Fun With the Auld Yins

The smell of piss and mince. Piss, mince and impending death are the key themes at Milbrook Care Home for the Elderly. Care homes are big business. This one is part of the Horizons Group. What fucking horizon’s? They always have nice cosy, sanitised names for these hard-nosed business ventures. Fleecing the Nearly-Dead would be more appropriate but it’s not such an honest world.

Auld yins are sitting about or getting wheeled about by uniformed staff. Some alarm seems to be perpetually ringing but no-one seems to be paying it any urgent mind but they certainly have not forgotten to put the heating on.

“Like sub-Saharan Africa in here” I quip to the receptionist. She smiles and replies “Aye, they like it toasty”

I’m directed to the ‘Activities Team’ which is on the first floor beside the lifts. I’m quite nervous about this as I’ve never had much to do with auld yins before. And these are proper ‘auld’. These folk are not kidding. Ninety-seven years-old and stuff like that. And they’re deaf too, or almost.

“And many of them have wee memory problems; early Alzheimer’s”. This says Gilbert who runs the activities team with nurse Phillippa and care assistant Ruby. It’s pretty obvious from the start that they don’t really want a volunteer at all; they’ve got this wee game sewn up amongst themselves. I’m obviously the result of some internal politics. Maybe they get increased funding for taking on volunteers? Maybe they’re trying to replace staff with volunteers, a venture I will not be part of, so I ask Gilbert;

“Is me volunteering anything to do with any policy of replacing paid staff with volunteers?”

This startles him a little and the other two exchange looks.

“Cos if it is I don’t want anything to do with it”

Maybe this attitude lets them warm to me a little and I’m taken downstairs to meet the residents who are being wheeled into a large lounge-type room which is painted leaf-green and has a sumptuous beige carpet. Next to this room is a large canteen area and a kitchen where tea is made for after the ‘entertainments’.

When everyone is settled – a process that seems to take forever – I am introduced.

“This is David and he is going to be helping us over the coming weeks with the quizzes and maybe he’ll sing along with us later when we sing our songs”

Some of these old souls can barely look up never mind offer any sort of greetings although some are a bit livelier than others and more responsive. I’d been chatting away to this yin they’ve asked me to wheel in but I think it’s been more for making me look keen than for her benefit. She seems a bit put-out by me spraffing on at her as if she’s a five-year old. This woman has been through a war and I’m yakking on about ‘getting a nice cup of tea later’.

Nurse Philippa is asking questions out of a quiz book. This she has to do by pronouncing every syllable very slowly and loudly. It’s painful to listen to but I guess it’s the only way if folk can’t hear properly. There’s a decrepit auld soul in a wheel-in bed who is obviously cooking on another planet from the rest of us as she keeps on with this distressing wailing noise every few minutes. Thankfully it’s care assistant Ruby who sits with her.

“Shhh Mary, it’s OK” Ruby placates.

This is quite shocking. I thought I’d be expected to read from a book to someone or play draughts or something. I didn’t know it was going to be this mental Quiz Night and Sing-Song scenario!

“When can I go home?” another screams.

I’ve to sit with this auld yin Betty and repeat some of the questions to her right into her ear.

Fiona asks “A popular comic with the same name as a trip to the seaside? A pop-u-lar co-mic-with the-same-name-as-a-trip-to-the-sea-side?”

Betty looks at me for clarification.

“D’ye mind the name of the comics, Betty?”

She looks at me blankly. Maybe I’m not saying it clearly enough.

“The comics, Betty, mind that ye used to read as a bairn?”

Still nothing. I need to speak louder.

“YE NEVER HEARD O’ BIFFO THE BEAR, BETTY?”

Too loud I think as the rooms gone silent and all who can are staring right at me.

Funny what you find yourself doing, innit?

Heart of Scottish Darkness

“What is it about Scotland and these wee, grey pill-box houses?”

There is something of Calvin about it: the fact of these drab flats and houses existing in a cold, dark North European country.  It’s as if they’d taken the anti-depressants off of a few architects from Scunnered and Co, put them in a room and commissioned them to ‘come up with something grim’.

