McGill September

DELIVERY

Here’s a little tale for the 21st century. A few Sundays ago I was shaken out of sleep at 6 am by Morag, who was shouting in my ear, “Maggie’s started!” Memory has it she was slapping me hard on both cheeks, but that’s probably just storyteller’s embellishment.

Maggie is the great Clydesdale mare who’s been grazing the paddock in front of our garden wall for most of the summer. We’d been watching her grow bigger and rounder for months but somehow the big event always seemed to be in the indefinite future: ‘a few weeks yet’ was the mantra. Blear-eyed as I was, I could see that something strange was going on at her back end. Trouble was, John the farmer was in Stromness, ten miles away. Normally I can’t function till I’ve brushed my teeth and washed at least one of my oxters, but these were desperate times, when a man had to do what a man had to do, even with the elastic in his pyjama bottoms gone. Hoping the farmer hadn’t had too big a Saturday night, I phoned Stromness to rouse him.

And somehow it didn’t seem amazing, it wasn’t surprising at all, that Morag should say, “You go and watch her while I get on the internet.”

Mid-July or not, there was a bitter easterly wind scouring our Quoyloo hills. Maggie nibbled absent-mindedly at some hay while I tried to make sense of the miracle. “There’s a hoof!” I shouted across the dyke. Our broadband connection always seems to be dodgy in the morning, but Morag had managed to get surfing.
“There should be two – and a head,” she shouted back.
I looked closer: everything seemed to be wrapped in a Co-op recyclable shopping bag, but I could just about make out the bits.
“Yes – two hooves and a nose!”
“That’s fine, don’t do anything, just encourage her.”

So I encouraged, and damn damn, I switched on the music. Some monstrous composite it was – culled from Stagecoach and half a dozen other westerns – mostly violins, but with a clarinet all poised ready to out-schmalz them. And the women were taking charge and the men were shuffling their feet and water was being boiled all over the place. He’s two feet taller than me and he wasn’t in Stagecoach, but it was James Stewart I finally settled on – as he was in Firecreek, when he did for Henry Fonda and his thugs despite his leg being shot off and his wife having an endless tough screaming labour. How else can a small Glaswegian get a chance to say “Shucks” and mean it?

No words for the half hour that followed: let the picture do the job.

Just to complete the Hollywood script, though: last Thursday, Dounby Show day, the farmer leapt over the dyke waving a rosette: Finn of Quoyloo, aged two-and-a-half weeks, was Champion Foal. More violins.

I once laughed myself silly when a colleague said, out of the blue, “I hate music.” It seemed like the most bizarre remark I’d ever heard – like saying “I hate standing” or “I hate looking” or “I hate breathing”.

Now I’m not so sure. If you regard yourself as an inheritor of the Scotch Enlightenment – and don’t we all? – there’s bound to be something scary about the way violins and flutes and screeching sopranos assault your ganglia. Puccini and Wagner are high on my list of thoroughly repellent human beings, so it bugs me that I burst into tears when old Rodolfo hits high C and that I can’t look over a big grey sea (and we get a lot of those in Quoyloo) without feeling the Tristan chord oozing through my ribs. Scientific friends tell me it’s not my ribs at all, but my cerebellum (or reptilian brain) and my amygdala, but knowing that I’ve got a bit of crocodile in me is no great comfort. Most monstrous of all: why, after I’ve been watching one of those minor-channel documentaries about the Third Reich, do I catch myself, as I put on the kettle or trot to the loo, humming the Horst Wessel song?

Not that I’m so naïve as to imagine that great art can only be produced by nice people: far from it – I don’t think Shakespeare or Michelangelo would have been wonderful guys to have a pint with. No, the disturbing thing about P and W is that the yuckiness almost seems to be part of the art itself: all those suffering self-sacrificing heroines, all that repetitive overblown mythic nonsense – frontal attacks on good sense and Enlightenment values. Yet I won’t stop listening. I don’t think many people outside the specialist circuit read John Dryden nowadays, or even mention him. In using his full name rather than just ‘Dryden’ I’m demoting him from the Eng. Lit. A-list. I retain a soft spot for him, however, because his ‘Alexander’s Feast; or the Power of Musique’ was one of the first grown-up poems to make a strong impression on me. How old Timotheus with his lyre puts the conqueror through the emotional wringer! How he can ‘swell the Soul to rage, or kindle soft Desire’! The bastard. For a paler version, you can try Nanki-Poo in The Mikado.

And yet again, Hollywood knows best. I once casually remarked to my film-pundit daughter that Stephen Foster’s exquisite dollop of syrup ‘Beautiful Dreamer’ featured in more movies than any other song. At that point, about two years ago, I could muster about seven examples, but my assertion started us on a desultory exchange of texts in which we alert each other to further manifestations. There’s an unwritten rule that they have to arise by chance, as with the guy in the story who devotes his life to stumbling across all 52 paying-cards – no research, no Googling. Our tally now stands on the brink of two dozen. She watches ten thousand times more films than me, but my predilection for westerns restores the strategic balance. Please feel free to join the quest: I offer here a few, drawn from the top drawer, to get you going:

The General
Gone with the Wind
Shane (the greatest movie ever, of course)
Move Over, Darling
The Naked Spur (James Stewart again!)
Batman (Tim Burton’s 1989 classic)
McCabe and Mrs Miller

But no Googling!