Repent, repent

Alone in a glass case in the Church section at the back of level three of the National Museum of Scotland stand two objects which, at first glance, seem quite unexceptional. One is a square wooden chair. The other, draped on a display dummy, is a dull-looking gown.

On closer inspection, the chair reveals nothing. It is simply dark and polished with use. The gown is odd, though. It is not made of any fine stuff, but rather sackcloth, now worn and threadbare. It is not a garment for grand occasions.

But this is the Church section, remember, and the church in question is an unforgiving kirk where questing nostrils were constantly alert to the stench of moral turpitude, and the salvation of souls was prosecuted with much energy, zeal and inventiveness. The chair and garment are two of the great seventeenth and eighteenth century instruments of ecclesiastical discipline. Otherwise known as the Stool and Gown of Repentance, they were to be sat upon, or worn, in front of the congregation, by fornicators, adulterers, slanderers and other wrongdoers.

Jonet Gothskirk was one such. Between July and November 1677 she appeared before the congregation of West Calder kirk on thirteen successive Sundays for her adultery with a certain William Murdoch. ‘Because of her stupidity and that she could discover no sense or feeling of her sin, nor sorrow for ye same,’ she continued to wear the gown each Sunday, week after week, while the minister fulminated at her wickedness. Nature eventually intervened and she was released on account of the imminent arrival of her child.

But what did she feel, what did she think to herself while she stood there, Sunday after Sunday, her belly swelling, her legs aching, the sackcloth scratching at her skin? Did she look out at the congregation and read behind the pursed lips, the solemn faces, ‘There but by the grace of God go I’? Did she glance at the minister and rage at the hypocrisy that the Bard would immortalise a century later in Holy Willie’s Prayer? Was she so cowed by the collective opprobrium that she simply stood there and hung her head in misery? Did she long to be back in the arms of William Murdoch for whom no punishment was recorded? Was she simply resigned to her fate? Or was she too fearful for her own future, and that of her child, to think of anything but what she would do when her present ordeal ended?

I don’t know, but I have to find out. The Gown of Repentance is my 26 Treasures object. This is the repeat of last year’s 26 project with the V&A, which we’re running this year with the National Museum of Scotland, the National Library of Wales and the Royal Ulster Museum. I have to find out because now that I’ve been to see the gown, it’s Jonet’s voice I’m beginning to hear. I don’t yet know her well enough to know what she’s saying, but I will. By the end of July, the project deadline, Jonet will have spoken. 

Ex libris

The thing I most remember from my student days about the main Aberdeen University library was the carved mouse climbing the leg of each chair. It was a lovely touch, irreverent yet also somehow appropriate to what I remember as being quite an intimate nineteenth century reading room.

On Wednesday I was back at the university for a meeting. I was a little early so I bought a sandwich and ate it in the sunshine outside King’s College ­– a glorious setting with the medieval buildings, the lawn and shady trees, and little groups of students, also enjoying the sunshine, sprawled on the grass, deep in conversation.

It was a moment of intense nostalgia as I remembered my own summers there, especially the last; and the long, long days, reading outdoors till eleven pm, as we revised for exams. It must have been round about this week, I thought, mid-June. And then it struck me that having graduated in 1971 I was, quite accidentally, marking the fortieth anniversary of my finals. It was an odd feeling, both pleasant and disconcerting.  I really don’t think of myself as someone who graduated forty years ago.

Then came another surprise. As I got up to walk to the meeting, I noticed a large glass cube towering into the sky, just the other side of the campus – the brand new £60 million university library, due to open in September. I know all about it because I wrote much of the original literature for the project, but I hadn’t yet seen it in the flesh, so to speak. I couldn’t go in, but from what I know it will be a marvel, a library of the future, a mere stone’s throw from the fifteenth century buildings of the old campus. It seems entirely right that the university has chosen to make its most conspicuous architectural statement with a library.

Yesterday it was another library, as we launched the Edinburgh International Book Festival’s 2011 programme in the grand, second-floor reference section of Edinburgh’s splendid Victorian Central Library. It’s a big space, lit by huge south, west and east-facing windows, and it was packed to the gunwales with authors, publishers, agents, journalists, sponsors and people from all the other organisations, including competing festivals, that make up literary Scotland.

