Mumble Words

Vint Bridge At Shiskine

Posted on February 1, 2022 Updated on February 1, 2022

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One

It is said on Arran the wind has a soul, & that this soul has a voice, & that sometimes it sings. A seasonal soul, that is, for thro’ the darker months of the year the wind certainly found something to sing about. Wagnerian, some Arranites would fondly recall when visiting some sultrier clime.

The empty spaces of an Arran winter are a complete antithesis to its tourist-teeming summer acres, for during the shorter days only 5000 happy residents compete for over two hundred square miles. The island of Malta, by contrast, despite being the same physical size as Arran, is home to half a million. Lots of fun to be had at the ‘navel of the world,’ whatever time of year. “But one must keep oneself occupied,” mused Beatrice, or Betty MacKinley, to herself, at the other European extreme, one January evening which offer’d nothing but extreme boredom. Exactly one week later she had formally enroll’d in the Arran Bridge Club. 

By the following winter she was playing vint three times a week – on Tuesdays, Thursdays, & Saturdays. Sunday was of course the most suitable day for cardplay, but had to be set aside for island duties, such as family visits, church services & other religious misdemeanours. They were playing vint, a  kind of auction bridge, because the Arran Bridge Club had voted against allowing such an exotic variant into their dusty old cloisters, & thus a schisming splinter-group had form’d in the Shiskine valley.

They play’d as follows; the corpulent & hot-temper’d Robert, or Bobby Mentieth play’d with Archibald, or Archie Alexander; while Betty partner’d her brother, the morose John, or Jock, as this forename rolls throughout the Scots. The reason Betty gave was that, to play against her brother gave her no sort of interest, for if one lost, the other won, & although the stakes were insignificant, the money would still be going to the family. She never could understand the use of playing a game for playing’s sake.

The players always assembl’d in Jock’s house – he had a lovely conservatory overlooking Machrie Moor, the sea & the ever-changing Atlantic weather systems. He lived alone, so there was perfect silence for the games, except for an occasional piece of classical music on Saturdays, which sometimes revolv’d under the soft spike of a gramophone needle. Jock was a widower; he lost his wife in the second year of their marriage, & for almost six months lay sick in an Edinburgh hospital for mental afflictions. His sister was five years younger, & the veritable baby of the party, at a not so tender forty-three years of age. She was also unmarried, but like her brother she had been wedded once, with the divorce being catalyzed like so. ‘Tata,’ a Russian prima donna who was living & working in Glasgow at the same time as Betty & her husband, had call’d upon the marital home quite spontaneously. Her husband was a painter of scenery at the city opera house, while Tata was supposed to be a soprano, but whose pitch wilted into mezzo from time to time. Nobody ever dared mention it, however, else incur the wrath of a corner’d, glorious Muscovite. 

Betty had been washing vegetables in anticipation of a fine broth, when there had been a knocking on the door. 

“Announce me,” said Tata, spreading out her train, & Betty, who never gave herself airs, announc’d her. Betty’s husband soon arrived, enslav’d in an aura of awe as Tata put forth all her arts to dazzle the poor man into a certain sensual servility. It was at the very moment she was flicking a long rivulet of flowing auburn hair from one of her large & partially exposed breasts that a powerful groan of thunder, like Poseidon waking from slumber, erupted in the sky-chambers over Glasgow. With almost immediate effect there began to hurtle down one of those showers which had been recently spoiling so many hats, & bringing so many roses into bloom.

“Good gracious! How it’s coming down,” said Tata. “May I trouble you to let your maid fetch a taxi?”

This was the perfect moment for Betty’s husband to prove himself worthy of her adulation, for an honest man would have here said, “I haven’t a maid, this lovely vision is my wife.” Alas, the man, or half a man, was a coward, & replied, “certainly.” Twirling his thumbs, he went into the kitchen where Betty was now slicing her vegetables, with a rather sharp looking knife which her husband clearly couldn’t see, so blinded by the attractions of Tata had he become.

“Madame Tata,” he utter’d, “is wearing a satin gown & satin shoes. It is raining cats & dogs & it would be wonderful if you could…”

“Fetch her a cab,” ask’d Betty, giving her husband a flaming glance that ought to have made him sink directly into the earth. “Fetch a cab! Well I never ! Hold on a minute.”

Betty went outside, getting her only pair of boots soak’d right through to her stockings. Her eyes, once bright as the stars, were now dark as doom itself. Her husband had never even waited at the door with a towel or anything, the wake of which was a month-long pantomime of cold soups & warm beer. No more rosy slices of smok’d salmon, sausages, bacon, roast potatoes, pies & butter’d sprouts, all wash’d down with a fine whiskey & a bottle of Irish stout. Just cold soup & warm beer. Betty, who used to rise with the lark to attend the marital home, could now only be awoken with difficulty after eleven o’clock, murmuring, “surely its not daylight, yet.” The house, formerly so spotless that you could have sought a grain of dust in vain, resembl’d the aftermath of an errant tsunami as it pull’d back from some unsuspecting coastal village. 

“Betty, its such a mess,” tutted her husband one day. “But I fetch’d the cab,” she replied, which pretty much form’d the refrain of all their future verbal engagements. 

“You don’t love me anymore; you never kiss me.” “No, my dear, but I fetch’d the cab.”

Betty left her husband after a month, spent a year at her brothers at Shiskine, then got her own place not far away. Two decades of life later they were still in each other’s orbit & had evolv’d into fine bridge partners. Of this particular arrangement of players at the AVC – the Arran Vint Club as they quite proudly call’d themselves – Bobby Mentieth was, at first, especially displeas’d. He was annoy’d at always having to play with Archie Alexander, that is, in other words, to lose all hope of ever making a gand slam no trumps. In every way he & his partner were entirely unsuited. Archie was a weary, dried-up fellow, dress’d summer & winter in dark coat & trousers, & was always silent & severe. Without fail he would appear punctually at eight o clock, not a moment before or after, & straightwise take a pack of cards up in his fingers, one of which appendages was crown’d by an over-large diamond, set in a circlet of pure gold. What annoy’d Bobby the most in his partner, however, was that he refused to make a higher contract than four tricks, even if his hand was certainly worth more. 

Polar oppositely Bobby always took risks, was a bad card holder & consequently a serial loser, but never losing heart, invariably hoping to win the very next time. Eventually, & relievingly for the siblings, the two mens’ styles soon melded efficiently enough, & they began to play rather well together, a reconciliation all who have felt the spirit of the tao could have easily predicted. 

