One of the final touches to the flat before flinging it open to the unsuspecting property-vultures was to replace the floor covering in the kitchen closet. This is what was underneath the old linoleum.

These are pages from a newspaper from September 1915, not long after this tenement was built. I don’t suppose whoever put them there intended to let them fester until they resembled a Kurt Schwitters collage, and if they did they left them too long to be able to claim to have invented Dada a year before Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara got together at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich.

Given the date I was expecting details of a military campaign but instead the news is dominated by the recall of Konstantin Dumba, the last Austro-Hungarian ambassador to the United States, following accusations of espionage.

I was not familiar with this episode of the First World War and had to look it up. I couldn’t find any link between Dumba and Glasgow, but when I told someone the story at work, I was surprised to learn that before the war the Austro-Hungarian empire was represented here by the famous shipping magnate and art collector William Burrell who held the post of consul until 1906, according to the Dictionary of National Biography.

It seems unlikely the two ever met (Dumba was serving as Minister to Serbia at the time) and Burrell’s acquaintance with Central Europe may not have been extensive, if the recollections of an encounter in 1932 are to be believed. This was on the occasion of the first visit to Glasgow by Béla Bartók who was a guest of the Scottish composer Erik Chisholm (himself sometimes compared to Bartók as a modernist who drew extensively on the idioms of his country’s folk and traditional music).

Chisholm’s wife, Diana, recalled:

When we knew Bartók was coming to Glasgow to stay with us, the first thing, which worried us, was – language difficulty. None of us, of course, could speak one word of Hungarian. Would our famous guest be any better with English? I immediately bought an ‘English-cum-Hungarian’ dictionary, (by the time I left Scotland I had entertained so many continental composers, musicians, and singers, that I had a very comprehensive collection of ‘English-cums’). I pictured myself standing on the station platform anxiously scanning the face of every male, who, in my opinion, looked ‘foreign’, and gesticulating wildly with the dictionary. However, I was rescued (or thought I was) from this predicament by the Hungarian Consul in Glasgow, Sir William Burrell, who telephoned me the day before Bartók’s arrival to say that he also would like to come to the station to receive this distinguished visitor from Hungary.

‘Luck’, I thought, ‘this lets me out’. So you can imagine my disappointment, when, on meeting Sir William a few minutes before the train was due to arrive (8.35 p.m. on February 28 1932), he said he hoped that either my husband or I could speak Hungarian because he could not.

‘Well’, I said laughingly, ‘you’re the official representative so you can get on with it.’ But we need not have worried. When the Flying Scotsman arrived and the passengers alighted from the train it was quite simple to recognise him. There was only one Béla Bartók! A small white-haired man, wearing a black Homburg hat, thick black coat with a heavy Astrakhan collar and armed with a music case in one hand and an umbrella in the other. Who I wondered had forewarned him about Glasgow’ s weather?

Sir William went forward at once to greet him, and I swear I saw a look of relief flit across the consul’s face when Bartók said in a softly spoken, broken English accent, ‘Bartók is my name’. After that all went smoothly. Later in the day, my husband and I admitted to each other that we had both felt ashamed that not one of the party who came to receive him could reply to him in his language, least of all the Consul.¹

Whether Sir William was still the Consul at that time I have been unable to confirm. I don’t know a word of Hungarian either, although I did find something else when I was clearing out the flat. I had not opened my copy of Bartók’s 44 Duos for two violins in more than thirty years.

In a fit of insanity I disturbed my violin out of hibernation. The downstairs neighbours must have been grateful the episode was very brief.

Notes

1. Erik Chisholm, ‘Béla Bartók: The Shy Genius’, available for download from the Erik Chisholm website.

I am old enough to remember decimalisation, which finally took place in Britain forty years ago this week. As an eleven-year-old in his first year at secondary school, who had never been abroad, it was my first taste of that slightly queasy feeling you get when you have to think in two different currencies at once. I recall the frisson as p’s and d’s mingled promiscuously in my pocket, the conversion tables on the walls of post offices and newsagents, the impending obsolescence of the eleven and twelve times tables.

But above all I am reminded of an event some ten years later: now a student at Birmingham University whose routes across the city often took in one of the alternative bookshops that nurtured the subculture. These institutions, defined negatively in that they offered what mainstream bookshops did not – a good coverage of left-wing politics, imported fiction and poetry, alternative health and non-western religion – nevertheless came to feel as if they obeyed a single organic principle.

They flourished in university towns, but not exclusively. As a teenager, I regularly visited a tiny one in Blackburn, Lancashire on my way home from school, spending money from a paper round on treats like How to Grow Your Own Marijuana, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn and the latest issues of Peace News.

