As a farmer’s son from Ayrshire I have some knowledge of the culture and landscape associated with Burns’ work. Alloway Kirk is a familiar landmark and my brother had a farm on the banks of the Doon. We have a tenuous connection to the man himself. He is said to have had negotiations regarding working in Jamaica at the home of Patrick Douglas whose family owned a plantation there. They lived at Garrallan House, Cumnock, part of the estate our family owned until recently. Patrick Douglas of Garrallan was present at the first ever Burns Supper on 21st July 1801 held in Burns’ Cottage. Of the 9 guests present only Hamilton Paul, who organised it, had not met Burns.
In Ayrshire, Burns Suppers are approached with no little gravity and reverence. When I moved to Edinburgh to attend university I was surprised at the levity associated with Burns Suppers on the East Coast. 10 years ago I was asked to prepare something for a Supper at a friend’s house. Knowing he would have some fairly able guests contributing to it I took my usual approach to public speaking and wrote some doggerel. At the time, Jeremy Paxman was getting flak for saying he didn’t like Burns, and looking at the annual parade of mediocrity on the Scottish media around January 25th one could hardly blame him for feeling negative about it. However, such tastelessness is not the fault of Burns’ work.
A few facts about Burns’ life might be helpful to the uninitiated. He was of course a farmer, well educated through his father’s efforts, and embarked on ‘poesy’ and womanising at a precocious age. Initially he was not successful and had to continue with the day job whether he liked it or not. The plan to escape Ayrshire and his romantic entanglements by going to work on the plantation in Jamaica was abandoned when his first book of poems the Kilmarnock Edition, made him an overnight success. He also abandoned ‘Highland Mary’, left waiting on the quayside, who he had intended to take with him. She then succumbed to a fever. After a three-day ride to Edinburgh he was feted by high society and embarked on an ultimately unsuccessful romantic correspondence with Agnes McLehose using fancy noms de plume. Meanwhile he made Mrs McLehose’s poor maidservant pregnant.
He returned to farming but remained financially embarrassed. His poor health, probably due to rheumatic heart disease, was an increasing handicap to hard physical labour and he took a job as an exciseman (or gauger) to support his family. The prescription of seawater bathing did not help matters. As an exciseman he was compelled to join the Royal Dumfries Volunteers. Aware that his life was coming to an end, he requested that the Volunteers should not honour him at his funeral saying, ‘Don’t let the awkward squad fire over me’. They did so nevertheless.
His wife Jean Armour gave birth to his last child in an upper room of his house in Dumfries as his coffin, filled with wild flowers, was carried past below. He was 37 years old.
The Immortal Robert Burns
His place is on Parnassus Mount But English men contest it The Ayrshire farmer’s verses count Though Paxman does detest it
(Sam Johnson’s more to Jerry’s taste They share Albanic grudges Sam’s self-description points their place- They’re both just “harmless drudges”)
Though born to toil in sodden field His passions overwhelmed him Amang the stooks the lassies yield The cutty stool will learn him
The churchmen sought to dowse his fire And lecture him on morals Our Robin ducked the elders’ ire And sought poetic laurels
Upon the muse his die was cast Scholastic style or rural The words came flowing free and fast Though life was hard and frugal
But nothing could he wrought that sold To free him from his labour The sullen land lay black and cold With penury its neighbour
He brushed the Carrick soil away And looked towards Jamaica Sweet Mary waited on the quay The ship would never take her.
The trusting Highland Lassie pines While the Poet woos the nation From Scotia’s Seat he reads the lines; “Edina’s new sensation”
Three days upon the eastward road Half-dead on his arrival The City hailed her ploughman God He had no match nor rival
The salons put him to the test He won each verbal combat The Masons clasped him to their breast His brithers true – for a’that
Part erudite sophisticate Part drunken rustic lover He’d scant regard for etiquette As Nancy did discover
She rued the floral path she chose Clarinda spurned Sylvander It’s back to Agnes McLehose And Robert Burns the farmer
The drink and Toffs went to his head He raped the Sabine women He claimed he had been badly led By passion he was driven
Despite the blaze of worldly fame His poetry attained him There was no living in the game The writing ne’er sustained him
So to Dumfriesshire’s green terrain Where rain and clay reclaimed him The labour wracked his sickly frame And in the end it tamed him
While words came freely to his quill Hard toil would never free him And so to save his family ill An excise man he’d be then
But Death soon claimed the Gauger man Whose heart, by now, was failing The quack prescribed Seawater baths His mortal span curtailing
That day Jean bore a child, his last The Awkward Squad fired o’er him Below her room the coffin passed Her heart held none before him
It’s surely worth the work and will To do a little learning We need no other voice to fill A Nation’s deepest yearning
Of mice and lice, and dugs and birds Society’s divisions Of trysting’s sweet and secret words And Tam o’ Shanter’s visions
The TV offers up its rot A thousand tasteless turns We should disown the bloody lot The Star is Robbie Burns
Although fixed in shape, fancifully, as ploughs, bears, archers and the like, the constellations visible to us change with the seasons. Obviously we cannot see any stars during daylight hours when we are facing the sun. The stars we can see now, in mid-winter, are only those visible from the dark side of the Earth when we are turned away from the Sun. As the Earth moves to its mid-summer position on the opposite side of the Sun a completely different set of stars become visible to us and the winter stars we see now will be obscured by sunlight during the day. That is why Orion is a winter constellation while Scorpius is seen in summer. As we slowly transition from winter to summer the stars visible at night migrate westwards in the sky. The winter constellations gradually sink below the western horizon to be replaced by summer ones rising in the east.
