kenny hodgart


by Leave a comment

Cult hero No 21: Dickie Jeeps

This article appeared as part of a year-long weekly series by the author in the Sunday Herald

Dickie Jeeps – his name so evocative of an era of good eggs, amateurism and the Corinthian spirit – was also a rugby visionary.

His name might have come straight from the pages of an Evelyn Waugh novel, redolent as it is of companionship with William Boot and Chatty Corner, but his Be Prepared philosophy was ahead of its time in his chosen sport.

In 1962 he was due to captain England in a trial match against The Rest. “I wrote to all the team and told them, ‘As far as I am concerned I want to play for England and I hope you are all with me in wanting to do the same,'” he later recalled.

“If you want to play for England versus Wales we need to win this trial match. I want you all to meet at Richmond at 2.30 next Friday [for a practice session],” he continued in his letter. “When Col Frank Prentice, the secretary of the Rugby Football Union, got to hear about that, I got a bollocking. A terrible bollocking. He told me, ‘This is not a professional game’.” The get-together seemed to work, however, as England won the match.

It was, indeed, Jeeps’s readiness that marked him out from the start. In 1955, uncapped for England, he travelled to South Africa as the British Lions’ third-choice scrum-half. Welsh stand-off Cliff Morgan liked Jeeps’s service from the base of the scrum, however, and he ended up playing in all four tests in the series, which the Lions drew 2-2.

A year later he won his first England cap, in a game at Twickenham that Wales won 8-3. (Jeeps only played in a winning side against Wales once. In 1967, he said of the Welsh scrum-half Gareth Edwards: “The sooner that little so-and-so goes to rugby league, the better it will be for us.”) He captained England 13 times in 24 appearances and also played in 13 Lions tests, a record until it was surpassed by Willie John McBride.

It was reported this week that Jeeps has had his England and Lions memorabilia stolen. Professionalism: the harbinger of foul play.


by Leave a comment

Brochs and boozing in Orkney

IT’S all starting to go in one ear and out the other. Not the whisky, which is going down the right place rather well, but the stuff Russell Anderson, distillery manager at Highland Park in Orkney, is telling us about it. The ears aren’t all that important in the tasting of good whisky. Alas, the nose most certainly is, and my nostrils are about as functioning and sensitive as a sniffer dog’s; one that’s just come through a bad accident with a fire-work.

We’re in the tasting room at Highland Park’s five-star visitor centre and Russell has put seven different malts in front of me and told me not to get pissed. He’s very good at explaining what are essentially industrial processes in ways that make you go “aah”, but I’m still not picking up Turkish Delight off the 25-year-old. What I can say is that Highland Park has a finer balance between sweet and smoky flavours than any other whisky I’ve tasted.

That, see, is the happy result of a combination of natural and human factors, not least the trace of heathery sweetness left by Orkney’s distinctive, aromatic peat, the judicious use of Spanish oak casks that have previously held sherry, and the gentle maturation process afforded by Orkney’s relatively constant temperatures. According to F Paul Pacult, an American expert past whose nose, presumably, nothing escapes, the 18-year-old is simply “the best spirit in the world.” When tasting, he says, the tongue should tingle and the mouth sweeten; it’ll then go dry, but water again three or four seconds later. Amazingly, it’s all true. The 18 is a marvellous whisky, but the alchemies of the barrels are equally to be savoured in the 25, 30 and 40 year-old malts.

Forty years, even the 211 during which whisky has been made at Highland Park, is as the life of a dram sipped in a peaceful moment to the long sleep of Orkney’s living yet unknowable past, the 5,000 years of civilisation that have so richly left their mark on the place; and yet the distillery has about it a sort of time-honoured purity of spirit and purpose that to this outsider at least is the very stamp of these islands.

A greater sense of being out of time, of the past resonating in the present, is made mainfest by the Neolithic remains that dot the landscape: houses, tombs and – great monuments to who knows what? – standing stones. Skara Brae is Europe’s best-preserved Neolithic settlement; viewed by visitors from above its neat warren-like, dollhouse layout seems tactile, familiar. All of a sudden, prehistory is no longer recondite: it is near. And near at hand, too, with their brochs, are the Picts, who farmed and fished for centuries before the Vikings arrived in 875 and annexed the joint.

Norse Earls ruled Orkney until 1472. One of them, Magnus, was made a saint, primarily because he hadn’t the stomach for a fight, preferring to stay on board his ship singing psalms during a Viking raid on Wales. His pacifism didn’t do him much good when his cousin Haakon, who disputed Magnus’s claim to the earldom, made his cook Lifolf split Magnus’s head with an axe in 1114, but the cathedral built in his honour, in Kirkwall, at least provided somewhere for his bones to lie undisturbed until 1917, around about the same time as Orkney was again playing its part in Albion’s “island story”.

