The Importance of Being E-Book

John Cairney

• Herausgeber: Luath Press
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 328

Beschreibung

Life is there for the taking. We can choose to take it, or leave it to float by as it will. If we have the confidence, we can reach out and grab it. Life is divided into four sections: birth, adolescence, maturity and old age. Writing from 'the final quarter', John Cairney looks over each section of his life and draws wisdom from the places he has been, the people he has met and the events he has experienced. He's been shot at (twice). Survived a hurricane at sea and an earthquake. He has taken risks and been derided as well as applauded. He is an extraordinary survivor. His attitude has been that 'life is there for the taking', and he has engaged with it passionately throughout his 84 years. The Importance of Being reveals the private, more reflective and unexpectedly philosophical side of a man better known for his public face in a long theatre, film and television career. Exploring notions of love and courage, interspersed with dry Glaswegian humour, this book will make you laugh and ponder the complexities of life at the same time. Nothing lasts forever, certainly not life itself. In these supposedly civilised and sophisticated times, no one appears to accept the moment for the present it is and revel in the free gift that is the day at hand.

Leseprobe

JOHN CAIRNEY made his stage debut at the Park Theatre, Glasgow, before enrolling at the RSAMD in Glasgow. After graduation, he joined the Wilson Barrett Company as Snake in The School for Scandal. A season at the Glasgow Citizens Theatre followed before going on to the Bristol Old Vic where he appeared in the British premiere of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. He returned to the Citizens from time to time, most notably as Hamlet in 1960. He also appeared in the premiere of John Arden’s Armstrong’s Last Goodnight in 1964. Other stage work until 1991 included King Humanitie in The Thrie Estaites for Tyrone Guthrie at the Edinburgh Festival, Archie Rice in The Entertainer at Dundee (1972), Cyrano de Bergerac at Newcastle (1974), Becket in Murder in the Cathedral at the Edinburgh Festival of 1986 and Macbeth in the same Festival in 1989. He also wrote and appeared in his own productions of An Edinburgh Salon, At Your Service, The Ivor Novello Story and A Mackintosh Experience while continuing to tour the world in his solo The Robert Burns Story.

His association with Burns began in 1965 with Tom Wright’s solo play There Was a Man at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, and at the Arts Theatre, London. The solo was televised twice nationally and was also an album recording for REL Records, Edinburgh, as well as a video for Green Place Productions, Glasgow.  From Burns he moved on to other solos on William McGonagall, Robert Service and Robert Louis Stevenson until he worked with New Zealand actress, Alannah O’Sullivan at the Edinburgh Festival of 1978. They married in 1980. As ‘Two for a Theatre’ they toured the world for P&O Cruises and the British Council as well as the Keedick Lecture Bureau, New York, with programmes on Byron, Wilde and Dorothy Parker until 1986.

Cairney’s first film was Ill Met by Moonlight for the Rank Organisation, followed by Windom’s Way, Victim, Shake Hands with the Devil and many more including Jason and the Argonauts and Cleopatra, Devil Ship Pirates and Study in Terror in 1965. His many television parts include Branwell Brontë, Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Bruce and he has featured in all the main series: Danger Man, The Avengers, Dr Finlay’s Casebook, Elizabeth R, Jackanory and Taggart. He also starred in BBC2’s This Man Craig, which ran for two years, 1966–68. In addition, he wrote and recorded his own songs for EMI at Abbey Road.

As a writer, Cairney has published two autobiographies, two novels and three books on Scottish football. He has written eight books for  Luath Press, including three on the life and works of Burns, biographies of Robert Louis Stephenson and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, a book of essays on Glasgow entitled Glasgow, by the way, but, and a book on acting called Greasepaint Monkey. His next book, The Tycoon and the Bard, about Andrew Carnegie and Robert Burns, is now in progress.

In his free time, Cairney watches football, paints, listens to classical music, reads non-fiction and enjoys occasional moments of silence.

Cairney gained an M.Litt from Glasgow University for A History of Solo Theatre in 1988 and, in 1994, a PhD from Victoria University, Wellington, for his study, Stevenson and Theatre. Having spent the last 17 years in New Zealand, John and Alannah returned to live again in Glasgow in 2008.

The Importance of BEING

Observations from my Anecdotage

JOHN CAIRNEY

LuathPress Limited

EDINBURGH

www.luath.co.uk

First published 2014

ISBN: 978-1-910021-08-8

ISBN (EBK): 978-1-910324-13-4

The publishers acknowledge the support of Creative Scotland towards the publication of this volume.

