Rathbone's Ramblin'

[rathbone]

Meanwhile Robin was becoming distinctly weird. Where had this Mynah Bird complex come from? And what was an octapotamus? He started handing in work under the pseudonym of Bimbo Plenderleith. At first Andrew Jackson rejected it, but then the rest of us also began submitting any work we thought was substandard in the name of Bimbo. To his credit Jackson got the joke. From then on Bimbo became a full time member of the year.

“Oi, Snaggadapussies”, Robin said one night when only he, Les and I were in the studio. “ D’you fancy going for something to eat?”

And so we went to the Bella Napoli in Candlemaker Row because Robin knew the cook there. Once we had gone into the restaurant he disappeared into the kitchen.

“You’ll enjoy this”, he said when he came back.

We did. The cook had put half an ounce of hash into our servings of spaghetti bolognese.

“See him”, Robin said, indicating some old guy in a corner,

“He’s always on acid.”

He pointed to someone else. “And him.”

Then another. “And him as well.”

They all looked quite normal to me. And then it dawned on Les and I that it was Robin who was taking the acid.

Drugs were not a big deal at the College. They were just there and taken for granted. Almost everyone drank too much, spending at least part of every night in Clarks Bar or some other emporium. Dexies and other amphetamines were commonly used when there were deadlines to be met. Away from the studios, it was usual to roll a few joints and watch Star Trek on the television. There were people in the drawing and painting schools who were obviously using LSD, but as far as I was aware only Robin had gone down that route in our year. For a comparatively long time acid had been both rare and expensive. Now it was becoming good, cheap and readily available.

Acid wasn’t really needed when the BBC started broadcasting Monty Python’s Flying Circus that autumn. The programme was weird enough on its own. Tonight we start with the wonderful death of Ghengis Khan, conqueror of India. Take it away Genghis....

[rathbone]

One of the consequences of the College being absorbed by the University was the requirement that we all had to take second subjects. A number of us, including Jim Jam and myself decided to take Social and Moral Philosophy. So did Robin. Unfortunately he brought his idiosyncrasies with him. While the rest of us were having a serious discussion on the teleological suspension of ethics, he would pipe up with:

“Would that apply to a dog?”

John was getting heavily in to a new act, a former performer in the Lindsay Kemp Dance Troupe who was becoming all the rage in the gay scene. At the end of October he dragged me off to a Humble Pie concert in the Usher Hall. Neither of us particularly liked Humble Pie, but the new guy was the support act. He was plugging the single he had out called Space Oddity. A couple of weeks later we went to see David Bowie again, this time in a solo midnight performance at the Caley in Lothian Road.

It was after this concert that John told me he had been asked to become a spy. He was quite sincere about this but I didn’t take him seriously. A couple of years later he joined the navy, became a communications officer and ended up working in the main U.S. naval base in San Diego, so perhaps there was something in it. Who knows.

Over in California, Charlie Manson had been arrested for the murder of Sharon Tate. As more and more details of the murder emerged, the Manson Family killings became the dominant story on the news. The fact that Manson, in his defence, repeatedly linked his crimes to the Beatles ‘Helter Skelter’, which he claimed was an incitement to an apocalyptic race war, only added to the interest. Ultimately he became a symbol of the insane, violent and bizarre side of the hippy dream.

There was some talk about having the Manson Family as the theme for that year’s Art College Revel, but in the end it was decided to go for The Clangers instead. The Clangers were small woolen creatures living in peace and harmony on, and inside, a small hollow planet. Their burrows were covered with doors made of old dustbin lids, which were intended to protect against meteorite impacts.They ate blue string pudding and green soup from the planet’s volcanic soup wells, which were guarded by the Soup Dragon. The Clangers looked like mice crossed with anteaters and they spoke in whistles. The programme had started on the BBC only a couple of months before, but had already become a cult.

The band at the Revel was Piblokto, with their lead singer Pete Brown. Brown had written most of Cream’s hits, like ‘White Room’, ‘I’m Free’ ‘ Tales of Brave Ulysses’ and ‘Sunshine Of Your Love’. The name Piblokto came from the eskimo word for hysteria,screaming, uncontrolled wild behaviour and senseless repetition. That about summed up the Revel. It was a really good night. The band were brilliant and everything reached its climax when, during the song called ‘High Flying Electric Bird’, they all started making whistling noises just like the Clangers.

[rathbone]

At the beginning of January the whole football crowd, plus Kirsteen, Bob and Kinsman who came along to spectate, piled onto a coach and headed off for Aberdeen. Once we were heading over the Forth Road Bridge Les asked if we could take a diversion through Kirkcaldy because he wanted to drop something off at his mother’s.

“Git tae fuck”, was the unanimous reply.

We carried on to Dundee, where we stopped for a carryout and then on to Aberdeen School of Architecture. It turned out that the weather had been bad and the pitch was unplayable, so the match would have to be a five-a-side indoors. We all headed off for the university sports complex. It was decided that while the best footballers were playing five-a-side, the rest of us would take on Aberdeen at badminton. Given that most of us had never played badminton before it was a total farce. The football was better. Aston won 5-3. Just as they were coming out the sports hall, there was a bit of a disturbance further down the corridor and then a very wet Bob, dressed only in soggy underpants was marched towards us by an irate janitor.

“This one of yours?” he asked. “Next time tell him to keep out of our pool.”

Kirsteen went looking for Bob’s clothes while Les lent him a towel.

The guys from Aberdeen Architects had laid on a disco in the evening. Merv and I spent most of the night trying, unsuccessfully, to chat up a girl called Victoria and her mate. It reminded me of the days with Donnie and Neil. Finally we climbed back on the coach for the journey back. All of us had had a fair amount to drink and my seat companion. Alex started throwing up. Fortunately he had the presence of mind to do it into his kit bag,

“What’s that smell?” somebody asked.


“Probably Kinsman farting again”, came another voice.

“No, that’s no one of Kinsman’s.”

“Where is Kinsman anyway?” someone asked.

It soon became apparent that Kinsman wasn’t on the coach. We had left Aberdeen without him.

By the time we got back to Edinburgh Alex was half dead and I felt shivery. I had caught a chill. Within a day or two I had a fever, was having difficulty breathing and then started coughing up blood and brown mucus. I had developed pneumonia. I was off college for three weeks.

[rathbone]

My twenty first birthday party was upstairs at the Wee Windaes pub at the Tron. Why the Wee Windaes I can’t remember. Perhaps it was simply availability or cost. I would like it to have been because of the reference in Robert Garioch’s poem To Robert Ferguson:

“ Up gaed ilk sah wi feck of skriekan,
Frae the wee windaes heids were keekan;
the Embro folk gied owre their gleekin for very joy.
In ae bright lowe we aa were beekan - wow! What a ploy!”

But it probably wasn’t.

I enjoyed my twenty first, and so did my sister, who spent the evening developing a crush on Merv. There were some of the people I still knew from McGoos and those I had been at school with. Most of the people there were those I now knew from the Art College. Like Garioch’s protagonist I was beekan in ae bright lowe. I used the money that the lads gave me as a present to buy a volume of Fergusson’s poetry.

My birthday treat to myself was a visit to the Caley in Lothian Road to see Family. I liked Charlie Whitney’s guitar playing and Roger Chapman’s voice. Family were underrated in their day and even more so now. In truth, they were a substitute because I had originally booked for Led Zeppelin at the Usher Hall, but that gig was cancelled because Robert Plant had an accident in his car. The Zeppelin concert was rescheduled for a couple of weeks later. The support band was Barclay James Harvest.