Scapa Flow, a sheltered body of water just south of the Orcadian mainland, was used as a Royal Navy base in both world wars. The German High Seas Fleet was transferred there during peace talks in 1918, but the defeated Boche decided to open their sea-cocks and scuttle their ships. Another wreck, that of HMS Royal Oak, dates from 1939, just weeks into the World War II, when a German U-Boat passed into Scapa Flow and 833 men were killed. As a result, Churchill tasked Italian prisoners of war with constructing the Churchill Barriers, causeways that closed off most of the access channels and had the added benefit of joining up some of the islands; and the Italians were also responsible for another Orkney attraction, the ornate baroque chapel they built out of leftover concrete, wrought iron and no little ingenuity.

To varying degrees, people on Orkney feel Scottish or British. First and foremost, however, they feel Orcadian. Orkney and Shetland were pledged to Scotland by Christian I of Norway as security against the payment of a dowry on the marriage of his daughter Margaret to James III. A clause in the contract gave Norway the right to redeem the islands for a fixed sum , but later attempts to do so were rebuffed. Norn, a kind of Norse dialect, died out some 200 years ago; but still islanders guard their distinctiveness jealously. Their culture is emphatically not the same as Highland culture, with its clans and tartan and sad songs.

In 1987, the Orkney Movement, a political party that supported devolution for Orkney, contested the constituency in the general election, its candidate polling 14.5% of the vote. Given the extent to which the islands are said to rely on subsidy, it may be legitimate to wonder how much thought was given to the idea. It did recently come to light that the Labour government of the 1970s, desperate to counter economic arguments for Scottish independence, calculated that should Orkney and Shetland be regarded as separate from Scotland, they would own 53 per cent of oil reserves in the North Sea; but regardless of whose oil it is, or was, it is probably worth remembering what it is we subsidise – an older way of life, a community not blighted by crime and social breakdown, custodianship of World Heritage and conservation sites.

This being my first visit to Orkney, I wondered whether a place I had read about in the works of George Mackay Brown and others would match up to the unreasonably fanciful ideas I had formed of it: an archipelago whose islands – Westray, Shapinsay, Stronsay, Ronaldsay – sounded like they existed in a song, and where strong-limbed men and women went about rearing cattle, knitting jumpers, leaving their doors open and telling their children stories about sea monsters. Conversely, I wondered whether if I lived in Orkney I would eventually find it boring. Remote places where not much happens can depress the life out of some people. Having been, I am now convinced Orkney would not make that remoteness felt negatively; that to belong there would be to feel blessed.

That is not to say that its way of life is invulnerable: islanders think long and hard about the impact on landscape and ecosystems of developments like windfarms; public services are stretched; farmers resent being told by the RSPB that they’re not allowed to thin out the flocks of geese that wrack their grass. In Kirkwall, the demise of Woolworths has been felt sharply, and local shops and businesses fear the impact of a planned new Tesco superstore.

But other shops and new entertainments have grown up in Orkney in recent times – a cinema, theatre and leisure centre, a thriving arts and crafts industry, a programme of music festivals, not the least of which, the St Magnus Festival in midsummer, attracts musicians and premieres of genuine global standing.

What’s more, that much-vaunted sense of community is palpable, and there is next to no crime. At the airport shop there is an ‘honesty basket’ in which you are asked to leave the right money when there’s no-one about to serve you. The court reports in The Orcadian tell of one young man being ordered to “grow up” after giving his girlfriend a hard time, and another who simply “entered a house and stared at a woman.” Reading between the lines, he would have been down as the local idiot a generation ago. Still, doors go proudly unlocked, apart from during Christmas week, when, in Kirkwall, they are barricaded against intrusion from the ba’ game. An obscure tradition that frequently results in mass brawling, it is contested between two groups of men who live either side of an arbitrary dividing line. One team, the Doonies, must strive to put the ba’ into the harbour and stop the Uppies from touching it against a wall at the other end of town. What greater purity of purpose can you ask of a place?

This article appeared in the Sunday Herald


by Leave a comment

An interview with Annabel Goldie

TO listen to the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, Annabel Goldie, is to understand that while Tories, either in Edinburgh or in London, are unlikely to confess as much publicly, painful lessons have been absorbed since Thatcherism left the party a spent force in Scottish politics.

David Cameron, the man who looks ever more likely to be the next Prime Minister of Great Britain, may seem to Scots – the way Thatcher did – as English as clotted cream and country houses; but where the Iron Lady effectively forced her will on Scotland Cameron, Goldie is assured, will respect the mandate of whoever sits at Holyrood and allow the Scottish Tories to dictate their own policy agenda. Devolution, the horse the Tories previously wanted shot at birth, has bolted. Cameron, though, wants devolution to work, and to work better.

In an exclusive interview ahead of the party’s Scottish conference, Goldie praised Cameron’s honesty and courage in “reconfiguring” the Tory Party, and said he had made it clear that if elected he will work with Scottish politicians in a spirit of co-operation.

