in the residential area are quiet and neighbourly. We both like peace and quiet. We both love living here.

             A little lane runs down the side of the garden wall to playing fields, and a footpath to the village’s main street shops. There are football pitches, walks, nurseries and a kiddies’ playground at the bottom of the lane. In the evening, all is calm and serene. The only people you are liable to see are people walking their dogs. Lots of people walking lots of dogs, in the course of the day. It is evidently a favourite walk to bring Fido up the quiet little street and round our wall, down the lane to the playing fields.

            And this is where the idyll starts to stink a little bit. All those dogs do what dogs do. And they do it on the streets and on the playing fields. Despite the fact that every second lamp-post has a bin attached to it so that dog owners can ‘bag and bin’ their dog’s mess, thereby rendering the environment a little less unpleasant, hardly any of them do it. (Indeed, one bin has been graffitied with the legend, ‘Ha! I wrote on this shit-bin. Take that, Society!’) It’s the only use the bin has been put to, so far as I can see. The Guardian article that I quoted at the start of this piece tells me that, in the year 2008 there were 7.3 MILLION dogs in the UK, depositing 1000 TONNES of dog-poo on the streets, paths and parks of our fair and fragrant land EVERY DAY. A thousand tonnes is equal to 2,205,000 (TWO MILLION, TWO HUNDRED AND FIVE THOUSAND) lbs imperial. That’s a whole load of steaming, stinking, sticky, dangerous poo in anybody’s ready reckoner. Per day, mind. Per day.

             Actually, let’s just drop the word ‘poo’ shall we? It hinders the argument. It’s twee baby talk. A nyah-nyah, niminy piminy euphemism. What we are actually talking about here is SHIT. Shite. Turds. Faeces. Revolting, isn’t it? Imagine if human beings were dropping their knickers and depositing over two million stones of shite on to the countryside every day. There’d be an outcry. Justifiably.  Redfaced old colonels would be writing to the Times. There’d be talk of The Great Stink, and where is the modern-day Bazalgette? So why do we tolerate Mr Selfish allowing his mutt to void its bowel on the pavement or the park and not do anything about it?

            Because we are a nation of dog-lovers, that’s why. Poochy poo can do anything he likes. Even shite on the street. It’s not the dogs’ fault. I don’t suppose. Though if the stupid animals weren’t there, it couldn’t happen. (Cards on the table here – surprise, surprise, I’m  not a dog lover. I wouldn’t harm any animal – or not many – but dogs bore me. They bark and they bite. And they shite.) But, I could forgive the dogs. It’s the selfish, arrogant, inconsiderate illbred spawn of whores - the dog-owners - that are to blame. If you want to own a woofing, snarling, biting creature, okay. But with that comes responsibilities. And one of the major ones is to clean up after the furry shit-machine.

            I can’t imagine it’s pleasant, lifting a hot dog shit in a plastic bag and carrying it to a shit-bin. But if you don’t want that unpleasantness, don’t have a fucking dog. Twice this week, I’ve toted buckets of water from the house to wash dog toleys off the pavement and into the gutter. There’s a lane, a snicket, down to the main street behind the houses a little farther down the road. I call it Dogshit Lane. It’s a gallery of old and new, solid and runny, brown and yellowish-green, lumpy and cylindrical, sausage-like and segmented dog-turds. It’s the Tate Dogshit. It’s unspeakably vile.

            Most of you will know the sickmaking experience of cleaning dogshit from the sole of your shoe. Have you ever had to carry a crying child in your arms all the way to the house, strip the clothes off her back and immerse her in a bath because she tripped while playing  IN A CHILD’S PLAY AREA and was smeared from head to foot in mutt-shit? I have. In this very house Herself and I now inhabit. When my daughter was a child, precisely that happened in the playing-field behind the house. Over thirty years ago, when it was her Granny’s house. So it’s not a new phenomenon around here. But it’s just as nauseating.

             Heard of Toxocariasis? It’s a really unpleasant illness humans can contract from dogshit that carries the toxocara roundworm. The Big Tox can cause rheumatic, asthmatic and/or neurological symptoms in humans and can even lead to blindness. Think about that the next time Pongo lowers his arse, spreads his cheeks and dumps his load on the green.

            Fuck the selfish dog owners and, if it needs to come to that, fuck the dogs too. People, children especially, take priority. The next lump of dogshit on the pavement outside my house will be lifted on a shovel and taken to the offending dog-owner’s house and deposited there, where it belongs. We need to force owners to pick up their animal’s shite and dispose of it sensibly. Fine them a hundred quid every time they don’t. Get big mean dudes, pay them as Dogshit Agents and entitle them to demand payment from offending owners.  Either that or force them to put nappies on Fido every time he’s outside.