These perceived changes in the appearance of the heavens depend on two things the Earth is doing. It spins on its axis, giving us night and day and it orbits the Sun (at 30km a second) giving us the seasons. Because of this rapid movement of Earth around the Sun, the position of the Sun in the sky as seen from Earth changes slightly every day. For this reason sunrise actually occurs 4 minutes after the Earth has completed one single 360º rotation. For obvious practical reasons we set our clocks to sunrise and sunset – not star (sidereal) time. We divide the day into 24 hours but a complete rotation of the Earth only takes 23 hours and 56 minutes. This means that the stars appear to move westwards by 4 minutes every night. In a year this adds up to 24 hours and the stars return to the same position in the sky every 12 months as the Earth returns to its original position.
In cosmic terms the Sun is quite close to us. An astronomical unit (AU) is the distance between the Earth and the Sun. It amounts to 150 million km and it takes sunlight 8 minutes to reach us. Because the stars are so much further away from us than the Sun their positions within any given constellation appear to be fixed in the night sky despite our own journey around the Sun. By contrast the planets of our solar system wander about through the constellations in an apparently random way that intrigued ancient observers.
Obviously those fanciful pictures the stars make in the sky are not delineated by points of light stuck onto the inner surface of a dark hemisphere but to stars which vary enormously in distance from us. Although our earthly position in the solar system changes by only 2 AU every six months this does affect the relative position of stars due to the phenomenon of parallax. Parallax is the change in position of close objects relative to distant objects as the point of observation changes. Try holding one finger up against a distant background with one eye open. Now close that eye and open the other one. The change in the position of your finger is due to parallax.
In the night sky the differences are so tiny that the existence of parallax shift was debated by astronomers for many years. Indeed, the apparent lack of any observable parallax was used to argue against Copernicus’ heliocentric model of the solar system; the problem was that early astronomers like Tycho Brahe could not conceive of distances so great that the measured shift would be infinitesimal.
Using very precise measurements a closer star will be seen to move relative to more distant ones as the Earth moves by 2AU around the Sun. By measuring this minuscule shift in position and by knowing Earth’s distance from the Sun it is possible to use trigonometry to calculate the distance to the nearer star. The first scientist to do this was Friedrich Bessel in 1838. The unit of length derived from this calculation is the “parallax second” or parsec (pc) which is defined as the distance at which 1AU subtends an angle of one arcsecond. An arcsecond is a mere 1/3600th of a degree. Expressed in other more familiar terms a parsec (pc) is 3.26 light-years or 206,000 AU. The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is 1.3 pc away.
Parsecs are used to quantify distances to closer objects within our galaxy while kiloparsecs (kpc) are used for more distant intra-galactic things. Beyond our Milky Way we use megaparsecs (Mpc) for distances to the closer galaxies and gigaparsecs (Gpc) for quasars and more distant galaxies. The colossal size of these units is not easy to comprehend.
There is a famous mistake in George Lucas’ Star Wars (1977) when Han Solo refers to the Millennium Falcon having done the ‘Kessel Run’ in less than 12 parsecs. As discussed above, the parsec is a measure of distance not time despite ‘sec’ appearing in the unit’s name – and for 40 years Lucas has had trouble explaining it away.
I love pianos, the least portable instruments in the world, but wander away from the well-maintained specimen at home and you will be a hostage to fortune if you get invited to play one. Tuning to concert pitch is nice but usually a random piano will be out of tune with notes that stick or don’t work at all. The felt on the hammers of old heavily used pianos in institutions becomes compacted producing a distinctive plonking sound.