Nowadays, that rapprochement is almost over, the trade fragmented between Buddhist Centres, herbalist emporia, welfare rights offices, with gentrified boutiques like the London Review Bookshop virtually the only places left for readers who think of themselves of independent mind. Where now can you walk in off the street and pick up a copy of Amilcar Cabral, Alexandra Kollontai or Ernest Mandel?

The nearest to my first flat in Birmingham was in Moseley, its volumes of Gramsci and Jung always faintly perfumed with jasmine and patchouli, although, with its squeaky wooden floors and gloomy mezzanine to the rear, retaining a studious air missing from its more activist-oriented twin situated on the curve of St Martins Circus Queensway in the city centre, filled with natural light that nurtured house plants and made hand-written cards curl around drawing pins on the noticeboard.

A mile away was the Communist Party bookshop, tucked away a block or two back from the busy A38, which pretty much stuck to printed material and felt a little more intimidating and austere in comparison, although it was already livened up with the snazzy covers of Martin Jacques’ Marxism Today and Robert Natkin’s colourful abstract paintings that adorned the cover of the first generation of Verso’s translations of French, German and Italian socialist intellectuals (most of whom are hardly spoken of today).

Not that these developments left much mark on Progressive Books and Asian Arts in Selly Oak. There were fans, incense, some fabrics and posters, but I was drawn to the shelves lined with the cream paperbacks of Peking’s Foreign Languages Press editions of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and of course Mao himself, alongside the darker hues of the rather more durable hardbacks that offered their Selected or Collected Works. A ramble on the web just now tells me that the bookshop was run in the 1970s by Jagmothan Joshi, General Secretary of the Indian Workers Association, a fact of which I was completely unaware at the time. When I used to visit, the proprietor was a taciturn and somewhat intense man in his late twenties or early thirties, perhaps an eternal postgraduate, whose longish hair, cardigan and brown suede shoes made me think of Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Not long after I discovered it, the shop was holding a closing-down sale, offering two-thirds off all stock. I chose The Poverty of Philosophy (60p, still pencilled on the now rather faded cover), Selected Letters of Marx and Engels (also 60p), Anti-Dühring (which seems to have disappeared from my collection) and a volume of Mao’s Selected Writings that included the Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan and On Contradiction (£2). Even at marked prices they represented excellent value for money at a time when – as a glance at the back covers of other books I bought around the same time reveals – a copy of Discipline and Punish would have set me back £2.95 and Althusser’s For Marx a stomach-clenching £4.25.

And for each one, Stockhausen diligently calculated the promised discount. And what I liked about this ritual was, when he took up the Penguin edition of Engels’ Selected Works and noticed that the price printed on the back cover – for it must have been on the shelf for more than a decade – was an uncorrected 7 shillings and sixpence, without missing a beat he rapidly executed the mental arithmetic and informed me, with a hint of a smile, that I owed him 12½p.

I don’t know if this sale made the slightest difference to his fortunes as he made his way in the world following the shop’s demise. But in honouring the agreement to reduce his prices to the point at which they became almost meaningless I think he made a tiny difference to mine.

Yesterday, the Observer, followed a long – but not, I think, distinguished – New Year tradition of asking a panel of experts to predict the future. Specifically, their brief was to identify the key developments they expected to take place in the next twenty five years in various fields, ‘from the web to wildlife, the economy to nanotechnology, politics to sport.’

What is troubling about this – and similar – projections is not their proverbial inaccuracy. An AIDS vaccine, driverless cars, the answer to the dark matter question. Who knows if and when they will arrive? The problem is their use of the first person plural.

• ‘We will be sharing videos, simulations, experiences and environments, on a multiplicity of devices to which we’ll pay as much attention as a light switch.’
• ‘I think we’ll be cycling and walking more.’
• ‘We’ll learn more about intervening in our biology at the sub-cellular level and this nano-medicine will give us new hope of overcoming really difficult and intractable diseases.’

What is it about the future tense that makes ‘we’ so attractive? Switch it to the present or the past and the universality it seems to imply would look distinctly forced. Is it not possible that some people might benefit or suffer from these changes more than others? Will the shining rays of the world to come strike us all at the same angle?

Why is it that these predictions always seem to invoke an undifferentiated ‘we’ when the disappearance of social division and inequality is not one of them?

I recently came across an old notebook in which I scribbled a holiday diary of sorts. As usual it petered out quickly into merely practical memos (addresses, phone numbers, train times) but it began well – as these things often do, with the enforced captivity of a transatlantic flight as inspiration. In this case, it was en route from Amsterdam to Washington DC that I read Chekhov’s ‘The Lady with Lapdog’ (in David Magarshack’s translation), and felt compelled to record my responses.

The dog plays only a minor role in the story. G, a late thirties’ serial adulterer, is in Yalta, his curiosity excited by a new arrival, a lady with a lapdog. He sees her first walking along the promenade as he sits in a restaurant. And then again, and again. Always ‘followed by the white pomeranian’. ‘No one knew who she was, and she became known as the lady with the lapdog.’