It was an inspiring event with brilliant presentations by both Janet Smyth, the new children’s programme director, and Nick Barley, the main programme director, now into his second season. Revolution, inspired particularly, but not exclusively, by the Arab spring, is the theme this year. There was a buzz afterwards, a sense of collective engagement with the big events that are shaping the world around us; and as always I felt privileged to be part of this festival, the largest of its kind in the world, which may have books and authors at its heart but is in reality about so much more.

This year there was something else as well: a deeper sense of connection with our purpose, coupled with a palpable feeling of solidarity, arising from the fact that we were in Edinburgh’s main public library. A library is, after all, the ultimate symbol of a free and civilised society. What does it say that we live in times when they are being closed?

Labour of love

This is a commercial and I make no apologies for it. My friend John Simmons has written and published a beautiful book.

It’s called The angel of the stories. It’s about a young woman called Julia who lives in a small Spanish town – whitewashed, cradled by wooded hills (not so very different, in fact, from Aracena where we take a group of Dark Angels students every year). Julia yearns to become a writer and as her craft starts to blossom so too do the buds on her shoulders. Soon they flower into wings that take her on journeys into the lives of her fellow townsfolk, whose foibles and passions and longings she chronicles with great tenderness.

Technically speaking, The angel of the stories is magical realism. To me it’s purely magical. The writing is simple and limpid. The storytelling has a quiet but mythical quality. Then there are the illustrations …

The book has 21 colour plates taken from paintings by the artist Anita Klein. She and John collaborated over the writing of the book; in fact, her Italian Angels series was part of the inspiration for it. Now she has created a series of original paintings around the character of Julia. What a delectable angel Julia makes: dreamy and pensive, innocent yet knowing, voluptuous and sexy, she is charming as only Beryl Cook-meets-Modigliani could be.

And then there’s the book itself. This is book-making as craftsmanship, and the craftsman’s hand is that of designer David Carroll. It’s cloth bound and comes in a cloth-covered slip case. It has a gold silk ribbon for a bookmark. The typography is lovingly chosen, as is the paper onto which the colour plates have been hand pasted with consummate care.

The angel of the stories is, in fact, a labour of love ­from first thought to final credit, from cover illustration to endpapers. Even the colophon of John’s newly fledged publishing company, called – wait for it – Dark Angels Press, is a plump little ‘d’ sheltering beneath the ‘a’ of an outspread angel’s wing.

This is the ultimate reproach to the Kindle. Writing, typesetting, design, binding, illustration, all work in harmony to create an object that has value beyond the sum of its parts. In the age of electronic publishing, thank God for The angel of the stories. May it be but the first of many from the Dark Angels Press.

You can order the book from www.darkangelspress.com

You can see Anita Klein’s work at www.anitaklein.com

Other worlds

A sackcloth gown and an empty room in a disused telephone exchange might not sound much like the stuff of dreams, but the human imagination’s a wonderful thing. I’m trusting that mine is going to respond by taking me on a couple of creative journeys over the next year.

The Gown of Repentance is the object I’ve been allocated for 26 Treasures Scotland, a repeat of the project we ran last year with the V&A in London, but this year one hand of a three-hander involving the National Museum of Scotland, along with the Welsh National Library and the Royal Ulster Museum in Northern Ireland. It will take the same form as last year, a wonderful exercise in precision of language, with 62 words exactly in which to write a personal response to one’s allocated object. This year my fellow author, the indefatigable Sara Sheridan, has been making the running in Edinburgh, liaising with the museum, herding together the 26 writers (including a wheen of Scots-speakers and Gaels), and pairing them up randomly with the objects the museum has chosen to create a historical trail through its Scottish collection.

I haven’t been to see the gown yet, but I know it stands in a glass case beside its more famous neighbour, the stool – both redolent with disapproval and attended by the ghosts of stern-faced kirk elders. Personal associations with repentance have kept themselves out of sight so far, but no doubt they’ll surface when the time comes.

The room in the telephone exchange is much more of an unknown quantity. This is a brand new project which has arisen from the Dark Angels masterclass at Merton College, Oxford, in the spring. The exchange is the building which, in due course, with the necessary funds raised, will become the new home to Oxford’s wonderful Story Museum. With somewhere in the region of sixty vacant rooms, currently housing a few items of abandoned furniture and the odd dead pigeon, the place is ripe for a show of some kind before the builders move in. So my two equally indefatigable partners in Dark Angels, Stuart Delves and John Simmons, have hatched a plan to invite twenty of our most advanced former students to choose a visual artist as a partner and mount an installation in the empty room they’ve each been allocated. Stories are the theme, of course, and Other Worlds is the title of the show. This time next year it will run for two weeks to a paying public, thereby raising funds for the Story Museum and promoting Dark Angels at the same time.