The author’s right to be identified as author of this work under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

© John Cairney 2014

To the unknown lady

in Edinburgh Central Library,

who first gave me the idea for and title of this book.

By the same author

Miscellaneous Verses

A Moment White

The Man Who Played Robert Burns

East End to West End

Worlds Apart

A Year Out in New Zealand

A Scottish Football Hall of Fame

On the Trail of Robert Burns

Luath Burns Companion

Solo Performers

The Quest for Robert Louis Stevenson

The Quest for Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Heroes are Forever

Glasgow by the way, but

Flashback Forward

Greasepaint Monkey

The Sevenpenny Gate

Burnscripts

Contents

The Four Quarters of Life

Preface

Introduction

THE FIRST QUARTER  WE ARE MADE

CHAPTER ONE  Infancy

First Interval: The Virtuous Student

CHAPTER TWO  Childhood

Second Interval: Dae Ye Mind?

CHAPTER THREE  Adolescence

THE SECOND QUARTER  WE MAKE OUR WAY

CHAPTER FOUR  Finding Uniformity

Third Interval: The New Generation

CHAPTER FIVE  A Work in Progress

Fourth Interval: I Speak Anguish

CHAPTER SIX  Following Your Star

THE THIRD QUARTER  WE MAKE OUR MARK

CHAPTER SEVEN  Home Work

Fifth Interval: Nostalgia for a Tenement

CHAPTER EIGHT  Child’s Play

Sixth Interval: What is Age?

CHAPTER NINE  Finding New Solutions

THE FOURTH QUARTER  WE MAKE OUR PEACE

CHAPTER TEN  Travelling Hopefully

Seventh Interval: Goya’s Old Man on a Swing

CHAPTER ELEVEN  Taking the Initiative

Eighth Interval: If I Had My Life to Live Over

CHAPTER 12  I Belong to Glasgow

Ego Absque Finis

Conclusion

Endpiece

Acknowledgements

The Four Quarters of Life

In the first quarter, we are made,

In the second quarter, we make our way,

In the third quarter, we make our mark,

In the fourth quarter, we make our peace.

Preface

The meaning of life is that it stops.

FRANZ KAFKA

WHAT IS IT TO be a human being? Is it only to be human? Or is it just being? Socrates said, ‘To do, is to be.’ What is to be? And what can we do? The answer is that we keep breathing. This may seem obvious but it is surprising how often this basic process is disregarded. It serves here as a starting point, the aboriginal fact in a consideration of being as far as it is reflected in this writer’s life and work and overall existence. To exist at all is only a matter of ventilation, a need to comply with the need to breathe in and out. A simple act, it reminds us that being alive comes down to the plain fact of being awake. If the heart is beating, a person is there. This primitive action is often overlooked or taken for granted in the hurrying, striving, contemporary days that are the early decades of the 21st century. We are all subject to mortality, which means, frankly, that we are dying from the moment we are born.

Why is it then, that we patently ignore the fact that all we really know at any given moment is the now we are in. We can remember the moment gone, whether a minute since or years ago, and we can reasonably assume the near future, but we don’t really know what is yet to happen.

Which is why, whatever or wherever our lives as we live them, the present is there to be relished; to be enjoyed for the very joy it holds or whatever satisfaction can be extracted from it, no matter how dismal the current scenario may seem. Nothing lasts forever, certainly not life itself. In these supposedly civilised and sophisticated times, no one appears to accept the moment for the present it is and revel in the free gift that is the day at hand. The focus always seems to be on the vague possibility of things, the reward that lies just over the horizon. In my view, the real answer is always right at hand, it is in us, and immediately about us, awaiting our notice. Is it only missed because it’s so obvious?

Wiser minds than mine have tried to tell us this truth down the centuries, but they were ignored or dismissed as irrelevant or eccentric, simply because the concentric mass, whatever the era, is always too preoccupied in surviving materially in a competitive world.

These thoughts have only occurred to me now because I am now old, and a survivor. Survival may be all but it isn’t everything. No one was more competitive than I when young, but over a long lifetime, my all-consuming, selfish ambitions have been gradually crushed out of my mind by the dead weight they are. I can literally be called light-headed today, because I’ve shed a lot of rubbish from the vanity bag I carried throughout a long, hectic career as a professional actor. I’ve finally broken out of my own, self-imposed bubble. I’m free now to concentrate on living’s only priority – catching the moment when I can, enjoying the passing hour and making the most of every day. Basically, I’m just glad to be.