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Two

The seasons pass’d on Arran as they always do – pleasurably. Meanwhile, in that ornate conservatory at Shiskine, the games of vint continued with the same enthusiasm as the very first hands they’d play’d. Outside, the doddering old world pursued its varied career; now red with blood, now drench’d with tears, now wrestling with worry; leaving in its track the groans of the sick, the naked & the wrong’d. Fascism was rising in Europe, while over in Manchuria the Japanese were running a deadly riot. Some faint suggestion of all this was sometimes brought in by Bobby Mentieth, but only as a distraction when he was late & came in to see the others already seated at table, fifty-two pink cards laid fanwise on the green cloth, & the tick-tock of the old clocks the loudest they’d ever tell the time. 

Bobby, red-cheek’d & carrying the fresh air with him, hurriedly occupied his place across from Archie & said;

“It seems Hitler is about to enter the Rhineland.” 

Betty consider’d it her duty as a co-hostess of sorts to notice the idiosyncrasies of her guests. Thus, while Archie gather’d in & shuffl’d the pack in grim silence, she alone answer’d.

“I’m sure the League of Nations will sort it out, but hadn’t we better start?” & so they began, slowly stepping into the silence of an undiscover’d Sumerian tomb, their conjoin’d breathing becoming the monetary equivalent of a fraction of a fraction of a farthing.

On & on they play’d. Twice a week in the spring, summer, autumn; thrice a week in winter. There were incidents, but chiefly of an amusing character. Sometimes Jock would forget altogether what his sister had said, & once, having contracted for five tricks, fail’d to make one. Bobby laugh’d loudly & magnified his loss, while Archie remark’d drily: “If you’d only gone four you’d have been nearer getting it.” Betty laugh’d, for it seem’d just for a moment Jock’s everfriendly grin, aflash with white even teeth, had spontaneously transmorph’d into a set of crooked ladders lying awkwardly against a wall.

Betty conceal’d her feelings best, but always display’d intense excitement when she contracted for slam. She grew a trembling red, not knowing which card to play, looking piteously at her taciturn brother, while her two opponents, with knightly courtesy for her womanhood & helplessness, encouraged her with condescending smiles, then waited patiently. 

Generally speaking, however, they took the game very seriously. To this renegade, musketeering quartet the cards had long ceas’d to be mere inanimate objects. Each hand, & every card in that hand, had its own particular individuality, & lived its own life full of wishes, tastes, sympathies, & caprice. The cards always combined differently, & when commingling with each player’s personality added even more mind-boggling combinations to the possible procession of play. Forget Go, forget Chess, it was thro’ vint bridge at Shiskine that the mathematical universe could really unfurl its infinite tapestry. 

Hearts usually went to Archie – Archie’s hearts they call’d them – while Betty’s hand was usually full of spades, tho’ she never lik’d them at all. Bobby always held bad hands. At times, for several evenings in succession, he could hold nothing but twos & threes, for which reason he was firmly convinced he would never make a grand slam, as the cards knew of his great aim & thwarted him on purpose. In the night-times following such desperately unlucky evenings, Bobby would fall asleep dreaming of winning a grand slam no trumps. So many times did this dream-desire manifest itself that it became the strongest wish of his life.

Other incidents happen’d, not immediately connected with cards. Archie crash’d his car into a deer on one occasion, leaving the bonnet thoroughly damaged, forcing his son to drive him to Shiskine. Then, Bobby disappear’d for two whole weeks, & the AVC didn’t know what to do at all; three-handed vint was contrary to their habit & turn’d out to be rather boring indeed. When Bobby return’d safely, his red face, which had shown up so vividly against his scanty white locks, had grown pale, & he seem’d to have shrunk. He inform’d them that his son had been arrested for some offence & was currently in prison in Fife. All were astonish’d, for they never even knew he had a son: perhaps he had mention’d it some time or other, but they had forgotten all about it. Soon afterwards he again fail’d to appear, & upon the Saturday when they were accustom’d to play for longer. They were also astonish’d to discover that Bobby had suffer’d from angina thro’ all these seasons of serious cardplay, & that he had suffer’d a severe attack that Saturday morning. But afterwards all went on as before, & the game became even more serious & interesting as Bobby regal’d them less & less with topics of the outside world.

Last Thursday, however, there was a startling change!

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Three

As soon as the game began last Thursday, Bobby Mentieth made a contract of five, & won not only his contract but a small slam, as Archie had an ace & kept quiet about it. For some time after Bobby held his usual cards, but then started a series of good cards in suits, as if the cards themselves wish’d to see how pleas’d he would be. Then he bid to play for the game, & all were astonish’d, even the phlegmatic Archibald Alexander. The excitement of seeing the furious tremblings of his partner’s chubby fingers infected him & all the other players.

“What’s up with you today?” huff’d the gloomy Jock MacKinley, who fear’d somebody else’s good luck was the precursor of the next level of his own life’s misfortunes. On the other hand his sister was delighted to think that Bobby was doing rather well for once, & curtly responded, “the cards must give everyone a turn!”

After Jock dealt the next hand, Bobby pick’d up his thirteen cards. Fanning them out slowly, his heart almost stopp’d beating & a sylvan mist rose before his eyes – he held twelve certain tricks in his hand: the clubs & hearts from ace to ten, the ace & king of diamonds. If only he could pick up the ace of spades in the exchange he had the grand slam no trumps.

“Two no trumps,” he began, controlling his voice with difficulty.

“Three spades,” said Betty, who was almost as excited, having nearly all the spades from the king downwards.

“Four hearts,” retorted Archie with a queer curl of an upper right lip never seen before at that most traditionally sedate of tables. He could sense something was brewing. Bobby promptly declar’d small slam, but Betty, carried away on a lavaburst of Vesuvian enthusiasm, bid grand slam in spades, despite seeing she could not make it. Bobby reflected for a moment, & affecting an air of triumph to conceal his agitation, declar’d, “Grand slam no trumps.”

Bobby Montieth declaring grand slam no trumps ! All were astonish’d, with Jock MacKinley exclaiming a loud & almost caterwauling:

“OH!”

Bobby stretch’d out his hand to draw the clinching, cosmic card, but sway’d at the final fingerstretch, paus’d a moment, lay his cards on the table, fell slowly to the left & sprawl’d in a heap across an oriental rug.