Although I’m looking forward to getting to grips with that grim article of apparel in Edinburgh, I’m looking forward even more to visiting Oxford in September for the Other Worlds briefing – because I’ve chosen as my partner my daughter Ellie and her brilliant alternative floristry business, The Flower Appreciation Society. We’ve never worked together before and right now I can’t even begin to imagine how we will, but there’s something thrilling and deeply satisfying to me about the idea of words and flowers coming together, just as there is in a collaboration between father and daughter. I can't wait to get started.

The eagle

Yesterday evening I raised my glass to Rosemary Sutcliff. It was an odd moment. I was sitting on my own in the restaurant on the sixth floor of the Leela Kempinski Hotel in Gurgaon, overlooking what my driver had proudly told me earlier in the week is the largest road toll in Asia (Ay-zee-a, he pronounced it), sixteen lanes of winking red tail lights, sixteen lanes of unblinking white headlights; and she had made me cry.

Here, in one of the most conspicuously modern cities of 21st century India, I was reading about Roman Britain. The young invalided former centurion Marcus and his freed slave Esca had made it back across Hadrian’s Wall having rescued the talismanic bronze eagle, lost by Marcus’s father and his few remaining comrades of the Ninth Legion in their heroic last stand against the tribes of the north.

Perhaps I’m getting sentimental as I get older, but their exhausted, quietly triumphant return to Marcus’s gruff old uncle’s villa at Colchester, and an ecstatic welcome from Marcus’s tame wolf cub, brought tears to my eyes. But then again, perhaps it’s not age. Rosemary Sutcliff was an exceptional writer and The Eagle of the Ninth her best-loved book. I had read it as a child and adored it. Prompted by the release of the current film (which I’ve deliberately avoided, though now I might see it), I bought a new copy for this trip and was not disappointed.

Like her character Marcus, Sutcliff herself endured disability, though his was acquired in battle whereas she was an invalid from infancy. A progressive wasting disease confined her to a wheelchair for most of her life. Yet she managed to evoke with the utmost plausibility events she could never possibly have experienced, for example a wild and terrifying manhunt through the hills and bogs of central and southern Scotland; and more remarkably still, a lyrical vision of landscape and a natural world that she was most unlikely ever to have seen.

‘Well, that’s the writer’s job,’ one might say, ‘to imagine.’ And one would be right. It just happened that, imprisoned in a frail body, she was particularly good at it. She died, heaped with honours, at the age of 72 in 1992.

She would certainly have been an inspiration to the young Indians I’m here to help with their writing and presentation skills. To communicate properly with your customers you have to be able to imagine you are them, I’ve been exhorting them. Tell the customers what they need to know, not what you want them to hear. And they try, because they value self-advancement highly and are eager to learn anything that will help them. They’re admirable people, these young Indians. Their working environment is ferociously competitive – I don’t think anything in the UK even begins to resemble it – and the rewards for success are almost incalculable in their terms, yet in the training room at least they’re serious (though by no means solemn), dignified, even self-effacing.

But they’re shackled by the language of their industry and the American provenance of their organisation. In their language, one doesn’t send people to do things, one deploys resources. But if you think of people as resources, I point out to them, it’s not long before you start treating them as such. I’ve been coaching three of them during the second part of the week, and they’ve all pledged never to use the word again when they mean people. It’s a small step but it’s a start. I’m sure Rosemary Sutcliff, wise and humane, would have approved.

Soundscapes

What seems like a very long time ago now, I launched and published a monthly magazine for the radio industry. It was called, unsurprisingly, Radio Month and it aimed to do for the world of radio what Broadcast did for the television industry. I was the grandly-styled publisher and Nick Higham, who later went on to become BBC television’s media correspondent, was the editor. There were four of us altogether, in an unheated, rather smelly former shop on Dawes Road, in Fulham.

Radio Month was a trade magazine. It talked about programme-making and station management, studio equipment and the then relatively new business of selling advertising; commercial radio in the UK was only five years old when we launched and was still making itself up as it went along. We had a good run for three or four years, then came the recession of the early 1980s. Our own advertising dried up and the magazine went bust.