            Failing that, make them lift all the dogshit from the polluted parks, playing-fields and streets for a while. Let them actually SEE and SMELL what it is, rather than stroll ahead whistling while Hereboy evacuates his bowel.

            Oh, and take the mutt from them. Obviously.

Obiter Dicta

Thursday, March 22nd

I received a Tweet from an old school chum the other day. He mentioned our English teacher in the bygone days of yore, a man known universally by the nickname Pud. That rang a few madeleines after all these years. I got to discussing him with Herself. She hadn’t been taught by him; she was taught English by a woman nicknamed Cluck. What a strange place St. Dementia of the Holy Tawse was, to be sure. Anyway, sufficient of this dribble. I mentioned to Herself that Pud introduced me to Chaucer’s work. And she reminded me of a piece I wrote for The Scotsman on that very subject in 1999.

            And here it is for your delectation.

“It’s 599 years since Chaucer died. Doesn’t time fly? I just turned around and he was gone.

            My introduction to the Father of English poetry came in 1967. To be perfectly truthful, so did most people’s. The line in Procul Harum’s A Whiter Shade of Pale – “And so it was that later, as the Miller told his tale” was the first inkling many of us had of the existence of Chaucer, his Miller and the tale. If I hadn’t been studying for Higher English that year, my familiarity with old Geoff would have gone no farther than most folk’s.

            I sat the Higher exam in the years before the Flood, when texts for study were still set, and were still classics of Scottish, but more usually, English literature. This meant their authors had to be dead. There was none of this modern fad of letting pupils study living writers who put sweary-words into their novels and poems. If you read that stuff at all, it was for enjoyment, not for passing exams. Pud O’Hanlon, our English teacher, was a firm believer in this approach. In previous years, I had studied The Coverley Papers, Macauley’s Essays on Clive and Hastings and Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Penseroso. I hated them all.  I was 14, for God’s sake! It was the 1960’s. Literature like The Catcher in the Rye, the works of the Mersey Poets and the plays of Joe Orton were being written. We were stuck with stuff we thought as ancient as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

            In fact, though I liked Pud a great deal, we came to blows over the Milton poems. Well, I say we came to blows, but actually he came to blows. Having read the two poems aloud, Pud asked one of the wee Marys in the class which she preferred. She said “L’Allegro, sir.” He looked at her for a moment. Then he asked some beefwit from Broxburn. Sussing that “L’Allegro, sir” was not the answer Pud required, he said “Il Penseroso, sir.” Pud shook his head in disbelief, as well he might, and then came to me. “O’Donnell, which do you prefer?” I said, “Neither, sir.” Pud beamed beatifically, and said, “Good answer, boy. The poems are, in fact, companion pieces, to be enjoyed together, aren’t they?” I said no, I just thought they were both rubbish. He belted me. My lifelong love of Milton started that day.

            Anyway, back to Chaucer, as Middle English ITV announcers used to say. Came the day when Pud doled out copies of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. These were musty, smelly volumes that had obviously been around since the Pope was an altar-boy. The pupils’ names written on their fly-leaves were things like Florence, Albert and Ernestina. One girl discovered her grandmother’s maiden name. The books were so foxed they should have had a red, bushy tail and been called Reynard. Pud started his spiel about one of the great comic poems of literature, a repository of beautiful lines and astute character observation. We weren’t convinced. But, when I opened my copy of the Tales, my arse nearly fell off in fright. This wasn’t a poem; this was a knitting-pattern. If you followed it closely, you could end up with a chunky polo-neck sweater in Fisherman’s Rib. Or maybe old Chaucer spoke in Algebra. Whatever it was, it bamboozled me. My bam had never been so boozled.

            “Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote/The droghte of Merche hath perced to the rote…” What was I to make of this gibberish? We might as well have been reading The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Or The Epic of Gilgamesh in the original Gilgameshi. Chaucer was a taucer.

            We ploughed our way through the damn thing for two terms. Pud intoned the ‘beautiful’ lines like the Swedish chef chanting the two-times table. He could see our heads bowed over the desks and must have inferred we were studying. What he couldn’t see, were the hankies being stuffed into our mouths and our knees being jammed together below the desk to stop us peeing ourselves.