Between the Led Zeppelin Concert and my next at the end of February, my whole perception of the world changed. I met Robin’s cousin. I couldn’t tell you what his name was; everyone just called him Robin’s cousin. Robin’s cousin was studying medicine at the University and Robin’s cousin had access to pharmaceuticals. Lots of pharmaceuticals. Robin’s cousin could get hold of almost anything. Mescalin, Psilocybin, LSD, STP, DMT, PCP, MDA .... the abbreviations were seemingly endless. Robin’s cousin became my dealer of choice.

That next concert was Pink Floyd at the McEwan Hall. I experienced that on psilocybin, what are now known as magic mushrooms. They didn’t taste very nice and made me boak. Then everything seemed very amusing. A little while later I began to get spiky colours at the edge of my vision. By the time Pink Floyd came on those spiky colours had transformed into full scale geometric patterns which flowed over the surface of the McEwan Hall. It was the first time that I had hallucinated. I did it again a fortnight later at The Nice in the Usher Hall. I fell in love with psychedelics.

[rathbone]

That enthusiasm was tempered quite quickly when I had my first bad experience in the Odeon in Nicholson Street listening to Deep Purple. It wasn’t the music which was the problem, but the one and only time I took PCP. PCP is actually a strong animal tranquiliser called Sernyl. I thought that I was taking more of the psilocybin mushrooms, but these turned out to be ordinary dried mushroom which had been soaked in PCP. The effect was anything but psychedelic. It was like the worst possible amphetamine come down. Racing heart, palpitations and general paranoia. It was scary. I learned a valuable lesson in trust and quality control.

John moved into a new flat in Glen Gyle Terrace with two of his former school mates, Dennis and Davie. The living room looked out on to the north facade of the Barclay Church with its huge rose window. Inside John painted a large mural of the cover of King Crimson’s ‘In The Court Of the Crimson King’ on the living room wall.

Bruce’s record shop brought two great LPs our way. The first was Pete Brown and Piblokto’s ‘Things May Come And Thinks May Go But The Art School Dance Goes On Forever’, complete with clanger impersonations. I have always fondly imagined that it was named as a result of the Art College revel. The other was the Incredible String Band’s ‘I Looked Up’.

By March we were all deeply immersed in work for our degree show. This was the culmination of all that work we hadn’t been doing for the last three years.

Still, there was always time for football. We headed over to Kirkcaldy to play the YMCA, were beaten 6-1 and drowned our sorrows in Les’s Dad’s local. In the van on the way back we noticed that we were now accompanied by a duck. No ordinary duck, but a reinforced concrete duck. Jas P. had picked him up from a garden we had passed on the way from the pub.

The duck did not make it to the Kings Manor Hotel the following month for the Aston Bungalow award ceremony. This was an event which Walter had devised as a morale booster. Essentially it was an excuse for a social evening with prizes. Best Goalkeeper went to Pete. Best pair of banana feet to Kerr. Best Headband to Les and best Reporter to me. I took my sister along for the evening. She picked up where she had left off at the Wee Windaes, mooning over Merv all night, much to the amusement of his girlfriend.

[rathbone]

The May issue of OZ was nothing out of the ordinary, just the usual mix of graphics, cartoons, articles, reviews and adverts. It was called the Schoolkid’s issue, mainly because it had been handed over to an adolescent editorial team. Tucked away among the pages was a montage in which the head of Rupert the Bear had been superimposed on a strip by the american underground artist Robert Crumb which involved a bit of copulation. Schoolkids' Oz didn't sell particularly well, and the Oz team had practically forgotten about it when, two months later, the obscene publications squad crashed into the Oz office in Holland Park, locked the doors, disconnected the phones and began carting everything away. This was to be cultural war disguised as a pornography trial.

It was with a copy of Schoolkid’s OZ in my bag, alongside a paperback of Hubert Selby’s ‘Last Exit To Brooklyn’, that I set off one Thursday morning to London looking for work. The previous year Last Exit had also been on trial for obscenity. Calder and Boyars, the publishers, had been found guilty. They went to appeal and the judgement was overturned. Depictions of sexuality and violence do not, in themselves, offer any threat. Ideas do.

John said that he’d come along with me because he wanted to visit someone he knew in Edgware Road. That someone turned out to be a girl called Maureen that he knew from school. The idea was to sleep on her couch.

On the Friday I put on my blue suit with the fleck and went up the west end for the interviews. One of the firms offered me a job designing telephone exchanges.

John’s way of celebrating was to take me up to a pub he had heard about in Camden called The Black Cap. Then, as now, The Black Cap was a well known gay bar, with a back room which was the venue for drag acts. That evening it happened to be Auntie Flo, Fabulous Freda and Mrs. Gladys Shufflewick. Neither of us had experienced drag shows before. There just wasn’t anything like this in Edinburgh. Fabulous Freda had a fantastic costume on, with loads of billowing netting and sequins. When Auntie Flo came on , she took one look and asked:

“Did you sew all those sequins on yourself love?”

“Yes,” said Freda, presumably expecting a complement.

Auntie Flo just shook her head.

“You must be fuckin’ mental!”

On the train back to Edinburgh John told me that he had decided to become a post man.

[rathbone]

The last twenty first party of the year was Les’s, which he decided to hold in an hotel in Kirkcaldy. To be more precise, he decided to hold it in a shed out the back of an hotel in Kirkcaldy. It wasn’t a bad little shed and it had a good juke box with a video screen of nubile young ladies divesting themselves of their clothing. Wally Ming took great pleasure in feeding money into the juke box throughout the evening.

Perhaps inevitably the party split into two groups; Les’ friends from Kirkcaldy and those of us from the college. I was introduced to Les’ new girlfriend, Norma and we discovered that we had the same birthday.

About half way through the evening Jim Jam and Dorothy said that they had some hash if anyone fancied going outside. It then turned out that Dennis had also brought some with him, as had Davey. So a select group spent the rest of the night sitting on the grass in front of the hotel rolling and smoking joints.

At some point we noticed that Jim Jam and Dorothy had disappeared. When they eventually came back they explained that they had seen an open french window, went through it and found themselves in a completely different party. Felling a bit embarrassed, they felt they had to say hello and make small talk before discretely withdrawing back out the window.

The evening ended back at Mike’s house with a mass acappella session.

Jim Jam’s stag do was on 18 June. It was overshadowed by the General Election. This was the first time I could vote. I was fairly confident that Labour would get back, albeit with a reduced majority. Edward Heath was not a popular Tory leader. After Ian’s stag we went to an election party up in Bruntsfield. It was a shock when Heath and the Conservatives won by 30 seats. As Richard Neville had written in OZ:” There is only an inch of difference between Labour and Conservative. it is, however, the inch in which we live and work.”

[rathbone]

Leaving Ian and Dorothy behind to get married, the rest of the year piled on to the college coach. It seems that there was belated concern among the academic staff that the history element of our course had been neglected and so the history tutor, Colin McWilliam, was charged with taking us down to London and touring us around famous buildings for a week.

Colin was under no illusions. He knew that only a handful of us would last a full week of trudging round the sites. Those of us who did (ultimately only Malcy and myself) owe him a debt of gratitude. I learned to love London and its buildings in the course of that week.

The others were left to their own devices. In Robin’s case that involved raking through the dustbins of the Beatles Apple offices in Savile Row one night, then getting bitten by a guard dog at Centrepoint the next. Then it was getting chucked out of a strip club in Soho for shouting: “Put them on!”.

The week ended with a running pillow fight down the corridors of the hotel at midnight.

Everyone was quite subdued on the coach back to Edinburgh.