There is a story about Art Tatum and a speakeasy. Tatum was blind but his other senses were remarkably sharp. He had perfect pitch. He could tell you the date of a nickel by the noise it made when it fell on the floor or the amount of beer left in his bottle by tapping it to detect the change in pitch. This speakeasy happened to be hidden in the rear of a funeral parlour. Tatum noted the strange embalming smells as he was conducted to the hidden room at the back. There, a pianist was entertaining the customers on a terrible piano. Tatum sat down and after listening for a while remarked that the A above middle C was sticking. Presently he said, ‘Take me up there.’
‘But Art, that piano is awful,’ his companion protested.
‘Never mind, take me up there,’ he insisted.
He sat down, pushed up the stuck A key and started playing. As the dazzling runs flew over the keyboard he used his left hand to flick up the stuck-down key each time he hit it with his right. He didn’t miss a note and to the listeners there seemed to be nothing wrong with the piano.
The first piano I can recall belonged to my grandparents. It was an upright Bechstein and stood in the parlour of the house they bought in Eskbank after my grandfather retired. My mother and her older sister Hilda had played it when they were growing up. Hilda was the better and more enthusiastic musician. She died young in the 1930s of ‘acidosis’, a mysterious diagnosis that was never clarified. I suspect they kept the piano for sentimental reasons because no one was playing it by the time I appeared on the scene.
Black is the eye of the Raven, Black is the eye of the Rook, But blacker still will be the eye of the person that steals this book
We had no piano at home in Ayrshire but we visited my grandparents regularly and I became fascinated by the amazing machine, experimenting with the noises it made. One day we arrived to stay as usual – and the piano was gone. It had been sold. I was inconsolable. My grandmother said she would not have disposed of it had she known I was so keen.
After that my only regular access to a piano was in the hotel where we ate Sunday lunch after church. I would hurry through the meal and skip dessert to rush off to the ballroom for a few minutes of experimentation. I tried to pick out hymn tunes and TV themes. Eventually my parents decided they ought to encourage me and an upright – a Cramer – was purchased.
Of course it was not their intention that I play any old thing I fancied so lessons were arranged with Mr Walker, a music teacher at the local secondary school. He had a small grand piano and a very cold house. While you negotiated your badly prepared pieces with frozen fingers he would warm his hands down the back of the radiator. Although I did want to learn to read music I did not enjoy the lessons nor the annual concerts his pupils were made to play. I didn’t go as far as my younger brother who, in his desperation to avoid a piano lesson, had a bath, put on his pyjamas and went to bed. After doing the Grade I Theory exams I gave up attending Mr Walker, ostensibly to concentrate on my O-Levels, but I never went back.
Those were the days of obsessional playing and rapid progress in my ‘by-ear’ technique. I just wouldn’t stop playing and my mother sometimes locked the piano to force me to do some homework. By late secondary school I could knock out some half decent blues and boogie woogie numbers. Once, having finished an appearance as Mr Bumble the beadle in the school production of Oliver! I was ‘entertaining’ the rest of the off-stage cast with some Champion Jack Dupree in the music room behind the stage when a breathless ASM came rushing in to say I could be heard ‘front of house’ and Mr Hunter (our scary director) said I was to stop immediately.
Music was a dichotomy for me then: the cryptic specks and spots on the stave which caused me so much grief, and the melodies and chord changes I had begun to work out for myself by experimentation. It would be decades before I began to see how the two related to each other. To this day I am much happier working with chord changes and a top line than I am with formal written music – I still cannot read with any fluency.
Ironically, the point at which your friends start to think you can play is often the moment you realise you can’t. Musicians’ self-knowledge is acute. Only other musicians truly appreciate how good the best are. Technical competence is an unattainable goal for many of us but a starting point for the really gifted. Perhaps a deep knowledge of what the great players achieve is the true benefit of being a serious amateur.
Leaving for Edinburgh University meant not having access to a piano again. I could play the pianos in the bars of the Teviot Row Union but that was always a ‘performance’ in a public place. I had nowhere to practise. Then I discovered a grand piano in an unlocked side room on the top floor of the Union, above the debating hall. There was competition for this instrument from other keen students, often very good players.
A short wander from the Medical School and the Union was a music shop cheesily entitled ‘Varsity Music‘. It sold a variety of instruments including a wide range of reconditioned pianos. Despite a rather gruff affect, the owner was prepared to let me play the pianos in the shop because he thought it created a good atmosphere. In the process I learned a little about the mechanics of pianos. He recommended German makes which were steel framed and overstrung. A steel frame was proof against warping and over-stringing meant longer base strings and a better tone. Above all you did not want to buy a piece of old British furniture with a wooden frame.