The narrator tells us a little about his marriage and his attitude towards women, which is disrespectul, and yet he is drawn to female company, as women are to him. He is seized with the desire to seduce her, and his chance comes when she happens to sit at the next table in a restaurant in the park. The dog provides useful pretext to talk to her, for G first attracts its attention, and in fact she speaks to him first: ‘He doesn’t bite,’ she said and blushed. She says she’s bored in Yalta and G makes a droll remark that gently chides her statement as a somewhat ridiculous cliché.

That’s what one usually hears people saying here. A man may be living in Belev and Zhizdra or some other God-forsaken hold and he isn’t bored, but the moment he comes here all you hear from him is “Oh, it’s so boring! Oh, the dust!” You’d think he’d come from Granada!

She laughs. We learn her name, A, and she’s quite young, only two years married, although she doesn’t know what her husband’s job is. G is attracted to her youth – only recently ‘she had been a schoolgirl like his own daughter’; to her ‘diffidence and angularity’ evident in her laughter and her conversation with a stranger. G concludes that is is the first time she had found herself alone in the company of predatory men.

He gets off with her, but the time comes for her to return home to S__ and they both seem to agree that they will never see each other again. But G is unable to get her out of his head and in December he tells his wife he is going to St Petersburg, but instead goes to S__ where he takes a room in a hotel and, having learnt A’s address, observes the house from the street. He hears her playing the piano, and even sees an old woman appear at the front door with the lapdog. But he can’t risk announcing his presence, and returns to his hotel, deciding to go to the theatre that evening to the first performance of The Geisha Girl. And of course A is also there, with a man he supposes is her husband. During the interval he takes advantage of her husband’s absence to approach her seat in the stalls. She hurriedly leaves the auditorium and they steal a few tense, intimate moments on a narrow staircase. She implores him to leave immediately, but promises to visit G in Moscow.

And she does. Every few months, she leaves P__ to visit her Moscow gynaecologist (so she tells her husband, who believes her and doesn’t believe her), takes a room at the Slav Bazaar, dispatching a porter with a message for G when she arrives.

The story concludes with an account of one of these secret meetings. (On this occasion, he doesn’t receive her message till the following morning, and he goes to the hotel after dropping his daughter off at school). She bursts into tears, wanting so much the secrecy to end, while G glances at himself in the mirror – reflecting on his advancing years and realizing that he had fallen in love for the first time in his life. And Chekhov leaves us on the threshold of a complicated future.

Then they had a long talk. They tried to think how they could get rid of the necessity of hiding, telling lies, living in different towns, not seeing one another for so long. How were they to free themselves from their intolerable chains?
‘”How? How?” he asked himself, clutching at his head. “How?”

And it seemed to them that in only a few more minutes a solution would be found and a new, beautiful life would begin; but both of them knew very well that the end was still a long, long way away and that the most complicated and difficult part was only just beginning.

If we rewrote this story and moved it closer to home, with a title like ‘Lady with Laptop’, how would this work? The opening scenes could take place in Rothesay. G would be from Glasgow. A from a small town outside Edinburgh: Musselburgh perhaps.

A would certainly attract some comment if she appeared in Rothesay, sitting down in parks, restaurants, opening up her laptop and typing away. Certainly it would provide a useful ‘way in’ for a predatory male such as G to initiate a conversation.

The laptop, like the dog, could fade into the background once it had served this purpose (maybe reappearing – like the dog – once more, as G stalks outside her Musselburgh home, and catches a glimpse of it through the window?). But it would be good to introduce a twist.

One possibility is that she herself is writing a story. So while Chekhov’s story privileges G’s point of view – and it is his transformation from adulterer to genuine lover that is its focus – this reworking would offer a glimpse of A’s version of the affair as it appears in the story or diary she is writing on her laptop. Or perhaps she’s posting updates to a blog or social network account of which G, but not the reader, is totally unaware.

In a previous post I drew on a much-quoted passage from George Orwell – the miscellaneous catalogue of what he thought were ‘characteristic fragments of the English scene’ which included that line about ‘old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn mornings’. It wouldn’t be quite so well known, perhaps, if John Major hadn’t used it in a speech to the Conservative Party Conference in 1993, changing ‘biking’ to ‘cycling’, presumably to make sure we didn’t confuse these old maids with Hell’s Angels.

And then last night I started reading Stuart Maconie’s Adventures on the High Teas: In Search of Middle England (2009). I’m not sure why. I guess books about Englishness are my version of car crash TV. There is something compellingly baffling about the way journalists, travel writers and cultural critics talk about Englishness as if it were a remotely meaningful concept. You won’t find its equivalent anywhere else. The French obsessing over francaisitude or an Italian crisis of italianità? Even the Scots only talk about Scottishness in order to disown it. In fact if there is one thing that the English do have in common, it is an uncontrollable urge to talk about Englishness, something they never define, just illustrate with lists which they trade with each other like marbles or cigarette cards.

