Obiter Dicta

Monday, October 8^th.

Well, I seem to have shifted the cold/flu/grippe/ that was making me feel miserable, but it took a while. Head stuffed. Chest stuffed. Loaded. It’s a long time since I sat at a kitchen table, towel over my head, inhaling the fumes from a bowl of boiling water and menthol crystals. Herself made me do it, or I wouldn’t have done it. It helped, I suppose, but it wasn’t pleasant. That shit burns the lining of your beak if you do it too enthusiastically. It put me in mind of childhood, when the mater  made me do a similar exercise with a bowl full of  hot water and Vick’s Vapour Rub (now, unaccountably, called ‘Vapo-Rub’: American influence, I’m guessing.). I hated it, blinded and choking, and making snottering noises like a pig playing blow-football. But just one of the delights of childhood medication. Along with butter balls rolled in sugar and dipped in vinegar for a sore throat. (Some pretty original vomiting after that dose.) Oh, and rubbing a wart with a half potato. Prunes for constipation. Eating crusts for curly hair. (Worked spectacularly!) Carrots for eyesight. (‘You never see a rabbit with glasses’, my father assured me.) And a kaolin poultice for a boil. They didn’t tell me that kaolin had to be heated first, before it was slapped on a crepe bandage and then applied to your neck. It felt like lava. I screamed the place down but was told it had to be hot to ‘draw’ the boil.

            Happy days. My arse.

            But congestion, as referred to at the beginning of this rant, was always a problem for the younger me. I blew my nose till my pals nicknamed me Rudolph. Rubbed Vick on my chest. Sucked Zubes and Fisherman’s Friends (now, you’re  making up your own jokes.) Nothing seemed to work. Till I went to university. And met my Director of Studies in  my first week. (Names changed from here on in.)

            There were, in the opening days of term, adminstrative matters to be gone through before I could be considered a bona fide, paid up member of Edinburgh University. Some of these were Course Choice, Registration and Matriculation, all of which tedious matters had to be endured before I got my hands on the grant cheque. This I intended to be my passport to times of dissipation and debauch, some of which, hopefully, would involve nudity.

            A Director of Studies was the member of staff allocated to young greenlings coming up for the first time, to advise them on the subjects to study for their first year. Some students got, for example, Dr. Katie Hartley, the junior lecturer in the English Language department who looked like a slightly more Edinburgh version of Brigitte Bardot; or Tom Collins, the trendy young lecturer in Linguistics. I, on the other hand, got the Literature Department’s Dr Riddle, a piss artist of the 33^rd degree, a Grand Inspector General of lushes, renowned for it throughout the university, and when I came upon him as he skulked in his little room on the seventh floor of the David Hume Tower, he was togged up in a wine-coloured dressing-gown over his shirt and trousers, with a book on his knee, and drinking neat gin out of a horn.

            On the way up to his eyrie, I had scorned the lifts, each car of which, as it appeared with a ping at the ground floor, was woe-inspiringly packed with students and academics. I had taken the stairs. I knocked on his door, received the summons to enter and went in, puffing from my exertions and, on account of this, did not immediately give my name. (It would have been impossible to do so in anything other than a wheezing croak, in any case.) Being taken aback by the artifice in his presentation did not help my respiration problem. He looked at me for a second, placed the horn carefully in a little rack and said, “Yes, I know. A pint of oil.”

            Finessed, I said, “Dennis O’Donnell.”

            He consulted a list on his desk, and said, “Ah, yes - the Half past Two man. You come most carefully upon your hour. For this relief much thanks. ‘Tis bitter cold and I am sick at heart.”

            I simpered to let him know that I recognised the quotations from the opening scene of Hamlet and was therefore a suitable person to study English Literature. He looked at me and said, by way of introducing himself:

            “John Riddle – Jimmy for short. Well, not so much for short as for different. An alias. Care for a hooterful?”

