More Lost Worlds and Old New Years

I know I said I wasn’t going to do a blog this week. Well, here it is.

Actually, that broken promise reminds me of something. I once attended a wedding reception where the meeting and greeting was done by an Elvis impersonator. I don’t know what height Elvis was, but this particular looky-likey was about seven feet tall, and was dressed in the white spangly suit of the Vegas Years. After getting over the initial shock of having my hand shaken by this giant, I then had to sit through him belting out what seemed to be his hundred best tunes. After a while he would precede each number by an apologetic announcement that this would be his last of the evening. Well, as you might say about the above, promises, promises. He went on and on and on. I wondered if I had died and gone to Elvis Hell. And I was driving so I couldn’t anaesthetise myself against the experience. I hope the bride and groom don’t read this.

Sorry, that was a digression. I have managed to produce one of these blogs every week for most of this year. The first one, about the writer Patrick Campbell had 205 readers. Last week's had 48, so I have achieved an impressive whittling down of the audience on the way. I think this may be my last one for a little while, as after a year I feel myself running out of steam. On the plus side, I did manage to break my writers’ block and write a story, which has been published in the anthology ‘Slay Bells in the Snow’, edited by Roo B Doo (honest) and HK Hillman, published by Leg Iron Books- excellent value at four pounds eighteen pence.

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Today, I was thinking about New Years past. There is no point going on about the good old days, to quote Frankie Boyle, ‘With fish and chips and polio and you could leave your front door open because you had fuck all worth nicking.’ But I would like to mention a world that has completely gone. When I was in my late teens and early twenties, in Cowdenbeath in the late 1970’s, New Year celebrations started at midnight. All my drinking was done after twelve. And along with my pals James Barker and Harry Campbell, I would do the first footing round between midnight and some ridiculous hour of the morning: The Murphys, the Lukeiwiczes, the Conways, and many others would have the benefit of our company, which probably grew less articulate as the whisky levels in our bloodstreams gradually rose. At around eight am, I would tumble into bed, then up again at two in the afternoon, and on with the procedure. New Years then seemed to last around three days, and were all about visiting, drinking a lot of whisky, eating a lot of fruit cake and madeira cake, with occasional breaks for sleep and fried breakfasts at strange hours of the day. Nowadays, the celebrations seem to end shortly after midnight rather than begin then.

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I often fall ill at Christmas. I don’t mean the after-effects of the New Year celebrations outlined above. I mean that just before Christmas, I catch a cold or other infection. I think that for most of my adult life, my work has revolved around the academic year, and the autumn term is always particularly busy. I tend to work very intensely up to a couple of days before Christmas, then the moment I relax, I catch something.

This happened in spectacular style at Christmas 1977. I contracted a very ugly virus, the symptoms of which included fever, malaise, vertigo (in the first couple of days), sore throat and very painful mouth ulcers. By New Year’s Eve, I had recovered sufficiently to do my shift as a barman in the Abbotsford in Rose Street, Edinburgh. We closed early, to allow staff to get home and see in the bells with their families (another thing you don’t see any more). I had been invited to a party in White Horse Close, at the bottom of the Royal Mile. Around half way down there, I met a tall chap standing in some frustration beside the unconscious form of his pal who was lying completely out of it on the pavement, at around 11 pm. He had clearly not been abstaining until the bells at midnight.

‘Can you give me a hand to get him upstairs to the flat?’ the tall man asked me.

‘Sure,’ I replied. The two of us dragged him up three flights of stairs to the tenement flat which he and the conscious chap occupied, and what a dead weight he was! We got him into the living room of the flat and draped him over the settee, where he snored peacefully. I felt like I was going to die or throw up, or both. The companion was effusive in his thanks and insisted on giving me a drink. He got a tumbler and held a bottle of whisky upside down over it for a little while. He then handed me this brimming glass of Scotch. I felt a trace of gag reflex as I looked at this substantial volume of spirit, but manfully drank it in the space of a few minutes. Strangely, as I made my way on down the Royal Mile, the symptoms of my viral infection seemed to fade away.

Two years later, at lunchtime on New Year’s Eve 1979, as a new decade loomed,  I was sitting in another bar in Rose Street, having a pint with Kevin Connelly, before we went our separate ways to celebrate the New Year with our respective families. This bar had a juke box, and someone put on Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall. This is another of these ubiquitous, popular numbers which irritate me intensely because I have heard them far too many times, but Kevin made a very pertinent remark.

‘Isn’t it strange,’ he said, ‘That after the punk revolution, we are going into the 1980’s with Pink Floyd at number one?’

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Another complete digression, but it has at least a very tenuous connection to the season of the year. I serve on a European Commission Guidelines Development Group which used to be chaired by a very smart Spanish guy called Jesus Lopez Alcalde. He used to sign his emails simply  ‘Jesus’. I would point to my computer screen and boast to my colleagues: ‘Look! I am that important, I get emails from Jesus.’

Strangely, they never found this as side-splitting as I had expected them to.

This definitely will be my last blog for a few weeks. A Good New Year to One and All.