Artcyclescotland

I went over to Scott’s in Blairgowrie yesterday to buy seed potatoes—on the advice of Willie my Postman and oracle on all matters vegetal.

This meant driving over the hill and through where my grandparents once lived in Coupar Angus. I have many fond memories of staying with them in Princess Croft, mostly of their generosity: of cold mince rolls and meat pie’s; of fishing trips down to the river which meanders through the surrounding fields and of working, not least, the “tattie holiday”. I remember being paid £8 a day on that last holiday—the same as the adults that year, after other years when it had been less—and how rich and exhausted I had felt at each days end—not just with the money, but with this hard accumulation to physical labour in muddy fields in all weathers; with my grandfather and uncles working the drills; taking tea from flasks and sandwiches from boxes. But sometimes I also wished that it would all end so that the “torture” would stop and my poor back would be left in peace to “stand up straight” for as long as it wished … the whinging of a youth unaccustomed to any work whatsoever let alone physical and repetitive work at that. These days in the field involved a different way of speaking, a language of soil and weather and crop; a stoic, but forgiving (and sometimes dirty) humour; a language of reek and touch; a dark language of the body, of pain, discomfort, endurance and for most others, necessity— A “temporal” community, which was then outwith my experience, but which I would again meet the likes of years later in Aberdeen when I cut fish on the docks for a living—at Buthley Brothers—after I’d completed my formal studies: the length of each day, six days a week, at a steel table with freezing water, a sharp knife and six women jawing on one unrelated subject after another from the start to the end of the shift seemingly without taking breath: but this time the pay didn’t seem commensurate to the weight of the labour, to the fish being cut—my life, circumscribed then, as it is now, but as it wasn’t in my youth, by a need to earn a living—but the talk, the cursing, the humour, the gossip … was passionate, and familiar to me. This was the year that Costello sang ‘A Good Year For The Roses;’ I ate a lot of broken yellow fish and the once oil-rich capital of the north-east of Scotland slid inexorably into a new granite sheath dressed like a ghost town: difficult years, in one way or another for many.

Willie had suggested Duke of York’s but the man was waiting for more to come in, so I bought Catriona’s instead, fifty of them, and sixty onion “sets” and plan a four (tattie) three (onion) drill layout when the weather lays off with the waterworks.