            I hadn’t a clue what this man was talking about, but it was clever and amusing. The last thing I wanted to be was like one of my new flatmates: a bore; a religious bore; a provincial religious bore, droning his way through the best years of his young life. I wanted these years and the experience of university, to take me on to a higher plane. I wanted to breathe rarefied airs. (Being on the seventh floor of the DHT helped.) I wanted to sprinkle my discourse with Attic salt, like this man did. I wanted to leave the callow and unfinished boy from Bathgate far behind me, to emerge like a gorgeous creature from the pupa that was him. But what was this queer stick in the dressing-gown talking about? A hooterful of what?

            He tendered me a small japanned box, open and appearing to be filled with cinnamon, sand or some similar brown powder.

            “What is it?” I said.

            “What is it?” he repeated, drawing back the box in some umbrage at my ignorance. “It’s snuff. Finest Rhodesian snuff, dark-fired and sun-cured leaf, scented with musk oil, sandalwood and rose essence. Have you never partaken?”

“No.”

“Lamentable omission. Try some now.”

“What do you do?”

            “What do you do? So young and so untender?” He placed the book, which appeared to be called Seven Types of Ambiguity, on the desk. “What do you think you do? Here – take a pinch between your thumb and forefinger, like so … Then make sure any loose powder falls back in the box - it’s ruinously expensive – and apply it to one nostril, inhale; then apply it to the other and do likewise. Have you never seen anyone take snuff before?”

            Not in Bathgate. In none of the pubs or cafés that circled the Steelyard had I encountered periwigged dandies in fitted coats, kneebreeches and stockings, offering each other pinches of their freshly milled. I watched him - I saw now that the reveres of his maroon gown were liberally spattered with the stuff - and followed suit. The snuff tickled and pricked the tender skin of my nostrils and soon I felt my head approaching climax and about to detonate from within. He evidently devined my problem for he hastily snatched two or three man-size tissues from a box on the desk and handed them to me. And not a moment too soon. With an entirely involuntary screech, the biggest sneeze of my life rocked my head back and forth, and propelled half a headful of mucus into the paper hankies. A smaller, quieter aftershock followed and I emptied the other nostril.

            Now my head was become a light and hollow spheroid, like a bubble, and I could inhale three times the volume of air that I had been used to doing. On the other hand, I had never held a hanky quite so heavy in my life. It weighed like a quarter of Dolly Mixtures. He pointed to the tin bucket and I lobbed the hanky there. It hit the far side with a solid clunk and was gone from sight.

                        “Spectacular performance. You should be able to see quite distant objects now, I should think,” opined Dr. Jimmy Riddle. “Infernal cold, up here, isn’t it?”

                         I did not feel it cold, and told him so.

              “Ah. Young blood. What it must be to have young blood,” he mused half aloud. Then he addressed himself, through fumes of gin and snuff, to the matter in hand. “Right, young Half past Two. What do you want to study?”

                “English.”

                 “Naturally. You should read Skelton. No place for him now in the course, more’s the pity. Shocking omission. If I had my way, he’d still be there. Still, read him, anyway.”

                I had never heard of Skelton.

                “Now,” continued Jimmy Riddle, after a delicate sip at the horn of gin, “outside subjects. No interest in Japanese or Chemical Engineering or anything outré, I don’t suppose?”

                I had no idea what outré was, or in which Faculty you studied it, so I said no.

              “Right then. English Literature. British History. Philosophy and Literature. Good balanced course. See you next year.”

               He handed me a signed form which would indicate, to the next mandarin to whom I had to kowtow, that I was enrolled to study the three subjects mentioned, all at First Ordinary level.

              “I don’t know anything about Philosophy,” I mumped, rather childishly.

              “You will,” retorted Jimmy Riddle. “But I should forget any ambition to be a snuffer. You ain’t cut out for it.”

            He was wrong on both counts. After a year of Philosophy, I still couldn’t tell if red cabbage was green grocery, but my newly decongested heid had convinced me of the benefits of taking snuff. I can recommend it.