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The National
12-07-2025
- General
- The National
What would this play's cast say about the Scotland we live in today?
What if a group of 2025 creatives set out, like John McGrath and his 7:84 company once did, to dramatise power, land, resources and belonging in Scotland? What would they say now? And how would they say it? It might be worth jumping back and forth between the eras, to see what persists of the Cheviot's original themes to this day. Start with the very title. The structure of the play – dramatised as a wild ceilidh night – maps to three historical periods of dispossession in Scottish history. The Cheviot is the sheep that replaced those human Highlanders cleared from their lands in the 18th century. READ MORE: Man jailed for 'despicable' wildlife crimes after setting dogs on other animals The stag populates the hunting grounds that many of those clearances became, at the hands of aristocratic landowners in the 19th century. And the black, black oil is obviously the 1960s and 70s discovery of fossil fuels in Scotland's coastal waters. The Cheviot today? Still nibbling away. They take up 55% of land dedicated to agriculture in Scotland – around 3.6 million hectares. But the sheep farming sector makes up only 7% of our overall national income from farming. In terms of their destructive impact on the environment, George Monbiot once described rural Scotland as being 'sheep-wrecked'. Vegans, rewilders and methane watchers have sheep-farming on notice, never might the weight of history from the Clearances. The stag's symbolism has hardly diminished as a misuse of the Scottish landscape, the extraction represented by hunting grounds still continuing. The campaign group Revive tell us that 12-18% of Scottish land is currently being used for grouse-shooting – about the size of Wales – while contributing a tiny amount to GDP. Wildlife tourism – which protects the diversity of species in landscapes, rather than blast away at them to keep game numbers up – brings in five times as much revenue as hunting. The case against is as strong now as in the 70s. The black, black oil was in its early potent surge when McGrath did the play's first performance in Aberdeen, April 1973. The following year, the SNP eventually elected 11 MPs on a proprietary slogan, 'It's Scotland's Oil'. But could the legacy of the black stuff be more complex? In the play, with amazing foresight, the American oilman Texas Jim thanks God that the UK Government 'didn't believe in all these pesky godless government controls like they do in Norway'. This anticipates the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund from oil and gas established in 1990, its trillions now invested in 1.5% of the globe's company stocks. Feel the pain. Which can be trebled. Firstly, the loss of such anchoring capital, because a tax-frittering Westminster had full sovereignty over the North Sea fields. Second, we have to admit the contribution that the exploitation of oil and gas has made towards what now looks like irreversible climate worsening. And thirdly, the pressure to leave remaining reserves where they are. Climate scientists urge that every ounce of carbon saved is worth it, if only to prevent an even more calamitous outcome. What a troubling, ethics-bending, dark-and-sticky mess this turned out to be. In 2025, the great theme of McGrath's play – extraction without consent – rolls back round again, with the stampede to develop renewable energy in Scotland. After the black, black oil comes the endless saving wind. READ MORE: I was homeless and using drugs. Now I'm playing at the Edinburgh Fringe But are the enemies as clear as the Cheviot identified them, with all the brutal clarity of seventies Marxists? Lesley Riddoch reported this week on the miasma of political and economic snarl-ups involved in wind-farm applications across the Highlands and Islands. It is, shall we say, a dramatic scene. Ed Miliband rejects zonal pricing, which would lower electricity costs in Scotland. MSPs raise their hands, saying they're legally bound by Westminster climate targets to allow rampant corporate and commercial developers to dominate bids – over that of community owners. Rural communities themselves are divided – between their commitments to the planet (which you'd expect, given their proximity to wildness). And then the despoiling of these conditions under breakneck imperatives – the 'industrialisation of the Highlands', as Gaelic singer Julie Fowlis puts it). They're suffering all the environmental chaos and disruption of next-stage renewable engineering, but on the poorest of terms. Turbines and pylons are on the march, sending clean energy to England. Meanwhile localities endure high domestic energy prices, as well as a structural prejudice against them benefitting directly from wind developments. Great and stormy meetings take place among and between communities. Rural electoral parties are mooted for next May. They look like they're urging a plague on all existing party-political houses. What theatrical drama could encompass such live political and social drama? The 2025 forms that might comprise a follow-up to the Cheviot are a really intriguing question. So many of the reports around its 50th anniversary in 2023 emphasised how much the play answered its audiences' thirst – for themselves and for their history to be represented on stage. The energy of the play seems to parallel Billy Connolly's explosion into the TV and concert