Grow old along with me
The best is yet to be
The last of life for which the first was made
I first encountered Browning’s Rabbi Ben Ezra as a young teenager at the opening of Isaac Asimov’s Pebble In The Sky, a novel I still pick up from time to time. It was his first novel, and isn’t one of his better-known ones, but it resonates still with assorted forms of nationalism on the rise. I’ve always found the opening lines of Browning’s poem to be the most resonant, and they were the obvious choice for yesterday’s post.
I find the notion of ‘growing old’ odd; In my head I’m about 34 with all the time in the world. Now, in a different sense, I do have all the time in the world to organise my life wholly for myself and my family. This is liberating and therefore daunting. There are things I want to do and I have no more excuses for not organising myself to do them. The most prominent of these things is writing.
A month ago, reflecting on my years at work, I realised that my happiest period in my whole employment history was researching and writing Automated Registration of Title to Land in the late 90s; I never again found the same mix of structure and freedom, though my time studying for my second degree and the early years of eProcurement Scotland came close. Outside of work, I found writing my short story collection, That I May Swim, and drafting my first novel, A Dream of Magic, fulfilling and rewarding. Neither are published, maybe they never will be, but that’s not the point: the pleasure and fulfillment is in the process of creating, of channeling and shaping.
A Dream of Magic now needs to be revised into second draft. I also have the spores of a new novel creeping through a notebook, with one or two rough fragments already written in early draft. The working title, at least for now, is The Magpie Rhyme, and it is set in an alternate Scotland in 1648. This means research. I’m already working on the historical material available to me at home or Edinburgh Central Library, but I also have an unused reader’s ticket for the Historical Search Room at the National Records of Scotland. I got it when I finished the course on Scottish Handwriting I mentioned earlier this month. I need a bit of a refresher period to get my eye back in, but it means I can go to primary records for the period and get a real feel for what was going on, even though the story is set in an alternate history.
With no excuses left, therein lies the daunting aspect: organising myself to do it.
For the first time since 1983 I am not in full-time employment. While the quote from Browning that provides my title for this post may seem dark, I mean it in a positive way, and this is why:
Several people have said the same thing to me, best summed up by my old chum Steve Bell who reckons I should be ‘making the most of what I reckon could be the best years of your life’ and seizing ‘the opportunity to transition to a lifestyle that would suit you down to the ground.’
I agree. We own our house outright, we have no debt, I have two pensions and savings, so, in my sixtieth year, things are set up nicely to grow older disgracefully.
My immediate plans including making headway on my large ‘to be read’ pile of books, walking some coastal paths, reacquainting my fingers with my guitar fretboard, and writing (with associated research). I have no plans to look for a job. That’s not to say I won’t look at work opportunities, just so long as they don’t look like a job. My guiding principle is that I am in no hurry to make any decisions at all; my immediate priority is chilling out.
More generally, I have long held to the view that it is a good thing–a necessary thing–to reinvent yourself every decade or so. I’ve mentioned it one or two times here, for example on 5 March 2011 I wrote:
What is important to me, though, is periodically to lose some baggage and reinvent myself. The last time I did this was in 1999/2000 when I left Registers of Scotland and transfered to the Scottish Executive.
I like to have a relationship between what I do and who I think I am. A friend, whom I haven’t seen for quite a while now, used to say at work ‘this is what I do not who I am’ but that isn’t a situation I like to be in. It worked for him but not for me; so if what I do and who I think I am become too far apart then it is time to change.
So reinvention means deconstructing and paring away the things that don’t fit for me and putting myself in a situation where I can effectively take what is useful from what has been, and challenge myself to develop in a new situation which is more stimulating, even if it is simultaneously uncomfortable and risky. That’s what keeps it real and interesting.
Thinking about it
1980 I switched the focus of my first degree, Bachelor of Divinity at Edinburgh University, from vocational to academic
1990 I was studying for an LLB at Edinburgh, and re-evaluating my life in the process
2000 I switched from Registers of Scotland to the Scottish Executive
2011 I left the Civil Service and started in the private sector.
These were all occupational or directional changes that correlate to changes in self-perception.
And now in 2019 a new challenge beckons, stripping away the old and becoming more who I want to be as my 60th birthday is in sight, setting up whatever changes I want to make in 2029.