Anyway, Maconie writes just two pages before he cites Orwell. And then he makes the following remark:

Orwell actually had his maids ‘hiking’, which sounds oddly transatlantic; Major’s misquotation is the one that has passed into legend.

This rather took me aback. Had I got it wrong? I surely wasn’t the only one. I hunted out my copy of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume II: ‘My Country Right or Left’ (London: Secker and Warburg, 1968). There on page 57 it was unmistakable: ‘biking.’ It is the only edition I had and the library was shut so I couldn’t check further. But what is Maconie’s authority for ‘hiking’?

Comparative web searching produces surprising results. On Google, ‘old maids biking to Holy Communion’ yielded 1,120 hits, while ‘old maids hiking to Holy Communion’ gave 258. Google Books scored 122 and 3 respectively. ‘Biking’ was a clear winner, but why so many for ‘hiking’?

It would seem that the culprit is an electronic version of the essay, available online from K1 Internet Publishing based in Vienna. Like many electronic books – especially unauthorized ones – it does not specify the source document. Even in the single paragraph in which this line appears I spotted at least three more variations from the Secker and Warburg edition. Is this a case of careless editing by the team that digitized it? Or is it – unlikely as it may appear – an ur-text that deserves wider recognition? Somehow, I don’t see the – notoriously litigious – Orwell estate giving out prizes any time soon.

Twelve hours later I’m still being stalked by this film. The Mexicans Are All Right I think it was called. A withering portrait of self-absorbed adults from the point of view of two adolescents, if I have understood correctly. In one scene – surely a fable in which the audience is meant to recognize itself – one of the adults realizes her Third World employee had been enjoying some sneaky glimpses of her adulterous romps while he should have been working in the garden. She’s unsettled by his expression and challenges him. ‘That’s not a look,’ he says. ‘It’s my face.’

Whatever. I woke this morning from the richest dream-world I had been in for a long time. I was briefly flung together with a former partner. We were both so concerned not to give in to our old feelings, there were some tender caresses and a strip of flesh, but mostly we circulated independently during what seemed to be a holiday reunion weekend. We were out and about, catching performances at a festival of some sort, then returned to a house our friends had rented. Or perhaps it belonged to the parents of one of them. There was some uncertainty about the sleeping arrangements. Nervously, I bought a pack of cigarettes for the first time in months and smoked one. I went out and came back as it was getting light, a little drunk and dripping wet, frantically trying to locate my bag so I could put on some dry clothes, in the end finding only a shirt that wasn’t quite long enough to be decent.

The epilogue featured me sitting on some steps in warm sunlight. I was in the centre of a small town, among people I knew, taking photographs of their children, and some poorly-dressed kids I hadn’t seen before, who unexpectedly walked into shot. ‘Street arabs,’ I called them, hoping they would not miss my irony.

In an appealing article on Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Don Paterson speaks up in favour of a more direct, personal response to the poems, against some of the more forbidding works of literary critics. Yet he lets slip a rather extensive knowledge of their Elizabethan context which he then seems to assume his reader shares. As if we’re all clued up on the names and addresses of Shakespeare’s known associates. ‘The trouble,’ he says, ‘is that it’s impossible to read the sonnets without speculating on identities.’

Well not for me. But then again I know as little about Tudor England as I do about…

Quite why I resolve the momentary dilemma of having to choose just one thing from the vast gunny sack of my ignorance by lighting on modern Basingstoke is something of a mystery. Perhaps the home of the Automobile Association and the Macmillan publishing firm ranks quite high in the list of British placenames that proverbially suggest a certain comic mediocrity. And for those who would say that it’s not too difficult to imagine Basingstoke if you haven’t been there, that a quick visit to a small library or a well-aimed search query should reveal its essential features if not its deepest secrets, I would refer them to my birthplace. In twenty years I acquired a high level of psycho-geographical mastery of its back streets, playing fields, waste grounds and cul de sacs. But of most of the neighbouring towns and villages I saw little beyond the main roads that passed through them, oblivious of the unexpected turns and confusing junctions that would have no doubt greeted those strangers who dared to alight from the bus, overtaken by a sudden impulse to explore the unknown.

The nearest I’ve been to Basingstoke was during the few summer months I spent in Reading in 1979, lodging with a Ukrainian couple near Cemetery Junction. Twice, I think, some friends with a car drove me to a country pub off the A33 and a bracing walk on a day that may or may not have resembled the one the author of Sonnet 18 had in mind when he penned its first line.