When the doctor arriv’d he found that Bobby had died from heart failure, &, by way of comforting the living, added a few words on the painlessness of his death. They placed the cold, dead, dumb man on a sofa in the conservatory, the one Jock would sit on with a book & the wireless, watching black stormclouds burst over Kintyre. Bobby was cover’d by a sheet & look’d large, fearful & unlov’d. Close by, the card table had not been yet clear’d, & Bobby’s cards lay face down in the same neat pile that he had assembl’d during the last ever act of his energized being. 

Archie walk’d round the room with small uncertain steps, trying not to look at the corpse, or go off the rug onto the polish’d floorboards, where his heels made a nerve-racking noise. After passing the card table several times he at last gave in to the gods of curiosity & studied his partner’s final hand. Then, placing them down in almost the exact neat pile as he had found them, he overturn’d the card Bobby would have drawn. It was the ace of spades, which would have made the grand slam. Archie sped off, heavy heels now clattering over hardwood, & in the next room sat down & wept, because this dead man’s fate appear’d to him the most pitiable of kinds. 

Just as in many of those similar moments of extreme pathos experienc’d throughout Humanity’s tragic existence, Archie remember’d a classical quote to somehow make sense of things. A leaf from the Odyssey issued forth from his mind’s internal library, exclaiming, ‘all deaths are hateful to miserable mortals, but the most pitiable death of all is to starve.’ But Homer had existed long before Bridge had been invented, & shutting his eyes Archie began to picture the sheer delight glowing & growing over Bobby’s face as he saw that ace of spades. That he never did so far outwoes a starving being, who would have at least at some point in their lives gorged with all their mortal senses upon the colours, aromas & flavours of multiple different foods. 

On a seat by the window, the events of the evening pass’d in review before Betty, beginning with the five diamonds which the deceas’d had won & ending with a series of good cards so exceptional as to be ominous. Now here, just a few feet away, lay Bobby Mentieth, dead on the very verge of an incredible grand slam. ‘How irrational, how terrible, & ultimately how unavoidable, is deathk,’ she thought. ‘Just one more moment of life & he would have seen the ace of spades, but he was dead without ever knowing.’

“Ne-ver,” she whisper’d out loud, pronouncing each syllable slowly, which allow’d the word to to be laced with a taste of bitter regret.

Archie shuffl’d back into the conservatory, aware once more of his clattering heels, & had decided to play his partner’s final hand, picking up the tricks one by one until he reach’d thirteen. It was the first & last time that he ever went more than his contract of four, & won the grand slam in the name of friendship.

Mrs Robertson

Posted on January 31, 2022 Updated on March 31, 2022

One

Memories swarmed into Mrs Robertson’s mind like prowling wildcats; days of youth & drain’d promise, nights of wonder & haranguing melancholy. Life’s toleraby engaging carousel.

‘What have I achiev’d?’ she ask’d herself. ‘Indeed, what was there to achieve?’

She remember’d her village under the mountain; the sad, sad parting from her parents those two summers since; & the hard days of service that follow’d. Memories drew talons, clawing her young psyche with jagged slashes, which she shrugg’d off, somehow, one-by-one, despite the wincing pain.

Yet, here she was, a young English bride, sunny-haired & hopeful-eyed, with lips that slowly parted before she smiled, making strangers want to kiss them. One of these, of course, had been Mr Robertson, her recently acquired brand-new husband, & the only one of the random admirers who – following the aforementioned smile & its glorious aftermath, when the softest regions of her face broke out into attendant dimples – had dared to ask her name. Ever since, in similar circumstances, lest anybody should think that this smile which fluttered like a handkerchief dropped into a Roman fountain was meant for them, she would quickly look up for her dear Charles – who was a foot taller or so – to find him  tenderly reciprocating her glance of love with a gaze of golden adoration. 

“I wish I could meet your parents,” he had said on of these occasions, completely out of the blue. “I’m sorry darling if that sounds selfish, but they must be very special people to have created such a treasure trove as you.”

“One day you will,” she replied, not knowing then that she would refuse to even invite them to her wedding. “Auld grievances,” she had cited, without giving a single iota of detail. The only thing she ever really told Charles about them was that, despite all the young men in her mountain village vieing for her mother’s hand, her mother had only ever wanted her father. “Such loyalty, such monamour,” she assured Charles, “was the definitive streak running thro’ the females of my family.”

Many people thought Charles was her brother, so similar were their thick flossy hair & rabbit bimbling eyes. They had little money between them, but the highest of hopes that one day they would be well-off enough to never have to worry about money & its rat race acquisition. A couple of well-paying pension plans & lots of scuttling grandchildren to spend them on were hardly Olympian ambitions; but to a young couple deeply entrenched in each other & in love, there flew dozens of golden eagles soaring through the misty gullies of their living dreams. 

Charles had recently got an agricultural job among the epic & fertile plains of Aberdeenshire –  auld farmtoun country – where he had obtain’d a friendly impression of everybody & much public trust in his own abilities. His boss had given him a couple of weeks leave to celebrate both his coming of age at one & twenty & his marriage to his younger wife.

“It must be Arran,” he had said while discussing potential honeymoons, “I went as a student & simply had the best of times! Akuta same…”

“What!” demanded Abigail.

“O sorry, akuta same, it means ‘deadly shark’ in Japanese. My classmate at the time had taught me the phrase on the ferry as we cross’d once to Arran. I will remember it always.”

Mrs Abigail Robertson found herself on that very same ferry, perched on a Calmac deck one gusty but sunny day, swiftly steaming west, with the boat being chas’d by three playful gulls. As the seabreeze made a rustle like rich raiment, or the whispering gossip of inquisitive neighbours, Charles stepp’d back from the rail & took a seat in those identical wooden chairs so beloved by the Calmac ferry company. 

“I’ll be with you in a minute darling,” smiled Abigail who, heady as a hedonist in heaven, peer’d forwards towards the haunch’d Isle of Arran, widening steadily towards the west.

