Changing room

When friends of mine Richard and Anne got married in the 70s, the ceremony and reception were held in Berwick, where her parents lived, and I decided to drive down from Edinburgh. The challenge was how to do this without rumpling the hired morning suit, so I planned to take the suit with me in its carrier with the necessary shirt, tie, socks and smart shoes, and find somewhere close to Berwick where I could quickly change. As I drove down I was keeping an eye out for suitable spots, and eventually spotted a quiet little side road that looked promising. And so it proved; I drove down it, travelled under a bridge and there in front of me were a couple of grassy fields looking out over the North Sea. Nothing in sight seaward and a high embankment behind, it was totally secluded. Emboldened, I hopped out of the car, got out the clobber and quickly stripped off down to my shorts, before pulling the dress shirt on over my head. This was a bit of a struggle. I had put in the cuff links already, and it took a minute or so to ease my hands through the cuffs. So there I was, with the shirt still over my head, blind to the world and waving my arms about, when I heard a loud hiss behind me. Alarmed, I wriggled more vigorously and eventually got both arms and head outside the shirt, and was able to look round. To find, on top of the grassy embankment, a London to Edinburgh express train, which had coasted to a halt exactly alongside my secluded spot, and from which amused passengers had been watching my struggles with the shirt - for how long I don't know.

With an appropriate mix of dignity and speed I pulled on the trousers, and the train pulled away, leaving me alone again with the sea.

The wedding was a great success.

D

During my teenage years, one of the regular purgatories was attendance at country dances. The format for these was that individual groups would gather in advance at someone's parents' house and then set out for the dance, which would be at some large establishment and could involve several hundred people. And we would lurch through a sequence of Scottish reels and waltzes, the boys in each group scrupulously taking turns to dance with all the girls. For me, intensely shy and socially inept, with no conversation, these occasions were awful. So it was a relief to meet a quiet girl, D, who seemed about as shy and quiet as I was. Every now and then we would find ourselves in the same group at one of these events, and it was a pleasure dancing (quietly) with her.

This pattern of chance meetings at dances went on for six or seven years. We may have met on occasion at other social events, but that was it. Really. We didn't ever go out together.

Then one day I got a call from her asking if I could come round to her house. I suppose by now I was about nineteen or twenty, and getting a bit hippy and arty in appearance, in fact probably downright shabby. Anyway, I went round as asked, and D very solemnly told me that she had met someone - an Australian sheep farmer - and she was going to marry him and live miles away from civilisation in the Australian outback. I offered my congratulations, as you do, and after some chat she left the room. At which point someone, an uncle of hers I think, leaned over to me and hissed: "she's going to marry a REAL man!" I thought at first that was just a remark about my long-haired appearance. And then with an awful horrifying clarity I realised that what he actually meant was: "... and NOT YOU." D had obviously been carrying a serious torch for me all these years and I guess had assumed that I had felt the same for her, and that our futures were intertwined. It was like being ducked in ice-cold water. I had been rejected without ever realising I was a suitor. I slunk away feeling disgraced and somehow guilty - had I been leading her on?

Putting aside the fact D will have had a far better marriage to the sheep farmer than she could ever have had to me, the answer has to be that I was just too self-centred and stupid to be aware of what might have been going on. But it has brought home to me the corrosively selfish nature of shyness - in concentrating so much on one's own inadequacy, one is blind to the feelings of others. At the very least I should have sensed what she was feeling.

St Mary's Street

In 1970 I moved into a small and insanitary flat at the bottom of St Mary's Steet, Edinburgh, with friends Simon and Janie. I seem to remember that on arrival between us we had four LPs, all Simon's. They were The Yes Album, Layla, It's A Beautiful Day, and Messaien's Turangalila Suite.

Janie, who moved out to live with her future husband shortly afterwards, had the only real bedroom. I had a room with a small window out onto the common stair (which as it was regularly used as overnight living quarters by rejects from the Salvation Army hostel opposite smelt strongly of many unpleasant things) while Simon basically slept in a cupboard.

