Alasdair Gray - Old Men in Love

31 Lumber : Scottish demotic verb, meaning to intimately caress late at night in the back yards of homes to which a girl’s boyfriend would be denied entry by her parents, therefore also a noun for a girl thus caressed.

32 Tawse of extra hard, thick leather manufactured in Lochgelly, Fife.

33 Kilquhanitya boarding school, in a country house near Castle Douglas, was run on pupil self-government lines by John and Morag Aitkenhead, a kindly couple. Their discipline did without punishment. Their example was A. S. Neill’s English boarding school, Summerhill.

34 After World War 2 healthy men over 18 years were conscripted into the British Armed Forces for two years until 1958, when the British empire was nearly extinct. Those who refused conscription for political reasons were jailed. Roughly 10,000 refused on religious grounds and were not penalized.

35 Glasgow University stands on Gilmore Hill.

36 This statement is in Auden’s Elegy for W. B. Yeats . Tunnock mistakenly assumes that one short quotation sums up a great poet’s whole attitude.

37 Scott’s Heart of Midlothian led to Scots law ending concealment of pregnancy as a capital offence; Melville’s Whitejacket led to the USA navy abolishing flogging.

38 Glasgow University Magazine mocked this edition of Catullus’ poems for omitting all explicitly sexual verses.

39 This and the next two paragraphs are identical with three in chapter eight, the Prologue.

40 Tunnock acquired the knowledge in these first paragraphs from Dr Chris Burton of Glasgow University’s Department of Geology.

41 This is the only complete chapter in a chaos of scribbled papers, news cuttings, copies of extracts from other people’s work. These were raw materials of a book intended to explain Scotland’s part in the first Crusade, its lack of an archbishop in Catholic times and Calvinism; also its present place in the international financial war machine. A report on unused mineral beds (chiefly coal) were mixed with prophecies that in 2020 or earlier, bankers will combat oil famine by hastily exploiting nuclear power and mutated crops. This will make everything catastrophically worse until folk see that their only hope is in small co-operative Socialist nations. The next diary extract explains why this huge work was abandoned.

42 All animals are sad after sexual intercourse.

43 The funnel was on The Waverley, the last Clyde-built passenger steamer. The research tower is currently the tallest structure in Scotland (127 metres) and the only one in the world designed to revolve round a static pylon to which it is hinged, allowing visitors a splendid 360 degree view over the city. It has been static since 30 January 2005 when 10 people were trapped for 5 hours half way up in the lift.

44 Twelve of the following fifteen dated diary extracts are in words Prince published, but Tunnock shortened by removing many phrases about the beauty of Christ’s love and Prince’s evil nature and the sinfulness of the human soul. Three marginally noted entries are partly John Tunnock’s invention, but use phrases from other entries.

45 The last three 1836 entries are partly fictional, the dates wholly so. Tunnock synthesized them from events and phrases found in Dec 17 th1837, May 24 th, June 1 st, 2 ndand 3 rd1838, Feb 17 th1839 of the published journal.

46 Tunnock has not given the date of this entry, nor have I found it in the turgid pages of Prince’s published journal. But Hepworth Dixon refers to the umbrella incident, so I have no doubt it could be found.

47 Many mystics have described this “dying to the self”. In Sartor Resartus Carlyle describes it as passing through “the everlasting No to the evelasting Yes”.

48 Dixon here makes the town-dwellers’ usual mistake of thinking the country as he saw it had always been like that. In 1867 it had been created by acts of parliament about sixty years earlier. An England where cultivated land was separated by commons (wildernesses where anyone could build a shelter, snare a rabbit, fish a stream, keep a beehive, graze a horse or goat) had been replaced by a countryside of densely-hedged fields and landed estates guarded by spring mantraps and signs saying TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.

49 Euterpean — a machine with revolving cylinders that played symphonies and opera overtures.

50 Frock here means Frock coat, knee-length and thinner than an overcoat, worn instead of what is now usually called a jacket.

51 The Abode of Love: a Memoir by Kate Barlow, issued by Mainstream Publishing Company (Edinburgh) Ltd, 2006.

52 These lines of the Bob Dylan song are misquoted.

53 Greek: enthusiasm.

54 The second policeman is a character in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman.

55 Furor scribendi — Latin for writing fever.

56 This was Robert Lowe, Liberal chancellor of the Exchequer and wholly opposed to democracy in Britain

57 Outsourced is postmodern slang for run more cheaply in foreign lands.

58 This festival, was started by local town councillors and business people acting unofficially, helped by Michael Dale, former Edinburgh Festival Fringe organiser.

59 As editor I have been obliged to omit several of Tunnock’s remarks that I have been advised would make me actionable at law.

60 Since 2003 this building has been called the Oran Mor Arts and Leisure Centre.

61 Professor Moignard teaches classics in the University of Glasgow, does not drink in Tennants, but was Tunnock’s neighbour in Hillhead.

62 This day must be Monday 1 stor Tuesday 2 ndof January.

63 These words are misquotations from a song in Behan’s play, The Hostage .

ALASDAIR GRAY, born in 1934, is a painter certificated by Glasgow Art School. Unable to live by one art he became jack of several and Old Men In Love is his 19th book. In The Dublin Independent Lawrence Sterne says it will swim down the gutter of time with the legation of Moses and A Tale of A Tub . Says Urquhart of Cromarty in The Scots Magazine, Relish the cheese — like brain that feeds you with these trifling jollities . Dr Samuel Johnson in The Rambler writes, Never has penury of knowledge and vulgarity of sentiment been so happily disguised . Sidney Workman in the Epilogue says This book should not be read . In this blurb Alasdair Gray writes Old Men in Love is bound to sell well because everyone now feels old after 25, so all youngsters are interested in what comes next.