            Next, he made us jot down suitable quotes for each character. By that, he meant one-liners from Geoffrey’s original text which we could regurgitate like feeding storks and use to tempt the examiners into giving us pass marks. What he didn’t mean was the sort of thing that Wee Louie jotted down in his exercise-book and which eventually earned him half a dozen strokes of the Lochgelly Leveller and a letter home to his parents. Louie made slighting references to things like the Cook’s private habits and the Pardoner’s sexual orientation. His gloss on the Reeve was his piece de resistance, questioning his hygiene, height and parentage. Something about his being a dirty wee … oh, I forget now.

            What I didn’t forget for a long time after I passed my Higher were short, pithy pen-portraits like the “verray parfit gentle Knight”, the Monk - “of priking and of hunting for the hare was al his lust” (several schoolboy jokes for the price of one, there) - and the Wife of Bath with her “hippes large”. Maybe, despite the fact that we loathed the poem, old Pud was right about the characterisation, after all. Luke found a short biography of Chaucer at the start of the book and drew our attention to the fact that he had also written something called The Boke of the Duchesse. “If she hud tae read this crap, nae wonder she boked.”

            I came to enjoy Chaucer much later in life. However, I don’t think it’s the thing to give teenagers in an attempt to inculcate a love of literature. When I had to teach it, 25 years later, I concentrated on some of the tales themselves and stressed how some of them were gripping stories with lashings of violence, rude words and plenty of what Chaucer’s contemporaries would have referred to as ‘swiving’. A cheat’s way in, maybe, but effective.

            You see, although I love literature, I’ve never been solemn or po-faced about it. This attitude not only got me the belt from Pud, but also a severe reprimand from a university tutor a few years later. I was studying an English Language course, part of which required me to read Anglo-Saxon poetry. Now, that stuff is even denser than the Middle English of Chaucer and its themes are all taken from the “Life is Hell” drawer – death, battles, exile and all that. There’s hardly a laugh in it. Anyway, one day we were studying the Old English poem, The Wanderer. Our tutor read the first two lines. “Oft him anhaga are gebideth, Metudes miltse . . . Mr. O’Donnell will now translate.” I hadn’t the foggiest what it meant. I looked at the title, The Wanderer, was suddenly inspired and sang “Aaah – I’m the kind of guy who will never settle down,” in my best 1962 Dion voice.

            The tutor favoured me with a look that would have stopped a clock. Everybody else just stared at their feet and wondered who the dickhead was. I was roundly castigated for not taking my work seriously. Well, it was a puerile joke, I’ll concede, but it was, after all, only a joke. Some folk cannae take a laugh. I still hate The Wanderer, but I love Chaucer’s writings now. And anybody who doesn’t, can perform the same act of devotion on me as Absolon did on Alison. While the Miller tells his tale.

Obiter Dicta

Sunday March 11^th.

Greetings from a very tired man this Sunday eve, as I wind down from the penultimate, or conceivably ANTEpenultimate, lap of my weird novel. So weird is it in fact, that it hasn’t yet got a title, although there are a plethora of contenders for the honour. None seems just right, though. It might be ‘Grand Guignol’. I’ve liked  that for a long time. It might be ‘The End of Things’. I like that too. But it suggests, to me at least, something that it isn’t. ‘The Secret Fauna of Nightmares’ – a phrase from my very own The Locked Ward is good. But… well … I’m not sure. And ‘Eurydice’, also very VERY good, is … well,  likewise.

            But we’ll let that hang for the time being. I’ve been on Twitter this week a fair bit, too. And there’s one writer who Tweets about his book nonfuckingstop. Now, I know we all do. All we who have aspirations to making a living from writing. I do it myself. But this guy – and I’m sure he’s a nice guy – just does it constantly. “940^th five-star review on Amazon… 941^st five-star review on Amazon…” It’s actually got to the stage of being the Tweet equivalent of the pub bore. If he hasn’t tweeted about his book in the last hour, I’ll be surprised. I actually tweeted myself, once, that I hadn’t read a bulletin about it for over two hours. What was wrong? Had he died?

            Like I say, I’m sure he’s a decent enough stick. I just wish he’d lay off for a while. His book is about taking kids on holiday. And how some places weren’t welcoming or friendly. Or weren’t hip to the groove about how to treat kids on holiday. It’s actually given me an idea. I could write a companion piece for it. From the other point of view. I did something sim’lar years ago when I wrote a column for the Scotsman. And this may even be a part of it:

            Because what I hate most of all about holidays is other folks’ kids. Sartre wrote “L’enfer, c’est les autres.” He was almost right. It’s actually les enfants des autres. Rich pickings would accrue to the first hotelier to announce a brat-free establishment. Nothing gets up my snitch more than torn-faced midgets running up and down when you’re trying to mellow out over a snort of the hard stuff and the latest bodice-ripper.