Altho’ Charles was only one & twenty, & she barely eighteen, to her he appeared almost godlike in his age, a piramid of maturity built up in some wise, old epoch of time. Her own life seem’d as simple as it had been short. She only could remember being a little girl, & then the next thing that occur’d was Charles Robertson, & positively the next thing she remembered of importance was being Mrs Charles Robertson. Her later adolescence & those two years in service were nothing now but grassy dewdrops dissipating in the morning sun. The one thing that never left her mind, however, was the mountain which towered above her village in the Lake District of England. Its beauty had been preserved by those who care the most about preserving beauty. Wordsworth had prevented rail companies sending steaming chains of dragon carriages down the unpolluted valleys. Her grandfather had also beat back the sniffing scouts of coal, mineral & timber companies, all wishing to skin & gut their forested mountain like a skillfully hunted piece of game. He had also said that her love for Charles was her love of a baby, & then but a baby in love. He had opined as much on a visit Scotland to ostensibly meet his potential grandson-in-law, but really because he loved to fish, & to his own mind the rivers which flow’d from the Cairngorms were the richest of all.

All this, of course, was five & forty years ago, for you know how old Abigail was when she returned to Arran last summer? Three & sixty!

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Part Two

Five & forty years ago, as I was saying, Abigail Robertson was exacting, with some excitement, her first visual memories of the mountains of north Arran, where Goat Fell points at the adventurous spirit with a rocky & beckoning finger, saying, ‘climb me.’ After landing at the port of Brodick, Mr & Mrs Robertson of Rhynie Farm Cottages, Rhynie,  Aberdeenshire, were seated in the back of a primitive, yet efficient taxi. They travelled at a gentle speed for six miles, following the coastal road as far as the sprawling ribbon-village of Corrie, decamping for a week up front in its bustling hotel. Their room overlooked the sea, & they made love the very moment the maid had closed the door behind her. The five shilling tip thrust into her hand by an excitable Mr Robertson had ensured her rapid exit.

With a bridal veil thrown over her neck & bosom, & her fine bright tresses carelessly yet gracefully arranged, she appeared to the eyes of her enchanted lover rather like a vision than a creature of mortal beauty; altho a countenance of nervousness would accompany her first kisses as a man & wife alone. The sweetness & the ecstasy of those moments would penetrate Abigail’s waking moments for an entire lifetime, & hearing the whispering breath of Charles’ vows once more in her ear, would echo just as long. Then came the puzzle-dance of passion, awaiting the moment when all the protuding pieces fitted together in the lock of love – limbs with limbs, eyes with eyes. It was a moment such as happens with only the truest of soul mates. All the different versions of themselves from across the aeons of human existence, reuniting in lovemaking for the first time as those particular avatars, were in that room, fractured facets of divinity form’d by their own recognizable shapes.

The newlyweds arose in the finest of spirits, as golden as the summer sun which had enticed a family of seals onto the rocks by Corrie harbour, to silently bathe in those sweet & splendid rays. Abigail had pointed them out to her husband as they walked the half mile south to the whitewashed cottages of High Corrie, perched sporadically above the sea like a Tuscan hilltown. Beyond High Corrie lay the mountains of Arran, where one hour later, Charles Robertson, veering from the paths with the elation of consummated love, had leapt onto a pile of brush which covered a long forgotten pothole, & vanished utterly from the earth.

It took everything for the good people of Corrie to contain Mrs Robertson in her grief. A couple had to stop her wading into the sea, her pockets full of heavy round stones. Another had to find her grandfather in England, for he was the only person Abigail wanted to see. The Hotel manager had encouraged the matter, for it seemed that after three weeks Mrs Robertson was rapidly running out of money, but was still obstinately refusing to leave. Each day she would retrace the steps she had made on that most magical of mornings, remembering the laughter, the chatter & those beauty spot embraces, strung like a pearl necklace over the mountainsides of Arran. Then, at the pothole’s mouth – fenced off now, for safety – she would sit, tearless, day after day, in whatever manifold variety of weather, simply staring into the profundity of the planet’s undercrust. Even by the onset of the Autumn storms, no power could win her from the place whence her Charles had gone.

Every effort was made to find him, but alas, in those days, pitcaving techniques were very much in their rudimentary infancy. Specialized equipment like nylon kernmantle rope, & specialist methods such as Single Rope Technique were decades away. The deepest they had got was 20 ft down, where a sharp-angl’d ledge would have bundl’d Charles into the black darkness of the mountain’s internal chambers. It was deem’d too dangerous to attempt any further probing, & the matter was deem’d closed. If there was a time worse for her than the moment her husband dissappeared, it was the one when they told her his body would never be found.

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Three

Mrs Robertson went back to her little cottage near Rhynie & lived there for the rest of her days. The rooms of the cottage that was to be their home remained bare & unadorned, as Charles had seen them last. She could not bring herself to alter them in any way, just in case he ever came back. She knew he would never, but unresolved grief is a far greater mind monkey than grief itself. If only he had been buried in a nice Scottish kirkyard, under the sweetest air of the northern climes, some green place lying open to the sun, where she could go & scatter flowers on his grave, where she could sit & look forward amid her tears to the time when she would lie side by side with him – they would be seperated only by short life, but united for eternity. Now, it seemed, that unless she returned to the island of all her woes – a thought which made her recoil as if seeing a scorpion primed at her feet – they would remain apart forever.

For Mrs Robertson, her life had become tainted with the taste of shame. Charles had been beloved in his community, his family adored him, & now he was gone. The young English siren had lured him to his doom on the jagged rocks of the Clyde. But Abigail was a stoic lass & did the best she could; working in service, then opening a little shop once she’d saved up enough money. Of course she never remarried, how could she? The ambrosial memories of her honeymoon night could never be desecrated by lieing with another man. There was much interest of course, a veritable Penelope surrounded by suitors, but no man could ever win so much as a courteous half-smile, let alone alone one resembling that which had won, for her, dear Charles.

It was early in the last spring that Mrs Robertson received a letter from Arran. It was penn’d by a young man who, with a quaint & polite formalism, had offer’d to find her Charles. The wind-blown hollow of her heart suddenly gush’d with roseate blood, straining to burst out of her chest. It took two cups of tea, a small glass of sweet sherry & a phone call to her best friend to finally finish off the letter. It went on to explain how the young man’s name was Connor Syme, he had been a student of Geology at St Andrews, that he was a passionate explorer of cave systems, & that he thought he had obtained the right & proper modern equipment to find her Charles. 

