These Are Scottish Roads: Please Keep to the Left

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Edwin Muir, George Mackay Brown, Hugh MacDiarmid, Jimmy Reid, Kenneth Williams, Parkinson, Robert Burns, Scotland

A Journey into Scotland

Part Two of the Bibliography

The South West of Scotland

Selected Poems  :  Robert Burns

I bought my copy of this book at a church hall jumble sale when I was an impressionable teenager. I have always been drawn to the presence of the poet in the verse. A funny, satirical, observant, subversive voice that celebrates the verities of decency and the pleasures of youth. A voice in tune with the natural world and critical of hypocrisy, vanity and cant. Just as every Englishman over the age of forty loves to have an opportunity to sing along with Lee Marvin’s gravel delivery of Wandrin’ Star from Paint Your Wagon, there isn’t a true-blooded Englishman who doesn’t get pleasure out of trying out his Scottish voice and Burns is a place to try this out.

Who hasn’t twisted their vocal chords into their best celtic snarl to observe a “wee sleekit, cowrin’ tim’rous beastie” ? or to pipe in the
“Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o’ the puddin-race!”?

The well known poems are rightly famous but his reputation, as a poet, rests upon a considerable body of work and he is one of the poets who repays reading his verses at length. I’m sure Scots would rightly cringe at our feeble attempts to imitate a Caledonian brogue but these poems simply have to be read aloud and you would kill them if you gave them your best RP Donald Sinden.

The Auld Brig o” Doon

 

Burns is most associated with Ayr and in particular the village of Alloway where he was born but he spent significant periods of his life in Edinburgh and around Dumfries. He is for all of Scotland and he has a true Scottish voice: intelligent, articulate, musical and not slow to point out the faults of the ruling classes. There is something wonderful in encapsulating the superior vanity of the upper class lady in church, with her finery outshining the rest of the congregation, and keeping them in their place, only to have the effect under-mined by a louse crawling out from beneath her collar. She sees everyone looking up to her admiringly. Everyone else sees someone to keep clear of.

“O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!”

My journey took me on an evening cycle along the very route followed by Tam O’Shanter in my favourite of the better known verses. Happily I wasn’t in the same state as Tam (Burns like many of his fellow Romantics was a powerful advocate of the dissolute life and the power of drink). The ride led ultimately to the superb Auld Brig ‘o Doon which was lit by a slanting evening sun when I reached it. An ancient bridge over the River Doon. No finer spot could be devised for a story of witches.

Burns’ Cottage Alloway (Near Ayr)

A Drunk Man Looks at a Thistle by Hugh MacDiarmid

My friend Laurence and I used to walk the moors above Saddleworth taking it in turns to recite verses of this poem to each other. He was from Bray near Dublin and I was from Barrow in Furness. The poem is beyond Burns’ use of the Scottish dialect. Here MacDiarmid helps to develop a new form of literary Scottish called Lallans. With our various Irish and Northern accents we loved the sounds we could get out of the words. The poem is now regarded as one of the most important of what became the Scottish Renaissance. It’s a state of the nation work and one that is informed both by a desire to establish a new Scottishness and by MacDiarmid’s communism. (As students at Manchester Polytechnic in the early 1980s we were very much in the spirit of Marxism that was the beating heart of that institution).

Looking towards the Isle of Arran from Ayr

The poem contains a warning that an understanding of Burns’ shouldn’t be taken as a Scottish birthright. That the Ayrshire Bard is mis-applied throughout the world by bogus scots (and almost certainly clumsy English twerps like me). There is something angry about MacDiarmid that we loved, even though we suspected the anger was as much directed at us as at anybody.

No wan in fifty kens a wurd Burns wrote
But misapplied is aabody’s property,
And gin there was his like alive the day
They’s be the last a kennin haund to gie –

Croose London Scotties wi their braw shirt fronts
And aa their fancy freens rejoicin
That similah gatherings in Timbuctoo,
Bagdad – and Hell, nae doot – are voicin

Burns’ sentiments o universal love,
In pidgin English or in wild-fowl Scots,
And toastin ane wha’s nocht to them but an
Excuse for faitherin Genius wi their thochts.