Like any country, Scotland has its fair share of national myths that function to reassure ourselves of our inherent humanity and, perhaps, moral superiority. I do not mean this cynically; it is something that people do in building their sense of individual and societal identity. The myths are, in that sense, as much aspirational as anything else.
For a long time the Scottish self-mythology has denied the role of Scots in the 18th century transatlantic slave trade, even though the evidence is all around us, right there in plain sight. A process of demythologisation has been underway for some time now amongst historians and activists, but it is only now slipping into the public consciousness. David Hayman presented an excellent two-part documentary Slavery: Scotland’s Hidden Shame on BBC2 last year, and the database of slave owners in Britain, compiled by UCL from the compensation records and used by David Olusoga as the basis of his short series Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners, showed that Scotland had the highest per capita number of slave owners of anywhere in Britain, often widows and ministers.
I’ve been interested in the presence of people of colour in early modern Scotland for some time, and a couple of years ago conceived of a project to find them in the records. This turned out to be difficult because they are rarely identified as such unless by a descriptor (for example Peter the Moor, one of the King’s tabronars), and, a commonplace of research, the wealthy leave archives but the poor leave few records unless they get into trouble. In this spirit I am fond of Harry Domingo the Moor in Aberdeen, hauled before the Kirk Session 16 January 1607 for ‘sounding the trumpet within the kirk.’
It was partly because of this interest that I took a course on 16th and 17th Century Scottish Handwriting run jointly by Edinburgh University and the National Records of Scotland in order to get into the primary records and see for myself what might be found. I was encouraged in this by Professor John Cairns of Edinburgh University who, with Hector MacQueen and the late David Sellar, ran one of my favourite courses from my law student days: Scots Law and the Western Legal Tradition; had I done that course when I was a lot younger, the course of my life might have been different.
Professor Cairns has been at the forefront of the demythologisation of Scotland and slavery, and recently gave a short public lecture course on Slavery and the Law in 18th Century Scotland. I managed to get to two of the lectures and was pleased to find they are being put on line. So far only the first two are up but I’d recommend them to you if you have a couple of hours to spare. Links below.
Into town today to retrieve a notebook I left in the Central Library last week. The town was full of Wales, bound for Murrayfield, bound for the pub, bound for glory. I walked up the High Street surrounded by men in red dragon onesies and women in short-sleeved rugby tops and miniskirts despite the chill. It was fun.
I took the opportunity to drop into the Cameo at Tollcross for a lunchtime showing of Captain Marvel. I hadn’t been there since, I think, Shallow Grave (and before that Babylon, though I might be wrong–it’s possible I saw Absolute Beginners there too). Eating a quick lunch before the film, I liked the music playing in the bar well enough to Soundhound it. I guess Brian Fallon is quite well known but he’s new to me. His music wears its influences like a neon badge on his lapel, but it’s well executed.
I enjoyed Captain Marvel. I thought the first fifteen minutes or so could do with more showing and less telling (cinema is a visual medium after all), but once it hit its stride I was quite happy to be carried along for the ride.
Captain Marvel will, when it comes out on BluRay, join my short list of ‘beer and pizza’ films for nights in (currently The Incredibles, The Force Awakens, Rogue One and Pacific Rim). It’s a fun movie held together by a good buddy-movie partnership between Brie Larson and Samuel L Jackson. And its soundtrack is ace.
One of the problems I have with Marvel productions is that, one way or another, they nearly all revolve around the Avengers franchise. The best of them manage to be their own thing while hitting their Avengers cues; The ones I really liked–Black Panther, Thor Ragnarok, Antman, Doctor Strange and the excellent Logan–succeed by creating their own reality (and Logan, of course, has nothing to do with the Avengers). Captain Marvel walks something of a fine line seeing as it tees up Avengers Endgame, but it succeeds on its own terms (hint: I’m not really interested in the Avengers franchise and wasn’t especially impressed by Infinity War which I thought was more spectacle than substance).
My TV viewing has been as minimal as usual, but I did watch The Umbrella Academy in a concentrated binge. I wasn’t sure about the first episode but I’m glad I stuck with it. Like Brian Fallon the influences are obvious, but apart from some de rigueur camera angles meant to reflect the comic-book origins of the show (and they’re not as egregious or distracting as in American Gods), it is well done. Ellen Page is really good, but it is a measure of how closely it sticks to well-worn tropes that as soon as we’re told she has no powers and is ‘ordinary’ in episode one it is a nailed-on certainty that she has, and isn’t.
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