In a search for stylish living I acquired a small white spherical television, which I suspended on a long chain from the living room ceiling. And which never quite stopped revolving thereafter, meaning that a lot of shifting was required to watch a programme all the way through. However, as the reception was terrible anyway, the sacrifice was not too great.

At an early stage Simon taught me to make chilli con carne, a valuable skill.

Conways

I think it would have been in 1969 or 1970 that I was driving in Edinburgh's New Town during the Festival and saw an elderly couple looking stranded beside an obviously damaged car on Queen Street. So I pulled over and asked if I could help. It turned out they were American tourists, passing through Edinburgh en route to somewhere further north when they had been involved in a traffic accident in their hired car. Their car was being taken away for repair but they had not planned to be in Edinburgh that night and so had made no arrangements for somewhere to stay. And as it was Festival time, there wasn't a spare room to be had. So I invited them to stay at the family's home where I was still living. My parents were away on holiday, so there was plenty of room. It must have been a bit strange for this couple to trust a complete stranger but eventually we all drove back home and they stayed the night and all went charmingly.

Their name was Conway, and I'm sorry to say that I never kept in touch with them afterwards. I would love to have found out what they really thought was going on - were they worried about being kidnapped, or ending up in a drug den, or what? I guess now I will never know.

Orienteering

In 1973, I guess, I was working at the Edinburgh Film Festival for the summer, and one of the films launched there was The Wicker Man. This was a fairly weird movie by any standards, and has since become a cult, valued in retrospect much more than its lukewam reviews and limited box-office at the time would have suggested. There was a press screening one day, attended by one of the actors in the film, Lindsay Kemp, who had a 'character' part as a Scottish innkeeper (if I remember). Lindsay was one of the features of the Edinburgh cultural scene, leading a mime troupe that I had first seen perform at the Richard Demarco Gallery in 1968.

After the screening several of the EIFF team went out to a nearby pub for a drink with Lindsay, together with Jack Birkett (Orlando) and others of Lindsay's group. In the chat, someone asked Lindsay, who was about as camp as they come, how he knew he was gay. 'Well', replied Lindsay, 'it's very simple. Women don't give me erections.' Now, I'm sure there are all sorts of experts in sexual orientation who would say it's a lot more complicated than that, but to me that was about as useful a test of which way one was swinging as any deeper psychological study. On this simple premise, I was able back then and since to confirm that I was in a different -er - camp from Lindsay.

Early classical music

We were not a musical family in particular. The record player was kept upstairs, and we certainly had some records of performers like Victor Borge, but listening to music wasn't a habit of any sort. I have no memories of the radio beyond the news and The Archers. But at some stage, when I was about ten, my parents bought a Readers' Digest boxed set of classical music, a sort of potted history of classical music in ten albums. A greatest hits selection. I came across this by accident shortly afterwards and started working my way through the collection.

The composers that really interested me were the more modern ones, and in particular Stravinsky, whose Rite of Spring was included in the set and which I played over and over again. I found this to be some of the most exciting music I had ever heard. It opened up completely new perspectives on what music could be, and probably fixed me for ever in preferring 20th Century composers to most others. I then discovered Delius (On First Hearing..), Walton (Facade) and Prokofiev (Romeo and Juliet) through my mother, for whom these were favourite pieces. And when I bought my own first record out of my pocket money, it was an EP of Sir Malcolm Sargent conducting Mars and Venus from Holst's Planets Suite.

Mortification

A recent conversation about children and gifts brought back to me an experience from when I must have been about six. I went to the birthday party of a friend of mine, at the conclusion of which presents were given to all. I watched other children unwrapping exciting toys and games and then my present was handed to me. I eagerly tore off the paper to find - a wooden clothes hanger, painted pink, with a little picture of a robin on it. This was about as big a let-down as it was possible to have at that age. Even today I cannot imagine who thought that a six-year-old boy would be glad to get a clothes hanger (I mean, hanging up clothes at all was a completely alien concept to me), let alone one that was pink. The scars remain to this day.