The Harriet Smart Blog

The following was given by me as a reply on behalf of the lassies at a Burns’ supper last night. The conceit is that these are lost pages from the diary of Nancy Maclehose, who was one of Burn’s more substantial flirtations. She inspired the song “Ae fond kiss” which he sent to her when they broke up.

Lost pages from Clarinda’s Diary

Dec 4^th 1788

Party at Mrs Nimmo’s. Was not intending to go as had nothing suitable to wear but Cousin Mary called to tell me that Burns was going to be there, and I was going, wasn’t I? As usual she had timed her call to coincide with scenes of awful domestic chaos, namely: cat and infant two being sick simultaneously; loyal retainer being notably disloyal and opening front door while drunk and gracious hostess, yours truly dressed only in fourth best morning gown, otherwise known as a filthy rag.

Cousin Mary, who lives in echoing, luxurious pile on far side of Nor Loch, in square so exclusive it hurts, looks round and makes remark about charming simplicity of my lifestyle. She then tells me Burns is the catch of the season - if you have not met him, you are no one. Therefore attendance at Mrs Nimmo’s utterly mandatory this evening or I face certain social death. I point out that I am not sure I am even socially alive, having banished my impossible husband to the West Indies and as a result living on the dingy side of town in an establishment best described as Haphazard. Cousin Mary makes matters worse by not disagreeing with this but telling me, that whatever the case, I ought to get out more. Suspect this is all a plot on Mary’s part to make herself look dazzling in front of famous poet, if room is full of drab females like yours truly. Says she will send carriage for me and so cannot argue.

Spend next three hours dithering about clothes. Settle on green silk, as dignified without being showy, with a touch of the pastoral. While lacing up stays, loyal retainer points out that “There’s nae so much give in them as formerly,” and wonders if the green gown will actually fit. Tell her through gritted teeth it will, but have disconcerting feeling when dressed that I resemble a marrow rather than an elegant rural sylph.

Fearful crush at Mrs Nimmo’s. Everyone in Edinburgh is there to meet the great man. Cannot help thinking that half these people have not even read his verse, and if they had, they might not want to meet him. Certainly this is the case with Cousin Mary who would probably burn Burns if she had bothered to read him. After having a massive fit of the vapours.

She is best dressed woman there, in stunning confection that must have cost as much as my annual rent. Feeling obscenely fat and vegetable like I retreat into the corner by refreshments and console myself with custard tarts and a large glass of claret, thus ignoring all my own admonitions to lady-like rectitude. Feel it would have been much better to stay at home with book of verse by the poet and a large pot of chocolate.

Am somewhat startled then to feel a hand on my polonaise and a dark brown voice in my ear saying “Mistress, is there any wine left in that jug, or have you finished it?” Have curious intuition based on literary acquaintanceship that this is the man himself. Turn and find myself facing a man neither classically handsome nor in any way gentlemanly in appearance, but with a look in his eyes that instantly reduces my insides to the texture of calves foot jelly, especially as his hand remains firmly in place on my hind quarters.

Now have to make snap decision whether to be mortally insulted or horribly charmed. Fatally decide on latter.

Explain, regrettably, yes the jug is now empty but my glass is over full. Would he care for some of that? Utter madness, but could see at once he liked the gesture. He takes the glass from me and tells me that the prospect of drinking from the cup of such a goddess is an unparallelled pleasure. He then adds a very pretty, if slightly improper toast to my charms, and downs the claret in one gulp. He smiles and licks his lips in a somewhat lascivious fashion and I smile back, also, I fear lasciviously.

“Mr Burns, I presume?”

“No other. And you are, mistress?”

“Maclehose,” I say, once again resenting extreme ugliness of marital name, eternally reminiscent of mending and haberdashery. Would like to be French or Italian Countess.

Unfortunately our tete a tete gets no further as Cousin Mary, apparently unaware I am talking to the great poet, interrupts to tell me she has a migraine and is leaving forthwith. Therefore if I want the carriage I must come at once.

As she sweeps away, Burns murmurs, “I must see you again. When may I call?”

Make miniscule hesitation for the sake of decency, and then waste no time giving him my address and telling him when I will at home - and alone. He promises he will call tomorrow at three.

For I have decided. then and there, to make a bid for literary fame by making a conquest of Mr Burns. Feels higher artistic motive is only way I can begin to justify overwhelming desire on my part to indulge in lewd conduct.

Proceed to spend rest of evening at home planning what future literary biographers will say about me when I inspire greatest sequence of love poems since Shakespeare’s sonnets to the Dark Lady.

Then wonder if Dark lady ever experienced difficulty lacing corsets.