Having gained leadership of the party in Scotland around about the same time as Cameron was chosen to head up Her Majesty’s Official Opposition, Goldie, who now attends Shadow Cabinet meetings at Westminster, described their relationship as one of mutual respect. “From the word go we got on with each other and that has grown to a very constructive political relationship because David Cameron is a highly intelligent man who is eminently easy to talk to,” she said. “In amongst taking the Conservative Party and making it fit for purpose in the 21st Century he has still found time for Scotland, in which he takes a very keen interest. I literally can phone him any time I want to.

“He and I have discussed at length how to get devolution to dovetail better with Westminster, whether it’s at party level, parliamentary level or government level. It’s interesting that the Labour Party, essentially the architect of devolution, has offered the most lamentable illustration of how to conduct relationships between the two parliaments.

“Holyrood and Westminster should not be in competition – they both have vital and different roles to discharge. David Cameron says ‘if I am elected Prime Minister, I will respect the role of Alex Salmond as First Minister. I may not agree with his policies, I may not agree with his politics, but he’s a democratically constituted First Minister and I must respect that and engage with him.'”

Any incoming government will have to get to grips as best it can with the parlous state of the UK’s public finances and the possibility of a very slow economic recovery, realities which are likely to mitigate against the traditional Tory policy of tax cuts and put an enormous fly in the ointment of welfare reform, a keystone in Cameron’s mission to heal “the broken society.” Save to observe that Cameron is under no illusions about the severity of these challenges, Goldie was light on the specifics of how he will set out about resuscitating either society or the economy, but she did pay tribute to the way in which he has energised and modernised his party.

“David Cameron has taken decisive and courageous decisions as leader of his party, both on party issues and policy, and that is the character of the man that will be demonstrated as Prime Minster of this country,” she said. “The Conservative party of all parties is not an easy entity to reconfigure, and yet he effectively said to it, ‘go and think about yourselves and the issues that are going to confront your children and your grandchildren, and understand that time moves on and that there are new issues emerging that are just as significant as the ones we considered were of paramount political importance 25 and 30 years ago.’ When he talked about green issues and the environment and society being broken in the context of broken families and social breakdown, I think people thought the Conservative Party saw itself as slightly remote from all that. But David Cameron has made the party face up to these things.”

According to Goldie, those who portray Cameron as being out of touch with the average Joe deliberately misconstrue him. “It’s easy for sections of the media to parody him as a toff and an Old Etonian and so that’s what they do, but at the end of the day he’s a husband and a father and I believe he is, genuinely, in touch with the lives of ordinary people,” she said. “He and George Osborne are saying there are tough decisions and they are being fair and square with the electorate on that. We are stepping into a situation in which the British economy is in hock up to its oxters and to that extent is burdening not just the current tax-paying population but the next generation and arguably a generation beyond that.

“David Cameron is very clear that there is no silver bullet to all of this – he is not going to go into the election claiming it will all be wonderful under a Conservative government. What he will say is that we face a very challenging situation that will require leadership and courage and that he is prepared to provide both.”

Part of this interview appeared in the Sunday Herald


by Leave a comment

Cult hero No 15: Willie Watters

This article appeared as part of a year-long weekly series by the author in the Sunday Herald

Usain Bolt won three sprint gold medals at last year’s Olympics Games on a strict diet of chicken nuggets. His feats in the field of turning saturated fat into sporting achievement pale, however, in comparison to the exemplary efficiency with which Willie Watters performed the task.

Watters was a footballer who made no secret of his fondness for a pie – opposition supporters enjoyed vocalising opinions on the effect this had on his physique, so there would have been no use his denying it. He also liked a good bucket when the opportunity arose, which was not infrequently.

Such qualities in a man have always guaranteed at least grudging respect from the patrons of Scotland’s lower divisions. But the fact that Watters was simultaneously, albeit sporadically, prolific in front of goal, made him an absolute legend at most, if not all, of the clubs he played for.

At Queen of the South and Alloa Athletic he disappointed, but at Hamilton Academical, Kilmarnock, Stirling Albion and a host of other senior sides he perfected the art of standing about waiting for the ball to come to him, then scoring with it.

A tubby striker in the Joey Harper mould, he professed that the secret to scoring goals was “to be fat and lazy and just hang around the box,” but unlike Harper he was satisfied that in Division One, or maybe Two in a bad year, he had found his level.

In his first season at Kilmarnock, 1988-89, his five goals in a 6-0 win over Queen of the South on the last day of the season were not enough to prevent the Rugby Park club from dropping down to Division Two after an injury-time penalty secured Clyde’s survival.

He then scored 23 the following season – including a hat trick in Tommy Burns’ Kilmarnock debut, against Arbroath – as the Ayrshiremen yo-yoed right back up, but opted to leave that part of the world for Stirling Albion in 1991.

