WHEN AND WHERE FIRST PRINTED
Well Being — Why Scots Should Rule Scotland (a political pamphlet), 1997.
Big Pockets with Buttoned Flaps — New Writings 9, 2000.
Job’s Skin Game — Prospect Magazine, 2003.
TALES DROLL AND PLAUSIBLE
Once again after completing a book — The Ends of Our Tethers — I had no intention of writing more fiction and felt another publisher’s advance need never again attract me. In 2003 I began a job I had wanted since my art school days: painting the ceiling and walls of a great building with no deadlines and sufficient payment. The job would last for years (it is not finished yet) but while working on it I would always earn a good weekly wage. Colin Beattie, the Glasgow pub owner, was converting the former Kelvin and Botanic Free Church (derelict for years) into an arts and entertainment centre called the Óran Mór — Gaelic words meaning the Great Music. I decorated the ceiling of the auditorium before the Óran Mór opened to the public, then decorated lower auditorium walls when this did not interrupt the concerts, banquets and conferences which were the hall’s main source of income.
In the autumn of 2004 the Óran Mór’s lunch hour theatre, A Play, A Pie and A Pint, occupied the auditorium floor on most days between 12.30 and 2 p.m. I was then painting walls of the gallery behind and above the audience’s back, so had no need to stop work, and thus heard several times several performances of new one-act plays commissioned from Scottish authors by Dave McLennan. With no funding but Colin Beattie’s support, Dave still directs this small, successful theatre. Eight years later, in 2012, he has commissioned 38 new plays, thus encouraging more new authors in a year than any other theatre, even those with the support of Creative Scotland (formerly the Scottish Arts Council) and more than all of Scotland’s broadcasting networks joined together. A Play, A Pie, A Pint revived my interest in playwriting, as it also offered a chance of production. From 2006 to 2008 it staged: Goodbye Jimmy, Midgieburgers, The Pipes! The Pipes! and Voices in the Dark. I gave these a longer life by turning them into stories, only changing the title of The Pipes! The Pipes! to Whisky and Water. I then added them to other new stories that had accumulated when I was not painting. The Offer, Misogynist and The Third Mr Glasgow were written as entries for competitions suggested by Canongate Books or my London agent (they did not win.) The Magic Terminus was commissioned by Tot Taylor of London’s Riflemaker Gallery, Soho, to accompany his show of Francesca Lowe’s richly fanciful paintings. Six stories were written in the year it was published.
Gumbler’s Sheaf came from a folder of annoying letters received over several years but never before got round to counterblasting. Eustace happened because in April 2012 Dan Kitts MBE sent me a copy of his new publication, Military, Naval and Civil Airships Since 1783. Here I read that in October 1916 the last Zeppelin destroyed over England had been shot down by Second Flight Lieutenant Wulfstan Tempest. He at once joined two splendid names I had been unable to forget or use for years: Knatchbull Hugeson, an obscure Victorian literary gent, and the sculptor Scipio Tadolini. I invented a vaunting speech to combine that trio, and a love of anticlimax led to the sad state of Eustace McNulty. I thought that a good way to start these late tales. Working with Giants came from words I heard — or misheard — spoken by a man opposite me on a London underground train when I visited that city to see the big Hockney exhibition in May. Late Dinner also came from eavesdropping on a train, sometime in 2011. I heard a man pontificate about his work in such empty clichés, that I had to invent bullying Mr Big and to give his vacant words a context. Maisie and Henry used some of my wife Morag’s experiences when young, with later memories that we now hold in common. The longer we live together the more her past haunts me. Maisie is therefore slightly like Morag, but also as different as I am from Henry, that efficient gardener. The Patient, however is almost purely autobiographical.
The four drollest tales near the end of this book derive from four short plays I wrote this century; but droll or plausible all of them are class bound. Though not about comfortable folk, they are nearly all folk with enough money. So Billy Semple is my concluding tale, if not the ending. I had met him in Studio One, a mildly sleazy local pub in the early 21st century, since gentrified out of existence. I described that meeting soon after it happened because (A) it reminded me that nobody can be sure of their end and (B) it mentioned social changes for the worse that surprised me when they happened, and which many younger folk take for granted. This I now see is the theme of all my later tales.
WHEN AND WHERE FIRST PRINTED
The Third Mr Glasgow — Prospect, 2007.
Magic Terminus — Riflemaker Gallery Catalogue, 2010.
Midgieburgers — New Writing Scotland 30, 2012.
Billy Semple — The One O’Clock Gun, 2012.
THE ILLUSTRATIONS
Pictures in Unlikely Stories, Mostly had some details copied from work by Paul Klee, Michelangelo, Raphael, Piranesi, G. Glover, W. Blake, E.H. Shepherd and a Japanese artist whose name has no phonetic equivalent in Roman type I am aware of. Drawing is a way of keeping the appearance of folk I know. The last page of my first Unlikely Story shows the face of my son in his teens and the last two Likely Stories show Doreen and Russell Logan when I first knew them. I will not name other friends used in that book. The original Lean Tales by James Kelman, Agnes Owens and me had a picture of each author before their part of the book, so now it has only mine as I was in 1985. The vignettes of merry or glum horned heads are a recent addition. In Glaswegians the initial capitals contain portrait drawings (not wholly in the following order) of May Hooper, Morag McAlpine, John Purser, Eddie Linden, Agnes Owens, Bethsy Gray and Carole Rhodes. A childish pun suggested the illustrative scheme in Ten Tales Tall and True. The frontispiece to The Ends of Our Tethers is based on its 2003 jacket design. The horned skulls were also in that. Other work left me no time to illustrate Tales Droll and Plausible so I enriched them with vignettes scanned from a book of plays by Philip Massinger published by Ernest Benn Ltd, London, and Charles Scribner, New York. Though undated it is obviously late Victorian, and though the artist who designed the vignettes is not named, their style belongs to an even earlier century. Most surviving art is by forgotten artists.
