Robert Burns for man of the millennium? Only the SNP could suggest something that ludicrous
Published 29 January 1999
Ich bin ein Edinburgher. Just before the new year I was telephoned by the Edinburgh Evening News and asked - "as one of Edinburgh's famous sons" - what my new year's resolutions were and if I had a wish for 1999. Get outta here. Me? Famous? Come on. Of course what this meant was that I was someone whose name had appeared in print - which hardly counts as fame at all beside the heady heights of Blue Peter presenter or club DJ - and whose telephone number happened to be available to the luckless working-through-Christmas reporter. Doubtless other Northern Athenians much more famous than me had changed their telephone numbers many times in an effort to preserve their privacy.
Not that I minded. Being Graham-Belled by the Edinburgh Evening News once a year is virtually the only remaining contact I have with the city of my birth and education, bar the odd flying visit to the book festival. Like quite a few other Scots, I live in London now, and have done so for the past 20 years. I lost my accent eight or nine years before that, when my parents moved south of the border.
Don't get me wrong. I love Edinburgh. It's just that my accent is more Rab Butler than Rab Nesbitt. Anyway, what do you know, but by the end of my wee chat with the man from the News, I was shounding fair Sean Connery, sho I was. Which is weird, considering that my Hogmanay wish was that Scotland should choose to remain part of the Union. Perhaps it's because I'd been reading all these stories about people getting beaten up in Scotland, not for being English, but for sounding English. Expressing opinions about Scottish politics when you live in England is always a chancy business.
We were planning to host a Christmas party, but after going to Ken Follett's party, which was a really good one, we realised we'd left it far too late to organise properly. Briefly we considered a Twelfth Night party, which was when people used to celebrate Christmas, with presents and a cake containing not a sixpence, but a bean and a pea (thus the expression "I haven't got a bean").
Samuel Pepys gave a Twelfth Night party in 1668 which drew the following admirable sentiments in his illustrious diary: "I do really enjoy myself, and understand that if I do not do it now, I shall not hereafter, it may be, be able to pay for it or have health to take pleasure in it, and so fool myself with vain expectations of pleasure and go without."
As it happens we decide that perhaps more people would be available to come to a Burns night supper. Except that nobody I know - apart from myself - seems to like haggis, and you can't have a Burns night supper without haggis. Even worse, to add insult to the apparent injury of serving haggis to your guests, someone has to recite that poem by Robert Burns. To cap it all, I heard Alex Salmond on the Today programme suggesting Burns as the man of the millennium. Robert Burns? What could be more ludicrous? His choice says everything you need to know about the SNP. Heart before head, every time.
So it's now going to be a garden party. But if you don't get invited, then you'll know I've been fooling myself with a vain expectation of pleasure and that we're having a Christmas party instead.
Maybe you've seen the IBM TV commercial. "Q: What are you doing? A: I'm talking to my computer." One of the many useful presents I received at Christmas was Dragon Naturally Speaking. "Speak to your computer at a normal pace - up to 160 words a minute - without pausing between words. Dictate entire paragraphs continuously. Your words appear immediately on your screen and in your document."
Or, as my new software might reproduce this: Man off many a useful presence I received at Christmas was DragonMed naturally is speaking. Speak to your computer at a normal pace up tae a hundred 60 words of minutes without pausing between worlds. Dictate the entire paragraphs continuously. Your words appear immediately off your screen and a new document.
Very useful if you want your dictation to look as though it was given by Robert Burns, after a wee dram or two.
Over Christmas I was contacted by Channel 4's Wall to Wall television documentary people. Apparently they want to make four documentaries about four writers who are beginning new books, the idea being to chart the genesis of a novel. They explained that once a week they would turn up for a couple of hours and film one's progress or, more likely, the lack of it. I said that I thought that the process of writing was not an obviously televisual subject - about as interesting as watching someone play solitaire. I haven't yet said no, but I rather think I will. Writers ought to cultivate reclusiveness and solitude, surfacing only once a year like a great whale to spout some publicity for a new book, before sinking without trace once more. For the rest of the year effacement should be maintained as well as if your name was Edmond Dantes and you lived in a quiet part of the Chateau D'If. The effects of any success on a writer are notorious enough without his having to deal with fame as well.
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