In each edition, a personal selection of things of value: we ask each contributor to nominate their favourite book, film, piece of music, work of art, restaurant or pub, and place. This week: journalist Bill Jamieson, editor of ScotBuzz .
By the time I finish this list of favourites, I’ll need a police escort from Scottish Review readers. So let’s start with those more likely to strike a consensual chord: food and refreshment. Drive north up the A84 past Callander and Strathyre and on the right you will come by Mhor 84 – the restaurant, coffee stop and motel run by Monachyle Mhor owner and celebrated chef, Tom Lewis. It’s an informal, come-as-you-are food and drink stop-over for walkers and cyclists, with a popular all-day menu, enticing cakes and pastries, and bar with spirits, beer and wine. The menu is a delight, the food wholesome, attractively prepared and promptly and cheerfully served. You can eat indoors or al fresco and the atmosphere is always relaxed and friendly. This is a great example of how good roadside stop-overs and restaurants can be in Scotland. If only there were more.
When in Edinburgh, my favourite cafe bar is Continis in George Street, a popular watering hole for business, media and public policy types. Rare are the days when I don’t bump into someone I know. Then there is Jean-Paul Gauffre’s La Garrigue rustic French restaurant in Jeffrey Street with superb food. In Glasgow, it’s still Rogano’s for me – a great rendezvous point for lunch or dinner. You never have to explain to people where it is – everyone knows Rogano’s.
Favourite play? Travesties by Tom Stoppard: a sparkling, effervescent fantasy on the weird coincidence of Vladimir Lenin, James Joyce and Tristan Tzara all being in Zurich during the first world war.
Favourite films: anything with Al Pacino, especially Scent of a Woman .
As for books, I take my Kindle everywhere. Among my favourite authors are William Boyd (‘A Good Man in Africa’. ‘Any Human Heart’, ‘Sweet Caress’), John Grisham (of course) and Philip Kerr (great on Berlin noir). Recent reads include ‘The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin’ by Steven Lee Myers, and, most recently, Nicolas Farrell’s biography of Mussolini (intriguing to read how many Italian communists were fascists).
Every so often I have to thin out my bookshelves but there are authors or specific books I always keep to the fore: all books by Emile Zola – I revere him so much I visited his tomb in Paris – a far better writer and critic of his era in my view than Dickens; any and all books on roses (I grow more than 60 in my garden in Lochearnhead); and Thomas McCraw’s biography of my hero Joseph Schumpeter (‘Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction’).
But top of the list of books to be treasured forever is Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France . Its passion, its anger, its eloquence, its richness of imagery, its sustained flights of brilliant, furious writing stir me on every reading. When I am tired, or need inspiration, it is to this that I turn.
Are the ranks of the children of progressive thought thinning out? I haven’t finished. Here’s my favourite music. Opera is my music of choice. For an energy charge, Verdi always does it – ‘Il Trovatore’, ‘Rigoletto’, and ‘La Traviata’ especially. Best not to catch me when I’m playing them: I sing along. I can’t sing along to Philip Glass but he’s the one modern composer I admire. But I do sing along to Country and Western and, yes, Dolly Parton.
I’m a gushy romantic, so Rachmaninoff is a big favourite and the third piano concerto rendition by Hungarian pianist Tamas Vasary especially. He’s not rushing for a bus and trying to cram in all the notes on speed dial: this inspired interpretation is plangent and steeped in feeling for its underlying pathos and wistfulness: themes stunningly laid bare.
But by far and away my favourite – higher than any clouds and way up in stratospheric reverence – is Richard Wagner’s sublime Ring Cycle . It’s not as if his other music dramas are duff: I love ‘The Flying Dutchman’, ‘Tristan and Isolde’, ‘Parsifal’ and ‘Lohengrin’. I thrill to them all. But The Ring is beyond compare.
I have six different recordings of the whole cycle. I have travelled to Berlin, Oslo, Amsterdam as well as London and Cardiff to see different Ring productions. It never fails to move and inspire. Its profundity, its depth, its drama, its romanticism, its soaring lyrical passages, its unbelievably moving themes and explorations of emotion take me through the deepest ravines and raise me to the highest peaks. And in its 12 or so hours here’s the thing: there’s not a single superfluous note. Not one.
My favourite work of art is a painting of Caithness thistles by the Scottish artist Fionna Carlisle: full of light, air, colour and movement: it never fails to cheer me.
My favourite place: Lochearnhead , of course: centred in an amphitheatre of stunning Trossachs beauty. It is a place of constant inspiration and gateway to the heaven that is the Vale of Strathearn.
Hello? Any Scottish Review readers left? I’ll slink away while I can with Edmund Burke, Schumpeter, and a quick burst of the Entry of the Gods into Valhalla, full blast. It’s been a pleasure.
By Bill Jamieson | 15 June 2016