Eventually, when I got a flat of my own in third year, I bought a suitable reconditioned upright piano from Varsity Music. I was then able to resume my obsession – and the musical torture of the neighbours. I also acquired a Wurlitzer 200A Electronic Piano. This instrument had been used in recordings by Ray Charles (What’d I Say?) and the band Supertramp (Dreamer). I had hopes to perform with it but at 25kg with awkward screw-in legs it wasn’t really portable.
I played a bit in pubs and clubs around the city after that, then in August 1977 I arranged my fourth year medical student elective at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, a teaching hospital that was part of New York University Medical School. I would be in the States for 9 weeks. At that time it was still possible to hear the best jazz musicians in the world playing at intimate venues in Midtown and Greenwich Village. The Village Gate on Bleecker Street was recommended. It had a ground floor bar that was open to the street and a performance venue upstairs. The piano in the bar had been stripped down to show the action and a mic was suspended over it for amplification.
My problem was the $15 cover charge which represented three days-worth of my allowance. I starved myself until I had enough cash. A kindly barman took pity on me and offered me free drinks if I could play the piano. In desperation I accepted. Once I got going, and drinks started arriving, he introduced me to the owner Art D’Lugoff who said I could play in the bar for drinks and get free admission to the gigs upstairs. I accepted.
Musicians hung around the bar and one night I played with Steve Knight formerly of Mountain. The big room upstairs was L-shaped with a stage at the angle. Over the weeks of my ‘residency’ I saw Memphis Slim, Earl Hines, Charlie Mingus and Dizzy Gillespie; each of them twice. At one point Memphis Slim was drinking in the downstairs bar while I was playing, tapping his fingers in time on the table. I got to speak to him and shake his hand.
A New York DJ I met asked if I wanted to stay with him while I tried to get gigs, but the few short weeks I was there were enough to convince me I had neither the talent nor the desire to emulate the outwardly rather grim lives of the brilliant musicians I had met. I returned to university in Edinburgh and to playing in pubs.
A few years later once I was embroiled in the junior doctor years my grandmother died and left me a little money. I hadn’t given this windfall much thought when my girlfriend suggested I replace my old upright with something decent. I went to a proper piano shop, the kind that had a flock of grands in the showroom with their lids up, asking to be played. It was immediately obvious that a new German grand was well out of my reach but I noticed they had a Yamaha G2 ‘boudoir grand’ that was within budget. As far as I was aware Yamaha made motorcycles. It had never occurred to me that their logo was three crossed tuning forks.
Yamaha has been making musical instruments, including pianos, since the nineteenth century, long before they made motor bikes. In the Far East their pianos populate the hotels, schools and concert halls. The Yamaha in the shop sounded bright and clean to me and had a nice action. I thought it suited jazz and blues. The girl in the shop said it was her favourite instrument too – so I bought it.
My flat at the time was on the top two floors of an Edinburgh New Town tenement. I was wondering how the shop might deliver such a massive object to such an inaccessible place. The van turned up with the piano crated up in the back. The rear lift lowered the crate onto the pavement where a team of men lifted it onto a small aluminium dolly with solid rubber wheels. They only lifted the piano when they came to steps. The rest of the time they moved it effortlessly on the dolly. In no time the piano was in my study and being de-crated. They fixed the legs on, turned it over and were gone. My friend Jim Dalziel painted it for me to celebrate the occasion. In due course it migrated to our current home where it sits in the bay window of the dining room. I’ve played it almost every day for over 35 years.
I abandoned the lonely business of playing piano in pubs as proper work took over my life but after a very long break with no performances I started playing with rock bands. Properly amplified music with a PA and fold-backs was terra incognita to me. This meant adding a proper stage piano, a Yamaha P-80 with the full 88 weighted keys. It had several very convincing sampled piano sounds and a decent range of organs. As the Capitols sang in Cool Jerk, “Now, give me a little bit of bass, with those 88’s”.
Later still, as a radiologist, I attended a series of medical conferences in Chicago. We settled on the Palmer House Hilton as our favourite shake-down. It’s impossibly grand with a painted ceiling in the vast atrium. It also has the Empire Room where Liberace made his debut. In it is a suitably grand piano. I have no idea if it is the grand piano – but I played it and one of my juniors recorded it.