After five & forty years Mrs Robertson suddenly found the will to live, & to live life for as long as possible.  That her beloved Charles might be afforded a proper burial near their little cottage energized every effort of her being to beautify their little home. The trifling articles, curiosities & pictures she had bought with Charles on their honeymoon were finally brought out. She would ask how such & such a thing look’d, turning her pretty head to some kind visitor, as she ranged them on the walls. Now & then she would have to lay the picture down & cry a little, silently, as she remembered where Charles had told her it would look best. She felt him with her in each room as she furnish’d them to the plans they had made in their minds, hand-in-hand on the curved beach of Ardrossan, as they gazed across to Arran in love. One room she never went into; the one they had meant to have for the nursery. It is not that she never imagin’d children in there, however, for often times curly headed cherubs that look’d just like Charles did clutter her cottage’s hearth & hall. 

Two weeks later Mrs Robertson was back on Arran for the first time in almost half a century. She had alter’d very much in that time, but was fill’d with a spirit quite unchang’d from that which energized her honeymoon.

“This is a good day to be alive,” she said to herself, “no, every day is a good day to be alive, this is a much better day to be alive.”

With difficulty temper’d by determination she climb’d the same steep paths she had once worn to the bedrock in those terrible weeks of limbo following her husband’s disappearance. The pothole was still safely secured; the sign was as bright as ever, but the fences had been worn to crumbling pastel cadavers in the wake of countless Atlantic storms. 

She watch’d on in silence as Connor & his small team open’d up the pothole & scrambl’d into the claustraphobic core of the mountain. An hour or so later, Connor haul’d himself out of the inky blackness & with a beaming smile said, “we’ve found him.”  It took several minutes for Mrs Robertson to finally stem the oceanic floods of tears which had well’d up from the wasted grieflands of her soul. But slow the flow certainly did, & in the silence between her subsequent & intermittent sobs, Connor spoke again.

“I think it best, Mrs Robertson, that you do not see the skeletal remains, unless of of course you really wanted to, but I do advise against it. However, by some miracle of dry air, your husband’s jacket has been completely preserv’d, if a little dusty. Would you like to see it?” 

Thes were the happiest moments in the later life of Abigail Robertson of Rhynie Farm Cottages, Rhynie,  Aberdeenshire, & within a week the jacket was hanging in the once unused nursery in their cottage, perfectly clean & pinn’d to the wall besides her own bridal gown, which she never once thought to throw away. She loved just sitting in the room with a small peat fire burning, & to simply remember. 

Her husband’s funeral had been more of a celebration of life than a memorial to death. Relations of his she had never seen of every generation had attended, with a couple of his nephews coming from as far away as Canada. Once all the family fuss had died down, she would attend daily to his grave; fresh flowers once a week, a wee prune of the rose brush & a gaze at the turf beside him where one day they would be truly reunited.

This dream of hers was not even disturbed by that singular strange evening when, of a sudden, she felt a compulsary tugging at her psyche while sitting in the nursery turn’d bridal shrine. ‘What was in the jacket pocket,’ she began to enquire with some force. It turn’d out there had been something in his pocket – a letter, adressed to a certain Albert Alexander of Dippen Farm, Arran. Of course she open’d it, & was intrigued by the Japanese characters at the head of the page. It was clearly her husband’s handwriting, & she began to read;

Dear Albert

I long to see you

I have married a young woman. She is good for me. But she is not you. We are staying in the Corrie Hotel for a week. Please come & take a room where we can meet &…

Mrs Robertson suddenly cut the reading short, & with the slow & deliberate motion of those dutiful wives who keep their husband’s secrets, as the letter was toss’d into the fire the fine wine memories of her darling Charles were tenderly, & forever, preserved.

BBWB 5: Suffragettes

Posted on October 11, 2021 Updated on October 19, 2021

THE BALLAD OF BLACK WATCH BRODICK

CANTO 5

Suffragettes

This was a most ‘immoral’ age
Dancing new-fangl’d tangos
Eliza swearing on the stage
Catwalks of risque clothes

An age it was of civil strife
Trade Unions upstirring
As strikes in every walk of life
Halts empire’s engines’ whirring

& bless the brazen Suffragette
That patriarchy smothers
“We’ll all get to the hustings yet
We sisters, sweethearts, mothers!”

Among whose thriving militants
Stands Sarah Fullarton
Emitting clear omnipotence
Until the vote is won

She was the fairest e’er to walk
The fragrant curves of Brodick
A lily on a fillystalk
But ‘tricky’ as a chopstick

For in an age of man & wife
When wives were more like servants
She’s chose to forge a finer life
‘Spite disapproving parents

In Glasgow there’s a rally sworn
All in Saint Andrew’s Hall
From Brodick, by swift steamer borne,
She’ll answer Pankhurst’s call.

Where if the Police did barge inside
Misusing all their powers
The speaker’s platform fortified
With barbwire mask’d by flowers

The room erupts, queen Emmeline
Captures the room starstatur’d
This is the season aquiline
When hearts by reason raptur’d

“Good morning sisters of the world
For future time each fights
When every little new-born girl
Shall share her brother’s rights

My promise kept, I’m here my friends
Despite our Kingship’s serpentin’d
Government’s inord’nate spends
To silence womenkind

But wit and ingenuities
Of women overcome such
Disgraceful elitist committees
That jaded aegis clutch

& come the change to surely come
That only time hold’s back
We’ll bang the democratic drum
Out of the cul-de-sac

Of our dead nation that ignores
The honest protestations
Of women knocking at all doors
Of legal delegations

Archbishops and the King himself
Dismisses each petition
Places them unread on a shelf
& calls its text sedition

How can one assume seditious
Equality twyx sexes
& socio-political justice –
Instead they avoid or vex us!”

With angry shouts & whistle blows
A storm of surging policemen
Surge thro’ the hall, a pure storm rose
Of women fighting men

Towards the stage the Police advance
With batons drawn for battles
Hail-dodging in a weird wardance
Chairs, boxes, buckets, bottles

A confus’d scene of bloody streams
& violence erupted,
The reckoning of dark regimes
By wickedness corrupted

A tornado’s worth of odium
All round the stage congeal’d
The Policemen reach the podium
Paus’d by barb’d wires conceal’d

Then stabbing pincers crab on crab
Hands lunge at Emmeline
Men drag her to a waiting cab
Some shameful concubine

She’s tossed inside a mouldy cell
Refuses bread & water
For you she’s done it, damoiselle,
For your mother & your daughter

All night the hungerstrike she kept
In noble spirit springing
Erewhile the streets of Glasgow slept
The Suffragettes were singing

Next morning she was roughly strapp’d
To stretcher & then driven
To Central Station, how they clapp’d
Those women who had striven

To line the route from cell to rail
Conjoin’d in common chorus
A movement that must never fail
Against the dinosaurus

That is the patriarchal beast
As down to Holloway
Goes Mrs Pankhurst whose increas’d
Her cause that awful day

When politics & ministers
Spurn basic Human Rights
& sends in strong-arm sinisters
Those ant-farm saprophytes!