In four seasons at Forthbank he scored 56 league goals, but the reasons for that move were never abundantly clear. It should probably be remembered that this was the era before the advent of the Killie Pie.


by Leave a comment

Cult hero No 14: Bill Werbeniuk

This article appeared as part of a year-long weekly series by the author in the Sunday Herald

BILL Werbeniuk was a fat man. In the days when snooker was sponsored by snout, he smoked on television, and he drank. A lot. At least six pints of lager before a match, then a pint for each frame.

When he was scheduled to play at 10am, he had to get up at six to get his starter pints in; then after a hard day’s work at the table, he’d retire to the bar for a social one.

For reasons deeply ingrained in the British psyche, this meant that when he moved over here from his native Vancouver in the late 1970s he quickly became the very essence of a cult hero.

Werbeniuk drank to counteract a condition which made his cue arm tremble; another condition meant he never really got drunk, and he even acquired a medical certificate which allowed him to offset the cost of his booze against income tax.

The highpoint of Werbeniuk’s career came when he, Cliff Thorburn and Kirk Stevens won the Snooker World Cup for Canada in 1982. The following year he was a beaten finalist in the Lada Classic – this was snooker’s glamorous heyday, mind – and in the Winfield Masters in Australia, but it was downhill from then on. Later, in a televised World Championship match against David Taylor in 1986, an attempt to lean across the table resulted in his trousers splitting. The flatulent ripping noise provoked laughter in the audience, but Werbeniuk took it in good spirit: “Who did that?” he demanded to know.

Eventually, concerned about the effect of his drinking on his health, Big Bill’s doctors recommended that he switch to the beta-blocker Inderal.

Unfortunately, the substance was subsequently banned and he was fined and suspended for continuing to take it. He went bankrupt in 1991 and returned to Canada, where he lived with his mum and played pool before his heart gave out at the age of 56, in 2003. After his last professional match, in 1991, he revealed: “I’ve had 24 pints of extra strong lager and eight double vodkas and I’m still not drunk.” Impressive.


by Leave a comment

Cult hero No 12: James Hunt

This article appeared as part of a year-long weekly series by the author in the Sunday Herald

James Hunt, the bad-tempered public shoolboy who had a penchant for blonde totty, smoked 40 a day and was prone to spectacular accidents, was never taken seriously by Formula One – until he started winning races. With his unkempt hair and shambolic demeanour, he always looked like he had just stumbled out of a nightclub.

That very scattiness was what endeared him to the British public, however.

Hunt entered F1 in 1973 with Hesketh Racing, a romantic concern bankrolled by the eccentric Lord Hesketh and by then managed by the excellently-named Anthony ‘Bubbles’ Horsley.

Hesketh initially entered F2 with little success but decided he might as well fail in F1 as it wasn’t significantly more expensive and would allow him to show off his yacht, helicopter, Porsche and Rolls to better effect.

Hunt won World Championship and non- Championship races before joining McLaren at the end of 1975 when Hesketh ran out of funds.

That was the year of Niki Lauda’s near-fatal accident in Germany, and though the Austrian recovered well enough to be able to finish the campaign, Hunt beat him to the Drivers’ Championship by a single point. He remained with McLaren for a further two years before moving to the Wolf team, but then retired midway through the 1979 season, declaring that he’d never really enjoyed driving anyway.

Back in those days F1 regularly left its participants dead or dying and the fear of crashing regularly made Hunt physically sick. Missing the immediacy of that danger, perhaps, he was prone to depression in the early 80s and for a while drank heavily – it is said he polished off two bottles of wine during his first broadcast as an F1 commentator for the BBC, in which role he distinguished himself with comments like “the trouble with [Jean-Pierre] Jarier is that he’s a French wally.” Latterly, Hunt did manage to cut out the booze – and the smokes – and channelled his energies into becoming a champion breeder of budgies and parrots, but he died, sadly, of a heart attack in 1993, aged just 45.


by Leave a comment

Review: Eclipse, by Nicholas Clee

Geneticists these days are coming round to the Judaeo-Christian idea that we are all descended from the same common female ancestor. In horseracing it’s the male-line that counts – and it is a matter of historical fact that every contemporary thoroughbred on the planet descends from one of three horses imported to England from the east in the early 18th Century and then crossed with English mares.

The legacy of Eclipse – great grandson of one of those horses, the Darley Arabian – is even more astonishing. Born in 1764, he was unbeaten in a brief but glorious turf career, before being put to stud in 1771. Over the next seven years he sired roughly 930 colts and fillies, 344 of which were winners on the racecourse. St Simon, born a century later, had 81 instances of Eclipse in his pedigree, a figure that would increase exponentially in succeeding generations thanks, in part, to St Simon’s own success as a sire. Ninety-five per cent of horses racing today are Eclipse’s male-line descendants.