Power Without Principles by Jimmy Reid

Jimmy Reid became a hero to me in the 1970s. His is a voice we don’t hear anymore in these most political of unpolitical times. Today the dominant political creed is of understanding the need for greed and justifying it on the flawed principle that if you let a few people become unbelievably rich and powerful they might sprinkle a little of their great wealth on the undeserving poor. That we should shuffle along being grateful that we also (or so runs the trick) can have our dreams and that good things go to those who deserve them. I found a copy of this in a Sheffield Library and read with equal admiration and disillusion as he points out what everyone came to loathe about New Labour (he wrote these essays in 1997 when everyone was cheering the odious Blair to the rafters). I didn’t have my ticket with me and didn’t take the book out. A huge pity as the book is now very hard to come by.

We loved Jimmy Reid for having principles. For understanding the dignity and value of the working man. He was brought face to face with Kenneth Williams on the Parkinson show which allowed the brilliant comic actor but seriously flawed human being a supposed equal platform with the Scottish trades unionist. Williams dominated the encounter through his inability to shut up. That a great man should be put on a light-weight talk-show to debate politics with a reactionary member of the Carry-On team seems to say something quite tragic about the truth behind truth in modern Britain.

Scottish politics are light-years ahead of English. They had sign posts where we settled for weather vanes. They maintained principles of decency and integrity. We ended up with politicians run by news baron(s?) who blow whichever way the current wind takes them; who would as happily trade on hate and fear as right and wrong. Jimmy Reid may never have been given the platform he deserved but he remains a hero of mine.

Scottish Journey  by Edwin Muir

OK so it’s another man of the left on a tour of Scotland. Did you expect me to take “The Astute Observations on the Economic Condition of the Celtic Nations” by Mark Thatcher with me in my saddlebag? I’m drawn to those who tell a Scottish story that they know from personal experience. I was led to this book by reading George Mackay Brown’s Portrait of Orkney. Muir is a fellow Orcadian and made his journey as Scotland was still reeling from the First World War and on the verge of the second. In the words of academic TC Smout “Muir held up a mirror to the face of Scotland all those years ago. It is frightening to see so many recognisable features in its glass.”

I gained an insight into Scotland through Edwin Muir as well as finding him a clever and amiable travelling companion. He intensified my dislike of injustice and (on a lesser theme) justified my reluctance to find very much to like in the works of Walter Scott. (Or at least in Scott himself.)  He also painted a Scotland with so many different facets and faces that I became reluctant to define anything as Scottish or to talk of Scottishness. (A reluctance I seem to have (at least partly) overcome.

A wonderful book.

To be continued…

A Drop of the Hard Stuff

Tags

Gothenburg pubs, James Kelman, Jeff Torrington, Just a Boy's Game, Newtongrange, Peter McDougall, play for today, Robert Burns, Scotland, Scottish Independence, Swing Hammer Swing, Whisky Galore

A Journey into Scotland … Part 63

If you pursue the stereotype of Scotland you will soon encounter alcohol and drunkenness. And the label isn’t all the fault of disparaging English. The Scots themselves make no secret of their love of a bevy or a dram. Scottish poets, songwriters, authors and comedians have turned drunkenness into an art form. Robert Burns’ great poem Tam O Shanter takes place on a ride home from the pub after taking a skinful.

“And getting fou and unco happy”*

In the brilliant Swing Hammer Swing, Jeff Torrington depicts a drunken week in the life of Tam Cley in the Gorbals of 1961 Glasgow. James Kelman’s How Late it Was, How Late is an equalling brilliantly written week in the life of Sammy Samuels. The beer and whisky flow freely in both and the bleak but perceptive comedy flies from it like sparks from a welder’s torch. Heroin may be the main mind-alterer in Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting but alcohol is no stranger to the pages. All three books celebrate Scotland’s complex relationship with bar culture and all three would be contenders in my list for the best novel to come out of Great Britain since 1990.

Billy Connolly, who has been sober for many years, made stories of drunkenness the central plank of his stage act. In the seventies Peter McDougall made television worth watching with his ground-breaking plays; Just Another Saturday, Elephant’s Graveyard and Just a Boys’ Game. They dealt with inter-weaving themes of Scottish Independence, sectarian troubles and the overspill of the situation in Ulster into Glasgow and the economic depression caused by the closing of the Clyde shipyards. Drink fuelled these dramas which were some of the very best of the BBCs Play For Today series. To me the best television made in this country during my lifetime.