Very few people know about ‘Dreich’ school of architecture and it has thrived in Scotland for quite some time. The country that has given the world Mackintosh and ‘Greek’ Thompson has also contrived these awful ‘schemes’which are liberally sprinkled across the land like mould on a beautiful painting. They are truly a blight but, amazingly, a deliberate one.

Back in the day, they shifted people out from The Gorbals and Bridgeton, out from their rat-infested fevered lumps of stone out to the outlying reservations of such as Castlemilk, Drumchapel and Easterhouse but ‘forgot’ to provide them with amenities such as shops and, yes, pubs. An oversight? I think not. Punishment, more like. ‘Thou shalt not’ was at the root of this abomination.

“Thou shall not have bright, cheerful housing because you do not deserve such luxury”.

John Knox Towers in Martin Luther Gardens.

Cumbernauld won architectural awards when it was first built. I think I may have to say that again or maybe just the three words. Cumbernauld. Architectural. Awards. That grey, sodden heap of ugly shit and brickwork in North Lanarkshire won design awards. If that’s not evidence of a masonic conspiracy, I don’t know what is!

Have you ever visited Livingston when it’s raining? Don’t, unless you have sufficient quantities of Valium to hand and the other hand on some sort of return ticket to wherever you’ve come from.

There’s a town in West Lothian (where else?) named Breich which is unspeakably glum. Why they didn’t just use the ‘D’ instead of the ‘B’ is a mystery to everyone who has ever seen it, or God forbid, lived in it. It doesn’t have a ‘twin town’ but it has a suicide pact with Whitburn which has the vibrancy of Las Vegas in comparison. The sinister strains of ‘Duelling Banjo’s’ emanates from the local ice-cream van and the one pub in town ‘The Breich Bar’ doubles as a field hospital at the weekends. Seven miles from Livingston, someone tried to run there once in desperation but was captured by one of those big white balloons from The Prisoner that everyone thought was made up!

The Plastic Factory

It was one of those shops where the workers weren’t supposed to talk to one another and I was busily researching my ad hoc PhD on the worst workplaces in Britain so we were ideally suited. Wee industrial estate round the back of Higham Hill eats of Walthamstow, factory that made plastic mouldings. I am no entrepreneur, far from it. If I had my way we’d all be living in council housing and handed out food vouchers by some local benevolent dictator: Stalin without the mass killings and fevered paranoia, that’s me. But, if I was an enterprising capitalist kind of chap, the last thing I’d have thought of as my fortune-maker would be plastic mouldings.

Plastic mouldings production is very boring.

Sure, it gives employment to folk but it also makes you want to ram your head forcibly down the grimy old lavatory pan providing there aint someone in there having a sneaky smoke.

Ye hud tae huv a laugh in a dull place like this just to make the time go.

Jings! What was ait about life? Ye were aye wishing yer life away. Clocks. Time. A constant preoccupation. ‘Time and work discipline’ old E.P. Thompson cried it. Wish it was the end of the shift. Wish it was the end of the week. Wish ah wis fucken deid.

The boss-man was obviously thick: an un-enlightened fellow. If he’d let his drones talk and have a wee laugh then they’d mibbe no’ hate the job – and him – quite so much. A happy worker can be a right busy wee bee. A couple of dozen miserable one’s and you might find your wee factory burning down one night.

Whit’s this job I’m doing? I’m marking a rough template of some plate affair with a wee stubby pencil; just drawing a circle for the band-saw guy. I asked him what it was for but he’s Turkish or something and the best I could get out of him was a soup-slurping motion with his hand and the international gesture for ‘loonies’, so I surmised that they were bevelled plates for bam-cases or at least folk who had difficulties eating.

This information somehow added to my misery. But, things were to get even worse. 

After the loony-plates job for three long days I was asked to perform a special function. There was a moulding machine over in the corner by the bogs that was not working properly. The ‘feed’ from a giant roll of plastic was not allowing for sufficient slack which was in turn stopping the machine. My job was to intervene and artificially create said slack. 

At first, I succeeded in doing this by holding the plastic above my head and gently letting it feed in through my hands but this became somewhat painful on the arms so I settled for it resting on my head and controlling it that way. By way of a much-needed diversion, about every five minutes I had to rush around to the cage of the machine to extract the successful mouldings and stack them in piles ready for their next journey in the process. Having done this I would speed back to my head-balancing duties. I did this for about a week before I jacked the whole thing in and went looking for a job more suited to my amazing gifts.

