Mister Duffy Changes Trains

  An Epiphany with Leon Redbone Early October, 1976. I am about to start my third year at Edinburgh University, but the week before lectures start, before the year of stuffing my head with mathematics gets under way, I am wandering the Southside of Edinburgh on a rainy afternoon. At some point, I find myself in Greyfriars Market, a cavernous hall full of rather dreary hippy stalls. By the one selling records, I hear something which holds me absolutely spellbound. It reminds me of   a stack of 78 records we have at home, by Jelly Roll Morton and other giants of early 20 th century New Orleans, but with 1970’s sound quality. The gravelly, lugubrious singing voice is especially evocative of The Big Easy fifty years back. Now, although it sounds corny, I think of the ‘Chapman’s Homer’ quote. I was silent, upon a peak in Darien. ‘What is that?’ I asked the stallholder. The contrast between customer and salesman could not have been greater. I was bowled over by the music,...

  You Said a Mouthful, Mr Waugh Early on in the 2020 lockdown a neighbour and fellow book group member roped in a few of us to contribute to an email trail about what we were reading in lockdown. I hadn’t been reading anything terribly profound or impressive. I’d done a good bit of rereading, in particular the Sherlock Holmes stories, which are great comfort reading, but they are a lot more than that. It is difficult to think of more perfectly crafted stories. And during lockdown, it is pleasant to think of Victorian and Edwardian London, hansom cabs rattling through the fog, Holmes and Watson biting a chop at the Savoy, Watson taking his service revolver just in case… Another comfort reread was a couple of collections of Patrick Campbell’s very funny Sunday Times pieces from the 1960’s and 1970’s, about which I had something to say last week. Someone sent me a Kindle copy of Hitler’s Peace, by Philip Kerr, imagined around the Tehran conference of Churchill, Stalin and Roosev...

  Knocking at the Gate Think of a Saturday night. Think of a Saturday night in London. Think of a Saturday night in London in the nineteen-sixties. The most exciting, the most fashionable, the most ‘happening’ place on the planet at that time. But you are not part of it. You are a kid too young to be out, and in any case living in a provincial town many miles from London, beguiling the Saturday night time by listening to the Police communications on FM on the radio. Or perhaps you live in London but are already too much of an old fogey to appreciate The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, pointy-toed shoes, and all the rest of it. Your Saturday night consists of a quick couple of pints in The Fox and Grapes half an hour before closing time, and an occasional exchange of pleasantries with others of your generation. Strangely, I feel that I belong to both of those demographics. Silly of course, I can’t be both sixty-odd years old and a hundred-odd at the same time. In reality I belong...