Scotland has long been the land of the fictional detective and whether it’s Taggart or Rebus, they are rarely very far from a bar and often seriously under the influence of strong drink. Compton MacKenzie’s war-time classic Whisky Galore tells of how Hebridean life almost comes to a close when a shortage of whisky hits the islands of Great and Little Todday and how it springs back into its full glory when a ship containing 50,000 cases of whisky runs aground just offshore. Music Hall acts of men in kilts in the later stages of inebriation were popular and there is even a song called the Drunken Scotsman wherein a fellow falls asleep on the side of the road in his cups. While asleep two young women approach and decide to find out for themselves the truth of what a Scotsman wears beneath the tartan. They only have to raise the hem by an inch to be impressed and as a joke tie a blue ribbon around the exposed manhood. Upon awakening the fellow goes to relieve himself after his sleep and is surprised to find himself thus decorated. He decides that whatever it was that he had been up to in his unremembered drunken state, he had won first prize for it.

In literature, a drunken Englishman is invariably either a bore or a beast. On the other hand the flying Scotsman is invariably portrayed with heroic nobility, no matter how far down life has cast him.

And yet Scotland is a country with a world-wide reputation for temperance, strict presbyterian observance and sobriety. My journey had been made to reflect the true nature of the nation and in this respect I had caught the national zeitgeist to a nicety. In Glencoe and Sutherland I had eventually taken to my bed after copious libations of beer and strong drink. In Kilmacolm and Kingussie I’d been as dry as a sixties Sunday on Benbecula.

Gothenburg pubs are a Scottish phenomena that began at the turn of the twentieth century and continues today. I’d passed a Gothenburg pub in Cowdenbeath but hadn’t gone in as it was too early in the morning. My long haul along the roads and by-passes to the south of Edinburgh had left me dry. The Dean Tavern in Newtongrange offered me a wall to prop my bicycle against and a bar to rest myself. I ordered a pint of heavy and, it being a quiet late lunch-time, was regaled with the history of the “goth’.

I’m not sure I got hold of the entire concept but the idea seemed to be to accept that the working man was going to fancy a pint at the end of the shift  but that he must be kept from drinking too much. Gothenburg pubs were designed to be as unattractive as possible and to be free from such attractions as music or gambling. The Dean Tavern seemed a reasonably accommodating sort of a place though I kept to the premise of the premises by only imbibing the one. The pubs were owned by shareholders who paid the staff and the overheads but who were then only allowed to take 5% of the profits. All of the rest was ploughed into local good works in a forerunner of the supposed precepts of our own national lottery. Profits from The tavern where I stood had provided a picture house, a row of shops, a sports ground with a pavilion and grandstand, a bowling club, a nurse’s cottage and a scout hall among other local amenities. You were served your pint, kept from having one over the eight and the profits sprouted up around you. It seemed a perfect mix of the two strands of Scottish opinion on the amber stuff that makes you wobble.

Newtongrange was built on coal. The mine had been famous and regularly appeared on news bulletins south of the border in the sixties and seventies. It closed in 1981. The effects on the local economy were obvious: there were only three of us in the bar.

From Edinburgh to the border, on the route I was taking, is really one long slow pull up the Pentland Hills and a long fast ride down the other side. Refreshed by my Gothenburg pint I made my way as best I could. I have no notes and no photographs of this stretch of the journey. I remember keeping going. I remember a typical Scottish sequence of sunshine and showers and wind and rainbows alternating like the horses on a carousel. I have never known a place like Scotland for rainbows. In England they are rare enough for people to point them out to each other or to say, “I saw a lovely rainbow this morning.” In Scotland pointing out  a rainbow would be on a par with pointing out the sky.

I can’t remember how many cars or trees I saw that afternoon. I can remember a van selling food in a lay-by and I stopped to buy myself a sausage sandwich. I was impressed that I’d got past Edinburgh and felt I was well on my way home. The occasional showers didn’t bother me. I was making good progress. Once over the top I expected the downhill to last maybe half a mile but it kept going. Gradual but very welcome after seventy miles or more of cycling that day. The landscape changed again. I’d passed the populated central belt of the country and was now rapidly approaching the once wild lands of the Borders. I was reminded of the less populated parts of North Lancashire. It was hilly and rural with fast moving streams that had been harnessed to run small woollen mills in the villages between farms where sheep kept to the high ground and corn was being harvested on the lower slopes.