            It doesn’t matter a Dundee damn to me whether they and their parents are entitled to a holiday, too. Fine. Just let them holiday far away from me. Round them up onto cattle cars and  choo-choo them away to St. Kilda or somewhere. Whether we’re on vacation abroad, or just having a break in Britain, I don’t want to see other folks’ sprogs eating with their mouths open or hear them whining because there’s nothing to do. Nothing to do is what I like best and, while I’m not doing it, I resent having to hear five times a day, at ear-shredding volume, that this place is crap because there are no TV’s, computers, hi-fis or play-stations.

            There are such things as hotels which advertise that they welcome children. Needless to say, if we turn up at one such, we waste no time diving back into the car and wheel-spinning off in a luscious slide of gravel, as if there were a convention of double-glazing salesmen, or an outbreak of beri-beri, inside. A roar of the engine, an inch of tyre left on the tarmac and we’re off into the wide, blue yonder.

            What I’m looking for is a hotel that welcomes curmudgeonly old crabs like myself. Or, at the very least, one which promises that all brats will be chained up in an oubliette and fed spaghetti hoops and pizza, out of the sight of human beings, until it’s time for their unfortunate progenitors to take them out for their daily girn. Now that I think about it, an even better plan would be for all children to be placed, on arrival, in the hotel pillory. That way, the soul could be soothed by lobbing an occasional projectile in their direction as you passed, on your way to the theatre or opera. Suffer the little children, after all.

            No, what I want is a hotel where there are no play-areas and no high-chairs available on request. I want one with a quiet study, furnished with leather armchairs and shelved with classic novels and belles lettres. I want an aged penguin to bring me a large Courvoisier on a silver salver and a prime Corona, rolled on the dusky thigh of some Habanera lovely. I want the Palm Court orchestra tootling away just within earshot. I want peace; I want quiet; I want space to myself. And I don’t want little Tracey, Stacey or Casey anywhere in a five-mile radius of me. Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Here’s to the next time.

Obiter Dicta

Wednesday, February 29^th.

This week, I have been writing much that reminds me of my past again. Chasing a reference  took me to a nostalgia spot on the web for 1950s TV. I almost wept with the sense of being back there. I share these reminiscences with you.

Our first TV set was a massive and cumbersome strong-box with a screen the size of an envelope. It took longer to heat up than an 8lb turkey and, when it did, the images looked like they were being projected through pea soup. There were two huge knobs on the front of it, one for changing channel and one for adjusting the brightness. The latter was a sophisticated calibration which meant that one turn to the left from the central position meant that all the action took place as in a coal-bunker at midnight, where one turn to the right from it meant that the picture looked like it had been shot at the North Pole.

            There were two stations, BBC on Channel 3 and STV on Channel 10. To change from one to the other meant Dad turning the other huge knob by hand, and it clunked ponderously through the Big Bang hiss of the empty airwaves on all the other numbers until he got what he wanted – usually, the news with Michael O’Halloran, who wore a flower the size of a savoy cabbage in his buttonhole. No zapping from one channel to another with an insouciant flick of the remote control in those days.

At first, being young, I watched Watch with Mother on the BBC.

              Picture Book on Mondays was a middle-class mish-mash. Making paper lanterns; guessing which one of a series of objects had been removed from a tray (“Are you closing your eyes, children?”); and wee moralising cartoons that told kids how to behave. It was presented by a dame with a cut-glass accent. If she’d ever taken the bool out of her mooth, I’d have realised, even at the age of 5, how patronising she was.

            Tuesday – I quite liked Andy Pandy. For one thing, I looked like him at that age. I had the same expressionless and slightly gormless look about me. Andy spent a lot of time hurling his girlfriend, Looby-Loo, around in a cart. But then there was Teddy. It was always Teddy who broke the swing, lost the ball or ruined the game. I wanted to wring the little bastard’s neck - no doubt, the intended reaction. Remember, children: selfishness is bad.