The Kilmarnock Burns And Book History

Posted on September 25, 2021

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Patrick Scott is Research Fellow for Scottish Collections and Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of South Carolina. His work on the Kilmarnock Edition is a must read for all fans of Rabbie Burns.

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Allan Young and I have just published the first-ever attempt to track down all surviving copies of Burns’s first book, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (Kilmarnock: Wilson, 1786), the Kilmarnock Burns (1). Mr Young started working on this project fifteen years ago, and I have been collaborating with him for the past two years. We located just eighty-four surviving copies, which makes Burns’s book three times rarer than the Shakespeare First Folio.

At one level, this project might seem merely antiquarian. As early as 1903, the purchase of a Kilmarnock by the Burns Monument trustees was fiercely denounced in an Aberdeen newspaper:

Really, I think it is absurd for the Burns Trustees to throw away so much money […] Private individuals may spend their thousands on first editions if they choose: but could the memory of Burns not be honoured in a more practical way than by giving £1,000 for a book which is to go in a glass case and be looked at by tourists? (2)

Yet one of the big recent shifts in literary studies has been the growing interest in ‘book history’, and in the material forms in which we encounter literary texts. Mr. Young and I were not just listing the eighty-four copies, but trying to describe them and track their stories. After 230 years, the ravages of time and the pride of former owners have left marks on each surviving copy. Many copies carry ownership inscriptions, annotations, or bookplates. Some include manuscript poems, a few in Burns’s hand. Successive bindings and re-bindings mean that the copies vary quite a bit in size. Some have tears or missing leaves, and even after repair and replacement, most restoration leaves detectable traces. The accumulative of such changes makes every copy distinctive, and through reading these differences one can reconstruct changing attitudes to this book, and to Burns himself.

Like much about Burns, the story is very easy to oversimplify. To its first readers, in July and August 1786, Burns’s book made its appearance in plain blue-gray paper wrappers, with the page edges untrimmed, and it was available chiefly through local distribution to subscribers in Ayrshire itself. The wrappers were fragile, and the paper spine cracked away easily, so few copies survive in this original form, but one is at Alloway, in the Birthplace Museum (the same copy that drew that protest in 1903), and it can be viewed on the RBBM website. (3)

But just as Henry Mackenzie’s ‘Heav’n-taught ploughman’ would morph into the late Victorian National Bard, so the Kilmarnock’s original fragile wrappers would in time typically be replaced by fine bindings in gold-tooled full morocco, from such noted London binders as Bedford or Rivière. The majority of copies now surviving are in a binding from this period, though not all quite as spectacular as the one illustrated below, which Ross Roy used to say was more appropriate for the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam than for a Kilmarnock. (4)

Such bindings were not only a statement about the importance of Burns, but also of the owner’s wealth and status, and the best examples are collectible in their own right: indeed, most copies in fine bindings were housed in their own protective morocco slip cases or boxes that to the casual eye look equally impressive. By 1900, Burns was not only a prestige author, but an international one. Both buyers and prices had changed: instead of an Ayrshire farmer the typical early twentieth-century Kilmarnock purchaser might be a Scottish peer or an American railroad baron. Burns’s original subscribers had paid just 3 shillings (15p), but in 1929 a copy sold at auction for £2,550 (£140,000 at current value). In 2017, while there are still six copies in Ayrshire, and twenty-five in Scotland, there are at least forty-eight in the United States.

The contrast seems obvious enough. A Kilmarnock as originally issued was all of a piece with hodden gray, hamely fare, and a’ that. The Kilmarnock as later collected was a precious icon of world literature. Relatively few of the later collectors aimed to build a comprehensive collection of Burns editions. Most of them were adding a Kilmarnock alongside other Great Books. Indeed, part of its prestige in the market was its inclusion in One Hundred Books Famous in English Literature, a collector-list published in 1902 by the Grolier Club of New York.

Both sides of this contrast need more nuance. The original page format and paper show the Kilmarnock was always intended to look superior to John Wilson’s previous books. The distinctive title-page decorations, also used throughout the book, seem to have been specially purchased to reflect this ambition. The paper covers were intended to be temporary, and most purchasers had their copy put in a more serviceable binding; Burns himself told his friend John Richmond ‘you must bind it neatly’. (5)

These early bindings, rather than the copies in wrappers, show best how Burns was read by his Ayrshire contemporaries. Distribution also qualifies too populist a narrative. As Richard Sher has pointed out, the immediate economic success of the volume came more from the backing of a few major supporters than from individual subscribers; over two thirds of the 612 copies were bought by just seven names. (6) In November 1786, when a letter to the Edinburgh Evening Courant complained that ‘not one’ of Ayrshire’s ‘Peers, Nabobs, and wealthy Commoners’ had ‘stepped forth as a patron’ to Burns, Gavin Hamilton fired back that, of the original print run, ‘the greatest part […] were subscribed for, or bought up by, the gentlemen of Airshire’. (7)

On the other side, even in the 1890s and early 1900s, many individual Kilmarnock owners on both sides of the Atlantic have not been people of great wealth. Duncan M’Naught, longtime editor of the Burns Chronicle, was parish schoolmaster of Kilmaurs, but owned two Kilmarnocks. One of the most famous wrappered Kilmarnocks was owned in the 1890s by A. C. Lamb, proprietor of a temperance hotel in Dundee. By 1900, too, many copies had become tatty, and the elaborate bindings played an important role in their survival. Unlike the Shakespeare First Folio, the Kilmarnock Burns is a thin volume that, in an undistinguished early binding or in bad condition, could well be overlooked when an owner dies or a house is cleared. Part C of our book contains several anecdotes of this kind. It was not till the collector generation that the special importance of the surviving wrappered copies was recognized, and the competition between collectors who couldn’t get one put a special premium on other copies with early inscriptions or manuscript material. Once a Burns manuscript had been bound up with a Kilmarnock in red morocco gilt, its survival was ensured. It was many years later before university libraries and other public institutions took over this role to any significant extent.