But a week later we were back down to London on the coach for the first Hyde Park concert of the year. It was a nice but cool summer day and, despite the reputed 100,000 who were there, there seemed to be plenty of room. I can remember being able to sit down on the grass without being stepped on. For once the Third Ear Band weren’t playing, but Kevin Ayers was a good substitute. He was joined on stage by Robert Wyatt on drums, Mike Oldfield on guitar and Lol Coxhill on saxophone. They played a lot of old Soft Machine numbers. Lol Coxhill then played a solo set which I found mesmerising. Roy Harper’s set was suitably impressive, as was that from the Edgar Broughton Band. Then Pink Floyd premiered ‘Atom Heart Mother’ with a choir and a brass orchestra.

College finally came to an end and people were going their separate ways. A number of us had decided to go down to London. Pete, Les, Merv, Ray, Malcy and me had all managed to get jobs there. Mike Diggle, who had been in the year above us, was leaving a flat in Shepherd’s Bush and arrangements were made for us to take over the lease from him.

[rathbone]

Much of my spare time was taken up with deciding what I was going to take with me. The key item was my stereo. Eventually I managed to get it packed up in a cardboard box, carefully insulated by stuffing all my t-shirts, shirts and underpants around it to keep it safe. The rest of my clothes went into a suitcase. I was ready to go, but before that could happen there was the Isle of Wight.

After last year’s experience, I was a bit more prepared for a weekend on the island: I was on my own, I had my sleeping bag, a load of tins of Heinz tomato soup and I had money. Like last time the journey to the site was straightforward and relatively hassle free.

This time the site was different. It had been moved round the island to just outside Freshwater at a place called Afton Down. I arrived on Friday afternoon. There was already at least a quarter of a million people there. By the evening that was up to 600,000. For once it is possible to quote the numbers with some accuracy because the only way to get to the festival was by ferry and British Rail published the number of ferry tickets they sold over the weekend.

It was obvious that the site was just right and also completely wrong. The stage was at the foot of Afton Down, which rose about 200 ft. above it. The police had insisted on security, so the whole festival site was surrounded by a high corrugated iron fence and patrolled by security guards with alsatian dogs. Stupidly the fence only went about a quarter of the way up the hill. People who had turned up without a ticket quickly discovered that they could hear and see everything just by sitting further up the slope. They could get just as good an experience for free as those of us who had paid our £3. Probably about a third of the audience were beyond the fence. For their benefit Hawkwind and the Pink Fairies set up a special mini festival in an inflatable tent outside the arena. This became quite popular when people discovered that the drinks in the tent had been spiked with acid. The compere for the weekend was Jeff Dexter, who had been a DJ for the Waldman Brothers in their clubs.

Inside the arena you could appreciate the choice of site. The ground sloped up, away from the stage, so wherever you were you could see over the heads of the people in front of you. As far as I was concerned the main innovation from the previous year was the toilet provision. This time there were about 100 cubicles, though perversely none of them had doors and it still took about an hour in the queue before you could use them. Most of us still resorted to pissing against the fence.

The Friday night acts were Chicago and the Taste. Rory Gallagher was one of my favourite blues guitarists and the audience seemed to think so too. They had five encores. To my surprise, when the music finished the security guards with their dogs then turfed everyone out of the arena. The atmosphere was not the free and easy one of the previous year.
There were no pass out tickets. You had the back of your hand stamped with an ink stamp just like McGoos.

I slept on the hill along with the other half million. In the morning thousands of us made our way down to the beach. The weather was very hot. There was lots of nudity on the beach. It was the nudity on the beach which the press covered, not the music.

Saturday started about 11 in morning with Mungo Jerry then, during day, John Sebastian and Joni Mitchell. Miles Davis came on in the late afternoon. His band included Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea. Most of the music was from ‘Bitches Brew. At the end of the set the musicians just left one by one after their solos until stage was empty. It was classy and cool. They were followed by Free. Ten Years After were really good. The Doors were not. The Who finally made it on to the stage at 2 in morning and finished at 5. John Entwhistle was in his skeleton suit. Pete Townshend opened with the laconic remark:

” Here we are on the same stage as last year playing the same instruments and the same songs.”

Tommy again. I fell asleep during Sly and Family Stone and woke again with the sun rising on Sunday morning listening to Melanie. As soon as she was finished we were turfed out of the arena again, just to come back in a couple of hours later. People were getting restless.

On Sunday morning Tiny Tim was absolutely unique. When he began to sing There’ll Always Be An England a red white and blue hot air balloon rose up from behind the stage and floated over the heads of the audience. Then there was Donovan, Bert Jansch and Pentangle.

Sunday was really windy and they had to take down the tents and marquees. Off stage there was a lot of bother kicking off. People, who described themselves as the French Anarchists and the White Panthers started painting slogans on the perimeter fence, most of them containing the words shit and fuck. Then they began to break down the perimeter fence. You could hear chants of:

“Up against the pigs maaan!”

Jethro Tull played their set and then the Moody Blues. It was getting dark. The spotlights were suddenly swung round on to the hill. At the top there was a row of policemen. The French Anarchists and several thousand other charged up the hill towards them, and the police retreated. Someone came on the stage and declared it was now a free festival. Jimi Hendrix came on early in morning. The set wasn’t his best, but still it was Hendrix. He was followed by Joan Baez. Then, to my shame, I fell asleep and missed Leonard Cohen. I was woken up by Richie Havens singing ‘Here Comes The Sun’. Ironically began to rain. By this time I had drunk all my cold cans of tomato soup and was very hungry.

On the journey back, the queue for the ferry was five miles long. I was in no hurry.

[rathbone]

As soon as I got back to Edinburgh I stayed only long enough to finish packing the suitcase and then my Dad took me up to the bus station. I loaded my suitcase and the box with the hi-fi and underpants into the luggage compartment, took my seat on the coach and bid Edinburgh goodbye.

In London I arrived with two addresses:

The first was Addison Gardens, where the lads were already repainting Mike Diggle’s flat.
The second was All Saints Road in Acton where my cousin Ronnie stayed. Little did I know that he was about to plunge me into the middle of the Dundee Gang Wars ..... but that’s another story for another time.

Having now left Portobello, never to return on a permanent basis, I think now is the time to draw a line under these reminiscences. Regular rambling will resume in the new year.

[wangi]

Right, I’m back.

I knew from the consistent high level of daily hits this was getting that people were probably enjoying it, but I didn’t expect so many to get in touch when I stopped!

Thanks to those who have asked me to keep on into the seventies and beyond..... Maybe later. It does get a little tiring constantly meandering down memory lane. Thanks also to those, like Poppy, who contacted me to say that she has some memorabilia from that period that I might be interested in. Thanks to those who just wanted to say hello.

What I’ve decided to do is to ease myself gradually back into the 21st. century. However, I do want to do something about the Dundee gang scene, because, having been inadvertently caught up in it, it fascinates me, and there wasn’t really an Edinburgh equivalent, so that will be coming along shortly.

But I want to start with OZ magazine. One of the people who contacted me wanted to know what this OZ magazine was that I kept referring to. So I did a straw poll of the boys in the bar-room. Nobody under 55 had a clue, so it probably follows that most of you reading this don’t know either.

I used to buy OZ regularly throughout the sixties and early seventies and, unlike so many other things, didn’t throw them away. Consequently I still have 44 out of the 48 issues. For something that cost 2/6 (15p) at the time they have been a good investment. Some of them now change hands for several hundreds of pounds. Just out of interest, I read through them again over the holiday period and was struck by (i) how good the quality of the writing was and (ii) how relevant much of it was to today (or looking at it the other way, how little things really change). Fortunately none of it was copyright. The actual wording in the magazines is “The contents of OZ are not copyright. They may be reproduced in any manner, either in whole or in part, in any publication whatsoever, without permission from the publishers”. If only all publications were so accommodating. So I’m going to bombard you over the next few weeks with some creative hippy writing.

admin: Oz magazine posts split to .