At Stowe I stopped at a delightful pub and contemplated asking if they did Bed and Breakfast. Young farmers were exchanging harvest stories in the tap room and playing a few rounds of cribbage while they waited for a fourth. I was welcomed into the conversation and invited to join the game but declined as I’ve never mastered crib. It was with the greatest reluctance that I re-mounted the bike and continued to tumble downhill in the company of Gala Water on my way towards the River Tweed and the town of Melrose.

 

 

fou = drunk

Day 253: Ten Miles if You’re Walking, Five if You’re Running

Tags

Ayr, Ayr Youth Hostel, Cycle tour of Scotland, Kilmacolm, Prestwick, Robert Burns, Scotland, Shakespeare, Troon, white pudding

A Journey into Scotland … Part 19

 

Back in the youth hostel there is a jovial mood. It’s half full and everyone is contented enough on their own but a young travelling couple from New Zealand are enlivening proceedings. They have that gift of involving everybody in everybody else’s conversations. I’m a largely solitary fellow who is happy to sit and watch but even I am drawn into the banter. It creates something of a party spirit in the member’s kitchen as we all attempt to serve ourselves something nice from a tin. I had beans but had found a local butcher, just before closing, who sold me a few rashers of Ayrshire bacon and a slice or two of white pudding. White pudding is popular in Scotland, Northern Ireland and anywhere where Scottish people have settled. It is similar to black pudding but doesn’t contain the blood that gives that delicacy it’s distinctive taste and appearance. White pudding is made form pork meat, fat, suet, bread and (being Scottish) oatmeal. It is a fabulous treat and only requires a few minutes in the fry pan.

“What’s that ye got there then?” asks the male native of Aukland.

I told him what it was and how the warden at Haworth Youth Hostel had always brought back these items as treats and proof of the superiority of Scottish produce to serve to his minions.

“D’ye mind if I have a bit.” I proffer sample and he tastes. “Hey Louise. You ought to have some of this. Real Ayrshire produce. It’s good.” Louise comes over and she has some.

“That’s much nicer than I expected. Has anyone else had this white pudding before?” I’m happy to share. It really is a pleasant atmosphere and sharing is happening all over the room.

Things settle into general banter.

“Where’ve you been then?” asks my new found friend from the southern hemisphere.

I tell him about paying a visit on Robert Burns. I pass over a copy of the selected poems and invite him to read Tam O’Shanter. I tell him he could drink and walk the route of the  poem later on if he wished. To be fair he takes the book quietly into a corner and reads the piece stopping only to read out favourite bits to the assembled kitchen.

“Oh, I don’t know too much about poetry but I wouldn’t mind being chased by the witches. Shall we take a walk out there later on Lou? Care to join us?”

I say I’m happy to join them for the beer end of the journey in Ayr itself.

“The words are easier to understand when you read them out.” he said. “Maybe Shakespeare’s like that. Never was much cop at Shakespeare at school. We’re off to Stratford on Saturday.”

I explained a literary theory that the way Shakespeare spoke was probably more like the accents of the New World. That early seventeenth century pronunciation had been better preserved in America and Australia and that one scholar had said that Shakespeare’s way of speaking was probably a cross between modern New Zealand and South Africa.

“Did you hear that Lou. Shakespeare was a bloody Kiwi!”

Our friendship was sealed.

I did join them for a beer at the Tam O’Shanter pub. It’s lively with an open fire and a number of locals holding forth and “getting fou and unco happy”(Burn’s speak for legless). The Kiwi was in his element and they were soon giving as good as they got. I left them there and wandered down the banks of the Ayr River and photographed the ‘twa brigs of Ayr’. (photo mislaid some years ago) and walked down to the river mouth and watched a rather beautiful sunset over the sea and the distant Isle of Arran.

The following day I set off along the coast. Past Prestwick airport where the planes came in to land practically over my head and past signs to Troon and Ardrossan. I was very tempted to take an extra day and catch a ferry to the Isle of Arran but I was expected. It’s the only night on the journey when I am going to be staying in a house. Nicky  was a drama student, and a darned good one, who’d persuaded me to act in her examination pieces while at St Luke’s in Exeter. Her parents lived in Kilmacolm and when I told her of my plans she got me an invitation to spend the night. I was also looking forward to getting a parcel from T who had used their address as a post restante.