Nicholas Clee’s book is a good primer for anyone with a passing interest in the breeding of race horses and the genesis of racing as we know it, but it’s also a fascinating study of Georgian society in all its pomp and carnality. Eclipse was feted by royalty and painted by the great George Stubbs, yet more perhaps than any other sphere of life, racing in the 18th Century was cross-fertilised by all social strata, a truth demonstrated by the fact that Eclipse was acquired from a middle class meat salesman by Dennis O’Kelly, the uneducated son of an Irish smallholder.

On arriving in London in 1725, the young O’Kelly, an inveterate gambler and womaniser, found work as a “chairman” – carrying the front end of a sedan chair. Later, in a debtors’ jail, he met Charlotte Hayes, whom he subsequently helped rise to become the aristocracy’s most celebrated brothel-keeper. She a madam, he a racing magnate, Clee observes they were “at the summits of two of the most important leisure industries in Britain.”

The author sifts through myth and half-truth surrounding these two larger-than-life characters and indeed the horse itself. The detail of their era and milieu is at times grotesque – one Lord, it is recorded, once successfully bet that he could find a man who would eat a whole cat live – but the narrative itself is never less than compelling.

This article appeared in the Sunday Herald


by Leave a comment

Review: Stranger to History, by Aatish Taseer

This article appeared in The Herald

Aatish Taseer, raised by his Sikh mother and grandparents in Delhi and educated at a Christian boarding school in southern India and in the US, knew when he set out on his travels through Islam’s heartlands that he had a limited grasp of what it means to be a Muslim. Not being extensively versed in Koranic tradition, his own faith was threadbare; rather, indeed, like that of his Pakistani father, Salman, who shortly after Aatish’s birth in 1980, abandoned his new Indian family to return to his wife in Lahore.

In adulthood the younger man has sought to mend that broken relationship, but the pair’s disestrangement, complicated from the first by Salman’s attitudes towards India and the West, was set back in 2005 when Aatish wrote an article about British Pakistanis and Islamic extremism to which abba took vehement umbrage.

Taseer fils, puzzled that his forebear – politician, businessman and avowed disbeliever – should put such store in calling himself a Muslim, wanted to better understand the ‘civilisation of faith’ of which he had heard spoken both in Pakistan and Britain. And so, armed with his own lightly-worn Sufism, he decided to travel once more to Pakistan, this time from Turkey via the Arab world, in search of what this supra-national Islamic identity means. If the fact of his being a Muslim at all is his passport on the road, however, it should also be recorded that it gives him licence to be honest about the religion he encounters to a degree western writers tend to shrink from. For this is a book that asks awkward questions of Islam and comes up with unsettling answers.

Part travelogue, part essay, part personal odyssey, Taseer’s narrative is probing, exhilarating and shot through with pinpoint observations of people, places and situations, from the menace of Tehran to the ecstasy of religious experience and the commercialism of Mecca. His is an attempt to understand those societies from which Islam takes nourishment.

In Leeds just after 7/7, Taseer had observed a generational divide between older British Muslims, who remembered with some pride their hard-earned economic migration from Pakistan, and their offspring, who lacked their parents’ instinctive humour and openness and hated the West. To younger Muslims, whose religion seemed the more rigid and forbidding, faith came with an amorphous sense of grievance. Bored and rootless, they found in political Islam a grand narrative not readily proffered by the secular West.

In Istanbul and Damascus he meets many others who feel the same way, who see the West as stopping Muslims from thinking “as the early Muslims thought.” The notion of the great Islamic past is everywhere sounded, historical fact skewered to support a narrative of aggression and attack from the Christian West. The message, that the Islamic world is now divided because of the West and the influence of its ideas, is one in which ‘cultural Muslims’ like Taseer’s father can believe, as it has “more to do with the loss of political power than divine injunction.”

To his dismay, the solution the author finds gaining ground is a sort of retreat from the world, the re-emergence of Wahhabism and its insistence on adherence to letter of the Book, effecting new levels of intellectual incuriosity and cultural homogeneity. All of this is anathema to Taseer, who has a special feeling for the religious plurality of India but, ironically, it is in Iran that he finds reason to believe the ‘civilisation of faith’ will, not before time, come up against its own illogicality and absurdity. In a country where women are beaten for the merest transgression and young people are criminalised “by a tyranny of trifles”, he finds a growing culture of private and public dissent and widespread hatred of the Revolution.

In Tehran he also finds people who make the distinction between the enforced religion of the Islamic Republic, and ‘the real faith’; yet shocked perhaps that people like his father can be so unperturbed by fundamentalism, he asks: “Did it really matter whether the Islam of the Islamic Republic was the ‘real Islam’ or not? Did it matter whether the socialism of Stalin or Mao was the real socialism?” Indeed, among his Pakistani family – supposedly moderate – he encounters hatred of America, Israel and Hindus, as well as a tendency to doubt the Holocaust. “It was too little moderation and in the wrong areas,” as he puts it.