Talking of creativity, a couple of years ago Epykat, Sunnyporty and I were thinking about setting up a website called RAW Art in order to get stuff that we were doing to a wider audience. That never came off, partly because the domain name was already in use by someone in Australia and partly because Epykat found an outlet through Cove. However, I am sure that we are not the only ones who paint, do craft things, write or make music. Does anyone else think that there might be merit in setting up a “Creative Porty” forum on here where people can display their talents? Just a thought.

[Linda]

Rathbone~~~

Dot Walker of The Crusaders is my Mother Paddy Dixon of same fame, is considered family..as is Ron Fraser , his wife Sylvia, and the awesome Roddy Reynolds..Frank Connor...Yes Tam Paton is dearly missed in my home. I appreciate your post, and I will make sure all former members, other than Toto who I am unfamiliar with..are told...Pat replaced my Mother when Mum moved to the states...This was nice to see and read.Thank you ♥
With much love from Texas...
Linda

[rathbone]

Hi Linda, Thank you for that.

Unfortunately Toto McNaughton died in 2008. It isa pity you didn't know him.

Toto was one of the reinforcing rods which ran through the structure of my musical consciousness. When I started off following Edinburgh bands he seemed to be drumming in every one of them and when Toto played the drums he held me spellbound. Whenever he took the stand the room was his for the rest of the night. Eventually the bands gave up, but Toto kept on going. Until the last couple of years before he died he was still constantly playing in one band or another, with residencies in venues all over the city, including a particularly long stint at the Preservation Hall. He always had time for the young guys coming along and regularly gave fledgling sticks-men lessons on technique.His influence was immense. The Edinburgh music scene owes a huge debt of gratitude to Toto McNaughton.

[rathbone]

Now that OZ is out the way (quite literally I see, Wangi) what was it I was going to go on to? My cousin Ronnie and Dundee gangs, wasn’t it?

When I first went down to London I only had two addresses. One was Mike Diggle’s flat in Shepherd’s Bush where I was going to live, and my cousin Ronnie’s in Acton. So, after having settled down in Shepherd’s Bush I took myself off one Friday night to pay Ron a surprise visit. It had to be a surprise because I didn’t have a ‘phone number for him and even if I did this was decades before mobile phones were invented and getting hold of people was more by luck than design.

Anyway, off I trotted to Acton and found the house easily enough. My bang on the knocker brought a guy with an excellent mullet to the door. I wasn’t invited in. At the door I explained who I was and was asked if Ronnie was there. It turned out that Ronnie wasn’t there. He had gone off to Jersey on a job. No, they didn’t know when he would be back, but If I kept turning up at the pub on a Friday, then I would be sure to meet him one night. So I asked for directions to this pub and was told it was on the other side of Acton Park. Not too bad, I thought. That was on the Uxbridge Road, on my route back to Shepherd’s Bush.

It wasn’t too difficult to find. In I went for a little light refreshment before tackling the walk back home. To my delight it was full of Scots accents. To be more precise, Dundonian accents attached to equally friendly Dundonians. I was soon playing darts and chatting and by the third pint we were on first name terms. I discovered that I was sharing a table with Jimmy, Jimmy and Jimmy. Jimmy C was the eldest and came from down Hilltoon. Jimmy Mac was the most talkative and probably said too much. Jimmy from up Clepington Road didn’t say anything, for now.

[rathbone]

The next week I went back. Ronnie still wasn’t there, but the three Jimmies were and we got on a treat. The third week there was still no sign of Ronnie so after a couple of pints I walked round from the pub to the house in All Saints Road. The guy with the mullet answered the door again. When I said that I was still looking for Ronnie, but he hadn’t turned up, he thought that was strange because Ronnie had left for the pub at least an hour before. He offered to walk back with me, so we set off for the pub again. Except it wasn’t the same pub. Ronnie called me a daft bugger as we settle down with our drinks. He asked where I had gone and when I told him, a bit of a hush settled on the group. He called me an even dafter bugger. Didn’t I know that they, and he indicated the other guys in the bar, were Toddy and the three Jimmies and their mates were Shimmy? I hadn’t the foggiest idea what he was talking about, but it seemed to be important to him that I hadn’t told the Jimmies his name.

[rathbone]

I was soon enlightened. Because I was Ronnie’s cousin I was, by association, a Toddy and a Toddy did not fraternise with a Shimmy.

While Edinburgh has always had a gang culture, the various gangs have tended to come and go, sometimes borrowing a name from the past, but generally just bunging ‘young mental’ on to the front of the name of the scheme that they came from. In Glasgow gangs have mostly been linked in one way or another to the criminal underworld. In Dundee there was a whole, fully formed, gang sub-culture.

Most of what I’m saying here I learned in my evenings in Acton, but there is a particularly good book about the gangs of Dundee by Gary Robertson, called, appropriately “Gangs Of Dundee”, which is full of hair-raising anecdotes by those who were, and are still, involved. To my shock, when I read it, I came across an interview with three guys who had been in the Shimmy in the seventies, called Jimmy Mac, Jimmy C and Jimmy W. Surely too much of a coincidence? I hope not. Jimmy Mac is quoted as saying:” Wi wir a wee but stupid at the time. Wi shoulda been makkin money.” To which Jimmy W. responds:” Wuddya mean a wee but stupid? Wi wir ah fuckin daft!”.

[rathbone]

Like any city, Dundee consists of a conglomeration of residential neighbourhoods or, as we from the Capital like to express it, schemes. In broad terms there are about twelve schemes in Dundee and within those there are one or two subdivisions. Each of them has their own gang. Ronnie and his mates came from Douglas. Originally the gang from Douglas was known as The Douglas Mafia and then Mafia was changed to Toddy. Toddy, I was firmly told, stood for Teams Of Douglas Don’t Yield.

The Shimmy’s name was much subtler. Allegedly they started as a group of similar minded Mods who liked a bit of a ruck after football matches and took their name from the flip-side of The Who’s ‘My Generation’, which was called ‘Shout and Shimmy’. The Shimmy tended to hang out in the city centre and accepted members from anywhere.

Gary Robertson’s book identifies at least two dozen separate gangs. Each of them had their own clearly defined territory and their secret signs, chants and colours.

Almost all of the gangs had hand signals through which they could identify, or taunt each other. There’s not a lot of difference between the signs for the Hula and the Whitfield Shams, or the Douglas Toddy and the Fintry Shamrock, but it is the difference which could stop you getting your head kicked in.

[rathbone]

The most obvious way to tell one gang from another was through their jumpers. All gang members wore jumpers in a solid base colour with a broad band of a contrasting colour across the middle. Every gang wore the same style, but each gang in their own colours.There wasn’t ever a real equivalent for this in Edinburgh.

Douglas Toddy was black with a pale blue stripe. Whitefield Shams were white with a red stripe. The Beechie Mob were yellow and red. Hula were originally black with two yellow stripes and then changed to light blue with a single green band.

Robertson traces the jumpers back to The Shimmy’s Mod beginnings, suggesting that they developed out of racing cyclists’ jerseys. There are claims and counter claims as to how they started, but what isn’t in dispute is that most of them were made by the woman in the wool shop in Victoria Road who knitted the jumpers to order. Just getting to the shop took courage as it was located deep in the territory of the Hulltoon Huns (black with a green stripe). As Gary Robertson points out, the owners of the shop must have eventually realised what was going on, but were happy to conspire in the gang culture as long as the money was coming in.

With hindsight the colours “wir a wee but stupid” as the Jimmies might have said. Not only did they signal the guys to other gangs, they also signalled them to the police, who from time to time clamped down on anyone seen wearing them.

[rathbone]

I was soon to discover that most of the guys I was hanging about with in Acton, at whatever pub, were there because of gang warfare in Dundee, and that went for my cousin Ronnie as well.