Dec 5^th

Visit from cousin Mary. Today she catches me re-arranging drawing room in preparation for Mr B’s visit. Do not tell her of course that I am expecting him, which is just as well as she has come to tell me that she thought him very vulgar and coarse and that he still smelt of manure. Worse still she has it on good authority that he has a roving eye. I point out that poets cannot be expected to be like ordinary men, and that a poet who does not look greedily at the world would hardly be a poet at all. Mary responds that I have a fatal weakness for men with roving eyes and should be very careful. She goes on to remind me that anyone who agrees to marry a man after a four hour coach drive with him is likely to be a danger to herself in future. I snappily retort that I am perfectly able to look after myself thank you, a remark somewhat spoilt by entry of loyal retainer announcing there is not enough tea in the house to make tea for her ladyship now and for the gentleman that’s expected this afternoon. Mary departs in royal huff threatening to send books of sermons and worse still, clergymen. Fortunately though does not demand tea, so am not forced to send loyal retainer to negotiate with the grocer.

Continue to rearrange drawing room to make suitable impression on Mr Burns. Aim for elegant simplicity with literary undertones by fetching all the books in the house and scattering them about carelessly. Decide this looks silly so tidy all away into state of nun-like austerity and plan to be discovered sewing charming little shirts for infant son. Confine actual infants to the kitchen with loyal retainer and still indisposed cat. At half past two sit on sofa and start sewing.

At half past three there is no sign of Mr Burns,

Nor at four.

By this time am heartily bored with sewing and am distracting myself with latest romance by Mrs Radcliffe. Thrilling trash. Finish volume 2 and still no sign of Mr B - at half past four. Light gone and cannot afford to light candles. Sit by fire and feel foolish. Decide to devise own romance in style of Mrs Radcliffe in order to secure literary fame, rather than attempt to become muse of irritating, unreliable poet. Eat elegant refreshments (cream horns) and come up with promising tale of orphaned boy wizard (with interesting scar) who is sent to college of warlocks. Get no further with this as messenger arrives at seven with note from Mr Burns.

Epistle short but indescribably charming. Poor man slipped on ice climbing into coach to pay visit. This resulted in injured knee. All beautifully expressed. Waste whole candle reading it over and over again. Makes all his poetry quite insignificant. Write thoroughly reckless reply on grounds that I must enquire about his health - not to reply would be rude.

Get scarcely any sleep, situation not helped by invasion of maternal bed by child one, complaining of nightmares.

The fragment breaks off there, and of course this doomed and tortured love affair was then played out in a serious of famous letters between Sylvander and Clarinda. During the course of the affair, Burns finally married Jean Armour - after he had royally abused her to Clarinda, and Nancy’s husband. Maclehose summoned her to join him in Jamaica or lose custody of their only surviving child. Nancy, who had no choice but to go out to the West Indies, gave Burns up, provoking him to write one of his most famous lyrics: Ae fond kiss.

The final fragment of this recently discovered manuscript seems to have been written by Nancy on board ship….

March 16^th 1789

Two days out of port I discover that loyal retainer is suffering from sea-sickness and also from irrational anxiety about being eaten by sea-serpents. She drinks copious amount of brandy and indulges in weeping fits about never seeing beloved homeland again. Consider joining in with this, feeling, in the circumstances, it would be a comfort. However, manage to maintain dignity. When she at last goes to sleep I escape to deck for fresh air.

Fellow passenger, very handsome young Englishman, pays civil attentions to me, but only I suspect because he has beautiful manners. Discovering I am from Edinburgh he asks my opinion of Burns’ verse. Am slightly taken aback but realise he is just making small talk. I tell him I consider some of them very improper and some of them very fine. This of course would be the moment to make delicate allusion to having been muse to great poet and impress the young man inordinately. However given who the whole horrible business played out, I quickly turn the conversation to other things and am very pleased with myself for doing so.

However, when alone, I cannot stop myself from taking out last wretched letter and still more irritating poem from reticule. “Ae fond kiss” strikes me as finest thing he has yet written but wonder if literary merit of it was worth complete ruination of my figure through over-consumption of cakes, nougat, sugar plums etc during depths of romantic despair created by his rat-like behaviour. Decide to make symbolic gesture and rip up poem and consign it to the ocean. Pleasure in doing this is somewhat marred by certain knowledge he will have taken a copy, and it will appear in his next collection, to admiration of all.

Am caught the act by young Englishman who seems intent on shipboard romance. Feel that my figure is perhaps not quite so ruined after all, and that sea air must be good for the complexion. Indulge him with smiles and more light conversations, merely to pass time. He is charming and not, thank goodness, a poet, so feel quite safe.

