In some ways I was a late developer. In others I was an old head on young shoulders, setting myself up for a future as a self-regarding gobshite with aspirations of poetic and artistic grandeur. I think this is best summed up in my choice of sports - more specifically school sports. I was a child who, even as the Savlon was applied to the latest grazed knee, always had one eye on his memoirs.
At the age of about 7, there was a decision to be made as to what kind of sport I would subject myself to: I could have chosen hockey, but those sticks didn’t seem to have much give in them. Rugby always looked to me like a game being played by far too many people at once, on the same pitch. So football it was. But not for this child the camaraderie that comes of pulling on the same shirt as all your tiny team-mates, nor the concerted everyone-running-after-the-ball tactics, as drilled into us by our foul-mouthed and foul-tracksuited manager. I wanted to be the goalkeeper. "It was good enough for Albert Camus", I’m sure I thought, "so it’s good enough for me". Naturally too, by that age I had already enjoyed Peter Handke’s excellent novel about murder and the dilemmas of free will "the Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty Kick", so really it was a no-brainer.
Then came four years of standing alone in the pouring rain, ignored as my team-mates celebrated each goal, vilified for each one I conceded. Four years of staring into space while I tried to invent lyrics to go with the Superman theme tune. Four years of standing exactly in the middle of the goal because Princess Leia would be executed if I didn’t. Four years of being caught unawares by lightening-fast attacks while I was figuring out whether I’d prefer to be Batman or Robin at playtime on Monday. Four long years, in which time I think Cults Primary School won about three games.
As an aside, special mention should now go to Erland Tangen, a slightly odd Norwegian boy who scored an absolutely spectacular goal against me in my second season. A right-footed volley from the edge of the box, which fairly thundered into the roof of my net. It was like a proper grown-up goal, and would have been goal of the season had Tangen not been one of our own defenders trying to make a clearance during what became a 7-0 defeat.
But then came the step up to the Big School, where the team’s manager had it all wrong. He made no mention of the importance of a goalkeeper letting his thoughts wander all over the place. Nothing about cultivating an air of aloofness that would stand me in good stead for my adult years. He wanted his ‘keeper to pay attention, bump into people, get in the way of the ball, even catch it. My goalkeeping career was over.
I recently finished reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Loved the first half, where not a great deal happened but it was creepy and there was a sense of impending doom. Wasn’t too fussed about the 3rd quarter where nothing really happened and the doom seems to stop impending. And then really didn’t think much of the last quarter, when everyone spends the whole time congratulating each other on their bravery, their manners, their fastidiousness, and proclaiming their love for one another. And then they find and kill the Count literally in the final 2 pages. I can’t help but feel that Stoker ran out of story at about page 200 but had promised himself it would be 400 pages long.
One of the places thought to have inspired Bram Stoker to write Dracula, and certainly an evocative location in its own right is Slains Castle, a few miles north of my home town of Aberdeen. Stoker spent time here as a guest before starting the novel, and few places have made such an immediate and lasting impression on me – The bleakness of the setting, the precipitous cliffs and the hollow sadness of the building itself. Even though it dates back to the 16th Century the more recent work left it looking like a late 19th early 20th Century stately home, and the ruination always seemed to carry echoes of week-long cocktail parties and late-night music – The chatter of guests dancing into the darkness of the First World War and everything that would mean for their way of life (the owners had to leave and remove the roof to avoid taxes by the mid-1920s). The ruins themselves won’t carry this sense of melancholy for long though, as the site is braced for redevelopment, the nature of which I dread to imagine. I love the place.
Slains castle in its heyday:
...and today:
I have spent the past year or so watching more costume dramas than is probably healthy, and yet healthy is exactly how it has made me feel. All these depictions of 18th and 19th Century England have served to emphasise what an absolute pain in the backside it must have been living in an age when people died at the drop of a hat.
Today, if we go two or three weeks without hearing from a particular friend, the worst we are likely to assume is that they have lost their phone or are busy with work. 150 years ago there was a very real possibility that it would be because they were dead. People died all the time.
And of everything. They died of colds. They died of fright. They died of toothache. They died of headaches. They died of broken hearts. It must have made it hard to make plans, and I would imagine the phrase "if I’m still alive" was used a great deal more than it is nowadays.
I write this having just returned from the British Library’s Magnificent Maps exhibition, which was predictably ace. There were more women there than I had expected, as I’d always presumed maps to be a peculiarly male interest, in the same way that directions and preferable routes from A to B via C are a default conversation topic for all men struggling for common ground, so to speak. I went on my own because I had presumed nobody else in their right mind would have fancied it, but it now turns out that there would have been several candidates had I only had the strength of my convictions. Mind you, if I’d gone with someone else I wouldn’t have felt as comfortable spending half an hour playing with the big magnifying glasses they had for enlarging the computerised copies.
Yesterday was a victory for second-hand bookshops over common sense, as I bought the following:
A history of the American Civil War by Shelby Foote,
A Short History of Africa by Roland Oliver
Martin Amis’ the Moronic Inferno,
Simon Winchester’s A Crack in the Edge of the World about the SF earthquake of 1906,
I Shall Bear Wintness a jewish memoir of nazi Germany by Victor Klemperer
Sebag Montefiore’s gimungous biography of Stalin,
For Love and Courage, a collection of First World War correspondence from the front,
Collected stories by M.R. James,
and something called Within the Context of No Context by George Trow, which looked amusing.
And all that because we happened to “pop in on our way past” a small bookshop with 5 minutes to kill on our way to afternoon tea. I don’t know where we’ll shelve them, and I’ll be lucky if I’ve read that lot before Christmas. On the plus side, at least the 21st Century has given me a decent chance of living that long.