At the end of the sixties problems were growing in the Dundee schemes. In Fintry alone over 900 houses were vacant and boarded up. The Dundee Courier estimated that there were 200 gang members in the Lochee Fleet alone (dark blue with a maroon stripe). The City Council’s response was to introduce a ‘best kept scheme’ competition. The Director involved described this as like a best kept village competition which could help to combat vandalism and lead to a better environment for all.

What it did lead to was an increase in rivalry between the gangs. In a seven month period there were 280 assaults and 7 killings all gang related. It culminated at the annual carnival at Gussie Park where the police came under attack, showered with stones and bottles. There were ‘shameful displays of hooliganism’ with havoc and devastation from the park all the way to Kirkton and traffic on the Clepington Road was stopped. Most of the kids, aged between 16 and 20, who found themselves in the dock afterwards, were members of the Douglas Toddy.

Most of them found their way to London to keep out of harm’s way. As an adopted Toddy I didn’t make my way back cross Acton Green to the other pub, which was a pity because I had rather liked the three Jimmies. I never saw them again.

[rathbone]

Exactly forty years ago I designed a little sign for a record shop which used to be in South College Street called Headquarters. It was nothing special. In fact it was a bit obvious, just a head divided into four parts. It acted as the open/closed sign on the shop door. Long before Headquarters closed down it had become faded due to the sun, so I retrieved it, stuck it in my portfolio and forgot about it.

Last year I was raking through my things looking for something else when I came across it again. Now, I am in fairly regular touch with Simon who runs the Edinburgh Gig Archive and a few of my pieces of memorabilia and reminiscences are posted on there. Among the sections on the site there is one for record shops and Simon already had an entry for Headquarters, so I scanned the sign and sent it to him and he added it to the site.

There it sat, looking faded and innocuous, with a little acknowledgement with my name under it. Until last Friday, when Simon received an e-mail from someone saying that I hadn’t produced it and wanting my name removed. According to this correspondent, all of the art work for the shop was done by Kenny Skeed and I was obviously trying to steal his glory. (Kenny Skeed was a well known Edinburgh muralist and died in 2008.)

Simon, naturally, got back to me and I re-confirmed that I had done the sign, but as that was all I had done I had no reason to doubt that Kenny Skeed had done the rest of the shop. After all someone had designed the frontage, the bags and advertising and it wasn’t me.

Simon responded to the e-mail accordingly and got a load of abuse back.

Firstly, it’s no skin off my nose to be accused of not being the artist. I know I was. Anyone who knows my style and looks at it would know it was me and not Kenny Skeed. Apart from that it was based on a photograph of a friend of mine and I still have the photograph to prove it. And why, at my age, would I be trying to claim authorship of something which is forty years old and not particularly good in the first place if it wasn’t mine?

No, what concerns me is the belief that people have that the Internet somehow gives them immunity from manners and lets them be as offensive as they like. Both e-mails Simon received were abrupt and gratuitously rude. Even if I had been at fault, he wasn’t, so why attack him in that way, and over something so trivial and inconsequential, and why have a go at someone you don’t know from adam when you know none of the facts about what you are attacking?

Regrettably, this kind of behaviour is all too common in cyberspace, occasionally even in some of the posts on this site.

[rathbone]

When I was in the library this young guy, probably about 17 or 18, came down and sat on the other side of the table from me. He was wearing a white t-shirt with a big yellow smiley on it and the single phrase Ibiza 87 underneath.

I wondered what it meant to him. He obviously wasn’t around for Acid House and at his age the last thing I would have been wearing was a t-shirt which advertised what my parents had got up to.

Then I thought, what did acid house mean to me and realised it was refuse freighters. Anybody who has gone over earlier ramblings will be aware that I live in a small country town in the south of England. What a big yellow smiley meant to the residents of our town in the late eighties was the horror of ‘a rave’ descending on them. As a result the Council paid for the refuse freighters to be out all night every night blocking off the entrances to the fields around the town. The dustmen were paid double time and thought it was a great laugh. This went on for months during the summer of 1987 and there was never so much as a murmured “aceeed!”, far less the drug crazed orgies and loud raucous music that they expected.

Mark, the DJ at the youth club started mixing a few balearic beats into the chart fodder which posed as the local disco. A few of the more enterprising kids started turning up in t-shirts and shorts with whistles round their necks. By the time the first smiley turned up the rest of the country had moved on to breakdancing and the new panic was our children breaking their necks in the playground.

As he got up to go I was tempted to advise him to be careful if he met the dustmen in the street in case they tried to block his access on to the nearest field. Then his ‘phone rang. His ring tone was from ABC’s ‘Lexicon Of Love’. It was almost touching. Here was someone thinking that he was being retro cool and getting it wrong. Just like the rest of us.

[rathbone]

I thought we were being burgled last night, but it was only an attack of no more nails.

Burglary was on my mind because we had lunch with JimJam on Sunday and he was telling us that they had been burgled. It happened through the night and, scarily, who ever did it had been into his bedroom while he and Arianne were asleep, took a few things from the room, including his watch from the bedside table, and left the door open. Down stairs all the lights were left on and the intruder(s) had gone off with the computer, stereo, etc.

So, when there was a clatter down stairs, I thought the worst. Creeping carefully on to the landing and peering down into the hall I couldn’t see a thing. There was no further noise, so down I went. It was the pipe casing which had fallen off and dropped on to the hall stand.

Now, to go back a week or two. One night Mrs. R. thought that she smelled gas in the kitchen, but by then she had lit the oven and nothing had blown up so we didn’t think too much about it. Coming down in the morning there was a distinct smell of gas, so I phoned the emergency number. I have to say British Gas were great. There was someone round within 15 minutes. The first assumption was that there was a fault with the cooker, so they stripped that, found nothing, and put it back together again. Then the boiler was stripped down, found sound, and reassembled. Then they disconnected everything, put a device on the meter and we all watched the numbers on the display slowly dropping. It appeared to be a leak on the supply pipe.

That may sound straightforward, but it wasn’t. Our house was built in 1954 and has solid concrete floors. The supply pipe comes up from the street, under the front door, up the lobby and across the kitchen to the meter cupboard, all buried in the concrete.

The proposed solution was to get in someone with a pneumatic drill to dig up the floor, excavate the pipe, lay a new one and then concrete the floor, wait a few weeks for it to dry, relay the hall carpets and the kitchen floor, and presumably redecorate. The alternative was to take the supply pipe up the wall, run it along the ceiling and drop it down into the kitchen cupboard. Not particularly attractive, but a couple of thousand pounds cheaper. We went for the alternative.

It took them four days to do the work. You may recall the weather a couple of weeks ago. With no heating or ability to cook we had a good time going out to restaurants and the pictures every evening just to keep warm.

I had previously agreed with Mrs. R. that I would box in the pipes, but when I came to do that they hadn’t left enough room between the pipes and the wall for me to get the drill in, so I had to resort to ‘no more nails’ to fix the casing to the ceiling. According to the packaging it should be able to support at least double the weight of the length of pvc I was asking it to hold up, but clearly it can’t. So sometime this week ‘no more nails’ is going to be replaced with at least one nail every 100 mm.

[rathbone]

The elder Rathbonette and I went off to Tate Modern to see the Yayoi Kusuma exhibition.

In keeping with the family tradition of artsy-crafty, the elder Rathbonette specialises in bricolage. She takes old furniture and covers it in collages of photographs and other personal memorabilia which personalises it for the owner. Some people like it, some don’t, but she does it well. The reason we were going to the exhibition is because Kusuma did a lot of extremely good collages.

And they were extremely good. What was just as interesting were her bricollaged clothes. Dresses, jackets, shoes, bags all covered in plastic flowers and spray painted. We’ll see where that leads the Rathbonette.