In Pakistan itself, he finds feudalism unchecked, corruption king and bitter division amid relative homogeneity, “where once great diversity had been absorbed.” His warning that extremists “know the country has to be destabilised, the robust society made bleaker” is all too sage in the light of last week’s terrorist attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore. Stranger to History is a beautifully-written book, but the ugliness of what it reveals is what lives on after reading.


by Leave a comment

A day in Grantchester

This article appeared in the Sunday Herald magazine

If all you knew of England was gleaned from BBC news or the tabloids you’d probably think it an over-developed, pissed-up dump full of people like Karen Matthews and Russell Brand. It’s almost as though its traditions, its neighbourliness and tolerance, and above all its natural beauty, were things to be bashful and apologetic about. Perhaps John Major’s speech about warm beer and old maids really did do for pride in English heritage, but great pockets of William Blake’s “green and pleasant land” remain still undivested of their come-hither fecundity.

Nowhere is this ineffable sorcery more alluring than in Grantchester, a village some two miles south-west of Cambridge that is as old as the Domesday Book. It is often said that the south remoulds and anglicises the mindset and manners of people not from there, but so long as you realise that on entering you are enjoined to scarper on a sliding scale of eccentricity, Cambridge seems to take no interest in redress. And Grantchester – idyllic, Arcadian, a place where time stands still and whose pubs do not sell lager – is where they go, tourists and chattering eccentrics alike, to escape the droves on the college backs and the world of cars, gymnasiums and Wagamama restaurants.

In doing so they follow in the footsteps of many of the country’s finest minds. Jeffrey Archer, “probably the best storyteller in the world” according to the Daily Mail, lives there now with his wife Mary Archer, the scientist; while past denizens include the poets Rupert Brooke and Sylvia Plath and the mathematician Bertrand Russell. And the list of others to have taken tea or fallen off punts there includes Newton, Darwin, Milton, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Tennyson, Wittgenstein, Keynes and the Stephens Fry and Hawking.

It was out walking on Grantchester Meadows – the pasture land along the River Cam that separates the village from Cambridge -that Alan Turing first came up with the idea of artificial intelligence. Turing, you may remember, cracked the German Enigma code during World War II. He later lived in Manchester, where, in the 50s he was prosecuted for being homosexual and subsequently killed himself. I was glad when John – my host – corrected my misapprehension that we were about to cycle to Manchester. Grantchester, he informed me, would be a less taxing journey. And so, he on his own bike, I on a borrowed girl’s one, we set off across the Granchester Grind, the path that crosses the meadows.

It would be difficult to prove, but I am convinced there are more bicycles in Cambridge than people. They’re like free newspapers: if someone nicks yours you can always find a spare one lying around. It’s all very well pedalling your library books and your corduroy around the city, though; a different story negotiating the Grind. No sooner had we set wheel on gravel than briar thorns gave notice of their views on two-wheeled gender-bending. Mindful of admonitions regarding health and safety in old films about the Countryside Code, I wheeled my punctured steed along by hand towards our destination, where I managed to get it patched up and we ourselves repaired to The Orchard Tea Garden.

To sit out in the sun drinking tea under the ripening apples there is to feel the ghosts around you, here Lord Byron expostulating grandiloquently, there Keats, half-demented, agonising over his verse in some shady bower. Just a little further upstream is Byron’s Pool, a former mill pond, where the poet used to swim. The mill itself receives mention in Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale. No swimming for us – instead we admire the enormous cows grazing on the river’s banks. It’s a scene that could have been painted by Constable and one that managed to charm even that grim poetess of death, Sylvia Plath. She indeed wrote from Grantchester to her mother of an occasion on which she recited Chaucer to a captive bovine audience, and the episode is recalled in verse by her husband Ted Hughes: “Your voice went over the fields towards Grantchester. It must have sounded lost. But the cows Watched, then approached: they appreciated Chaucer.”

Having had enough of jam and clotted cream, John explains to me how the Romantic poets, contrary to what you will hear said of them, were bothered deeply by the cruel degradations of the industrial revolution. They feared “the dark Satanic mills” of places like Manchester but it was because they distrusted the new capitalism, and their fight was for the soul of England and its people. John is learned, so I don’t argue, but there is no doubting the poet most associated with Grantchester, Brooke, is unreservedly and unapologetically nostalgic.

Homesick in Berlin in 1912, Brooke, who lodged at Grantchester between 1909 and 1911, first at the Orchard House and later at the Old Vicarage – now the Archers’ gaff – wrote: “I only know that you may lie Day long and watch the Cambridge sky, And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass, Hear the cool lapse of hours pass, Until the centuries blend and blur In Grantchester, in Grantchester.” He ends the poem with the famous line: “Stands the church clock at ten-to-three And is there honey still for tea?” During much of 1911, the hands of the clock on the tower of the church were stuck not at 2.50 but 3.30; to this day, however, it is always ten-to-three in the dining room of the Rupert Brooke Inn, formerly the Rose and Crown.