Yesterday my ten year old daughter Toni sang her first solo at St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral in Edinburgh. This is a big thing in the life of a cathedral chorister and it means she is well on the way to earning her surplice - the voluminous white thing they wear over their red cassocks. I don’t know how it works in other Cathedral Choirs but here it is a ‘big thing’ and you are actually surpliced in a little ceremony during the service.

She did it beautifully of course and it can’t have been easy. I would have been terrified but she takes it all in her stride. It’s part of the training. Afterwards, Duncan Ferguson, the master of the music, named her ‘person of the match’ which is apparently a daily motivational accolade he gives out. It seems to be having a good effect - they are all singing magnificently at the moment.

If you are in Edinburgh you can hear them at the Cathedral most days but more informally they are singing carols at Ocean Terminal on Saturday afternoon. This is a fundraising exercise - part of our on going campaign to fund a tour of the US and Canada next summer. Hopefully the exposure on a busy Saturday afternoon shopping mall will make people in Edinburgh realise what a hidden treasure the city has in the choir - our very own version of the Vienna Boys choir - except that we have girls and they are allowed to shout while playing football.

Writer’s Cafe is slick, cross-platform software for all writers by ZDNet’s Christopher Dawson — I stumbled across a link to Writer’s Cafe yesterday and just finished installing it on my laptop (64-bit Kubuntu). I installed it on an XP box, too, for comparison. It looks basically identical on both platforms and also has Mac and PocketPC ports. This cross-platform application brings together several tools for writers […]

This review makes my day! I’ve always thought that Writer’s Cafe would be handy in the classroom for planning essays so it’s good to hear a member of teaching profession endorsing it. Thank you Christopher!

Having listened on BBC replay to parts of an epic BBC London programme about the hunt for the Routemaster buses, I am happy to report that I have spotted at least one in Edinburgh, doing the tourist trips. It’s a pity we don’t have more of them, running on ordinary routes. Lothian Buses could have bought up a pile of them, a.d marketed them heavily as part of the Edinburgh experience. It would lovely to go down The Mound on a Routemaster. I was very impressed the way San Franscisco bought up old trolley buses from other cities to supplement their own. They invested in the iconic and now the trolley bus future in SF is assured.

If we all have to use public transport more, surely we ought to be recognising the emotional appeal of something like the Routemaster to make travelling across a city fun and enjoyable? A carrot rather than a stick. I remember bus trips in London when I was a child and it was terrific. The conductors were something else. And oh the terror that he might forget to ask you for your fare and the awful embarrasment of sitting there without a ticket, somehow feeling like a thief until you had managed to catch his eye and pay up.

Writing is such an undramatic activity, except for the person doing it, who is liable to feel that they are at the epicentre of an earthquake. It is not good fodder for the movies - the life of a great writer is hopeless material for a bio-pic because all the interesting stuff happens when the writer in question either has a good think or sits down at his or her desk and types or worse still writes by hand. Visually this is not very thrilling. However, despite this, movies about writing do get made, and they often have interesting things to say about the writing life.

Stranger than Fiction stars Emma Thompson as a writer with block and Will Ferrell as the hero of her unfinished novel who, by some freak chance, happens to exist in the real world.

We learn that Thompson’s character has spent ten years trying to finish her latest novel and is searching for the best way to kill her hero. This is Harold, a super-anal IRS agent who starts to hear her voice narrating the intimate details of his mundane and over-regulated life. When she predicts his impending death the terrified Harold takes advice from an infuriating Eng-lit professor Dustin Hoffman who helps him to track down to whom the mysterious authorial voice might belong. At the same time Harold begins to question the very life he has been leading, and begins a flirtation with warm-hearted anarchist baker whom he has been sent to audit. This leads to a classic situation namely: only when he finds that he has a life worth living is he forced to give it up.

The novelist, Karen, works out her ending and is about to type it up when the telephone rings. It is Harold who has tracked her down. He comes to see and she is astonished to see her creation in the flesh, perfect in every imagined detail right down to his shoes. She grovels on the floor staring at them in horrified wonder.

She gives him her manuscript which he passes to the literature professor who pronounces it a masterpiece. The ending cannot be changed without it being ruined. He has to accept death. Harold reads the manuscript and (rather astonishingly) comes to the same conclusion. He will give up his life for the sake of the great novel. So the following morning, when a small boy on a bike gets in front of a oncoming bus Harold steps out to certain death to save him.