mainstream. Both 7:84 and the Big Yin were relentless giggers, adapting themselves to whatever church hall or community centre could house them. However, we are also social media people in 2025, wherever we are strewn across Scotland. The young are on TikTok, but even the oldies are on Facebook and WhatsApp. And Zoom or Teams are the default organisational tools for many. What kind of single dramatic 'representation' could take purchase, when we have so many ways and means to represent ourselves? Creatives worth their salt should rise to such a challenge. Another major difference between these eras may be the acute need to foment less an anti-capitalist critique, more a pro-planet tendency. What's the bigger vision we can land, that makes Nigel Farage and his anti-green populism seem small and petty, in a Scottish context? Between makars and folk, can we co-compose 'cli-fi' – climate fiction – that puts emotional and dramatic flesh on the lives of Scots in this future? We can also be eclectic about the forms this cultural intervention takes. What's the 2025 equivalent – EDM club night, immersive event, game platform, social cosplay: let's explore – of the ceilidh which originally frames the Cheviot? And which often continued onwards, for real, after the final call? READ MORE: TRNSMT main stage act calls out politicians' attempts to cancel Kneecap Many stories from the Cheviot's past cherish the interaction between performer and audience. Again, assuming the presence of digital networks, how could culture and performance click directly into other democratic and self-determining behaviours? Both face-to-face and virtually? Powerful, co-created arts should be one motivating element to help you persist with the planning and deliberation of projects like community energy, civic assemblies, collective envisioning. To defeat the Faragists, we need a dollop of Antoine de Saint-Exupery's advice about projects: 'If you want to build a ship, don't drum up folks to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.' And reflecting on the Cheviot, it may not be that we need a 'theatre of the oppressed', as the Brazilian Augusto Boal once asked for. But what Simon Starkey, one of the founders of the National Theatre of Scotland, calls a 'theatre of opportunity'. Let's push back against yet more 'extraction without consent'. But as many of Scotland's greatest artists would agree, let's raise visions of a desirably complex and alternative Scotland at the same time. That's the kind of new Cheviot I'd yearn to see – and maybe even help shape. Something vast and unruly enough to hold our anger, our grief, our planetary hopes, all at once. So what's your version? Who's your cast? Where's your stage?
The Herald Scotland
28-06-2025
- General
- The Herald Scotland
New archive tells the story of land reform across Scotland
The land all around was owned by the Chief of Macleod, who lived in the impressively preserved Dunvegan Castle. Then, in the mid-70's, Dunvegan went high-tech. Gaeltec arrived in the village. The company was at the cutting edge of film resistive (of foil) strain gauge sensors – thin miniature pressure sensors used in medical and veterinary work. With up to 20 good jobs at its peak for the locals, Gaeltec was a trailblazer for high-tech remote working, and justifiably lauded as an example of a partial solution to the depopulation and demographic challenges that have haunted much of the Highlands for many generation. READ MORE: Unfortunately, Gaeltec struggled to survive latterly, and despite a change of owners, public support and much goodwill, the lab in Dunvegan finally shut its doors about eight years ago. The rollercoaster history of Gaeltec is only one small adventure in the colourful wider history of the Dunvegan community. Macleod of Dunvegan and his tribe fought the last clan battle in Skye against the constant foe, Macdonald of Sleat. That gruesome clash - Battle of Coire na Creiche - in 1601 ended two centuries of serious violence between the clan rivals. Then, much of the area around Dunvegan was ravaged by Clearances. The Glendale Martyrs – who led the fight for land rights during the Crofters Wars – were from the neighbouring estate. Young Highland Crofters with spinning wheel and new hat (Image: Community Land Scotland) The populist land agitator and bard, Mairi Mhor nan Oran, was brought up in the area. Today the Macleods of Dunvegan are a pale shadow of their former selves. The Macdonalds of Sleat have long since surrendered most of their south Skye fiefdom to the Clan Trust – now bogged down in a highly controversial sale of the old Macdonald Castle and restaurant and grounds. Meanwhile, the local community in Dunvegan now has plans to take over the old Gaeltec building and transform it into a community facility. Once more the building will be a centre for optimism and opportunity as the local community takes control. The rollercoaster story of Dunvegan is only one of 840 possible example from around Scotland where buyout communities have taken control of land and buildings, in cities and towns as well as the rural heartlands. Now Community Land Scotland curator Iain Craig is researching and collating these stories to create a national archive telling the history of Scotland's land reform movement and the unique records of the communities that are engaged in the process. A historical scene at Kyleakin on Skye (Image: Community Land Scotland) He said: 'Like Dunvegan, every community has a story to tell and these stories are often fascinating and dramatic. Our project aims to ensure the stories of these communities are available for everyone, capturing the history of people and community and explaining ultimately, why so many of them opted for community control.' Mr Craig - a Gaelic-speaking design graduate from Balmacara in Wester Ross - argues that community ownership can be transformational and it is now one of the most important political and social movements in Scotland. 