The plastic trays, by the way, were for vivisection laboratories!

The Taxman Cometh!

It could only happen to me! Actually, that’s a foolish and illogical thing to say. It could happen to anyone who happens to find themselves plodding around Camden Town on a summer’s day attempting to collect unpaid tax. For I am that most unwelcome of creatures: the tax collector, loathed since biblical times and beyond. No-one, when I come calling ever says ‘break out the best china, Greta, it’s the beloved taxman come to divest us of money the bastard government says we owe’. And this would be a bastard Thatcher government I’m collecting for, too! Working for the enemy and me a good trade unionist.

Has its perks, this job.  Schlepping around London in the sunshine; like being a paid tourist. This day it is NW1 and NW5; away up to the high hills of Highgate, Archway, Kentish Town, then back down to Camden High Street and this Arlington Road where the ‘sauna’ is. Not hard to figure that it’s a knocking shop but the façade is all ‘legit’ (they even have the nerve to chase the dossers from Arlington House away in-case it discourages the local businessman from gaining access for his daily wank).

I don’t know what can have happened. Maybe I had recently urinated and left what should have been zipped-up unzipped.

“I see you’ve come ready for business” the young receptionist says and she and the other young lady present have a giggle to themselves. Must be a slow day and this is the ‘masseuse’ just waiting for fresh meat.

“Actually, I’m here from the tax office”.

This has them in fits. They’re both looking in the general direction of my groin. Maybe their trade has rendered them obsessed with the male sexual apparatus which they also find humorous as fuck.

Then, of course, the penny drops.

I write on my ‘report of call’;

“Visited premises at 3pm but could not gain access”

At least it would keep the young lovelies supplied with tittle-tattle for a while. The taxman cometh with fly’s a-gaping!

One time I had cause in my professional capacity to visit an old porn-queen. Worn out she was like some old lino that had been left out in the rain to mould. I didn’t say this to her. I didn’t say, by the way hen, you look like a piece of mouldy old lino. I thought it best not to mention this impression of her I had on first sighting.

Later on I googled her and found that she’d been in those 1970’s soft-porn flicks with such as Johnny Briggs who had gone on to play Mike Baldwin in Coronation Street. Probably got her tits out for him. Another thing I wouldn’t have asked her if I’d known.

“Did you ever get your tits out for Mike Baldwin?” This too may have been met with frostiness and reports back to the office.

“You said what to her?” my manager would splurt. Like the time I wouldn’t call Sir Michael Havers ‘Sir Michael’ being the son of a mad Communist who wouldn’t have called him ‘Sir Michael’ either.

“I have early-stage Tourette’s Syndrome and am not always in control of what I say hence the question about her tits and Mike Baldwin. I’ll see a doctor about some pills”.

Either I’m a nosey bugger or am just naturally interested in people’s lives. I mean, if you met a porn-star you’d want to know all sorts of things, wouldn’t you?

Some people tell you too much. This one fella in Kentish Town I was calling on (some Schedule D outstanding?) was determined to show me his operation scar. I seem to be one of those people that folk feel free to show their operation scars to. I have to admit, though, it was some scar alright. Don’t know what had been wrong with him but it can’t have been good. Damn thing, all liverish and fresh, went all the way from his groin to up beyond his chest.

He did tell me what his ailment had been but I was too conscious of this rivulet of a scar and the fact of his semi-nakidity in what was quite a confined space to fully take in the information. ‘Diseased tripes’ or somesuch.

Poor bloke was just dying – maybe literally – to show off his trophy scar to someone and who better than the taxman. You’re no’ getting any money but here, cop for this!

Some of my work colleagues were a tad on the nutty side. Back in old days, even before computers were common in offices things were awful basic. You got a tin with some work in it and you got on with it. 

To be employed in the lower reaches of the British Civil Service all you had to do was turn up at the interview and not swear at anyone. They chose people by ‘the cut of their jib’ and not by any fancified consultancy-engendered  ‘competency-based’ rigmarole that they have now. Even to apply to work for such as the DWP these days you’d think it was NASA doing the recruiting. Three ‘interview stages’ so you can wind up asking folk what work they’ve been looking for and could they maybe try a little harder.

