Old Men in Love

SEVEN TUNNOCK'S DIARY 2002

Depressed. I need a chapter describing a performance of The Clouds, but no matter how hard I study that play I cannot get the jokes. It caricatures Socrates as a sly meteorologist enriched by spreading fog through the minds of disciples. Aristophanes, as in all his plays, is satirising part of the democracy — in this case experts who taught fashionable young men the most modern ideas. He is surely attacking a very pernicious idea, like our recent one that Capitalism has abolished Socialism and brought world history to a satisfactory end. He is probably also mocking fashionable jargon, like our own dysfunctional instead of bad, vertically challenged for short, chronologically gifted for old, downsizing for dismissing a lot of workers, outsourcing for employing more poorly paid foreigners, spin doctor for writer of speeches that make lies seem truthful. In another fifty years such speech will sound meaningless along with comedy satirising it, not because folk will be talking more sensibly, but because the spin doctors will have invented a new truth-concealing jargon. And The Clouds was written two and a half thousand years ago! Yet I am sure Brecht or Ibsen COULD have made a funny, cutting, relevant modern version of it.

Remember, Tunnock, you are not a Glaswegian Brecht but a retired schoolmaster with literary ambitions inspired by Plato’s Symposium, which has Socrates joking about love with Aristophanes and Alcibiades, and rejecting all pretence to wisdom, preferring “right opinion”, which he describes as a referee between wisdom and ignorance. Scottish Enlightenment philosophers called it common sense. Socrates was therefore a sceptic like Diogenes, Voltaire, Hume, Nietzsche, not a system-builder like Plato, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant. And he defended common sense with uncommon courage. After the Shining Sands sea battle a huge parliamentary majority voted for the mass execution of sea captains who had not reclaimed the bodies of the dead. Socrates was president that day and Xenophon writes that he declared the vote illegal under Athenian law, which said everyone accused of a crime should be tried for it separately. Socrates ruled that a parliamentary majority, no matter how great, must not break its own laws. Courage was needed for that. Alas, next day the lot made a coward president who legalized the mass executions. Thucydides writes that Socrates, after the majority voted to invade Sicily, went through the streets shouting that this would lead to disaster. It did. Like Aristophanes he was of the anti-war minority, but strongly opposed majority decisions because democracy dies without that opposition.

Yet Plato’s later dialogues have Socrates advocating government by a clique of celibate academics who employ military police to manage productive people, rewarding the chief policemen by letting them rape who they like — an adolescent fantasy. And Aristophanes dramatized him as a money-grubbing obscurantist homosexual who sits on a rooftop to seem nearer heaven until an enraged pupil burns his house down. Was the play a flop because Athenians disliked the jokes? Or because Socrates went to every performance and stood quietly in the audience, showing the difference between himself and his caricature on stage? Or is Nietzsche right in saying Socrates started the decay of noble Athenian thinking by making men doubt their manliest instincts?

I cannot solve these problems, nor can I condemn to obscurity chapters on which I have worked so hard. Having given a copy of them to the Mastermind I have posted another to Chapman,⁵ hoping Joy Hendry will print one or two.

Late afternoon saw from behind, outside Kirklee corner shop, young thing inadequately dressed for cold winter weather. Short bright purple hair twisted into spikes like sea urchin’s. Naked zone round waist tattooed with scorpion holding flower. Tight wee denim jacket above nude zone, broad belt of square metal studs under it, belt holding up denim skirt with frayed hem, not much wider than belt. Net stockings, high-heeled sandals, not plump anywhere. Repulsive. Dislike thin lost pathetic girls, however tartily dressed.

Entered shop, bought milk bread biscuits Sunday Herald then lingered in the warmth. Brooded over magazine display. Every cover seems designed by the same agency using the same women with perfect figures and complexions. They wear less on male pornography mags, more on female fashion and scandal mags, those on motorcycle and computer covers are irrelevant to contents, yet still catch the eye shouting sex sex sex sex sex. The big Byres Road newsagents Barrett’s has some unsexy covers, but The Economist, Scottish Field, House and Garden are hardly visible among shelves of glamorous repetitive women-baited cover photos — always photos, perhaps because art schools no longer teach drawing and painting. And nearly every cover lists an article with sex in the title: “Twenty Ways to Dress Sexy for the Under Fifties!”, “Are Beattie and Blanko Still Having it Off?”, “The Men Who Make Me Come, by Gwendoline”, “Sixty Celebs Tell You Their Dirtiest Bedroom Secrets”.

Had forgotten the girl outside shop when, leaving, saw her from in front. A fierce accusing scowl showed she was no helpless waif. It halted me, dazed and breathless. A moment passed before she noticed me, said, “Who do you think you’re staring at?”

I muttered, “A good looking lassie.”

“I cannae say the same about you.”

“Of course not, I’m an old man.”

“A fat wee ugly old man.”

“But harmless,” I pointed out.