My memories are of a very windy ride along main roads heading past Irvine and then further inland. I called into a pub at Lochwinnoch to ask directions. I didn’t want to arrive at a friend’s parents house with beer on my breath. The pub did me a nice pot of tea.

“Aye, you’re on the right road but you’ll be wanting something a bit stronger before you go to Kilmacolm. Has nobody told you that it’s a dry town.”

“A dry town?”

“Aye. There’s nay pubs in Kilmacolm.”

I filed the information under interesting but non problematic. “Is it far?” I asked.

The old man looked at me with the same rolling eyes that John Laurie used to such good effect throughout his acting career. Punctuating his speech hugely with pauses and quizzical looks as if to say that I was largely out of my mind to even think about attempting the journey; but being already out of my mind may as well be given the information I require.

“Well. I’d say that Kilmacolm would be about ten miles if you’re walking. Five if you’re running.”

I finish my tea and thank them. “Are ye sure you’ll not be having a pint of beer before ye go. It’ll be your last chance today. There’s no beer where your going.”

The weather was changing. Well, this was Scotland. That is what the weather does up here. Rainbows signposted my route and it was nice to be on a quieter road. I’d let them know that I’d be arriving about five. I was in plenty of time. The ride was now thoroughly rural; the road took me between fields of shaggy pasture where dairy cows grazed. I was a little disappointed that there were no Ayrshire cattle. It was 1987 and the English dairy herd had become almost exclusively Holstein-Friesian at that time. One of the happy sights in the English countryside since then has been the re-emergence of mixed herds with other breeds, which at one time seemed to be being consigned to history, taking their places in our fields.

I pass from Ayrshire into InverClyde. The sun is shining on fields and hedgerows and spinneys. The road takes me up and down enough to keep me honest but doesn’t over challenge. It’s a very good stretch of road to be in no hurry. No sooner has the sun come out than another shower crosses. I take shelter under some low growing trees and take out the primus stove. I’m glad I had the presence of mind to take a photograph of my little picnic spot. The shower quickly passed over and I stayed there for an hour of more quietly reading. It was a very special hour. One that has stayed with me through the years. Nothing much happened. But it happened very nicely and at exactly the right pace.

Day 252: The Best Words in the Best Order

Tags

Ailsa Craig, Alloway, Ayr, Edward Lear, poetry, Prestwich, Robert Burns, Scotland, The Jumblies, The Quangle Wangle Quee, Troon, Turnberry

A Journey into Scotland … Part 18

 

I’ve always had a fondness for verse. I cannot clearly remember anything before the age of four, but have ghostly recollections of being much smaller, and hearing nursery rhymes for the first time. I don’t mean the first occasion on which I was told the magical poems that are part of everybody’s cultural heritage. I mean hearing a poem that began with Humpty Dumpty sitting on a wall and not knowing what was going to come next. It could be that I am remembering these verses being told to my younger sister but I don’t think so. I was pretty sure by that age that once we’d got Humpty onto the wall the end wasn’t going to be particularly happy.

There was a book of verse that was so thumbed that the cover eventually came off. I’d love to find a copy. It’s the sort of thing the internet makes possible but I’ve had no joy yet. It had The Jumblies and The Quangle Wangle Quee by Edward Lear. I loved them and went out on more than one occasion in the expectant hope of actually finding a Crumpety Tree. There was a poem of a street vendor selling “‘ot fried fish” and a warning against talking to strangers on the way to school in a poem called “Meet on the Road”. It was my introduction to what an examination board (and absolutely nobody else in my research) called aptronymic characters. (Characters whose names reflected their dominant traits or functions in the plot). I used to take the book to bed with me and read it until sleep took over. It did as much as formal schooling in teaching me to read.

Later I remember being moved by Tennyson’s Crossing the Bar. I was nine and possibly more open to accepting an extended metaphor than I became after a few more years of schooling. I was told that Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner was the longest poem in the world. I looked it up as a challenge and found instead one of the most wonderful adventures I had read. I wasn’t reading beneath the narrative. I didn’t need an understanding of symbolism or an awareness of allegory to enjoy it. (I was also disappointed to find out that it is far from the longest).