You weren’t really expected to do much work and I think you’d maybe raise concerns with management, who didn’t do much work either, if you did. I had one manager named Avril who looked a little like Crystal Tipps off that cartoon on the telly but without the personality. I think I scared the life out of her with my somewhat ribald Scottish humour (either that or she couldn’t understand a blind word I was saying which, now visualising the bewilderment on her little face anytime I spoke to her, is the more likely scenario).

My first mentor as a tax-clerk was a raspy wee rat-featured wummin that smoked cigars. Being a callow though secretly lustful youth I fancied her rotten. I fantasised about erotic trysts in the store-room among the ink-pads and County Court warning letters. I would have set the place ablaze with my sensual fervour while she set it ablaze with her fiery stubs. We would be discovered eternally encoupled by fire officers, two husks of horny human.

The cashier was Maurice Speigel, a genial Jewish man who lived in a flat in the trendy Barbican. How he afforded what seemed like luxury accommodation was somewhat of a mystery. Maybe he had a rich wife. I had occasion to call at Barbican addresses, usually to chase up some has-been pop star or an agent of such. This was exciting to me as I’d always been fascinated by the environs of The Barbican; those massive high-rises and its little ponds and features. I reckoned that if I lived there I’d have no need ever to appear outside its confines again. It had everything a gentle, cultural lad like myself could want: a library, a concert hall, the Museum of London and several genteel hostelries where ale could be bought.

There was this one bloke – let’s call him Lance – who was beyond the pale altogether. Whichever wise manager that put him on the phones must have been having a laugh for Lance wasn’t quite the entire ticket and was to customer service what Harold Shipman was to the bedside manner.

“YOU’RE NOT LISTENING TO ME” he would bellow before smashing the phone back on its cradle then he’d stamp off muttering to walk the corridors.

If you happened to be walking towards him on said corridors he’d walk this big exaggerated loop around you as if you were somehow contaminated with disease. He’d scale along the walls in an effort to avoid you.

Old Lance was a boy right enough! Funny thing was he’d go on these holidays to somewhere in Wales where they’d let him pretend to work on the miniature railways. He’d bring back photos of himself waving guards flags and blowing whistles and pin them on the wall next to his desk.

The Hunger Artist

Eating is a problem for many people. In the obvious sense, because it is a scarce commodity or they are too poor to afford it, but in a far more subtle sense as well and especially for women: look at Karen Carpenter, Princess Diana, Lena Zavaroni and countless, countless others. It becomes a syndrome where every morsel is seen as invasive and has to be dealt with. Skinny, exiguous women still think they’re too fat and ugly. Christ! The world of fashion insists upon it; look at the state of super-models. They’re no longer really women, merely clothes-horses.

There used to be a phenomenon – a type of entertainment – called the ‘hunger artist’. These were usually men and folk would pay to watch them fast or starve themselves for weeks at a time. Sometimes they’d be doing this in a restaurant while in a cage at the end of a table while people were gorging themselves on food and fine wines. It was somehow entertaining for them to eat while a person starved. You don’t need me to point out any metaphors here but we do live in a world that has two extremes of a problem centred around food. One is obesity and the other starvation.

Malthusians would say it is because the poor over-produce that food is scarce, others would insist there is more than enough for everyone and it is unfair distribution that is the problem.

I remember some huge American woman – one of those that has to be lifted out of a chair almost with mechanical pulleys – who said basically that she was consuming food for the good of America. Her point was, the more she ate the healthier the economy.

There is clearly an ethical problem here.

Different Strokes

 Bob Simmons is an advice worker in Craiglaw, Edinburgh.

“That’s your ten o’clock, Bob”

Denise, the volunteer receptionist, does the universal ‘supping glass’ genuflection to indicate that his ten o’clock, Tam Sullivan, may be ‘hauf-pished’.

Tam Sullivan is a wee squat fella: ‘Clyde-built’ you might say excepting that he very much hailed from the east coast. East coast/west coast still sublimated relations in lowland Scotland.

‘East is least, west is best’ as they said in Glasgow. ‘Fuck you, ken?’ was the retort from Edinburgh.

