Old Men in Love

NOTES

1 Mastermind is Tunnock’s invariable nickname for Francis Lambert, who in the 1970s achieved some fame through BBC television by doing well on a general knowledge quiz show called Mastermind.

2 This sentence introduces Brunelleschi in Vasari’s The Lives of the Great Artists translated by Julia and Peter Bondanella in the Oxford World’s Classics edition.

3 The farmer may be exaggerating the height of Athena’s statue by Phidias. A popular website says it was only 12 metres or 38 feet high.

4 Dionysus’ quarry was a cavernous space called The Ear of Dionysus, because there was a point where the owner, without being seen, could hear every word spoken by slaves working there.

5 Chapman: A Scottish literary magazine founded in 1970 by Walter Perrie but edited since 1976 by Joy Hendry.

6 No name, no pack drill is British Army slang suggesting namelessness ensures freedom. Pack drill is punishment any senior officer can impose on a soldier of lower rank, but only if he knows the soldier’s name, rank and number.

7 Blackhill: a Glasgow housing scheme built in the mid 1930s, known as a Slum Clearance Scheme because folk from the poorest areas of central Glasgow were put into it. The school where Tunnock had worked was there. The scheme was notorious for its high level of crime so was mostly demolished in the 1970s and given another name.

8 This quotation is from Antigone by Sophocles.

9 Davidson’s Runnable Stag is in many anthologies. T.S. Eliot was influenced by his Thirty Bob a Week. Hugh MacDiarmid, 18 when Davidson’s body was left by the tide on a south coast beach, said it struck him like, a bullet hole in the lands-cape, God seen through the wrong end of a telescope. In The Sign of Four Holmes gives Watson The Martyrdom of Man, saying “let me recommend this book — one of the most remarkable ever penned.”

10 Polis is Glasgow phonetic dialect for police.

11 Spud is demotic for potato: a popular article of British working-class diet, usually served boiled with meat or fried as chips. Being commonplace yet comfortably nourishing, it is sometimes used as a mild term of endearment.

12 Heraghty’s is a public house on Kilmarnock Road about a mile south of the Clyde.

13 Brother Guido, christened Guido di Pietri, received the monastic name Giovanni da Fiesole, but is better known as Fra Angelico, 1387–1455.

14 Messy Tom is an English translation of Masaccio, Italian nickname of the mural painter Tommasso Guidi, 1401-28?.

15 Granchio, better known as Nicolaus Krebs of Cusa, was the best Renaissance philosopher. He rejected Aristotle’s doctrine that mathematics deal with large and small things by saying everything was infinitely divisible in the eyes of God, so all size is relevative. Also that only God was eternal and infinite with His centre everywhere and limits nowhere — so the world and everything else was contained by God, and never at rest.

16 Vasari says that when a slave in North Africa Filippo interested his owner by sketching him in charcoal, the Muhammadan never having seen a portrait before. Eventually Filippo was ransomed and returned to Florence by way of Naples.

17 This letter was stapled to a page of John Tunnock’s diary between the last entry and the next. The writer is a left-wing historian and literary critic who taught at the Universities of Sussex and Nairobi before settling in Edinburgh, and author of The People’s War: Britain 1941–1945 and Revolutionary Empires: English Speaking Empires 1400–1780s.

18 A stickit Minister is Scots for a student clergyman who fails to qualify.

19 Calder is here over-modest. He is a competent poet with three published books of verse, the first of them translations of Catullus into Lowland Scots.

2 °Carlyle’s Life of Frederick the Great tells how King Fred’s Prussia was about to be conquered by a trio of nations when the Russian Czarina died, at which Fred’s other enemies made peace with him. Goebbels was reading this in 1945 when he heard of President Roosevelt’s death. He rushed to Hitler with the good news that history was repeating itself, and though Russian troops were in the suburbs of Berlin, Britain and the U.S.A. would now join Germany to fight the U.S.S.R. (The top Nazis believed the U.S.A. was mainly fighting them because Roosevelt was a Jew.)

21 This long dash indicates the only friend of John Tunnock who has refused permission to let their name be printed.

22 This demonstration was on February 15^th 2003.

23 Protestants instead of protesters may be a hint that anti-war protesters are heirs to the traditions of the 15^th century Reformation.

24 This story is Drinking Coffee Elsewhere from Z Z Packer’s collection of that name published by Canongate, Edinburgh, 2004.

25 This quotation is from the Bible for Today edited by John Stirling and published by Oxford University Press in 1941.

26 Many Glasgow families called the evening meal tea or high-tea, and called the mid-day luncheon, dinner. Tea was usually eaten when the wage earner came home around 6 o’clock, and contained a large main course followed by a variety of biscuits and cakes and several cups of tea.

27 From Chambers Biographical Dictionary: HARRIS, Frank (1856–1931), British writer and journalist, born, according to his autobiography, in Galway, but according to his own later statement, in Tenby, ran away to New York at the age of fifteen, became boot-black, labourer building Brooklyn Bridge, and worker in a Chicago hotel, but in 1874 embarked upon the study of law at the University of Kansas. About 1876 he returned to England and entered the newspaper world. Perhaps the most colourful figure in contemporary journalistic circles, an incorrigible liar, a vociferous boaster, an unscrupulous adventurer and philanderer, with the aspect and outlook of a typical melodrama ‘Sir Jasper’, and an obsession with sex which got his autobiography, My Life and Loves (1923-27) banned for pornography, he had a great impact on Fleet Street as editor of the Fortnightly Review, Saturday Review, Vanity Fair and of the Evening News, which became under his aegis a pioneer in the new cult of provocative headlines and suggestive sensationalism.