“So what?”

I said she seemed to have waited a long time for someone, if they didn’t turn up she could come to my house nearby for a heat and something to eat and drink.

“That isnae all you want to give me,” she sneered. I said anything else she got was for her to say, and gave her a card with my address. She asked why my name was not on it and I said, “No name, no pack drill”.⁶

She looked across the street, then behind her, then sucked in her purple-stained under lip, then said, “Can I bring a friend?”

“Not if he’s a man,” I said firmly. She said bitterly, “Don’t worry, he won’t be.”

“See you later perhaps,” I said and skipped briskly home, my blood buzzing. At such times, thank God, a glorious excitement fills me that no memory of past disappointments can spoil.

Upstairs I turned on the gas fire, regretting that since the city went smokeless in 1969 I could not build in the grate a blazing heap of coals. I made a cosier space inside the room by pulling the sofa up to the hearth rug, placing the armchairs at each end and, on the coffee table between, the three tier cake-stand with plates of Abernethy biscuits, chocolate biscuits and strawberry tartlets. On the sideboard I laid out glasses, brandy decanter, open bottle of red wine, then took precaution of locking other wines and spirits in bathroom geyser cupboard, leaving one bottle of red in kitchen. I put a ragtime roll on the pianola, sat down and waited. And waited. And waited. Then fell asleep.

I was wakened by doorbell shortly after pub closing time, jumped up, switched on pianola, rushed to open door. A troop of girls marched in, led by a bulky older one in a military khaki overcoat, my wee urchin-head coming last. They stood in the lobby looking around as if I was not there, but followed me upstairs after hanging coats on hall stand. I was not alarmed. There were only four and I always feel safe with women. Men sometimes punch each other for no good reason but petty theft is my worst experience of women. They wanted wine. I served it and sat sipping brandy, the commander of the troop beside me, the rest as far away as possible and whispering to each other while beasting into the biscuits. The commander said, “Have you nothing modern?”

I deduced she was speaking of the music and said, “That’s Scott Joplin, he’s modern.”

She said, “You don’t know what modern is. Have you no more booze?”

“Some,” I said and went down to the kitchen, she following. I was glad only one other bottle was visible. As I uncorked it she said, “What do you want Is for?”

“Is?” I said, puzzled. I know that young folk sending text messages on mobile phones shorten their names to one syllable, but was confused by such savage brevity.

“That pal of mine you picked up.”

“That is none of your business,” I said.

She said, “Things will go easier if you come clean. Do you want her to tie you up and spank you?”

“Tut tut,” I said, “No no.”

“Do you want to do it to her?”

“Certainly not.”

“So what do you want?”

I lost my temper and shouted that I wanted pleasant female company and whatever that naturally led to, which (I repeated) was none of her business! None at all! She frowned, nodded thoughtfully and said “You shouldnae be dealing with Is. You should deal with me.”

I stared at her and she stared expressionless back. Her face was freckled, without make-up, not glamorous, not ugly, not exactly plain. She wore a leather jacket and baggy jeans with cuffs turned up to show laced-up, thick-soled boots. I said coarsely, “Sorry hen, you’re no my type.”

“You don’t know that.”

Her impudence was not surprizing. All women think they know me better than I do. I groaned, shoved the bottle into her hands, rushed back to the living room where the three others sat giggling and drinking the last of the brandy. I changed the ragtime roll for the first Wagner that came to hand, sat down and, pedalling furiously, played the overture to The Meistersingers as loud and fast as possible. Someone shouted, “So you want rid of us?”

“Yes,” I said, standing up. They had finished the wine and still sat round the fire, the three youngest staring at their boss who, without moving, said slowly, “I think you owe Is more than biscuits and three swallies of booze.”

“You mean money,” I said, “Here’s what’s on me, there’s no more in the house.”

I dropped my wallet open on the coffee table so they saw the notes inside, then chucked coins from my pockets on top. Isabel and the other two stared at me, then at their boss, then at the money. One (not Isabel) stretched a hand toward it. The boss said, “Leave it. Come on yous, we’re going.”

She stood up and led them out. I hurried before them to open the front door. The boss took longer to put her coat on and left last, saying as she passed me, “You havnae heard the end of this.”

I lost my temper, thrust my face close to hers and with what felt like a thoroughly evil grin whispered, “If that’s a threat, I’m no feart.”

We stared at each other for a moment then I slammed the door on her.

And went upstairs weary to bed. Why did I say that last thing to her in the voice of a tough Blackhill schoolboy?⁷ I understand myself as little as the young things I pick up. I’m sure life is easier for Italians, or was before the Counter Reformation.

This morning received letter from Joy Hendry saying she will print a special edition of Chapman with all my first chapters of Who Paid for All This? as a work-in-progress, if I give her a prologue explaining and outlining the whole book. Very encouraging. I will tackle it at once, giving it an epigraph from my favourite novel.