Tam had been a footballer of some note, a nippy wee winger in days long before his current shambling alcoholic persona. “Ah played fur Hong Kong Rangers, but I’m no’ a hun, I’m a tim” he’d proclaim before asking Bob to phone the Social Fund for a further loan on his behalf.

Craiglaw is a predominantly Catholic area and has a large traveller community. This is reflected in the names on the client list – McCallum, Doherty, O’Connell. In the central belt of Scotland the poorest communities tended to be the Catholic one’s like Coatbridge and Niddrie and the more prosperous, like Harthill and Uddingston, being Protestant which was evident by the number of unionist flags on show in such areas on bedroom windows and waving atop flagpoles like so many territorial markers.

Unionists hated the notion of Scottish independence, but mainly they hated the fact that it was the poor Catholic schemes that voted for it in 2014 and came scarily close to securing it. Scotland’s future decided by Irish Catholics? If you listened closely you could actually hear John Knox spinning in his tomb.

“What can I do for you, Tam?”

The waft of stale beer emanating from the wee man as he slumped down in the chair offered to him told Bob that Denise hadn’t been far off the mark. Several hairs of several dogs had been consumed even this early in the morning.

“Ach I’ve been away a few months up in Arbroath and when ahv come back the council have taken ma flat back and selt aw ma stuff in an auction”

This was not an unknown occurrence among the travelling community. They’d disappear for months on end off up to the Highlands or wherever where others of their kith and kin were gathered. They wouldn’t bother informing the council, no rent would be paid and the place would be lying empty. The council by their own rules would evict then store the tenants possessions for a month before selling them off. All above board and nothing much folk like Bob or anyone else could do about it.

“Aye, well you know the score about that, Tam”

The wee man looked crestfallen.

“Just got a new three-piece suite and a stereo anaw wi’ that money ye goat me fae the council fund, but it’s no’ that that’s pissin me aff. It’s ma Grandfather Clock!”

This last statement stopped Bob in his tracks. It was if something really quite incongruous and surreal had entered the conversation. Like Salvador Dali had begun collaborating with an amateur water-colourist painting some ducks in a pond.

“Did you say Grandfather Clock?”

“Aye, brand new tae. Always wanted one. Was wondering if there was anything you could do about it? Maybe they’ve known no’ to sell it?”

Bob had not often pondered the meaning or etymology of the word ‘flabbergasted’. It seemed an odd word when you looked at it close up. What exactly was a ‘flabber’ and how indeed was it ‘gasted’?

“So Tam, you’ve lost your flat and all your possessions; your fridge, your cooker, your carpets and, as you say, your new suite and stereo?”

“And ma wide-screen. Don’t forget that”

“And your wide-screen. But, you’re maist concerned about your Grandfather Clock?”

The man Sullivan looked at Bob warily. Was there some piss-taking going on here? Was the adviser chappie getting wide?

“Aye, that’s right” he offered cagily.

Bob could imagine the phone call he was about to make.

“Oh thank God you’ve phoned. Of course we’ve kept Mr Sullivan’s clock. We’ve kept it safe with all the rest!”

There was something about Traveller’s and Grandfather Clocks.

Swearing in Slovakian

The phone never rings when you need it to; it lies there quiet as the grave on a slow day. You listen to Michael Torke’s ‘Corner in Manhattan’ and smother your chip roll in brown sauce. Life doesn’t get any more juxtaposed.

The neighbours next door were fighting again last night; the police came to my door seeking my views– I stay neutral and say ‘I know nada – not my problem’.

Best not to get involved.

He’s a big hockey-playing Slovakian half my age. He’d tear my head off like Withnail says Jeff Wode would.

I read my Guardian wishing the big Slovakian would fuck off back to Bratislava or wherever the fuck he’s from.

Life just got more juxtaposed.

Easy to be prejudiced about people, much more difficult not to be. What do you do when your neighbour is a heavy drinking Slovakian ice hockey player who is built like a wall? No-one prepares you for that!

Do you wish that your neighbour was a heavy-drinking Scottish shinty player? Not really! There’s nothing worse than ale-slurping Scottish shinty players, especially when you live next door to them.