This is not to be smug. Far from it. My knees are not what they were, the arms are drained of muscle mass, the hearing is suspect and the heart has a stent in it, but that same heart is pounding with enthusiasm for life, real life, not its hybrid imitation, which is accepted by most from what they see and hear around them. My own mind is continually racing with ideas. Why couldn’t I have felt this spilling-over of vivacity years ago? But that’s only one of life’s lessons – we learn as we go. Yet why are we so punished for growing old? Why should we lose much of our faculties, just when we’re really beginning to know how to use them? This is an irony that continues to be one of life’s puzzles.

Looking back over life, at least as I have known it, I see that it is a time of cries, a series of appeals at every stage, heard as the baby leaves the womb for the crib, then goes from the crib to the nursery pen, from there finding the freedom to stumble to the front door and, on firmer legs, takes the first steps out into the world. In life’s second quarter, the adolescent seeks the freedom to explore. It is a time of flux. The cry here is for attention so that what we are doing can be seen and applauded, and if not, put away to try any alternative that will meet the continuing changes. The cry of the third quarter is for acknowledgement, for justification, proof that you have done well. If not, there’s still time to make it right if you have the will. In the last quarter there is only one cry and that is for mercy, for forgiveness, but we have cried out so much in life that we are hoarse and can only whisper, ‘I’m sorry!’   

Choices arise regularly and have to be met. For instance, you have chosen to read this book. Which means you have given time to it. Let’s face it, a book is a luxury of the reading classes. Today there are so many alternative means of passing time, being entertained, or imparting or receiving information available to the public, that to buy or borrow a book to read, for any reason, is to make a superior statement of intent. Once any book is taken up, a definite aim to read it is assumed. Should you do so, you obviously don’t have toothache, or a bad tummy, and have no desperate worries. More importantly, you have the time to surrender to another’s printed opinions and/or imaginings.

Every book is a private conversation between reader and author, unless the book is being read to someone, then it is a performance, and the reader an actor. For the most part, however, it is a complicit act between two consenting parties. The following pages are a conversation with myself, which I cordially invite the reader to overhear as a very welcome third party. The main narrative takes me from infancy to near senility, giving me an opportunity to unburden the weight of things done; of seeing the experiences of a crowded lifetime for what they are: merely incidents and happenings along the way.

The essential person that we are continues throughout, affected for better or worse by the very act of living. This is what will be examined as each stage is explored. I shall try to scrape away the self and reveal the Id, which prefaces the entity we are and creates what we know as ‘identity’, which is what we are seen to be. I may then be able to look at myself honestly and see my ‘self’ – what I really am, just another example of a striving man.

Any one life describes the progress of an age as it has changed down the centuries. That being said, mankind per se remains the same. Only our material environment is altered. I don’t know the baby I was, I’ve almost forgotten the boy I must have been or the young man I became and the older man I am now is completely foreign to me, a total mystery. These phases are the signposts on which we hang the faces we present, the masks we hide behind as we grow. These selves are almost strangers to each other, even to ourselves, but they are, in their sum, what we really are.

I have laid out the line of my own life so that I can hang out the washing of my personal observations and arrive at some kind of conclusion about why we are all here in the first place. What use did I make of the life given me at birth? After all, it was a gift, a present, not to keep, but to be used, on loan, for a certain term. The rent due is the return one makes on the investment, and is counted in terms of every day lived. This calls for concentrated effort, integrity and objectivity, traits I have worked on over the years and, hopefully, I may have reached the stage, at last, where I can trust myself to say what I mean.

We still have the voices we were born with. It is something that is in us and is unique to us. This is everyone’s mark, our stamp, and we want it known. Basically, it’s the same impulse that compels people to daub their names on walls, carve their initials on trees or scrawl graffiti in inaccessible places. They only want to tell the world, ‘Look! I am here! I am alive! I exist! I have being!’ Whatever we do or say, we can never make a bigger statement than that. Life is there for the taking. We can elect to take it or leave it to float by as it will. If we have the confidence we can reach out and grab it as it passes. Or, if we are lucky, it will reach out and open up to us. The path will suddenly appear and each of us will then be faced with a decision: do we take it and find out who we really are by doing what we want to do, or do we meekly accept what it throws at us along the way and conform? Decisions are there to be made at every turn, that’s what life’s about. On the choices we make, depend the lives we lead.