Then there was the room where all of the furniture had been covered in fluorescent dots and then displayed under ultra violet light. Mildly disorientating.

But nothing compared to the completely mirrored room. All four walls, the floor and ceiling were mirrored. The only illumination was a set of fairy lights. There was just sufficient light to see the reflections. Now that really was an experience to walk through. Your senses were telling you that there was nothing underneath your feet. Wherever you looked you were gazing into infinity. The layout was cleverly done so that once you were inside you could see neither the entrance you came in or where the exit was. One woman had to be rescued and led out. The rest of us just wandered around bemused until we found the exit. Inevitably someone felt that they just had to take a photograph. The flash was truly spectacular.

If you ever get the chance to experience this, do it. It is genuinely mind bending.

[rathbone]

It’s interesting reading the thread about rat running and the assumption that somehow the Council will take a common sense approach or, indeed, even listen to common sense.

Where I live we used to have a small parade of shops. There was a butcher, a greengrocer, a newsagent, a general store with a sub post office, a haberdasher who also fixed sewing machines, and a woman who ran party supplies. They had all been there for years, served our little community well and hence had thriving businesses.

Next to the parade there was a big house in its own grounds. The owner died and the house was sold. Then a planning notice went up. It had been bought by a company
who intended to build a new store. (I’m not naming them because they are notoriously litigious). It was obvious to all of us who lived here what would happen. Almost everyone objected. There was a petition with over 5,000 signatures, but the planning approval went ahead.

The store was built and then began aggressively undercutting the shops next door until first the general store with the sub post office closed. Then the greengrocer and butcher. Then the newsagent. Because of the store the owners of the parade couldn’t get new tenants to take over the shops so they decided the sell the whole parade. The haberdashers and the party shop woman were given notice and they went as well.

The Company bought the parade, demolished it and created a car park for their store.

Common sense should have told the planners that this would happen. We, as residents have lost good shops, our post office and our consumer choice. Worse, perfectly innocent and hard working people have lost their jobs and livelihoods.

Next ...... the store stands on a street corner not too far from the school, but the kids have to cross the road to get to it. It’s not a seriously busy road, but kids are kids and there have been a number of near misses. Eventually one young lad was clipped by a car and had to go to hospital. The Council were petitioned for a crossing and, after a concerted and well organised campaign, they did listen and agreed to put one in.

However, their common sense told them that because the store was on the corner, the only ‘safe’ place for the crossing was 30 metres up the street. 30 metres further away from the school. Our common sense told us that no school kid is going to walk a further 60 metres to and from a crossing when they can run straight across the road. Nevertheless the crossing went in 30 metres up the street.

The inevitable happened. The kids kept dashing across the road to get to the store and the ‘safe’ crossing was only used by people on mobility scooters.

After continuing complaints by parents, the Council responded. They put metal barriers along both sides of the street around the junction where the store was. Clearly common sense dictated that these kids had to be forced to travel that extra 60 metres.

So now we have the situation where the kids are climbing over the barriers into the path of on-coming cars, dashing across the road and climbing over the other side.

The response when we suggest that a set of lights at the junction would resolve the problem was that the accident rate is not sufficiently high to justify that expenditure. Unfortunately that might not be the case for long.

Good luck with the rat running.

[rathbone]

I came across an article recently on the Least Collectable Records Of All Time, the ones that have been chucked out of people’s record collections and which no-one else appears to want.

This was based on research that some anorak had carried out trudging round charity shops and noting down the records that were in those forlorn little cardboard bins at the back of the shops.

Nor was this just a small sample. After posting his findings on-line other anoraks across the country joined in. And then, as these things do, it went international and lists started coming in from around the world.

So far, so amusing. Where it stopped being amusing was when I saw how many records on the list were ones that I have bought myself : the Paul Young’s, the Terence Trent D’Arby’s.

If you’re of the vinyl generation you might want to play the game yourself. With the rise of downloading and the demise of the CD you can play the digital version as well. Videotape opens up another dimension. Just visit your local charity shops, note what is in the boxes then go home and compare it with what you’ve got. Easy. Then go on holiday and do it all over again. You can have hours of innocent amusement.

In case you’re interested, the American top five artists were Seals and Crofts, Styx, Chuck Mangione, Asia and Bob Seger.

The UK list was Chas and Dave, Mud, Bros, Geoff Love and Leo Sayer.

The international worst seller is Herb Alpert and The Tijuana Brass’ “Whipped Cream and Other Delights”, which seems to be a charity shop fixture around the world.

[rathbone]

Are Robins really friendly? Or are they only opportunist?

I was getting the raspberries into shape yesterday. If you grow raspberries you’ll know that the suckers get everywhere. Out of one bed into another. Under the lawn, Under the fence and up through the path. So every year around this time I start digging them out and trying to get the raspberries back into the bed where they belong. It’s one of those annual jobs that I don’t particularly like for a couple of reasons. One, I don’t wear gardening gloves because I find that you can’t get a really good grip on the canes to pull them up if you’re wearing gloves. Consequently all the little prickly bits on the stems get under the skin and take weeks to work themselves out again. Two, the things are so woody that they won’t compost and are too long to go in the bin, so after they’ve been dug up they take a couple of hours to cut down into bin sized chunks.

This year it was particularly difficult. Except for the snow a couple of weeks ago we have had hardly any precipitation to speak off down here since April last year. In fact, statistically, we have had less rain than Morocco. Starting to dig was a revelation. The water from the snow had penetrated about two inches into the ground, then it became quite dry and crumbly and the, about four inches down it was like concrete. The first sucker I tried to dig out the trowel bent at the haft. I ended up having to get a chisel and hammer to break up the clay sufficiently to get the thing out.

In retrospect the hardness of the ground explains what happened to the fence. Just after New Year we had really high winds and our fence blew over. Not blew over as in a few panels came loose, but as in all of the posts snapped neatly at the bottom. My assumption is that there was no give in the ground which would have allowed the posts to flex so they sheared instead. So another of the tasks has been to dig out the broken bases of the posts, re-bed them, modify the panels and put the things back together again.

Which brings me back to the Robins. Before I opened the back door there were a blackbird and two ring doves on the lawn. A pair of magpies in the rowan tree and a couple of blue tits hanging on the feeder. As soon as I opened the door they all disappeared.

Then I started digging. First one robin started bobbing about on the path, then another two came to join him. As time went on they got closer and closer. Then they perched on the fence panels and finally joined me on the soil I had dug out the holes. It felt really pally. Nice to have such friendly birds watching you work. Then they started pecking away at the pile of soil where presumably I’d thrown up some seed or turned up a maggot, and I realised that they were as mercenary as the rest of us.

[rathbone]

About two years ago the eldest Rathbonette was made redundant. She and all of her colleagues were called to a meeting where they were informed that their company had been taken over by another one and as part of the rationalisation of the business the new owners had decided to close down their area. In other words, it was an asset stripping exercise. Her boss seemed very upset. He was very sympathetic to all of them. After all they were all in this together. He was losing his job as well. More than that, he was losing the company which he had spent most of his life building up.

The eldest Rathbonette initially took it in her stride. She used the relatively modest redundancy payment to clear her debts and invested in a training scheme to get some transferrable skills. Nevertheless, she was out of work for over a year, had to come back to live with us and first depleted her savings and then started on ours. Like most people in that situation she became depressed and ended up on regular trips to the doctor.

She was lucky. She managed to find another job. Not all of her former colleagues have managed that and some of them are still on benefit, with little sign of things improving in the near future.

Last week there was an article in our local paper about our County’s Rich List. There at number two was the Rathbonette’s former boss. His company had been sold to a competitor for over £1 billion and he had personally made £340 million out of the deal. It’s nice when you’re all in it together.