             Thursdays brought the bizarre menage-a-trois of Rag, Tag and Bobtail. They were just dull. But it was Wednesdays and Fridays – The Flowerpot Men and The Woodentops – that were the highlights of this wean’s week. Cue another bint with a haw-haw accent:

            “Once upon a time, there was a little house. (Tring! Pling!) And all around the house was a beautiful gah-den. (Pom! Tiddley-pom! Tiddley-pom!)” Bill and Ben only appeared when “the man who worked in the gah-den had gone into the house for his dee-nah.” It wasn’t Daddy who did the gardening, but a hired man. In the middle of the day, “in the warm sunshine”, he had dinner. Not lunch, but dinner. The man was obviously working-class. It’s a wonder Mummy allowed him into the house. (Well, maybe not.) The Woodentops, country folk, had a daily woman, Mrs. Scrubbit, and the orra-man Sam. Mummy Woodentop was kept busy with the housework and the twins, Willie and Jenny. Daddy and Sam did manly things like shaw neeps and fork dung.

            Another world than this. It was really Home Counties TV for Home Counties weans, although I didn’t know it at the time. I never, ever made paper lanterns. I didn’t know anybody who had a daily char, a gardener or an odd-job man. I never even had the biggest spotty dog you ever did see. But my brother and I squatted like gnomes in front of it every day .

            Being a cowboy myself (Santa had brought me the suit, hat and guns), I loved the cowboy series and watched all of them mounted up on the brown moquette arm of the settee, which I rode into the sunset along with my heroes. I knew all the theme tunes, too. Champion the Wonder horse – ‘like a streak of lightnin’ flashin’ ‘cross the sky; like the swiftest arrow whizzin’ from a bow’. Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier, who ‘killt him a bar when he was only three’. The bad little bastard. And, best of all, the Lone Ranger. The stirring music of the William Tell overture, the way the Lone Ranger galloped Silver up a hill to cliff, made him rear up and then rode him down again (pretty futile riding I think now, but I loved it at the time), the bold block lettering of the title that, for some reason, always made me think of biscuits, and the dogged loyalty of the faithful Tonto to Kemo Sabe – I was mesmerised.

“A fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust and a hearty "Hiyo Silver!" The Lone Ranger. "Hiyo Silver, away!" With his faithful Indian companion Tonto, the daring and resourceful masked rider of the plains, led the fight for law and order in the early west. Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear. The Lone Ranger rides again…”

The next day I was The Lone Ranger, or Hopalong Cassidy (‘clippity-clippity-clop’), riding my two-legged steed around the prairies of Marchwood in my endless quest for justice and freedom.

            Entirely new to me, and introduced through this new magical medium, were swashbucklers. There was a clutch of these programmes that I instantly loved as well: The Buccanneers with Robert Shaw as Dan Tempest (‘Let’s go a-roving and join the buccaneers’); and William Tell, with Conrad Phillips as the eponymous hero (‘for we’ll escape from the jaws of hell for TELL and Switzerland’).

            But best of all was Richard Greene as Robin Hood, Alan Wheatley as his arch-enemy, the Sheriff of Nottingham; and Archie Duncan as the only Scottish Little John ever to travesty the legend. I loved it, from the opening credits where Robin’s arrow fizzed through the air to bury itself deep in a tree trunk, the title “The Adventures of Robin Hood” spun in a whizzing circle before righting itself dramatically, and the catchy theme tune – “Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen” – set our little hearts aglow. Not too many glens in Merrie Englande, I fancy, but then we didn’t know any better (‘Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen; Robin Hood, Robin Hood, with his band of men. Feared by the  bad, loved by the good, Robin Hood, Robin Hood, Robin Hood.”)

            A year or two later, and I was hugely diverted by this parody of the theme song, as invented by one of the bad lads from Belvedere.

Robin Hood met a nude, riding through the glen.

Friar Tuck ran like fuck to tell the Merry Men.

When they got there, Robin was bare,

Robin Hood wae a nude, in the wood.

There are some interesting psycho-sexual assumptions in there. A nude, invariably pronounced ‘nood’ to rhyme exactly with ‘Hood’, was a naked woman, a woman whose nakedness was her identifying quality, as a nun’s was piety and a nurse’s dedication. Further, to meet a nude, in a wooded glen especially, was instantly to be consumed with the desire to be like her and to experience the overwhelming urge to cast off one’s garments. And once that happened, as is proved by the ineffectual arrival of the Merrie Men, one was lost; beyond all reclamation. A nood was evidently as deadly an adversary as a gorgon or a fury. However, quite why Robin was moved to be bare, along with the nude he met in the wood, or what he intended to do once he was unclothed, never crossed my mind. I was innocent enough of that taint – for the time being, at least.