In my time, I have survived an earthquake, a hurricane at sea and being shot at (twice). I have been inside a pyramid, walked over Red Square, sailed up the Yangtze River and down the Suez Canal, and I have seen much of what is between both Poles. I have been applauded, derided, switched on and switched off, loved much and actively disliked – but I have never hated, really hated, anyone or anything. I’m glad to say that. I know now that I only fully exist when in complete relation to everything else that lives and breathes around me. I believe that everyone’s life is a story, that my story is yours, and your story mine. That is the tale I want to tell.

As a working actor, published author, selling artist and sometime academic, I have a harvestable field to work from; at the very least, I can claim a right to put forward a point of view. Call it an attempt to unearth and illustrate, by anecdote and/or comment, those interior areas in our lives that are common to us all.

What I have written might be described as a hymn to growing old. I like to think that this volume is my Book of Hours. That I wrote it by candlelight, with a good fountain pen, into the lined pages of an old ledger, sitting at a wide desk under the window while ‘Vespers’ were being sung in the distance. Instead, it is my Book of Years, stabbed out with two fingers on a temperamental computer, while wearing a tracksuit and listening to BBC Radio 3. My publisher has wrapped around these pages a cover that features the dashboard of a car and a rear-view mirror with my own eyes looking out. In these pages, I’m looking back on the long road I have come, seeing my existence through all its parts. Any life is one long paper chase, from the birth certificate to the death notice, with papers of all kinds in between: school reports, medical reports, exam results, graduation certificates, love letters, wedding certificates, divorce certificates, press notices, parking fines, citations, correspondence, and finally, the obituary.

By which time, we will know more than anyone about life and ourselves. We may perhaps wonder why we bothered so much about the unimportant tomorrow or left it so late to understand the precious now. It all comes down to nothing more than being heard or seen. What else prompts a person to put down on paper their closest thoughts, secret hopes or wildest speculations? After all, a writer’s voice has to be seen before it is heard.

Introduction

ROBERT BURNS, in the Introduction to his Second Commonplace book in 1787, wrote:

I don’t know how it is with the world in general, but with me, making my remarks is by no means a solitary pleasure – I want some one to laugh with me, to be grave with me, some one to please me and help my discrimination with his or her own remark, and at times, no doubt, to admire my acuteness and penetration.

The world are so busied with selfish pursuits, ambition, vanity, interest, or pleasure, that very few think it worth their while to make any observation on what passes around them, except where that observation is a sucker or branch of the darling plant they are rearing in their fancy. Nor am I sure, notwithstanding all the sentimental flights of Novel writers, and the sage philosophy of Moralists, whether we are capable of so intimate and cordial a coalition of friendship as that one man can pour out his bosom, his every thought and floating fancy, his very inmost soul, with unreserved confidence to another without hazard of losing part of that respect which man deserves from man –

For these reasons, I am determined to make these pages my Confidante. I will sketch every character… to the best of my power, I will insert anecdotes and take down remarks … where I hit on anything clever, my own applause will, in some measure, feast my vanity.

My own private story likewise, my love-adventures, my rambles, the frowns and smiles of Fortune on my Bardship, my Poems and fragments that must never see the light shall be occasionally inserted. In short, never did a [book price] purchase so much friendship, since Confidence went first to market, or Honesty was set up to sale.

LIFE FOR ALL OF US is no more than an accumulation of days, a succession of sleeps. Our finite state, our common mortality, gives us a sense of belonging to the tribe, of being. And that’s what makes it important. That’s what determined the title of this book. The finished volume has been slow in developing, but the original idea for the project came from the four lines shown on page nine that first came into my head while driving around the earthquake city of Christchurch, New Zealand, during February 2011. Time passed, but the words stayed in my head until November 2012, when, in Edinburgh, I was due to give a reading of my solo presentation on Robert Louis Stevenson in the Central Library. After the performance, I was at a table signing copies of my Stevenson book when a well-dressed, well-spoken lady approached for an autograph.

‘I do hope you write that book?’ she said.

‘What book?’ I asked as I scribbled my signature.

‘The Importance of Being,’ she replied. ‘Lovely title. I’d buy it.’