[rathbone]

It would appear that after over thirty years, my marathon days are over. That is if I take the advice of Adam, my chiropractor.




It really started last summer when Bruce, my running mate, started complaining that he was having to slow down in order to keep up with me, rather than me having to run faster to keep up with him. My race times peaked when I was in my thirties and have been declining by about a minute a year ever since. We decided that from now on Bruce would run at his own speed and I would rely on my ipod for company on the country lanes.

Gradually I found that my right knee was starting to play up while I was running. This was nothing new (I’ve had the cartilage in both knees done in the past) so I went through the usual ritual of the bag of frozen peas and strapping. But it didn’t go away, so off I went to Adam who specialises in sports injuries.

All the poking and prodding resulted in a close study of my running shoes and then a closer study of my buttocks. His conclusion was that the right knee was now almost completely worn out and that I was subconsciously compensating for that, which was now putting extra pressure on my left leg. That in turn was probably leading to damage to my hip joint. He referred me to another doctor in the next town who also specialises in sport and his diagnosis was the same.

As I’ve never particularly relished coming out the crematorium furnace as a pile of ashes with a gleaming stainless steel ball joint in the middle, I asked what they thought I should do about it. The suggestion is that I give up running and take up power walking instead. Fortunately in our county there is an annual walking half-marathon, so I might give that a go in June.

[rathbone]

My friend Stan asked me a good question last night. It was :”Why do you do it?”, meaning why do I spend half an hour every morning gobbling my breakfast and trying not to get crumbs in the keyboard of this laptop while writing this piece.

I suppose one answer is to go back to August 2005 and the first bit of rambling: After the infamous Dalriada Spladoosh I mentioned that I sometimes found it difficult to get involved in Porty issues as living so far away means that I feel a bit 'out of it'. There was then a discussion on the Porty Diaspora and it was suggested that I start a blog to keep people informed on what I am up to, and maybe other Porty exiles could do the same.

So that’s the official line, but Stan’s question was a bit deeper than that. Is it an overweening ego? Maybe. I’ve always been a bit full of myself, in an understated, quiet way of course. Is it attention seeking? Maybe, but if it is it’s unconscious. I’ve never been short of self confidence. Is it arrogance and/or vanity? Maybe. As my kids will attest, I am both perfect and can do anything..... I’ve been telling them that all their lives.

Then there are other types of questions: Is it an attempt at entertainment? Maybe. You will have to be the judge of that, but I assume that it is because the number of views goes up every day, so people must be coming back for more. Is it Art? Again you’ll have to be the judge of that. Art is anything you want to make it (some pretentious basket said that, and it wasn’t me). Is it science? Now that’s where the questions get really interesting..... take Kurenniemi.

Erkki Kurenniemi is one of those names which just trip off the tongue. Some of you may be familiar with his electronic music. Some of you may be more familiar with his documentaries. Most of you probably haven’t the faintest idea who Erkki Kurenniemi is.

Erkki Kurenniemi believes that at some point in the future medical advances will increase life expectancy to the point where there will be no living history because people’s memories will be so long that recording history as we know it will be distorted. Consequently he thinks it is incumbent on us to maintain a day to day record which can be archived for use by these semi-immortals in the future to understand what life was like before they were born...... a bit sci-fi, but potentially feasible.

Consequently Kurenniemi registers, one way or another, every trivial detail of his life. He takes at least a hundred photographs a day. Records the sounds of his daily life. Videos his every movement. Produces cassette diaries of how he feels. He has been doing that for decades. He looks forward to when he can directly download his consciousness into a computer. Some people consider him slightly dotty. I think he’s worth a google.

So, let’s look on these ramblings as my contribution to the great Porty Archive and hope that in a couple of hundred years some semi-immortal will learn a little bit about what it was like to be spladooshed.

[rathbone]

I walked out of a conference yesterday and felt guilty in the car on the way back home.

Down here the Government have set up Local Enterprise Panels. These have taken over almost all the functions of the old Regional Assemblies, but instead of being made up of local politicians they consist almost exclusively of business men appointed by the Government instead of councillors elected by us.

This conference was meant to be about the rural economy. I was there in my capacity as vice-chairman of our county branch of the Campaign To Protect Rural England.

The keynote speaker, who is a big-wig in a multi-national company, spoke for twenty minutes and didn’t mention the countryside once. Instead he went on and on about economic growth.

He was followed by another big-wig, this time from a large spanish bank, who went on and on about economic growth.

Then there was someone from a large film company who explained how it was going to be necessary to build all over the Green Belt if we were to get the economy on track.

It went on like this until the coffee break.

Then came the plenary session.

One brave woman stood up and asked why there was this constant focus on economic growth. It might do everyone a bit of good if we just flat-lined for a while. There was nothing wrong with breaking even. After all, what they meant by economic growth was just making more and more profit. I have never seen such universal incomprehension on the faces of a top table for a long time. They just couldn’t grasp the concept she was putting forward.

Then a man got up and asked why none of them had addressed the issue of small and medium enterprises in the countryside. Mr. Multi-National answered that by saying that there were very few SMEs in the countryside. The questioner then said that he was a farmer, and as such he was a medium sized business. In fact 60% of the countryside consists of farms and all of them are businesses. Mr. Multi-National then attempted a bit of damage limitation and said that it went without saying that farms are SMEs.

And so it went on. It was clear that these people, who had been put in charge of the countryside, knew nothing about it. To them it was a bit of green space that you could visit at weekends.

After lunch we split into workshops. My workshop was on representation. We were joined by Mr. Spanish Bank. It turned out that everything we were discussing today would be taken into account by the LEP, but under their terms of reference they were not bound by it or had to take action on it. I had the temerity to ask what actual representation the rural community would have on the LEP. I was reassured that there would be a rural voice because one of the appointees had been give the ‘rural portfolio’. When I asked who that was I was told that it was the head of a computer software firm who lived in London.

The second workshop was on ‘maintaining the rural economy’. I decided to give that a miss.

Then I felt guilty in the car for effectively just rolling over and letting this travesty happen.

[rathbone]

Vampirella strikes again

Actually she has quite a nice bedside manner, but she does have a thirst for blood.

It started over a year ago when I was going off on one of my trips to Kenya. As usual I wandered along to the surgery to pick up a prescription for anti-malaria tablets. While I was there the practice nurse mentioned that my records showed that I hadn’t had my blood pressure tested for some time. So she took my blood pressure and decided that it was too high. 154/90. I was referred to Vampirella.

She also took my blood pressure, still 154/90 and decided it was too high. She shook her head and said that I would have to give a blood sample. In our neck of the woods that meant going to the hematology unit at the hospital. So off I went, sat around for an hour, gave the sample and waited till next week before returning to Vampirella for the results.

They were normal. No abnormalities. But she was still concerned about the blood pressure, so she prescribed two tablets to be taken daily for the rest of my life.

I don’t take that sort of thing lightly, so I bought myself a home blood pressure kit from Boots and started taking my own blood pressure. It was normal 125/80. I took it every day for a week. The highest it got to was 129/81.

Back I went to Vampirella. She took my blood pressure. 160/91. She sent me off for another blood sample. Meanwhile I was to keep taking the tablets.

As well as the tablets I was still taking my own blood pressure. It didn’t go above 130/80.
When I went back to the surgery I took my monitor with me. Using my machine, in the surgery I was registering 155/90. On Vampirella’s machine 154/90. Fortunately, my machine has a memory and I was able to take her through the previous week’s results.
She was sceptical about it being ‘white coat syndrome’ so I suggested that I keep daily records for a month and see where that got us.

A month later my home readings were all still below 130/80. When I went back she accepted the readings, but now claimed that they were because of the tablets. She sent me off for another blood test.