However Karen has had second thoughts. She changes her ending and lets him live. He up to his neck in plaster but he is very much alive. The Professor pronounces the book all right but not great. The happy ending, he reckons, is in terms of great art a cop out. In the view of literary establishment tragedy is always going to be worth more than comedy. This is an interesting point for a mainstream Hollywood film to raise, where happy endings are distinctly more saleable. And the film came down firmly on the side of the happy ending. How could it not? Will Ferrell was in it.

I’m often in favour of happy endings. You need moral courage and mental strength for tragedy. I’ve only been dipping into Esther Waters by George Moore because I’m afraid to read it properly. I don’t want to be disturbed too much. I want a happy ending. In the case of Esther Waters I wanted one so much I did skip to the end and find that there was a happy ending of sorts, thankfully.

But I’m not averse to ruthlessly slaying my characters either. People have wailed at me: “Why did you have to kill so and so?” and I’ve been so enchanted with the notion that it affected them so much, that I haven’t really cared about the fate of individual in question. Maybe if we were confronted, as the novelist Karen is in the film, by our characters in the flesh we would hesitate to be so brutal. At one point she lies on the table in her huge, empty flat and enumerates the horrible ways she has killed off her characters, describing the nasty accidents that have befallen them for the sake of her stories, for the effect. The fact of Harold’s existence makes her change not just her ending but her whole style of writing. It makes her sacrifice her art for human concerns. That is of course how it should be. Any decent person would do the same. But maybe it would have been a more interesting story if the writer had not been decent, had chosen the literary laurels over the quiet dignity of doing the right thing. But it would not have been very comforting.

In fact the most unrealistic thing about this film was not the business of there being a real person who corresponds in every detail with an imaginary character, or the voice of the narrator in his head. The most unrealistic thing was that Karen, a literary novelist with writer’s block, who had not produced a book for ten years, had a publisher so eager for her next work that they were prepared to pay for a personal assistant in order to get the book finished. In real life, I suspect she would have been dropped years ago as a thoroughly bad prospect. If she was the equivalent of Danielle Steele, with the fans baying for a new book, it might just have happened - but even then wouldn’t the publisher be more likely to get a ghostwriter in?

Appropriately I’m writing this first entry in a cafe.

I’m sitting in Starbucks in Forrest Road, Edinburgh, within spitting distance of the famous statue of Greyfriars Bobby - apparently one of the most photographed statues in the world. Does this have something to do with it being small and not too difficult to photograph I wonder?

I have been hanging round this particular area for years. It is the nearest thing I have to a village. I live twenty minutes stroll away from here. My bank is next door and the place I get my hair done is round the corner. I used to write in The Elephant House and I still write in Central Library, especially in the Fine Art Library up at the top. The big hall at the Royal Museum is a favourite spot for Sunday Lunch, and then there’s Blackwells Bookshop (which used to be James Thins) and is probably now the best bookshop in Edinburgh.

This is an area of constant change, not all for the good. Take the vast Quartermile redevelopment of the old Royal Infirmary site for example. This project seems to have been pushed through with a brutal disregard for architectural heritage and in the last few months a very beautiful Arts and Crafts building, the Red Home has been demolished. For weeks I could not quite believe that this had actually been allowed to happen, but only when I whizzed past the sight on the top of 23 bus did I realise it was no longer there, just as Jules (my other half) had been telling me. This massacre must be added to a list that includes the unnecessary demolition of a row of large Victorian houses in Lauriston Street and the whole of the Simpson Maternity Pavilion, with its magnificent Art Deco staircase. Couldn’t any of these buildings been than conserved, revamped and re-used in some way? They are revamping other period buildings - why did these ones have to go?

The arguments can’t have been entirely economic I suspect it is to do with an arrogant ‘vision’ of the development - an philosophy that allows the destruction of perfectly good buildings and replace with them with the constraints of what is already there. Yes, it might have been awkward making something out of the Simpson, but it could have been done. Who knows the results might have been quirky and interesting and possibly more marketable than masses of modernist, bland flats, with indentikit decor. That would have been the really radical thing to do.

I’m not against change. Things have to grow and develop. I’ve come to love the extension to the Royal Museum of Scotland, although at first sight the plans looked awful. But its an imaginative, warm interior, full of secret corners and unexpected views. The roof terrace is a great addition to the City, an extraordinary place. The whole thing makes me think of Lutyens in its playfulness. But I don’t see much evidence of playfulness on the Quartermile development. It’s just trying to be terribly, terribly impressive in an “Aren’t we clever” sort of way but I’m not impressed.

But just to show you that some things endure, despite everything, here are two shop fronts in Forrest Road - a lovely old optician, and a pharmacy. You can just see that it has all its original fittings. Fingers crossed that no-one decides to modernize.