I read poems as often as I read prose as a little boy. I never considered it odd and still don’t. But it was only when I uncovered To a Mouse that I actually fell in love with a poem. I’d lived in Scotland. I understood the Scottish accent and to some degree the dialect. I liked to say this one out loud. It was probably just as well that I spent a good deal of my childhood in the countryside. We were a fairly happy-go-lucky bunch but I was wary of sharing my love for reciting verse with too many others. In fact I kept poetry secret. This isn’t unusual. Even in these days when I’m prepared to send prose out into the world to earn its keep, I am private about my poetry. When I read poems at school (especially from age 9 and upwards) I did it in a different way. I’d make notes and pick up the points that the teacher made. The poem rarely spoke to me out of a schoolbook. I became, with poetry, the way most students become with music. They love the music they listen to and play at home or with their friends but fail to make any connection with the badly taught twaddle coming at them in music lessons. Oh I dare say there are decent music lessons where students connect in a significant way. It’s just that I have never experienced them.  Poetry lessons became the same for me. We came to an understanding of what a poem meant but had no grasp of what the poem was. The poem may have had a meaning but it mean’t nothing. It mean’t nothing to me anyway.

On my own, poems opened out and spoke to me. I liked anthologies best. Probably wasn’t up to reading too many by the same poet until I came to Burns. He was this slightly wicked voice. A keen observer and pointer out of the flaws and pretensions of those around. I got the same feeling reading Burns as I later got working with the perceptive working class subversives who taught me more than teachers ever did. There’s a great wisdom in the rhymes and a silver tongued pleasure in the telling of a tale or the making of an observation. It is small wonder that he was regarded as good company by those with a wit and as dangerous by those with something to hide.

He was a major reason in making this trip up into Scotland and the sole reason for choosing a western route to the top. I’d cycled through the lanes where I learnt to read and recite as an infant and I’d cycled through the lakes that drew Southey and Coleridge and held Wordsworth and Norman Nicholson. And then I’d crossed the border. From Dumfries to Ayr I was in Burns Country. These were the hills that he knew. These were the views that were familiar to him. As I approach Ayr itself, I wonder if any of these fields could have been the one he was ploughing when he turned up the mouse’s nest and sent those best laid plans agley.

I book into the youth hostel. I want to be in the town and don’t think the good folk of Ayr will be as tolerant of a tent on their green as the people of Dalry. Once there I unpack and ride a strangely wobbly bicycle (without heavy bags it is almost like having to re-learn how to ride) on the route taken home by Tam O’Shanter from his chummy boozing in the centre of town out towards the kirk at Alloway.

It’s a beautiful ride to make. Ayr isn’t the handsomest of towns but it has handsomeness. As I ride down the Esplande I have large areas of mown grass on one side bounded by turreted houses that say nineteenth century Scotland even to a fellow wobbling along on a bicycle. To my right is the sea. A clean sandy beach and then the grey waters extending down towards Ailsa Craig in one direction and out and across to the mountains of the Isle of Arran. It’s a special piece of coast. It’s a rare combination of really lovely seaside in a proper full sized town that has other things on its mind than making sandcastles and staring over the waves.

Eventually the Esplanade runs out and I come a little inland. The only real difference, is that I now have to look over the grass to see the sea. It’s a good view until I realise I’ve been so seduced by the sea that I’ve ridden into a cup-de-sac. A few twiddles and I find myself on the main road south. It’s Doonfoot Road so I presume I’m on the right lines. The beauty of plain grass is now exchanged for the landscaped contours of a golf course. This is golf country. There are probably more golf courses on this bit of coast than anywhere else in the world and a number of them are world famous. Both Troon and Turnberry hold the British Open Championships (or The Open Championship for pedants) and the first ever Open was held at nearby Prestwich. I’m not over impressed. Even up here a golf course looks like an otherwise attractive piece of countryside with an overdone makeover.

Once I get to Alloway I’m not disappointed. Nothing much is open. I take a picture of the cottage where the poet was born and wander around the memorial gardens. Both are pleasing and the early evening quiet adds to the mood. It is the bridge that catches me by surprise. The watery sunshine lights it like a candle. I didn’t connect the bridge with the poems. To me it was just an extraordinarily lovely old bridge over a perfect Scottish river. While photographing it I get accosted by a man who has imbibed heavily during the day. He wants first to tell me about Burns and how ridiculously over-rated he is and then, on hearing my English accent, he wants to tell me what a pile of bastards we all are. He’s quite a tour guide. Burns would have loved it.