Alasdair Gray - Old Men in Love

These were once only seen in army uniforms and workers’ overalls. Professional folk and people at leisure wore trousers, jackets and blazers with pockets sewn within the linings to interrupt, as little as possible, the body’s outline. A single breast pocket in jackets was sometimes made noticeable by a protruding fountain pen or, on formal occasions the triangular corner of a neatly folded white handkerchief. Women’s dresses and skirts had no pockets, so they carried handbags. It is now not fashionable to look suave and neat in modern Britain so every garment I saw from my pavement table had external pockets of the workmen or military kind. On baggy jeans several looked as big as buckets. Some big pockets had small ones on top. There were jeans with four or five pairs of pockets, some at ankle level. Miniskirts also had them. They were fastened by a variety of buttons, buckles, studs and zips. Girls in slim jeans only had them on hip pockets where, seen in motion from behind, they pleasantly emphasized the changing balance of the buttocks, but baggier trousers were more frequent, often made tougher-looking by conspicuous seams. Some women’s jeans have the oblique canvas strip at the side for tradesmen to sling their hammers, and I saw a skirt with that too. Nearly all clothing suggest the wearers are ready for hard work, while some were deliberately torn to suggest they had suffered rough treatment, why? Saw one slim, attractive girl with huge ragged holes through which were visible expensive stockings with a delicate openwork pattern of leaves and fruit. And amidst the brightly coloured stalls, bouncy castle, balloons and candyfloss most clothes were black, khaki or blue-grey.

But police clothing has changed most between 20 or 30 years ago and now. The police uniform of Victorian days were intended to be quite unlike police on the European continent, most of whom wore a military style of uniform, and carried visble weapons. The dark uniform of the London Bobby did not attract the eye; his helmet was comic rather than martial; his weapon was a wooden baton carried out of sight within his uniform, unless violence erupted. This was the policy of governments who thought threatening displays would make British policemen unpopular. Nowadays our police have been re-styled on the American cop pattern with highly visible jackets in fluorescent colour and waist belts from which dangle handcuffs, radios and blunt instruments that can probably gas or stun people. While worn thus to be more rapidly used if needed, they have the effect of being flaunted. We know some carry guns but not how many, as these are probably worn out of sight, like the old batons.

After 2 p.m. the centre of Byres Road was cleared for a colourful parade emerging from the Botanic Garden gates. It was led by a band of carnival drummers and musicians followed by groups of children from local schools dressed like butterflies or wearing elephant masks or equally droll disguizes; then came gyrating belly-dancers and bicycles supporting fantastic frames resembling dragons, the Loch Ness Monster, King Kong and Marilyn Monroe; also stilt-stalking tall Mexican-Day-of-the-Dead skeletons with wreaths on their skulls and flowers in their ribcages. I was so enraptured by this procession that I was tempted to join in behind some ten-year-olds in the costume of a martial arts club who marched along striking martial postures, but eventually joined some older people carrying the banners of the Green Movement. We all processed down to Dumbarton Road then turned left past the old Andersonian College to finally enter Kelvingrove Park behind the Art Galleries. Here we mingled with the Mela Festival, a big gathering of Glasgow Asians that had been running all day. Wearing the brightest dresses and costumes of their original homelands they were cooking, serving and eating their national foodstuffs to the music of their own bands and singers. Almost intoxicated by this abundance of new colour I wandered back home. No wonder those who bathe daily in sensual experience are incapable of historical thinking. End of modern social history lesson.

I am weary of unending news about British political corruption. It has been steadily increasing along with crime at street level and accidental shooting of innocent folk by armed police. In the 1960s 59

Several Tories were delighted and declared this was such a splendidly 18 thcentury response to criticism

Then in the 90s Blair’s New Labour Party promised “an end of sleaze” — a friendly word for corruption. I hear today that

The Tory Party has always been funded by rich businessmen because it exists to represent them. The Labour Party was founded to represent the common workers, so funded by the trade unions. Since New Labour has rejected the unions and courted the rich, where else can poor Blair get all the money he needs?

Sick of these thoughts I tried to change my mind yesterday (which was Sunday and warm), by wandering around Whitmanizing as I had done in the West End Festival last year. How time flies. The old Kelvinside and Botanic Gardens Free Church of Scotland is now a pub with restaurants, theatre and concert hall. 60 In the yard between pavement and front door I joined drinkers at tables under parasols. Bought half pint, edged towards empty table in far corner, noticed —— crouched over cup of coffee, talking rapidly as usual into mobile phone. Hoped she had not seen me but had hardly settled down when she sat opposite saying, “For three years you’ve not answered my postcards and never phoned me, why?”

Explained I had been inspired to write a different book from the one we had discussed, but I had worked hard and recently finished it. She said, “Has another woman got hold of you?”

“Yes!” I said sternly, “And I will not say one word to you about her because she is an essential part of my private life.”

After staring hard at me —— said, “And your public life? Have you abandoned writing about modern Scotland? Have you gone ostrich again?”

I told her that I was now a Pepys, a Boswell recording everyday life for the benefit of posterity. She said, “Then you should tell posterity the state of our refugees because the fucking Scots today don’t want to know,” and spoke of a Chinaman she was defending whose ancestors had cultivated a piece of land for centuries, even under the rule of Chairman Mao. But that government now deals with global capitalism so the Party sold his land, despite his protests, to a U.S.A. company that did not want him. He was promised a sum of money in compensation, but on going to collect was offered a third of that by a Party official who said legal expenses had consumed the rest. He therefore knocked the official down with a mattock, fled from China and was briefly harboured in Scotland as an asylum seeker. Said ——, “We called them refugees when they were escaping from Fascist or old Communist regimes, but now they’re called asylum seekers, so no matter how long they live here their case can be reviewed and a legal loophole found to again shunt them out into homelessness, hopelessness, perhaps prison and death. Did you know that an Asiatic family of four was recently arrested here by the police at four o’clock in the morning? The Soviet police also arrested people at that hour to stop folk seeing their neighbours deported. This family were driven in a windowless van to London and questioned by immigration officials who discovered what had been officially recorded years ago: the parents had entered Scotland as subjects of The British Empire and the children had been born here! Well, they were returned to Glasgow but others born and taught in schools here, knowing no language but English, have been suddenly extradited with their parents on a small legal technicality without right of appeal! What do you think of that?”