That was the spark that set the whole idea going. One chance remark, casually made, was enough to tie it to the few lines from Christchurch and I knew I had the frame of something. The importance of being. But the importance of being what? Like everyone else, ‘Earnest’ was the first thing that came to mind. As much as I admire Oscar’s word skills, I am just as earnest in putting forward ‘being’ as an orphan among words. It is rarely used in its proper context, which is as the basic description of the human condition. It is usually a twin, holding hands with other words, so that we get ‘being sad’, ‘being happy’, etc, but I am being particular in this case, defining ‘being’ first and foremost, as the term used to describe our elementary physical existence as members of the human race.

Then I remembered why the lady had picked up the phrase. I had ad-libbed on this ‘being’ theme before starting on my script only because I was so pleased to see a full house.

‘I’m delighted to be here tonight,’ I began, then broke off to say, ‘In fact, at my age, I’m delighted to be anywhere!’

This got an immediate, warm response and encouraged me to continue playing on the ‘to be’ idea and to link it with the Kiwi lines. All this came out quite spontaneously and may only have lasted five minutes, but it did include a snippet from Hamlet’s ‘To be, or not to be? That is the question…’ To me, there was no question, but I then remembered I had a show to do. I got on with the RLS performance and, ironically, the first line of the script was uncannily apposite –

‘We all invent ourselves in our own lives but we don’t always get the opportunity to play as cast.’

This only added fuel to the idea, but the whole concept burst into flame for me after I saw a film at the Glasgow Film Theatre early in 2013. It was called I Am Breathing and was made by two young filmmakers, Emma Davie and Morag McKinnon. It concerned a 37-year-old architect, Neil Platt, a Scot working in London, happily married and with a baby girl. Neil was suddenly struck down in his 30s by Motor Neurone Disease. His slow dissolution was movingly filmed in his home and by the end of the film everyone in the cinema that day was in tears. The stress of the narrative was in the importance shown to the simple act of breathing in and out, which was the only difference to Neil Platt’s being alive or dead. This was exactly the theme I had been looking for, and, from that moment, I not only wanted to write this book, I knew I had to.

Are any of us really the person we want to be? Or are we only what life so far has made us out of the bumps, scrapes, mountain peaks, valleys and troughs of everyday existence? Is it that simple? What is it we’re all looking for? Is it all a big mirage? Are we only the heart-hinge between what has been and what will be? As Robert Burns points out, the heart has it:

Nae treasures nor pleasures could make us happy lang,The heart’s ay the part ay that maks us richt or wrang,Catch the moments as they fly, use them as ye ought, man.Believe me, happiness is shy and comes not ay when sought, man…

It is always difficult to catch these flying moments because we are either fretting about what has passed or worrying about what is to come. We are reassured by the past because we know that it did happen, that we survived, and it can be remembered, but the future is an uncertain quantity and we are all, subconsciously, afraid of the unknown. Being, however, is not memory, nor is it speculation. It is here and now, and with us continually. Contentment in the present, therefore, should be our priority. We have to bear in mind that, as long as we are warm, fed, clothed and, best of all, loved, we have no reason to complain of our state of being. It is always at hand and at our service. It is meant to be enjoyed or at least provide proof of our ‘being’ at any given time.

Meantime, we survive in the consciousness of the four constant states available to us, the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual props that uphold our very fabric. As long as we engage in life at all of its stages, fully and fearlessly, then we’re living and that is reason enough to be grateful. As I said, ventilation is the key, a continuing wind function, breath coming and going, burping and farting, air relentlessly refreshing and renewing all our body parts. That’s living.

Mankind, however, is more than a physical phenomenon. He is a thinking animal with a body apparatus that is a miracle of physical and intellectual efficiency, which is sadly underused in today’s increasingly spectator world. If we really used all that was within us to its full force, we could touch the very heart of things. We could be our own worldwide web, but in our over-informed, sophisticated age, the focus is always on exterior show and tomorrow’s great plan. Of course, we must sensibly plan ahead, but we must never lose sight of where we are at the time, or forget that the present is the place where the real living is done. How right to say, ‘How good this is!’ when it is. It frames the moment and sets it up in our minds.

We can’t exist properly on the possibility of things. The real answers are always available because they are in us and about us. Solutions are always at hand. Our first concern should be to concentrate on the essentials, taking time to listen, talking less and enjoying the silence. It provides that special moment, wherever and however it happens. Silence is a good place but good silence is a rarity. It is not golden, as the saying has it, it is platinum. It should be welcomed like a much-loved visitor. Above all, be slow to break it. Just be glad to be.

