Wednesday, February 1st.
Hello, yes, I’m still alive.
My wee book, The Locked Ward, was officially ‘launched’ in the Word Power bookshop in Edinburgh’s fair city on Tuesday the 24th of January. People stood by as I cracked a bottle of Tizer against the hull, and watched as it roared down the slipway with a rattle of chains. Or the literary equivalent thereof. It was extremely gratifying to see so many people crushed into the admittedly fairly narrow confines of the bookshop – family, old friends, companions in drink, former colleagues from the hospital (including the consultant for the locked ward), former colleagues from my teaching days, one or two former pupils and, perhaps even more gratifying, strangers. People who had been drawn by an interest in the book.
They listened politely as I read three short extracts – Stefan, Donnie, and the trip to the garage in Chapter 22. I chose them to give as wide an idea of the nature of psychiatric illness as I could - as wide as is possible in three short extracts. Then they asked some crackingly good questions. And then many queued to have my invaluable signature plastered across the endpapers. I had to apologise often for my handwriting. I am afraid that the bold hand that once was mine has been badly affected by the passage of the years and the arthritis in the two main fingers of my right hand. (What I get for thrusting them up so often at the establishment for the last 40 years or so.)
There was, I am told, excellent wine on tap. Or at least in bottle. And many partook. I did not. Oh, not for any fastidious reason. Not temperance, me. No, no; it’s just that wine is a drink I have never taken seriously. I like it occasionally with dinner. A glass of something red and robust slips ower a treat with the game pie. But for drinking – real drinking – no, no. I’d rather wash the dog with it. On the few occasions I have had to drink it as drink, usually at other folks’ soirees, I have slugged it like it is a weird kind of flat ginger (Scottish for ‘fizzy pop’) and then ended up with a mouth that tasted like I’d been sucking old pennies from the back of a drawer. Dey-vil take it; that’s no quaff for a man like me.
Herself and I repaired, after the launching/signing/reading gig, to a howff hard by, where I drank strong ale and spirits in the company of the aforementioned consultant and two guys who used to work with me on the ward. One is from the Caribbean. I was drinking rum, and reminded him how we both had a session on the treacle, one evening long ago in the fleshpots of Bathgate. Being a Carib, he prided himself on his knowledge of rum and suggested we drink something slightly more refined than the sump-oil the nasty little toad behind the bar had been vending us.
“Like what?” I asked
“Well, there’s several tawny Caribbean rums. How about Mountgay? Or Cockspur?”
“If you think I’m asking for Mountgay or Cockspur at all, let alone in the same breath, in this den of iniquity, you’re sadly mistaken, old chum. They’ll think we’re Oscar and Bosie. We’ll stick to the sump-oil.”
A literary reference that amused him. He did bring me back some Mountgay the last time he visited family in the Windies, and I have to say it is a tasty slurp of hooch.
In other news, I see that TLW is book of the month in Blackwells in Oxford. Ah, ye Oxonians, away oot and buy it in your numbers and make me a millionaire! Interview with Alban Maginnis of the Irish News tomorrow and, maybe more scarily, one with Natasha Coleman of ‘Your Voice’, the magazine for Rethink Mental Illness, on Friday.
Keeps me fae wearyin’.
Go placidly, my friends until we meet again.