Brooke moved to the village hoping to escape a hectic Cambridge social life, but instead he became the lodestar of the Grantchester Group, a circle of friends that included Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Virginia Woolf, EM Forster, Keynes and the painter Augustus John. Woolf dubbed them the ‘neo-pagans’: contemptuous of the religious stuffiness of the mid-Victorians and later held to be symbolic of a doomed novocento optimism and innocence, they would go barefoot in the village, hike for miles around and travel to Cambridge by canoe. On one occasion Brooke and Woolf skinny-dipped together by moonlight, although it is not believed that they were lovers.

Russell lived for ten years at the Mill House writing his Principia Mathematica, the manuscripts of which were so heavy that he had to transport them to Cambridge in a four-wheeled barrow, while John, the outright bohemian, lived for a time in a gypsy caravan on the meadows with his two wives and seven children, all male, whose game it was to run around the place naked.

Yet for all he embodied the spirit of his time and place, and the timelessness of that place, posterity has not been kind to Brooke’s reputation, mainly because the sonnets he wrote shortly before his death in 1915 celebrate the dream of dying for a noble cause. They are the poems of a man who never saw battle: he died of septicemia on the Greek island of Skyros while waiting to land in Gallipoli. Locally, though, he’s still a hero – along with Brooke’s and 16 other names, the war memorial in the churchyard bears the inscription “Men With Splendid Hearts”, a line from his Grantchester poem.

The church itself is a magnificent old edifice, its nave dating back to the early 12th Century. We were happy sitting Betjeman-like in its cool stillness thinking ourselves the proper aesthetes; though happier still drinking pints of real ale (Adnams) in The Blue Ball Inn, one of four pubs in the village, all of which date back centuries. The Blue Ball is where the locals drink now; The Green Man – which Brooke tended to frequent and where John (Augustus, not my companion) once laid a man clean out after a quarrel – has fallen on hard times, its Scottish owner having gone bankrupt and then been arrested while breaking into his former property to find out what the bailiffs had left.

The Rupert Brooke, which has a fifty-cover restaurant, and where if you’re lucky you might hear Pink Floyd’s wonderfully bucolic Grantchester Meadows playing on the stereo, is also worth a visit. Or so I’m told: dinner was with friends at Wagamama that night and neither of us could remember what the Countryside Code had to say about cycling drunk. So we opted to play the peaceable Scots, scrapped the idea of paying a call on the Archers and rode back out across the Grind convinced eccentrics these days aren’t quite up to the old mark.


by Leave a comment

Postcard from Poznan

This article appeared in The Herald Magazine

It is Poland’s age-old quandary: what to do about the past. Only pragmatism, Poles say, prevented Poznan’s Zamek Cesarski, the Prussian imperial castle built by Kaiser Wilhelm II at the beginning of the last century, from being demolished after 1945. When Poland, having regained its independence in 1918, was invaded by the Nazis and the area around Poznan became a part of the Third Reich – most of the rest of the country was simply German-administered – Hitler had the castle’s western wing and tower redesigned to mirror, exactly, his headquarters just a short trip down the road in Berlin.

Most buildings of its kind in Germany itself having been blitzed by the British, the place has lent its mise-en-scene to the odd film-maker down the years. The communists didn’t do very much with it – that it stood as a symbol of authoritarian rule was perhaps enough for them – but while it is now a cultural centre, housing a dance school, galleries and a cinema space, it still feels somehow empty, more strange fairytale palace than museum.

We are used to Germans treading on eggshells when talk turns to the years 1933-45, but the ethical equation is different in Poland. The Nazis killed around five million Poles. Anyone wondering whether it would be right or proper of a geared-up Polish tourist industry to hitch its wagon to some sort of Adolf Trail, will, therefore, find no easy answers. You’re not meant to feel prurient about Hitler. Pace his chambers and you just might.

All its sad, bloody, violent history has given Poland something few European countries enjoy: perhaps not so much a single idea of what it is but a definite sense of what it is not. Partitioned by the Prussians, Russians and Austro-Hungarians, invaded by the Swedes and the Ottomans, subjugated by the Nazis then by the Soviets, its sense of nationhood is inseparable from its struggle for survival. The Prussians were Protestant, the Russians Orthodox Christians. Of the five million killed by the Nazis, three million were Jewish; only a few thousand Jews survived. Catholicism – not exactly the default religion in northern Europe – makes sense. For centuries the church bolstered Polish national identity; in turn Poles have remained faithful. Religion and patriotism – an endearingly uncomplicated patriotism – go hand in hand, or at least that’s the impression. Religious attendance remains sky-high; in Poznan there’s a church everywhere you look.

The Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul has particular significance, having been founded in the year 968 by Mieszko I, the first ruler of Poland. In the shade of its Gothic silhouette – the original Romanesque cathedral was sacked centuries ago – a statue of Pope John Paul II welcomes parishioners to prayer. Old Karol Jozef declared the site to have been the birthplace of the Polish nation, and besides being a pontiff he wasn’t from Poznan but a place near Krakow, so he probably wasn’t lying.

The Prussians tried, and failed, to suppress Polish culture and language. The communists tried, and failed, to reduce the influence of the church. In Poznan the commies even “moved” the River Warta off its natural meandering course around the cathedral, for no other apparent reason than to let the Catholics know who was in charge.

Now that the Poles are self-determining, all that suppressed culture and heritage has come into its own, while the revolts and uprisings of 1918, 1956, 1970, 1980 and too many other years to mention are everywhere commemorated. Not that everyone is dancing the polka, debating folk art or pining for the days of Solidarity. Western-style consumerism caught on a while back and Poznan is proud to have the “best medium-sized shopping mall” in the world, a fairly impressive piece of modern architecture that brings everyone from Zara to Barbour, Van Graaf and Mothercare under one roof. Let it slip that you’re from Scotland and as well as telling you about friends and family who live and work there, Poles – in common with everyone else in the world who watches Hollywood films – will mention Braveheart. Having grasped their own freedom, they can’t understand why we’re so phlegmatic about ours.

It may be the ultimate endorsement of their patriotism that many of the thousands of young Poles to have sought work abroad since the country joined the EU in 2004, are now going home. In Poland low levels of home ownership should ensure a degree of protection against the credit crunch. The Polish economy is actually growing right now, fuelled partly by a construction boom, while the zloty has been getting stronger and salaries higher for some time. Paradoxically, meanwhile, for a nation that puts such store in its independence, the EU remains almost universally popular, the Common Agricultural Policy notwithstanding.

Poznan, at least, exhibits many of the signs of a city in which business is thriving. It is said that people here are even more prudent than the Scots. National stereotypes aside, the region was historically more economically progressive than other parts of Poland and in the 21st Century has become something of a financial, industrial and scientific hub. The Poznan International Fair attracts some 350,000 visitors a year to the city and in December the great and the good clocked up the air miles to fly in and discuss how to get more investment from their respective exchequers for biofuels, and other topics, at the UN Climate Change Conference.

Polish farmers might well have taken an interest. Food shortages are no distant memory, while the national diet is still very much based on staples, not least in Poznan, whose citizens are referred to in other regions as “pyry” (potatoes) – rather like Liverpudlians are named for their consumption of lobscouse, and not always affectionately. In Poznan you will discover any number of delicacies involving potato: pyry z gzikiem, potatoes cooked in their skins and served with cottage cheese; szagowki, potato dumplings cooked with flour and, um, cottage cheese; and koptyka, potato mixed with egg, wheat, and (why not?) potato flour. Everything is served with red cabbage, but if you want fleshing out a bit other traditional dishes involve lamb, wild boar and herring. It’s prosaic cuisine, but rather healthy, and no-one under 30 seems to be fat. The women are stylish and beautiful, all lustrous eyes and Slavonic cheekbones. Moreover, the absence of joggers from the city’s streets is surely a sign of rude health, not to mention the absence of corporeal guilt.

The men, you might reasonably conclude, prefer drinking and smoking to anything remotely as tiresome, but while Poznan boasts a breath-taking concentration of bars and nightclubs around its market square – the city’s universities house 130,000 students – it doesn’t feel either debauched or decadent. Apart from Polish barbers having a precipitous knack for reproducing the very worst footballers’ haircuts, modesty reigns. People are hospitable if not demonstrative, cheerful if not exuberant, and strikingly well-informed.

The market square itself, Stary Rynek, has a typically northern European toy-town quality to it, with the sort of gabled, ornamental skylines you find everywhere from the Baltic to the east of Scotland; although its centre-piece is an elegant town hall designed by the Italian Renaissance architect Giovanni Battista di Quadro. A short walk from there throws up the Baroque of St Stanislav’s Parish Church – gaudy, vulgar, exhilarating. Head west and you’ll find the German-built opera house and Teutonic, faux-medieval castle vying for prominence with Polish libraries, theatres and an excellent National Museum. All of which points to the obvious contradiction that while Poznanians just love being Polish, it’s the juxtaposition of the foreign, colonial and native that makes their city so physically appealing.

People here can be punctilious, which is possibly a German influence. They’re also fairly hidebound about rules such as forbid photography inside communist-era civic buildings and will happily stand for aeons at empty crossroads waiting for the lights to change. If this is to their detriment, at least they’re organised enough to have their new football stadium for the 2012 European Championships well underway, while those in other parts of Poland are in danger of not being ready in time. A city of spuds? One thinks not.