I sat with the Slovak after his worried girlfriend chapped on my door saying she was scared for her safety. She’d called the police on a previous occasion and if she did so again they’d charge him and he was the father of her child after all!! Would I come in and calm him down (I must seem like the sort of guy who has a calming influence on inebriated East Europeans).

She’s very pretty and I’m as soft as shite so I agree, however reluctantly.

He’s totally blootered and falling about the place and clearly resents the introduction of this neighbourly presence. She buggers off with the babby and leaves me to it.

One slight problem. He doesn’t speak much English and I possess literally no Slovakian so my attempts to discuss the ‘velvet revolution’ proves fruitless. “Lubo Moravcik” I offer, knowing the little Celtic midfield magician is a countryman of his. This he drunkenly understands and we spend the next five minutes bandying that name back and forth like a ball in a tennis match. “Dr Josef Venglos” I change the mood slightly feeling lucky to support a team that has employed two Slovak nationals. He doesn’t know this name and offers again “Lubo Moravcik”

I can’t spend any more time merely saying “Lubo Moravcik”, no-one can. Imagine how tedious life would get if all one could say was “Lubo Moravcik” all the time. He seems to want to go out on the landing so that he can smoke. Even in his moroculous state he is well-trained enough not to smoke in the flat.

He starts criticising his girlfriend in what sounds like aggressive Slovakian the odd word like ‘bitch’ sneaking in. “Lubo Moravcik” I respond but he eyes me with bleary disgust. He is very unsteady on his feet and I fear he may tumble over the bannister down the three flights of hard stone stairs.

In the morning he chaps my door and blearily asks in pidgin-something if I have any drink in the house. “Drink I very must have” he says and I shake my head. “You have money? Girlfriend will give you back”

I think for a few seconds and say..

“Lubo Moravcik”

I think I at least now know how to swear in Slovakian.

The Scottish Witch-hunts

In terms of bias and exaggeration, there can be no period more notorious in Scottish history than the years of the witch-hunts. For a period spanning the 16th, 17th and into the 18th centuries up to four thousand individuals – mainly women – were tortured, tried and executed for the most spurious of reasons and in the most brutal manner. This was three times as many as occurred in England which had five times the population (although pales in comparison with the someone hundred thousand who perished in Germany for the same ‘crime’).

The impetus for this phenomenon can be laid at the door of The Reformation and the attitude and writings of the Scottish King, James VI (also to become James I of England)(1) It was through these forces that what was considered as ‘witchcraft’ was effectively criminalised. Before such people would have been perceived at worst warily but usually as folk who could concoct herbal cures for fevers and agues and assist as ‘Spae wives’ with the delivery of local children.

The persecution of ‘witches and sorcerers’ was a form of social control and the insinuation of the power of the church and the peculiar madness of a King willing to believe that cat’s tails and devilish incantations could summon up storms in the sea.(2) Perhaps witch-finding was more prolific in Scotland than England due to the force of Presbyterianism which felt it had something to prove to its Episcopalian neighbours?

Unless you believe there was a Devil at large then these ‘witches and sorcerers’ were no less than ‘fitted-up’: provoked to ‘confess’ by cunning and torture or else they were somewhat mentally deluded individuals looking for fame in the seventeenth-century version of ‘X-Factor’, their celebrity achieved on the gallows or at the stake. These innocent people died because of a mad King’s delusions, religious zealots and folk with local grievances and in a more sinister sense perhaps by a church flexing its muscles and intent on enforcing ‘a Godly society’ and scapegoating old women and eccentrics to do so.(3)

Indeed, it was in heavily populated areas where the church had control and influence over Parish affairs that the preponderance of witch-hunts took place. The Highlands, sparsely populated region where Presbyterianism had no such hold, knew little of the barbarity that was going on elsewhere, although, as Henderson, L has pointed out, it was by no means unheard of.

The rich and powerful were very seldom accused of witchcraft in Scotland. They were wives of farmers or cottars or poor old widows or tinkers and vagabonds.

Basically, if you were accused of being a witch if that finger were pointed at you, you were done for. Barbaric methods of torture such as thumb-screws (‘pilliewinkies’), breaking irons, sleep-deprivation and ‘witch-pricking’ were used to force a confession, and it didn’t end there. The powers that be were convinced that witches operated in covens of thirteen so they demanded twelve other names which were duly offered by the poor woman in her agony. Then those others were forced to give up more names and thus the numbers increased. One wonders if competing parishes were trying to out-do each other in ‘godliness’ and extirpating evil-doers.