We are now a year on and I have comparative data. My blood pressure has remained more or less constant over the entire period, except on the days when I have gone into the surgery. I went back on Monday. She sent me for a blood test.

Mrs. R. suggests that I stop taking the tablets to see what happens. I know what will happen, Vampirella will send me for another blood test and then tick me off for stopping the medication. She can be quite scary when she’d roused and that’s enough to give anyone hypertension.

[rathbone]

When I wrote the stuff about Dundee Gangs the other week I made the comment that there wasn’t really an equivalent in Edinburgh. That wasn’t intended to be provocative, just a statement of fact, but I have had a response. “What about the Capital City Service then?” was the precise wording.

Two comments: 1) One sectarian group does not represent a city wide phenomenon in the way that the Dundee gangs did and 2) Football hooliganism is a completely different culture, with different motivations and different kind of territoriality.

That’s not to say that Capital City Service are not worthy of some attention. There is even a whole book devoted to them.....hunt out ‘ These Colours Don’t Run’ by Derek Dykes and Andy Colvin. There is a whole sub-cultural genre devoted to Football Casuals, and Capital City Service fit into that niche. The hey day of the Casuals nationally was between 1984 and 1997 and it’s probably true to say that was also the peak of Capital City Services.

I know that someone will come back and say ‘what about the running battle in Lothian Road after the Hibs - Hearts draw in October 2006?’ Well, what about it? That may well have happened even without the casuals and was nowhere on the level of the mayhem surrounding what the Daily Record called ‘The Arena Of Horror’ at Easter Road in November 1987 or the Hibs-Liege match in 1989 or even the campaign which the Evening News ran in 1990 to encourage people to shop a Casual Acquaintance.

As I say, there is some merit in looking at groups like these and what motivates them and I might come back to that at some later date, but not in the context of street gangs.

[rathbone]

Given what I was intending to do this morning, it was deliciously ironic to log in and discover that Talk Porty was down for server maintenance.

Oh the tension! The main computer has been playing up and I’ve exhausted the options so I have saved all the data and am in the process of re-installing the software.

As the data bar is saying time remaining about 49 minutes, I thought I’d use the window of opportunity to write this.

I’ve done this so many times over the years without any mishap that I wonder why I feel nervous every time I do it. Right now I’m having kittens that I may destroy Mrs. R.’s work, even though I know that it’s all there on the external drive. Then I hope that I’ve not screwed up the e-mail connections. Do I have a separate record of the IP addresses? Yes I do. Are all the photos backed up? Yes they are. Did I run a virus check before I started? No I didn’t. God, does that mean that any infections will be carried over to the new instal?

Hold on, the screen’s just gone black. Now it’s restarting itself, but just a moment ago it said it had another 47 minutes to go. Now I’ve got a blank white screen with the spinning wheel. This is nervewracking.

Now the screen’s gone black again. Oh no, it’s come up with the data bar again saying about 33 minutes. That means that in the last two minutes it’s saved 12. Does Einstein know about this distortion of time?

I’ve now got the big purple flare of the snow leopard screensaver coming up. That was unexpected.

Frankly this computer is on its last legs anyway. It’s five years old and has been in for repair twice in the last year. The first time it was the internal speakers which had gone phut. The second time the RAM was wonky and had to be replaced. A couple of months ago the internal speakers went again and I couldn’t be bothered shelling out another hundred quid or so just to hear the start up chimes so I just have to take my chances when I press the on key.

In that context it probably doesn’t matter much if this installation is a cock up because I know that sometime soon I’m going to have to replace the whole lot anyway.

Time has distorted again. We are now ten minutes on from it saying about 33 minutes and it’s now saying about 34 minutes. Apple have invented time travel. So that’s what Time Machine is for! (In-joke there for people with Macs.)

Whoops, it’s just gone black again...... It’s been black for nearly six minutes now. I’m going to make myself a cup of tea..... back again and now the screen’s turned blue.

Now I’ve got the spinning beachball of death (another in-joke for the Mac users among you).

Relief..... It’s now showing the set-up assistant.

Back to normality.

Nice to see that Talk Porty is back up as well.

[rathbone]

How is the current economic climate affecting your creative juices? There has been a lot of hand wringing in some art circles about Arts Council grants being cut because of the recession.

I was a reading a piece by Phil Poynter in Dazed and Confused where he said : “ Out of recession comes creativity. You’re pushed to find a way to present your ideas if there’s no financial support. People come together at those times and challenge each other, and that always turns into something.”

Fair enough, I will buy that as far as it goes, but I hope it wasn’t coming from some nostalgic view of bad times past. Nor will I accept the view that people only come together and challenge each other when times are bad. Creative collaboration goes on all the time. If a project’s worth its salt most people will get it to work some way, some how.

The vast majority of creative people are just like the rest of us. They struggle most of the time. Most artists, musicians and writers that I know are operating financially well below the national average wage. There are only a very few David Hockneys, Adele’s or J.K. Rawlings in this world. Being creative doesn’t recognise the norm. Inspiration doesn’t come along on a 9-5 programme, so artists’ work runs on its own timetable which isn’t conducive to making money. In my experience, and I’ve had lots, it’s a load of tosh to claim that trying to produce something to a deadline brings out the best in you and produces good work. It doesn’t. It leads to cut corners and compromise.

It’s also tosh to say that good art comes out of adversity. Some times it does but most times it doesn’t. For most people art is impossible without at least a degree of stability. You need the time to think and you don’t have that if all your effort is going into simply surviving.

Nor should we confuse the content with the source. The Boys From The Blackstuff didn’t come out of the dire economic conditions in Liverpool under Thatcher, it was inspired by them. It was created by people on comfortable BBC salaries. Good art comes out of good artists.

Art and money have always been closely connected, and there have probably been a few artists who have given up because their Arts Council grant has been stopped. But for most of them it won’t have mattered a jot. They never received subsidy in the first place.

Nor should we be deluded into thinking that the average man in the street gives a toss. Art rarely impinges on Britain’s Got Talent.

[rathbone]

Just following on with Art and Money, there was an article in this week’s Observer about Damien Hirst.

Now here is someone who has reputedly earned £215,000,000 from his art. Back in 2008 he made £111,000,000 in two days at Sotheby’s. That was him personally. He shrewdly decided to cut out the middle men, bypassing the art dealers and selling his work himself.

Let’s just explore that phrase ‘selling his work’. Once he realised that people would pay large amounts for his work, Hirst decided, a bit like Andy Warhol, that you could mass produce. He bought a big studio and hired an army of ‘assistants’. It is estimated that these ‘assistants’ have now produced over 1,500 ‘original’ Damien Hirst paintings.

He himself has recently announced that he is again working mainly on his own paintings, by which he means canvases on which he, and he alone, applies the paint. We will have to see if these fetch higher prices than those produced by the ‘assistants’. Apparently he is currently painting parrots.

What is refreshing is that he openly describes some of his stuff as crap. More precisely he says: “ Some of it is un-realised and didn’t make it and some of it is just shit.” He also makes it clear that his piece ‘For The Love Of God’ (the jewel encrusted skull) is “mostly about money”.

The critic Peter Schjedal has written that Hirst will go down in history as a particularly cold-blooded pet of excess wealth. It’s immortality of a sort. (You could also argue that it’s immorality of a sort.)

In 1996 Hirst went on record as saying “Museums are for dead artists. I’d never show my work in the Tate. You’d never get me in that place.” So next month he has a big retrospective opening at the Tate.

I will be going along to it, even though I’m not particularly fond of his stuff. The reason I will go along is because for a long long time I was very snooty and dismissive of Tracy Emin’s work. Then, a couple of year ago, I went to an exhibition of some of her drawings and was completely blown away. She can do if she wants to. Maybe Hirst can too.