‘To be’ in Latin is esse. Thus we get the word’s essence, and the essence of existence is the compulsion to keep on living. It also gives us the word ‘essential’, which appears to be the most misused word of the century, since it applies to things that are really quite unessential to living, like the internet, social media, electronic toys, fast cars and fast food, every kind of gadget, money lending and almost any kind of insurance. Values and standards change almost on the hour. It’s no wonder people are bewildered by the lack of tried and familiar certainties. It is time to rediscover the old-fashioned sureties like family connections, personal relationships, writing real letters by hand, talking with friends face to face, finding time for contemplation, economy of diet, and a wardrobe bought for utility, not show.

By all means let us enjoy our hobbies, but know they are only for leisure. On the other hand, we must pursue our projects relentlessly. These need time and application and often a little luck, but what is luck, after all, but Providence with a blindfold? It is the underground swell that carries along the surface tide and we have sometimes to lie back and trust that occasionally our needs and opportunity coincide. This is serendipity. Except that we are often the last to notice. The first essential for the good life is optimism, but the most valuable, by far, is the faculty it spawns: enthusiasm. This might be our most important attribute, for it is well nigh impossible to do anything worthwhile without it.

Once embarked on any enterprise, the next asset is sheer persistence; never to lose heart, whatever the setbacks. Persistence is a virtue sadly underestimated, for it is associated principally with diligence, a dull slogging away, yet without it, many greater projects than just another book would never see the light. No matter the seeming impossibility of overcoming the problem or removing the obstacle, we soon find that Robert W. Service was right in his view that everything either blows hot or cold or away.

Tomorrow’s worry is today’s nuisance and both are only a souvenir of a long-gone yesterday. ‘If only’ is a phrase that we should drop from our vocabulary. It is emotional sabotage. The ‘if’ is conditional on so many things, and ‘only’ limits the choice to one. So, we made the wrong decision. It wasn’t fatal, was it? So forget it and get on with the next wrong decision. We can too easily make an enemy of our own selves. It may be, subconsciously, that we are afraid of ourselves. We are all, in a sense, entirely of our own making.

We don’t see ourselves in others as we should. We are all one of many, yet, paradoxically, each of us is unique. Each of us is original but we are not apart. Nobody in the world is anonymous. We all fit in the one great design. We only have to recognise our place in the jigsaw. Find your target and run towards it, take a flying leap. Taking the leap, that’s what living is about. As the old Zen saying has it: ‘Leap and the net will appear.’

All I know for certain is that that I’m not certain of anything. In the writing of this manuscript, other people everywhere have been my true guides and mentors, and I shall remain grateful to all of them, many of them ordinary people like ourselves. Although, that’s my first lie. There are no ordinary people. We are all, in our various ways, quite extraordinary and that is principally what I want to celebrate here. I’m only human, after all should not be an apology or an excuse, but a celebration.

This book, if you like, is a book of wisdom – folk wisdom, ‘folk’ meaning the people I’ve met. They are the canvas on which the narrative is painted, and the result owes more to observation and memory than to any hard study. It may be no worse for that. I want to explore the life theme imaginatively and take the opportunity wherever possible to extend the thought, improvise on it if need be. The matter owes much to things read, overheard, talked about, thought about or wondered at, even picked up casually. Especially when it is fun. For instance, in our hairdresser’s recently, a well-dressed, fussy woman was complaining that she had been sitting unattended for at least five minutes: ‘I’ve got to be in Comrie in an hour,’ she complained. Tommy, the hairdresser, was unfazed, and in his typical Glasgow way replied, ‘Have no fear, Ma’m, Comrie’s been there for a thousand years, and it’s likely to still be there in an hour.’

Or again: one summer afternoon, I was carrying home a large painting canvas, all wrapped up and just bought from the art shop. A passing Glaswegian in overalls said, without breaking his stride on the pavement, ‘Geez, that’s some pizza!’

Even the passers-by laughed.

Then, on the bus recently, an older couple came on, arguing quietly in the way of long married couples. I stood up to let them have my double seat and moved to sit in the single opposite. This, however, was quickly occupied by the woman.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I thought you were married.’

‘We ur,’ said the wife. ‘That’s how we never sit thegither.’

I shrugged and said nothing, but sat down dutifully beside the husband, who whispered to me, ‘It gies us baith a bit o’ peace.’

But I noticed the twinkle in his eye.