'Looking at the variety of stories across Scotland, we don't have rose-tinted glasses. Our members know that buyouts can be challenging. They have to be very inventive and resilient and they have to ensure their income stream works", he said. 'But everywhere there are great stories where community buyouts are reinvigorating the community in Stow or Bridgend or Kirkcaldy, Huntly, and Lewis and Harris." The Assynt Foundation community trust lives under the shadow of majestic Suilven, and the less attractive historical shadows of The Duke and Duchess of Sutherland, the most notorious of the Clearance barons. Laundry women on Skye (Image: Community Land Scotland) Now in community hands, the estate is leasing out Glencanisp Lodge – built by the Duke's family in 1850 - to a hotel entrepreneur. The Glencanisp development should create around 15 jobs and provide income for the community. 'What a great story for the archive', said Mr Craig. 'There is the horrible drama of the clearances, the lodge as a sign of privilege while the community suffered, all finally leading to community control and community benefit as the lodge is owned by the people rather than the laird.' The archive will tell the stories of these community journeys including all areas of Scotland. As well as the riches of the new archive, Mr Craig has been travelling Scotland with an exhibition of artworks, featuring creations by contemporary artists telling the stories and achievements of the pioneers of community ownership. The Where We Stand exhibition has travelled the length and breadth of Scotland from Stow to Stornoway, Glasgow to Oban to Wick. READ MORE: Over 7,000 people have visited the exhibition so far, enjoying the works of artists such as Virginia Hutchison, Richard Bracken, Colin Tennant, Saskia Coulson, Francia Boakye, Kate O'Shea, Emma Duncan, Ann Little and Helen Walsh. Mr Craig said: 'The Where We Stand artworks are all themed around the long and difficult struggle for community empowerment. It reflects the conflicts and celebrates the achievements. 'The exhibition investigates the journey of community ownership over the last 100 years, and ask: 'What do we want next?' 'Good progress has been made in some communities in the last 100 years, but shockingly only 421 people own half of Scotland's private land and radical change is needed. 'Where We Stand investigates these issues and themes and hopes through the eyes of contemporary artists, and we hope it will help enrich and stimulate the land reform debate. The feedback, conversations and connections made during this tour makes it clear that this isn't just about ownership, it's about empowerment of people and the impact that has on their lives on a day to day basis.' After visiting multiple communities across Scotland, the exhibition, which finishes its comprehensive tour in Edinburgh at North Edinburgh Arts from June 27 to July 11. For more information on The Where We Stand exhibition, visit
NZ Herald
20-06-2025
- Politics
- NZ Herald
David Seymour: I went to Oxford to test my beliefs and learned a sad thing about NZ
Is it a prank? We think it's real. Okay, then, but we can't use taxpayer money. That conversation is how I ended up debating at Oxford Union. The question of the debate was that 'no one can be illegal on stolen land'. It was a clever moot, tapping into colonisation and immigration. What Government has the right to tell would-be migrants they can't come, when every inch of the planet has been fought over at some time? I went to test my beliefs that human rights are universal, that we should stop searching the past for reasons to doubt one another and focus more on where we're going than where we've been. I think those beliefs held up well, but I learned something sad about our country, too. Every Thursday in semester time, the Union invites guests to debate. Most people don't realise Lange was one of six or eight debaters. His speech, and the uranium line, obliterated the others. I had a student and a couple of American 'immigration enforcement experts' on my team. On the other side was the president of the Union, an Australian senator, an Oxford academic, and someone best described as Noam Chomsky's daughter. At the end of the debate, the audience divides, going through one door or another to register their vote for or against the motion, like Parliaments of old. The president of the Union opened, saying our team of white guys in tuxedos had 'something in common', that all borders are drawn in blood, and that New Zealand 'invites, exploits, then hunts' migrants. Since she came in an Alice in Wonderland dress with a two-metre hoop skirt, though, you can't help but like her. I think she was in on the joke. The Australian senator said 'white immigration' to Australia is unlawful, then described her own migration from India without explaining the difference. The academic wanted open immigration rights for anyone whose ancestors had been colonised, but it wasn't clear how far back this went. Chomsky promised to make seven points in her speech. I