In his own times, Burns’s poetry was disseminated in many different ways, not just in books, from manuscript and oral transmission to newspapers, chapbooks and broadsides. Burns himself wrote a satiric squib about fine bindings and insect damage in an aristocratic library:

Through and through th’inspired leaves,
Ye maggots, make your windings,
But, oh! Respect his lordship’s taste,
And spare his golden bindings. (8)

Two centuries later, the importance of Burns’s own poems means that all Kilmarnocks, whatever their binding, can be of great research interest as well as of monetary value. Even a copy that is damaged or imperfect tells a story. It is often through the material form in which Burns’s first book has survived, in the ambitious ‘improvements’ made by earlier owners and in the traces of neglect or mishandling, that we can now reconstruct the varied ways in which Burns has been valued.

End Notes
1 – Allan Young and Patrick Scott, The Kilmarnock Burns: A Census (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Libraries, 2017). The discussion here draws from my introductory essay, ‘Describing the Kilmarnock’, pp. xxi-xxxvi, which gives fuller references.
2 – Aberdeen Journal, July 29, 1903, p. 10.
3 – Robert Burns Birthplace Museum object 3:3135
G4 – . Ross Roy, in Burns Chronicle Homecoming 2009, ed. Peter J. Westwood (Dumfries: Burns Federation, 2010), p. 415.
5 – Letters of Robert Burns, ed. G. Ross Roy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), I: 50.
6 – Richard Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors & Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, & America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 230.
7 – The exchange is reprinted in Donald A. Low, ed., Robert Burns: the Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1974), pp. 65-66.
8 – Poems and Songs, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), II: 906.

On The Antiquities of Arran (4): Machrie Moor and the Samothrakean Mysteries

Posted on July 22, 2021 Updated on July 22, 2021

Is it possible, still, that the ancient gods can influence the modern world. Recent investigations of mine have landed my personal supposition on the notion firmly in the YES camp. It all begins with my first glimpse of Samothraki, last summer, about this time of year actually, when I remarked to myself how like Arran the island appear’d – a great mountainous heap on an isolated island, with lower levels spread either side of the peak. Fengari Mountain & Goat Fell are both about the same size & rise like jagged dragonsteeth from the sea & anyone seeing both peaks can only assume they were crafted by the same forces.

On Samothraki is the anciently famous Sanctuary of the Great Gods, which I visited last year & was inspired to recreate the Mysteries once held there – Alexander the Great’s mum & dad were two initiates who met during the ceremony. On visiting the sprawling complex I was inspired to recreate the Mysteries from the scraps of detail recorded millennia ago – the following two posts ( a video) show the idea & its fruition.

Reconstructing the Samothrakian Mysteries

The Samothracian Mysteries

Roll on a year & I am conducting a chispological survey into the antiquities of Arran – see what I can dig up that has been missed. So let us revisit Machrie Moor, an amazing place I was last at a few weeks back. A century ago scholars had decided that because they found sepulchral remains in the circles of Machrie Moor, then this was their main purpose. However, holy sites in Britain have always evolved. It is not uncommon in the south of England especially to find a church built upon the site of a Roman temple, which in turn was erected on some pagan place of worship. It is possible, then, that the Machrie Moor complex had also evolved, from Pagan through Cronos worship into this fresh hyperbasis upon which I shall now attempt to show its one-time relationship with the Great Sanctuary of the Great Gods on Samothraki.

We begin with a 20th century American author, Jean Stafford, who noticed the connection between Corrie & Cora, inventing a rather spurious story about her being related to Alexander the Great, but adding an interesting detail that her ancestors had migrated from Samothraki to Arran. A strange start, admittedly, but as a Chispologist I see the latent possibility in the village Corrie of being connected to the Goddess Cora, also known as Persophone, the daughter of the great mother nature goddess, Demeter. This leads us then to Strabo, who on discussing the geographical writings of Artemidorus of Ephesus [late second-century BC], we read that, ‘his report about the goddesses Demeter and Core is more credible. He says that there is an island near Britain on which sacrifices are performed like those in Samothrace for Demeter and Core.’

Of course that only narrows the Samothracian mysteries to an island off mainland Britain, but the fact that the rites were performed in this area is both astonishing & also unacknowledged by academia! Those mysteries, by the way, were said to have been founded by two legendary heroes & brothers, Dardanos and Iasion, who became associated with the divine twins known as the Dioscuri. This then leads us to Diodorus Siculus’ discussion of Timaeus [early third century BC];

Historians point out that the Celts who live on the shore of the Ocean honor the Dioscori above other gods. For there is an ancient tradition among them that these gods came to them from the Ocean.

One way of looking at that information is to place Dardanos and Iasion voyaging along the fringes of north west Europe, coming across the Samothracian looking Arran & deciding to set up a sister mystery ceremony. Perhaps. But if they did, then it must have been at Machrie Moor, a series of stone circles which seem to mirror the areas at Samothraki thro which the initiation ceremony convey’d. In the following image of Samothraki, the buildings themselves were erected over many centuries but noble patrons, but like I said before, these constructions may have been novel ‘improvements’ on earlier layers, which could well have been stone circles or something akin. This is a quote from my own post on Recreating the Samothrakean Mysteries;

The physical evidence of the Mystery ceremony can be found at the Sanctuary of the Great Gods on Samothraki, a sprawling religious pan-centurial site which contains the three sacred precincts which the initiate had to move through in order to complete the Mystery procession. These were the preliminary Myeses, the Telete & the Epopteia. One school of thought states that after a prospective initiate had been prepared in the Sanctuary’s Sacristy, the Myesis took place in the Anaktoron’s main hall, followed by the Telete in the inner adyton at the building’s north end. Once this concluded, the mystai (initiates) could proceed to the Hieron where they acquired the higher degree, the epopteia.

I will leave this post with one last hint at the background to what I now believe is the sacred colony of Samothraki that had been set up on Arran. We begin with a passage from Diodorus Siculus discussing the mysteries;

And Iasion is reputed to have been the first to initiate strangers into them and by this means to bring the initiatory rite to high esteem. And after this Cadmus, the son of Agenor, came in the course of his quest for Europê to the Samothracians, and after participating in the initiation he married Harmonia, who was the sister of Iasion and not, as the Greeks recount in their mythologies, the daughter of Ares.