That painful moment was, quite directly, the start of my career as a business writer, although that’s another story. But working with the BBC’s Peter Day and his producer Sandra Kanthal through the recording of last week’s In Business programme about Dark Angels reminded me of two things in particular from that time.

The first is that radio then was populated mainly by enthusiasts. With a couple of notable exceptions (Kenny Everett, a true comic genius, being one) it wasn’t a celebrity medium. You could look like the back end of a bus and still be a brilliant broadcaster, the pay was generally lousy, the hours long, the working conditions sometimes hair-raising, and the company often eccentric. Most people who worked in radio did so because they really loved the medium. They were genuine, and genuinely committed. Sadly, I’ve lost touch with that world now so I don’t know whether the same is still true. I hope so. Peter and Sandra certainly both seemed cast in that mould.

The second thought, and it’s hardly an original one – though I think it connects with the first in some slightly opaque way, was that radio was, and remains, so much more a vehicle for the imagination than television. Peter and Sandra had nothing but a couple of microphones (one of them admittedly rather large and hairy, like an unkempt rat on a stick) and a tiny digital recorder with which to create half an hour of radio. The resulting programme was rich with the sound of bells, of footsteps, of different voices, of echo and its opposite – close presence, all building an atmosphere of Oxford and the mood of a Dark Angels course. It left one room to create one’s own pictures, all the more powerful for being personal. (Click here if you missed the programme.)

The analogy is there with good writing, which leaves room for one to attach one’s own thoughts and feelings to the words written; a lesson which the business world still largely has to learn. And perhaps the people who write well for business are also rather like the radio-makers, unseen craftsmen and women, who know how to create space for one to make an imaginative connection with the subject at hand, no matter how dry. These are not the people who would ever write, as I recently heard one organisation proudly declare, that they are ‘nurturing their talent pipeline’; for which Orwellian abstraction read people.

Still crazy

Last weekend I went to see Wim Wenders’ film Pina, about the work of the pioneering German dancer and choreographer, Pina Bausch, and her company. It was an extraordinary two hours, not least because Pina herself died three weeks after filming began, but rather than abandoning the project, at the insistence of the company Wenders turned the film into a tribute to her. Inter-spersing the dance footage, each member of the company in turn speaks a few words to camera about what she meant to him or her. It must have been a profoundly emotional experience for them all.

Apart from these short spoken pieces the film was all dance and music. It was a feast of colour, movement and rhythm, some of it filmed during theatrical performances, some in ‘natural’ settings ranging from a river-bank to a steelworks, the rim of an open-cast mine to a busy motorway intersection. There were moments of humour and surprise, menace and tenderness, violence and joy. And underlying it all was a growing sense of the depth of Pina’s influence on her dancers – who came, it seemed, from almost every country under the sun.

I’m used to being transported by words, music and images, but less so by bodily movement and I was unprepared for how touched and inspired I felt by this film; not merely by the unseen but towering presence of Pina Bausch herself and the affection in which she was clearly held by her dancers, but by the beauty and grace of those lean, steel-muscled bodies, by their power to silently evoke all the emotional and psychological subtleties of what it is to be human.

Funnily enough, though, rather than making me want to dance, I left the cinema with a very strong craving for stillness. Those dancers, I felt, were able to move their bodies as they did, in some cases almost like acrobats, because they knew how to be still at their core, to create some point of inner calm and balance from which their control, and therefore the power of their movement and emotional expressiveness, flowed. That stillness was there in their faces even as they talked about Pina.

Life as I get older is not as I’d imagined it. It’s not slower and calmer, but faster and increasingly frantic. There is so much I want to do and never quite enough time to do it all. I’m sure I would do more still, and all of it better, if I could find that stillness. But it doesn’t come merely from the absence of activity; it’s the presence of something single-minded and disciplined, hard-won through years of practice. Yoga and meditation are paths to it. Perhaps we reach a version of it when we’re utterly absorbed in something, living only in the moment. But the trick must be in being able to put ourselves there at will, rather than waiting for the moment to strike.

I imagine it as a kind of gathering-in, of bringing all of oneself to a single point – which is just how Pina’s dancers were, the totality of their beings focused on each successive movement. Swap dancing for any other activity you care to name and the goal starts to become obvious, even if the means of reaching it are less so. But I love the paradox that these thoughts of stillness were triggered by a film about movement.