listened, but can only guess they were above my pay grade. My team agreed that, yes, history is filled with barbarism on all sides, but who decides where it stopped and started? Should we count Scottish victims of the Clearances as victims or villains? How about descendants of Māori who slaughtered other tribes in the musket wars? How do we account for people who, like the new Pope, have ancestors on both sides of conflict? We argued that grouping ourselves into victims and villains, based on ancestry, is exactly what leads to oppression and discrimination – seeing an individual as just another faceless member of a guilty group. Even if you could pick a time when land stopped being owned and started being stolen, you would create another problem, determinism. No wonder young people are depressed and anxious, being told they are either victims or villains in stories written before they were born. Building a better world, we said, needs a commitment to treat each person as a thinking and valuing being, deserving equal rights and dignity. I think the arguments for equal rights stood up well, but I learned something about New Zealand from how the events in Oxford were reported at home. What a depressing little country we can be. TVNZ based its coverage around an activist saying I shouldn't be able to speak because free speech is dangerous. The headline was me 'defending' speaking. What a contrast with the Oxford Union's commitment to free speech. Stuff's coverage announced, sneeringly, that I 'debated at Oxford, and lost'. Nowhere in the article does it explain how the debate is decided, or that my team, not I, lost by a margin of 54-46. It quotes a handful of audience members who disagreed with me, but didn't try to inform the reader of what I said or why nearly half voted for my team. Anyone reliant on these outlets would prove the adage that if you don't read the media, you're uninformed; if you do, then you're misinformed. I thank the Herald for its more balanced coverage and this right of reply. Thank you, Oxford Union, for the wonderful opportunity to freely debate controversial topics. Yes, all borders are drawn in blood, but if you want a better world, you need to ask not where we came from, but where we're going. Some in our media could learn from your spirit. David Seymour is the Deputy Prime Minister and Act Party leader
The Hindu
16-05-2025
- Politics
- The Hindu
Supreme Court strikes down ex post facto environmental clearances to building projects, constructions
The Supreme Court on Friday (May 16, 2025) held the grant of ex post facto or retrospective Environmental Clearances (EC) by the Centre to building projects and constructions a 'gross illegality' and an anathema against which the courts must come down heavily. A Bench of Justices A.S. Oka and Ujjal Bhuyan, in a judgment, restrained the Union government from granting ex post facto clearances in any form to regularise illegal constructions. The court struck down the 2017 notification and 2021 Office Memorandum (OM) of the Centre, which in effect recognised the grant of ex post facto ECs, and connected government circulars, orders and notifications as illegal and completely arbitrary. However, the Bench clarified that ECs already granted till date under the 2017 notification and the 2021 OM would be unaffected by the judgment. Accusing the Centre of 'crafty drafting' to clear illegal constructions through retrospective ECs, the court said the government was only protecting project proponents who had committed gross illegality by commencing construction or operations in these illegal constructions without obtaining prior EC. 'Before undertaking a new project or expanding or modernising an existing one, an EC must be obtained… The concept of an ex post facto EC is in derogation of the fundamental principles of environmental jurisprudence and is an anathema to the EIA Notification of January 27, 1994,' Justice Oka observed. The judgment said the government had issued the 2017 notification despite a clear declaration of the law in favour of prior EC by the Supreme Court in the Common Cause judgment the very same year. 'The reason why a retrospective EC or an ex post facto clearance is alien to environmental jurisprudence is that before the issuance of an EC, the statutory notification warrants a careful application of mind, besides a study into the likely consequences of a proposed activity on the environment,' Justice Oka explained. The effect of granting an ex post facto clearance would amount to giving permission to complete the construction of a project which had started without prior EC. In cases in which the construction was already completed and activities had begun, the retrospective EC would facilitate continuation. Thus, in effect, the ex post facto EC regularised something which was illegal with retrospective effect. Referring to the 2021 OM, the court said the Union government had not 'cleverly' avoided the words 'ex post facto', but the provisions had the effect of allowing a retrospective regime. 'The 2021 OM talks about the concept of development. Can there be development at the cost of the environment? Conservation of the environment and its improvement is an essential part of the concept of development. Therefore, going out of the way by issuing such OMs to protect those who have caused harm to the environment has to be deprecated by the courts… Even the Central government has a duty to protect and improve the natural environment,' Justice Oka underscored.
