The Cafe 2
Power prices
Why not gay marriage?
We have a tradition
of religious liberalism
Barbara Millar
Real doctors
Barbara Millar
It is all very well for Jill Stephenson PhD to laud the awarding of doctorates (3
November). In whatever discipline, they are really just another degree, some earned, some bestowed, mostly for reasons beyond me. In extremis, the only time you want to encounter someone who uses the title doctor is when it’s a real one.
A few years ago I was in a minor accident on the M25. Not hurt, but badly shaken, I got out of my car and stood, with the driver of the other car, in the fast lane (where traffic had been proceeding at its customary rush-hour rate of 20mph), aware that we should call the police but still lacking the joined-up ability to be able to do so.
A car pulled up in front of ours and a chap got out, and asked how we were. He then phoned for the police and an ambulance, introducing himself as Dr So-and-So. I looked at him, delighted, reassured, safe. He then apologised. ‘I’m just a PhD’, he admitted, sheepishly. And sheepish he should have been – why on earth did he feel he had to tell the emergency services he was a doctor when – to be frank – he wasn’t?
Okay, he had a courtesy title awarded after x more years at university, writing a thesis most likely to be gathering dust on some library shelf, rarely consulted and barely relevant. But, particularly in the context of helping at a road accident, this courtesy title was meaningless.
I acknowledged his apologetic shrug – and waited for the proper doctor to arrive.
SR Extra
‘By looking at the art form which is theatre and how it is performing in the Highlands and Islands, we can learn more about the state of the nation.’
‘The artistic director of Scotland’s largest theatre company recently asked me to explain "Just what is the Highlands?". I just pointed to Bheinn Wyviss. "It’s that sort of thing", I said forlornly.’
”The writers, actors, directors, designers, technicians and musicians find themselves diminished, abandoned and out of work.’
In this weekend’s Scottish Review, a searing indictment of arts policy in Scotland by the playwright and director George Gunn
Why not gay marriage?
We have a tradition
of religious liberalism
Christopher Harvie
I
In George MacDonald Fraser’s romp ‘The Pyrates’ a bunch of innocent mariners have their ship captured and are set adrift in an open boat. ‘One of our pirates will now demonstrate the safety instructions’, announces the Pirate King helpfully.
The line never fails to convulse me, and it recurred when reading Gordon Wilson’s ‘Pirates of the Air’ (Scots Independent, £7.99) on the SNP ‘living a bit dangerously’ in its near-wilderness years.
‘Pirate’ isn’t the first word that one would link to Gordon, otherwise a very logical and indeed legalistic customer: convincing about renewable energy and Scottish economic autonomy, less so in his Free Kirk line on same-sex marriage.
I remember interviewing him on Broughty Ferry beach in 1986, when he remarked in an aside that a senior Whitehall bureaucrat had once told him that there was a plan in 1977 to move hundreds of London bobbies north should rioting break out against Westminster’s rejection of the first Scotland Bill. ‘That shows how little they understood us!’.
Not a man, then, to exalt the business of living dangerously. The exploits of Radio Free Scotland had to match the shadowy ‘forces of law and order’ concerned to suppress it. RFS first got a hearing in 1956, run by – among others – a kinsman of Robert Louis Stevenson, and indeed had the impudence of RLS’s ‘Lantern-Bearer’ boys about it. It got the attentions of the ‘political’ plods: not nice people, and with a bad record in that decade. But by subterfuge and sheer chance, these very respectable rebels – lawyers to a man, at one stage – stayed free. In 1972, when RFS fell silent, nationalist ideas had made the mainstream, and Whitehall was keen to hear Gordon Wilson’s facts and ideas, as he and Donald Bain knew more about North Sea oil than it did.
The ‘pirate’ exercise, ironically, helped ‘legal’ nationalism at a time when Northern Ireland – not as far away as we liked to think – was exercising the plods. Then and there, after the BBC closedown, was where the SNP set out its wares. You couldn’t infect it with the bacillus of extremism if you tried.
II
The sobering thing is to go from this midge-like activity and its pretty inspiriting aftermath – from ‘Tutti-Frutti’ to Colin Bell in the 1980s convening those wonderful lunchtime flytings – to the present establishments of public-service broadcasting.
Once the BBC had awkward folk like RFS moonlighter Dougie Stewart in the undergrowth of Queen Margaret Drive; these days they’re kept in order by bosses on six-figure salaries, the seductions of well-endowed PR, and parliamentary duties going little further than attendance on FMQs.
Truly toxic pirates play expensive golf in the watering-holes built for the profiteers from our Pinstripe Darien. And what of broadcasting Scotland via Holyrood? Promises, promises, of a Scottish network, but from the BBC more of Jeremy X – ‘He moans for Middle England’ – to annoy us, and eternities of sport to send us to sleep.
The formless immensity of post-print communication drives people back on their known environment, in Gordon’s case what Thomas Carlyle called, sympathetically, the ‘little tabernacle’ of his Kirk.
III
In May 1979 Scotland failed to beat England at Wembley. Virginia and I were moving from her place in Chelsea, 200 yards from Carlyle’s house, to an Islington flat, unaware of the Scottish ‘grand peur’ supposedly besetting London.
‘Together’ lasted, through some blazing rows and far more happiness, until she died in the Middlesex Hospital in February 2005. The joy recurred, bitter-sweet, watching Michael Powell’s remarkable film ‘A Matter of Life and Death’ (1946). It ends with words from Canto Three of Walter Scott’s ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel’, when the celestial judge lets young David Niven off his death sentence and returns him to his girlfriend:
In peace, Love tunes the shepherd’s reed;
In war he mounts the warrior’s steed;
In halls, in gay attire is seen;
In hamlets, dances on the green.
Love rules the court, the camp, the grove,
And men below, and saints above;
For love is heaven, and heaven is love.
Out of desire, affection, negotiation, every marriage becomes a miniature politics, and my own family has done well from the friendship of straights and gays, single or partnered. So why not let the latter marry if they choose?
Contrary to our religion? Scott knew this wasn’t reassuring. ‘The Lay’ starts in Newark Tower, above Yarrow, in the 1690s: brooding over one of the worst days in Scottish history, the Covenanters’ butchery of over 300 Irish, including women and children, after the Battle of Philiphaugh in 1645. Scott and Burns were religious liberals, but John Buchan’s horror of this in ‘Montrose’ comes from the same Presbyterianism to which I belong.
And the Scots’ social tradition was Hellene as well as Hebrew: great weight given to emotional loyalty. In ‘Waverley’ the hero Fergus MacIvor’s friend Evan Maccombich spurns a pardon to die with him on the scaffold. Kinship and sexual preference are as important, and fallible, as belief itself. What there’s no place for is contemporary ‘traditional’ marriage where the wife is belted when the boys’ game doesn’t go their way.
Eddie Morgan’s parliament poem ‘Open the Doors!’ gave Holyrood its soul. And this –
Come all ye persons of goodwill,
From Newton Mearns to Maryhill,
Rattle the chains and launch the boat,
And get it properly afloat.
I bash this poem against the bow…
is Makar Morgan launching the Glasgow Gay and Lesbian Centre. Whitmanite universality – though it rhymes:
But if you should prefer a suit,
We’ll certainly no pit ye oot.
He went on to give the SNP a near-million. Someone break that to Brian Souter.
Professor Christopher Harvie recently returned from the USA, where he addressed the International Walter Scott Conference. He is president of the Scottish Association for Public Transport