This wedding of Cadmus and Harmonia was the first, we are told, for which the gods provided the marriage-feast, and Demeter, becoming enamoured of Iasion, presented him with the fruit of the corn, Hermes gave a lyre, Athena the renowned necklace and a robe and a flute, and Electra the sacred rites of the Great Mother of the Gods, as she is called, together with cymbals and kettledrums and the instruments of her ritual; and Apollo played upon the lyre and the Muses upon their flutes, and the rest of the gods spoke them fair and gave the pair their aid in the celebration of the wedding.

The claim is also made that men who have taken part in the mysteries become both more pious and more just and better in every respect than they were before. And this is the reason, we are told, why the most famous both of the ancient heroes and of the demi-gods were eagerly desirous of taking part in the initiatory rite; and in fact Jason and the Dioscori, and Heracles and Orpheus as well, after their initiation attained success in all the campaigns they undertook, because these gods appeared to them.

The key nugget here is the mention of Agenor, who I believe is present in the Pictish King List as Agam/Agnoiun at the very start of the Pictish arrival in Britain.

The children of Gleoin, son of Ercol, took possession of the islands of Orcc, that is, Historend, son of Historrim, son of Agam, son of Agathirsi

Cruithne, son of Cinge, son of Luctai, son of Parthalan, son of Agnoiun

Which leaves us perfectly poised for the next installment of The Antiquities of Arran, where I shall be associating the island with the Hyksos diaspora…

On the Antiquities of Arran (3) : Sacrifice on Stronach Ridge

Posted on July 19, 2021 Updated on July 19, 2021

There has been a new development to my time on Arran. But before we step forth upon the evolution, here is one last sonnet from my Sannox explorations, with rather a lovely name I think;

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ON LOSING A HAT BELOW THE DEVIL’S PUNCHBOWL

Following the bob of the deers’ head guide

I scamper’d up my first Arran hillside

Not quite a goat, not even younger man

But, damn it, let me do the best I can

For I shall dwell the best part of a year

Upon these stones, where bones of mountaineer

Who died a lonely death, a broken pile,

Lies hidden in some crevice peristyle;

On scene-sunk ridge I gulp’d a morsel thrill

But storming midgies meant no standing still

Until I froze, & found I’d lost my hat

A good one, & my only one at that

Destin’d to join the lost lives Arran’s claim’d,

Ungarnish’d & ungarden’d & unnamed.

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As for my personal progression, I have found a patron here, who seems a fan of my poetical intellect & historical instincts. One could say Clio & Calliope have gone to work. The gentleman lives in England, but has a holiday home on Arran & after a most serendipitous meeting he has leant me his house &, better, still, his copious cornucopia of archeology books, including many on Arran itself.

A couple of days after we met he took me on a small expedition to the woodlands behind Brodick School, parking the car near the entrance to Glen Rosa. It was not too deep into the forest that we came across certain slanting rocks on which were carved cup marks & some images that looked like circles & keyholes. 

I also noticed certain channels & after a while I I began to get the notion that because there were two channels per circle – the legs of the keyhole so to speak – there might have been some kind of oracular purpose based upon the blood flow of sacrificed animals, or even humans. I.e. putting a bird or a human heart in the circle & seeing where the blood flowed, either the yes or the no channel.

My new friend said he’d never heard that before & a few days later after he’d left for England I began to analyze his library in search of more information on those markings.

In the very famous 2 volume Book Of Arran by J.A. Balfour (volume 1 – archeology 1910), there is a chapter by Fred T Coles entitled ‘Cup & Ring-Marked Rocks: Stronach Ridge, Brodick,’ which immediately gave me the name of the place I had become curious about – Stronach Ridge. In 1910 Mr Coles had made a special examination & drawings of the site for the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, which Balfour reprinted.

Of the images, Coles writes;

These designs, though never hitherto noticed in Scotland in anything like the same number, have their cognates elsewhere. For example, on a rockat Gillroannie, Stewartry of Kirkcudbright, there occurs just such a plain oval ‘boss’ as is found here on Stronach Ridge… & in Yorkshire, on a stone near the Panorama Stone, & on other surfaces in that neighbourhood, near Ilkley.

In a later book of the 20th century, ‘Exploring Arran’s Past’ Horace Fairhurst adss a little more correlative knowledge;

Examples of comparable decorated surfaces occur notably at Kilmichael Glassary & other sites in Mid-Argyll, & again around Gatehouse of Fleet. Boulders with man-made cup markings on them are common in various parts of Scotland, including Kintyre, but they seem to be scarce on Arran.

As a scholar of Pictish history, I also noticed the similarity between the ring marks & one of the Pictish symbols, monicker’d the ‘Disc & Rectangle.‘

At this point in my study I would like to bring to your attention a certain passage in Hector Boece’s 16th century history of Scotland. In recent centuries Academia has debated & argued its way through the possible meaning of the Pictish symbols, but perhaps Boece knew the answer all along; 

Those who died fighting the Britons should be honored with conspicuous monuments, and obelisks should be erected over their tombs to match the number of men they had killed. A large quantity of these obelisks can still be seen in the Highlands. In later times the custom arose that the tombs of the most famous and distinguished men were held in veneration like shrines, and men would build cairns of stones and erect large ones on which were inscribed the shapes of fish, snakes, and birds (that age used these instead of letters of the alphabet for writing arcane things), to advise passers-by who they were and what fair things they had achieved in life.

A very early Pictish presence on the island could well be connected to the cairns mentioned by Boece & also Thomas Pennant, who tour’d the Scottish highlands in 1772. Of the cairns, Balfour writes;

The Chambered Cairns of Arran are chiefly distributed over the southern half of the island. It is probable that many examples of this class of monument have disappeared owing to the extension of cultivation. Since the date of Pennant’s tour (1772) a number of great cairns which he describes have wholly vanished.

I shall be analyzing the very early Pictish connection to Arran in the next ‘episode,’ which the cairns might be a relique of. My studies are definitely gonna happen now, I’m sure, for I’ve been bless’d with a sense of security & permanence. My bookshop is up & running, as is the ground coffee beans element which I’ve introduced to my ‘revenue stream.’ Indeed, I feel rather safe, blessed even, to continue my investigations into the Antiquities of Arran.