Lastly. It was in a Glasgow street, outside Sainsbury’s, not so long ago. As I emerged with a full plastic bag in each hand, a woman stopped me at the door, and asked me quite seriously: ‘Excuse me, did you used to be John Cairney?’

THE FIRST QUARTER

We are Made

In the first quarter

We are made,

Displayed,

All parts intact,

All systems go,

Except you don’t know

What to do with yourself.

Your mouth pressed on a small, soft hill

And held until

A smooth, warm liquid

Fills your entire being.

It stills your fears,

Stops your tears.

Why weep?

When all you want to do is sleep.

You are only one of millions born

At that moment, torn

From the comforting womb

And hurled into a room

Of cold wind, noise and light

That hurts your eyes, closed tight

Not daring

To see this place, not caring

To hear their cheers

As all alone

A helpless handful of flesh and bone

Is thrust with force into time and place

As part of what they call the human race.

CHAPTER ONE

Infancy

If you must create something, you must be something.

GOETHE

JAMES LOVELOCK’S 1970s Gaia theory, named for the Greek goddess who symbolised Mother Earth, suggests that everything created was in creation from the beginning, it just took time to emerge from its microscopic origins to become the vast, multi-universe we now know. We can then accept that the tiniest events in nature can have enormous repercussions, which can, in some cases, lead to chaos. The smallest actions can lead to the biggest happenings and there is no smaller action than the development of the seed in the womb, nor a bigger repercussion than the resulting birth of another human being. We still have in us all the apparatus for living we were given at the first moment of life. The difference is that it is now conditioned, not only by environment and education, but by what has been absorbed subconsciously as we develop. We have been dealt our life-cards and it’s up to us to learn how to play them in this wonderful, exciting and unpredictable gamble called existence.

It is our only decided certainty, the sole definition accepted, that to be alive is to have being, to live now – right now – and with the means to grow into our full potential. We are a continuing part of the primordial process begun when someone or something crawled out of the sea or fell from a tree. Whether we were originally aquatic or arboreal is irrelevant. We have begun, therefore the only requirement is to keep going. For just as the universe started with the action of the smallest atom in space, the hardly perceptible first movement in the womb is our practical start, the miniscule event from which comes our history, all the epic deeds of mortal man and the highest heights of human thought or artistic creation.

What is plain to see in our story as a species is that humankind’s greatest skill is not only in creating human life, but in replicating itself, making itself anew from generation unto generation with unstoppable energy, thus firmly establishing the unvarying process of procreation. The copyright for the original process may lie elsewhere, but it is humanity’s primal act. Like the earth’s action, it is a never-ending cycle, based on similar collisions or junctions involving physical matter at every stage. Bumps certainly do occur and this can be seen readily in the gradual expansion of the female outline over the required nine months of pregnancy.

I never cease to be amazed at how our spinning globe, a pre-ordained conglomeration of minerals, metals and molecules, over countless centuries can make mountains. And still does. Even to my uninformed ear, stories of our human and our world’s beginnings still fascinate, no matter who or what the real originator might be. The narrative itself is still a matter of wonder. So many tiny factors conspiring to create objects of mammoth proportions. It is a universal phenomenon. Applied to the generation of life itself, mammoth proportions are not looked for and the tiny things involved are babies.

This latest specimen of human life has been arrived at by an incredible harmony of disparate events. Events that still occur today. But so does an inherent harmony, whatever the climate change, and where there is harmony, some-body must be calling the tune. But who, or what? We may never know. Meantime, perhaps the most important of all world events is birth. Human birth. It is a purely animal exercise, no different for a fox in the forest or a polar bear on an ice cap. A little version of a bigger one forces its way out on a given day in a given way and the species continues, whether through the birth pangs of a cosseted royal under the media blanket, or of a single mother under an overcoat in a rented back room.

A birth of any kind has all the importance of the remote black hole to us earthbound creatures, except that we know exactly how it began and what is the likely outcome. As with the principal of natural selection, the phenomenon of human birth goes through all its preliminary stages before the necessary explosion that announces its happening. It is, in fact, a miniscule replaying of that super-celestial action taking place even now above our heads. It is indeed above our heads and completely beyond our understanding, if we will only admit it. There might be no end to the universe. So why don’t we just get on with what we’ve got while we have it?

We are an assorted mixture of bits and pieces all functioning in concert while healthy but given to painful discordance when any part of the whole fails to function. Human being