The National
12-05-2025
- Business
- The National
The Scottish poets whose lines feature on RBS bank notes
I gave the text of Munro's poem in full and received a message from a correspondent saying that the poem 'paints a sad picture of cleared Highlands, which must rank in its own way with Consider The Lillies, the moving short novel by Iain Crichton Smith. In so far as I had been appointed 'literary adviser and validator' for the project of redesigning the banknotes, I thought again about the value of Munro's poem in that context. It's surely important to remember that a bank note (especially a large denomination banknote) should carry a very acute message about the authority of devastation that money brings about. Who knows if any folk might read it so deeply? Does anybody notice what's inscribed on banknotes, beyond the pictures? But it's there. Intentionality counts, no matter what they say. I explained last week that RBS asked the Edinburgh design company Nile to take the lead, a few years ago, in redesigning the notes. Through the research, the central theme emerged: The Fabric Of Nature. Thus each note contains a feature or cultural element 'deemed important in the eyes of the Scottish people'. READ MORE: Cash in your pocket carries more value than at first appears Among a team of specialists, designers, calligraphers and photographers, I offered my advice on literary aspects of the redesign and suggested various quotations from the writers and poets that could form part of the notes themselves, and my research for this was serious. I scoured the anthologies, visited libraries, drew on what I knew, made lists of possible lines that I thought might work, and discussed the meanings and priorities and implications of having one poet or another, one language or another, and different forms of poem, before settling on our selection. This week, I'd like to unpack two of the other quotations – Norman MacCaig's, from the £10 note, with lines from his poem Moorings: 'The cork that can't be travels – / Nose of a dog otter'. This connects with the image on the note, two otters at play. And the lines on the £20 note, from Mark Alexander Boyd: 'Fra banc to banc, fra wood to wood, I rin / Ourhailit with my feeble fantasie'. Neil Munro's poem reflects on the devastations wrought upon Scotland by the Clearances, and there are connections from MacCaig to the Gaelic world that must not be forgotten. MacCaig's poems are exclusively in English but his Gaelic ancestry was important to him, and his poems show clearly their affinities with the three traditional Gaelic poetic modes of celebration, condemnation, and lament. Without irony, in Praise of a collie ('She flowed through fences like a piece of black wind'), Praise of a boat ('in still water gurgling like a baby') or Praise of a thorn bush ('an encyclopaedia of angles') he uses metaphors and similes that retain cut-crystal brilliance. His laments (especially in the sequence Poems for Angus) show how, with minimum language resources – no multisyllabic rhetoric, phrases pared down to essentials – the utterance of grief at the death of our loved ones is meaningful on the verge beyond which words become silence. And his hate poems, condemning the loss of language in the Gaelic world, particularly Aunt Julia and Two Thieves, are poems that remain forever angry, partly through the skill of their composition (their use of repetition, imagery, argumentative development) and partly because the reason for their anger is still with us. In fact, simile is relatively rare in Gaelic poetry and metaphor is primarily a form of straightforward identification. So while MacCaig's brilliance of observation and allusion might indicate an essential aspect of Gaelic poetic practice, it is not directly aligned with it. READ MORE: What's to be done with Hugh MacDiarmid's historic cottage home? In MacCaig's most explicitly political and longest poem, A Man In Assynt (1967-68), he writes of the Highlanders, asking, has it come to this: that this dying landscape belongs to the dead, the crofters and fighters and fishermen whose larochs sink into the bracken by Loch Assynt and Loch Crocach? – to men trampled under the hoofs of sheep and driven by deer to the ends of the earth – to men whose loyalty was so great it accepted their own betrayal by their own chiefs and whose descendants now are kept in their place by English businessmen and the indifference