28 Stoor is demotic Scots for dust or muck, so Stoory means dirty.

29 See note 26.

30 Kelvin Aqueduct, Maryhill: architect Robert Whitworth, built at a cost of £8509 in 1787-90, 400 feet long and 70 high, then the largest canal aqueduct in Britain. Four rusticated arches of 50 feet carry spandrel walls horizontally arched from the massive cut-water buttresses needed to contain the waters of the Forth and Clyde Canal.

31 Lumber: Scottish demotic verb, meaning to intimately caress late at night in the back yards of homes to which a girl’s boyfriend would be denied entry by her parents, therefore also a noun for a girl thus caressed.

32 Tawse of extra hard, thick leather manufactured in Lochgelly, Fife.

33 Kilquhanity a boarding school, in a country house near Castle Douglas, was run on pupil self-government lines by John and Morag Aitkenhead, a kindly couple. Their discipline did without punishment. Their example was A. S. Neill’s English boarding school, Summerhill.

34 After World War 2 healthy men over 18 years were conscripted into the British Armed Forces for two years until 1958, when the British empire was nearly extinct. Those who refused conscription for political reasons were jailed. Roughly 10,000 refused on religious grounds and were not penalized.

35 Glasgow University stands on Gilmore Hill.

36 This statement is in Auden’s Elegy for W. B. Yeats. Tunnock mistakenly assumes that one short quotation sums up a great poet’s whole attitude.

37 Scott’s Heart of Midlothian led to Scots law ending concealment of pregnancy as a capital offence; Melville’s Whitejacket led to the USA navy abolishing flogging.

38 Glasgow University Magazine mocked this edition of Catullus’ poems for omitting all explicitly sexual verses.

39 This and the next two paragraphs are identical with three in chapter eight, the Prologue.

40 Tunnock acquired the knowledge in these first paragraphs from Dr Chris Burton of Glasgow University’s Department of Geology.

41 This is the only complete chapter in a chaos of scribbled papers, news cuttings, copies of extracts from other people’s work. These were raw materials of a book intended to explain Scotland’s part in the first Crusade, its lack of an archbishop in Catholic times and Calvinism; also its present place in the international financial war machine. A report on unused mineral beds (chiefly coal) were mixed with prophecies that in 2020 or earlier, bankers will combat oil famine by hastily exploiting nuclear power and mutated crops. This will make everything catastrophically worse until folk see that their only hope is in small co-operative Socialist nations. The next diary extract explains why this huge work was abandoned.

42 All animals are sad after sexual intercourse.

43 The funnel was on The Waverley, the last Clyde-built passenger steamer. The research tower is currently the tallest structure in Scotland (127 metres) and the only one in the world designed to revolve round a static pylon to which it is hinged, allowing visitors a splendid 360 degree view over the city. It has been static since 30 January 2005 when 10 people were trapped for 5 hours half way up in the lift.

44 Twelve of the following fifteen dated diary extracts are in words Prince published, but Tunnock shortened by removing many phrases about the beauty of Christ’s love and Prince’s evil nature and the sinfulness of the human soul. Three marginally noted entries are partly John Tunnock’s invention, but use phrases from other entries.

45 The last three 1836 entries are partly fictional, the dates wholly so. Tunnock synthesized them from events and phrases found in Dec 17^th 1837, May 24^th, June 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd 1838, Feb 17^th 1839 of the published journal.

46 Tunnock has not given the date of this entry, nor have I found it in the turgid pages of Prince’s published journal. But Hepworth Dixon refers to the umbrella incident, so I have no doubt it could be found.

47 Many mystics have described this “dying to the self”. In Sartor Resartus Carlyle describes it as passing through “the everlasting No to the evelasting Yes”.

48 Dixon here makes the town-dwellers’ usual mistake of thinking the country as he saw it had always been like that. In 1867 it had been created by acts of parliament about sixty years earlier. An England where cultivated land was separated by commons (wildernesses where anyone could build a shelter, snare a rabbit, fish a stream, keep a beehive, graze a horse or goat) had been replaced by a countryside of densely-hedged fields and landed estates guarded by spring mantraps and signs saying TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.

49 Euterpean — a machine with revolving cylinders that played symphonies and opera overtures.

50 Frock here means Frock coat, knee-length and thinner than an overcoat, worn instead of what is now usually called a jacket.

51 The Abode of Love: a Memoir by Kate Barlow, issued by Mainstream Publishing Company (Edinburgh) Ltd, 2006.

52 These lines of the Bob Dylan song are misquoted.

53 Greek: enthusiasm.

54 The second policeman is a character in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman.

55 Furor scribendi — Latin for writing fever.

56 This was Robert Lowe, Liberal chancellor of the Exchequer and wholly opposed to democracy in Britain

57 Outsourced is postmodern slang for run more cheaply in foreign lands.

58 This festival, was started by local town councillors and business people acting unofficially, helped by Michael Dale, former Edinburgh Festival Fringe organiser.

59 As editor I have been obliged to omit several of Tunnock’s remarks that I have been advised would make me actionable at law.

60 Since 2003 this building has been called the Oran Mor Arts and Leisure Centre.

61 Professor Moignard teaches classics in the University of Glasgow, does not drink in Tennants, but was Tunnock’s neighbour in Hillhead.

62 This day must be Monday 1^st or Tuesday 2^nd of January.

63 These words are misquotations from a song in Behan’s play, The Hostage.