A final note: the farm I grew up on is called Changue, a descriptive Gaelic place name pronounced ‘chang’. Farmers are often known by the name of their farms rather than their actual surnames – as in Knockterra, Auchengilsie, Cooperhill, Changue etc. Their sons are referred to as ‘Young’ followed by the farm name. I was therefore ‘Young Changue’ to many local farmers. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that in South Korea there is a company called Young Chang – and they make pianos.
New Year’s Day, Ne’erday, pronounced ‘Newerday’ in our part of East Ayrshire, was a significant day on the farm where I grew up. On a dairy farm caring for the animals has to continue every day of the year and the farm workers, whether on or off duty, would be invited to come into the kitchen at intervals during the day to have a drink and a piece of homemade cake or shortbread, known as their ‘Ne’erday’.
A sort of Lord of Misrule situation applied on these occasions and older members of the farm staff would enjoy recounting stories of Changue as they remembered it from long ago. Although my father was 47 when I was born, Mary McKrindle the dairy maid remembered him, his two brothers and his sister as children. She also remembered my grandmother, suffering from acute appendicitis, being taken away to Glasgow, never to return. That was in 1920 and my father, the eldest of the children, was 14 when she died.
My father and his mother in 1908
In due course a stepmother arrived who was thereafter referred to as ‘Mrs S’ within the family. When my grandfather, her husband, died in 1932 my father was left to lead the family and the business at the age of only 25. Mrs S, apparently lacking any confidence in Dad’s youthful judgement, left Changue and went off to Glasgow. When I was born 22 years later in 1954 there was no longer any reason for my parents to mention her at all. One day my mother took us aside in the morning room and said, ‘I think you boys should know that Mrs S has died’. Although the name was vaguely familiar to us we had no idea who she was referring to.
In addition to my father and his siblings James, Willie and Nan, there had been a wee brother David who was scalded to death in an accident on the farm aged 2. That story filled us with dread and was perhaps meant to engender caution on our part when playing all day unsupervised among so many agricultural dangers.
Changue in the 1950s
On the other side of the family my mother’s parents were not that much older than my father. My grandad was born in 1892 and my father in 1907. It seemed perfectly natural to us to have just the one set of grandparents.
My mother was very close to her parents who having retired from farming nearby, lived in Eskbank. We visited each other many times a year, becoming very familiar with the A70. We knew the coal mining count-down of Howgate, Rosewell, Bonnyrigg and Lasswade before we reached Eskbank and Fala House. The sulphurous smell of smouldering pit bings told us we were getting close to our destination.
Granny and Grandad always came to Changue for Christmas and New Year. We played cards and stayed up for the bells, watching TV. Being awake at midnight was a strange and unfamiliar experience. Granny and Grandad toasted the new year with soft drinks like Schweppes Bitter Lemon. All the adults held strong christian beliefs and my father was an elder of the Kirk. Drinking any alcohol other than perhaps a sweet sherry was frowned upon even at the great midwinter celebration.
Nevertheless it was exciting to be allowed to stay up late and we accepted the naff offerings on TV without question. The White Heather Club dancers, Andy Stewart, Duncan McRae and Ricky Fulton tripped their monochrome way across the Ferranti set with its wooden doors and bakelite knobs.
Below the screen were two large round knobs; one to switch the set off and on and the other for volume. Between these, in a little fold-down compartment, were additional controls: brightness, contrast, vertical hold and horizontal hold. When we finally got STV, a small maroon box with cream switches appeared on top of the cabinet. This meant we could rush our lunch and watch Larry ‘sit back and relax’ Marshall and the One O’Clock Gang before going back to school in the afternoon. It supplied a vocabulary of really bad jokes by which to judge better ones later.
There was a certain thrill to the change in the year, a much more significant event if your age is still in single digits. I can recall the Blue Peter programme pointing out that 1961 read the same upside down as it did the right way up and later years seemed to have an almost science fiction air of modernity as the numbers ticked up. The Sixties were all about relentless modernity.
At primary school early one January I overheard some boys telling each other a hilarious joke which included some words I was not familiar with. I carefully remembered it so I could entertain my father when he collected me at lunchtime.
“Dad, do you know what year it is?”
“Eh, what year is it then?”
“It’s f*****g nineteen b********g sixty one!”
Dad’s thoughts, as usual, were miles from the subject but he suddenly became very focussed.
“You must never, ever, use words like that again! That’s a very bad thing to say!”
I was totally crestfallen. Like many jokes I would attempt later it hadn’t gone down as well as I hoped.
The Bohemian Waxwing 