of a remote and ignorant government. Consider especially that phrase: 'men whose loyalty / was so great it accepted their own betrayal'. There is pathos in that description as well as a kind of modern critical condemnation of outmoded ways of thinking, self-destructive habits of mind and self-sacrificing attitudes of respect and humility. And is that not something our independence-pledged political parties today should remember? MacCaig's Collected Poems are an enormous thesaurus of similes and metaphors. Overtly descriptive of animals, reptiles, birds, creatures of the natural world, particular people, specific places in the north of Scotland around Lochinver and in Edinburgh, his poems are also quizzical about the inadequacy, uncertainty, inefficiency, unreliability and the limits of language itself, the borders of what language permits us to understand. Writing exclusively in a clear, unaffected English, the tone is usually conversational and wry. He did not typically use capitals at the beginning of lines or even (after the first letter) in titles of poems. In A man in my position, MacCaig writes: 'Hear my words carefully. / Some are spoken not by me, but / by a man in my position.' And in Limits we are told that 'our knowledge goes, / so far as we know, only / so far as we know'. Yet the limits to our knowledge do not excuse us from certain understanding: when molecules jump from one figuration to another they may not go hallelujahing into heaven or howling into hell, but water becomes ice. MacCaig began with two slim volumes in the 1940s which he later disowned, claiming that their avalanching obscurities were too much of their time, part of a quasi-surrealist movement in poetry called the New Apocalypse that had been prompted by Dylan Thomas, asserting the value of imagination over that of social realism. After a pause of a decade, MacCaig returned with Riding Lights (1955). While his poems up to the 1960s were usually metrical and regularly rhymed and, after the 1960s, normally in free verse, the absolute precision of his unmistakable tones of voice was maintained throughout his writing. All his poems, even when they seem slight, are the work of a mature intelligence. He is characteristically ironic and, at times, wildly and wittily funny, yet the predominant ethos of the Cold War, the existential anxieties of the era, have specific correlatives in MacCaig's work, in his sensitivity to the provisional and sometimes duplicitous nature of language, and the virtues of peace. READ MORE: Poets' Pub and Scotland's Voices prompt a more thoughtful understanding Like other poets of his generation, he was an educationalist, a primary school teacher and, undemonstratively, an exponent of Scotland's cultural and literary history. He is also one of the funniest poets ever. His extraordinarily dry, ironic humour delivers from unsuspected corners a shrewd sense of value. This can be both withering and comforting. Consider how precise observation and meticulous annotation of trivial things seen in Five minutes at the window implies a profound understanding of people, and about what political idealism always neglects at its peril. Its message is urgent but the poem gives no sign of anxiety. We are invited to note that 'a tree with lights for flowers' says 'it's Christmas' and a 'seagull tries over and over again / to pick up something on the road' while 'a white cat sits halfway up a tree.' Each observation invites the question, 'Why?' and then another: 'What are trivia?' They've blown away my black mood. I smile at the glass of freesias on the table. My shelves of books say nothing but I know what they mean. He is suddenly 'back in the world again / and am happy' even though he acknowledges 'its disasters, its horrors, its griefs.' In the middle of the poem is a single line, 'Oh, the motorcars'. No other poet could have written that line. It is imbued with a precise inflection, a sigh of recognition and an invisible shaking of the head at the vanity of people spuriously rushing to unnecessary appointments, instead of simply pausing to take pleasure in the virtues and values of trivia in a world of fortunate and vulnerable peace, surrounded, as he knows, by other worlds, of violence, torture and war. Here, then, is the poem from which the RBS took its lines, Moorings: In a salt ring of moonlight The dinghy nods at nothing. It paws the bright water And scatters its own shadow In