Witch-hunting died out in Scotland towards the middle of the 18th century as society moved into early enlightenment and the barbarity and irrationally of such a practice was more widely perceived among those with the power to stop it. Janet Horne(4) was the last witch executed in Scotland in 1727 nine years before the witchcraft acts were finally repealed.

1.            ‘Daemonologie’ published in 1597

2.   North Berwick Witch Trials of 1590 which ran for two years with over 70 executed. James VI attended these trials as the accusation was that a coven from near North Berwick had cast               spells on the sea to raise a storm to kill James and his new wife who were returning from                     Denmark.

3.            It was also a method of getting rid of undesirables as when Chisholm the landlord in the               Highlands used the accusation of witchcraft to rid himself of tenants.

4.            Although this may not have been her real name as ‘Janet’ or ‘Jenny Horne’ was a generic             name for witches in certain parts of Scotland. ‘Horne’ perhaps denoting the Devil.

‘A History of the Scottish People: 1560 – 1830’ Smout T.C. (1998) Pilgrim

‘Goodnight My Servants All: The Sourcebook of East Lothian Witchcraft’ Robertson, D.R. (2008) The Grimsay Press

‘The Witches of Fife: Witch-hunting in a Scottish Shire, 1560 1710)’ MacDonald, S (2002) Tuckwell Press

‘Witch-hunting and witch belief in the Gaidhealtachdt’, Henderson, L. (2008) University of Glasgow

‘North Berwick Witch Trials’ Stewart, T  History UK

http://thebookofross.com/chiefs.php

Darien Scheme - A Scottish Disaster

In terms of bias and exaggeration, Darien is notable for the palpable bias of the English establishment toward their own concerns and opposed to Scotland’s.  Also, the lies sent back by the first expeditioner’s that must have led to the second lot venturing out thinking they would find a ready-made community instead of which it was chaos and death.

Darien was a good idea that turned quickly to farce and disaster. This linkage of two oceans - “this door of the seas, and the key to the universe”- would later transpire as the Panama Canal which would open a trading route between Atlantic and Pacific.

The extent of Scottish trade in the late C17th – and certainly in comparison with their thriving colonial neighbours, England – was measly and limited only to low-value exports such as grain and cattle. The English had the East India Company and Royal Africa Company which prospered from slave-trading. Further than this, they had introduced the Navigation Acts in 1696 which denied Scotland access to English-controlled markets and colonies. The Darien Company – a public joint-stock affair – was meant to be a response to this dominance and a way for Scotland to rise from near-poverty.

The English were from the start antagonistic and obstructive. They warned foreign bankers that they may lose trade with the English if they in any way backed the Scottish scheme, so the funds had to come from Scots themselves: wealthy landowners, rich men and merchants raised money which amounted to some twenty per cent of the entire Scottish economy (over 16 million pounds in today’s money). In fact, the English intransigence solidified support for Darien as ‘a point of honour’ where attention was perhaps diverted from the developing imprudence of the affair.

As events transpired and the first expedition led by William Paterson was developing into a tragedy of death and hunger, the English at sea wilfully sabotaged the sending of food and supplies to save the Scots.

In order to sell Darien to Scottish investors much too much was made of the certain success of the venture and this was the case too as reports were sent back that failed to tell of what had actually transpired. This omission was to lead to a further expedition who found not a settling community but an anarchy of disease, death, hunger and the need to fight Spanish forces who all along held a claim to the territory.

Approximately two thousand lives were lost in total and the scheme abandoned. Scotland then found themselves subject to the English Aliens Act of 1704 which counted all Scots living in England as foreigners and also revoked all import trade with Scotland. The paradox here is that from being classed as alien, only three years later Scotland was in Union with its bigger neighbour.

The bankruptcy that Darien had left in its wake was to forward the cause for the loss of its independence.

‘A History of the Scottish People’ Smout, T.C. (1998) Fontana

‘The Scottish Enlightenment: The Scot’s Invention of the Modern World’ Herman, A (2003) Harper Collins