a false net of light. A ruined chain lies reptile, Tied to the ground by grasses. Two oars, wet with sweet water Filched from the air, are slanted From a wrecked lobster creel. The cork that can't be travels – Nose of a dog otter It's piped at, screamed at, sworn at By an elegant oystercatcher On furious orange legs. With a sort of idle swaying The tide breathes in. Harsh seaweed Uncrackles to its kissing; The skin of the water glistens; Rich fat swims on the brine. And all night in his stable The dinghy paws bright water, Restless steeplechaser Longing to clear the hurdles That ring the Point of Stour. Every observation of this watery, nocturnal scene relates its human occupation and material economy to the natural world it inhabits. That, in itself, should always be the context in which money, the RBS banknotes, the priorities of finance and commerce, need to be understood. Moving back 400 years, let's go to the RBS £20 note and find Mark Alexander Boyd (1563-1601). He was the oldest of three cousins, all literary figures, of the Boyds of Penkill family. Boyd studied at Glasgow University, where apparently he was an insubordinate scholar, leading a rebellion against the principal, Andrew Melville, and quarrelling violently with his teachers. He travelled to Paris, gambled away his money, joined a troop of horse-soldiers fighting German and Swiss mercenaries and journeyed through France, Italy and the Low Countries, having various adventures. He published a collection of letters and poems in Latin and Greek in Antwerp in 1592, finally returning to Scotland where he died at Penkill, in Ayrshire in 1601 and was buried in the churchyard at Old Dailly. His biography by Lord Hailes was published in 1783. This is my version of one of his Latin poems, a poem of gratitude addressed to his teacher Patrick Sharpe: If you were the first to show me how to see The mountains to their topmost peaks, and how to drink As deep as earth from replenishing springs – Now, face to face – It is not only words, nor poor prayers sent by me, Nor fragile flowers, nor the simple strength of my arms, I think, But thanks from my soul this poem brings – Now, let's embrace! Cupid and Venus is Boyd's greatest poem and one of the finest sonnets ever composed. Ezra Pound, in his indispensable book ABC Of Reading (1934), wrote of it: 'Boyd is 'saying it in a beautiful way'. The apple is excellent for a few days or a week before it is ripe, then it is ripe; it is still excellent for a few days after it has passed the point of maturity. I suppose this is the most beautiful sonnet in the language, at any rate it has one nomination.' READ MORE: Inside the Kolkata Conference bringing India and Scotland together By which I take it Pound means that Cupid and Venus is the most beautiful sonnet because it is most perfectly ripe. Fools will quibble. Check out the brilliant setting by Francis George Scott (1880-1958), a major songwriter in the European tradition, available on Moonstruck (Signum Classics, SigCD096). If we paraphrase the poem into English, we'd have something like this: 'From bank to bank, from wood to wood, I run, overwhelmed by my insubstantial fantasy, like a leaf fallen from a tree or a reed blown over by the wind. Two gods guide me: one of them a blind child, one of them a woman born of the sea, whose touch is lighter than a dolphin's fin (that is, Cupid and Venus). Unhappy forever is he who tills the sand and sows seeds in the air, but twice unhappier is he, I know now, who feeds his heart with mad desire and follows a woman through fire, led by blindness and infantile hope.' Here's the poem: Fra banc to banc, fra wood to wood, I rin Ourhailit with my feeble fantasie, Lyk til a leif that fallis from a trie Or til a reid ourblawin with the wind. Twa gods gyds me: the ane of tham is blind, Ye, and a bairn brocht up in vanitie; The nixt a wyf ingenrit of the se, And lichter nor a dauphin with hir fin. Unhappie is the man for evirmair That tills the sand and sawis in the aire; Bot twyse unhappier is he, I lairn, That feidis in his hairt a mad desyre, And follows on a woman throw the fyre, Led be a blind and teichit be a bairn. The 'banks' in the poem are riverbanks, of course, so seeing those first two lines on the £20 RBS bank note is a kind of deep pun. Maybe Richard Stark, the creator of literature's greatest professional thief, that most beautiful character, Parker, would have appreciated it!
