Stuart Campbell's Blog
The Launch
Initally it seemed like an early festival performance of Ienesco’s The Chairs as the frantic host (me) rushed to the door of Stevenson College’s stylish Music Box scanning the bleak Sighthill horizon looking for potential punters willing to give up an hour or so, drink some wine and buy a copy of RLS in Love at a vastly deflated price.
The campus car park has been infested with rabbits who seem to breed if you so much as look at them. In my mind’s eye I saw row on row of spectacled rabbits sitting alert in the audirorium peering towards the screen showing, on a loop, the chosen and discarded images from the book; Robert Davidson in miximatosis mode hurling screwed up dust jackets at the seats while manicially singing a demented version of Watership Down.
At the far edge of the carpark is Edinburgh’s state of the art municipal tip with separate containers for wood, small electrical goods, TV sets and monitors, old surgical trusses, dead pets, (domestic waste only, please observe site rules) For some unfathomable but engaging reason the path through the complex is lined with garden gnomes presumably rescued by a secret council gnome lover. The Mother Teresa of gnomes. Perhaps in their gnomic way the small people could point their fishing rods at a huge container reserved for books left over from various failed launches.
Perhaps I should attempt an assault from the stairwells of the high rises waiting to be demolished and persuade anyone foolish enough to open their doors that poetry was at least as effective a substitute as methadone, and at £12.95 a cheap fix. Anyway I could point out to them the poem written by Stevenson when clearly under the influence of something much much stronger. A junky’s book. The Trainspotting for the naughties. ‘Come on pal, gi it a shot, fuckin’ poetry, change yer fuckin’ life, big man, likesy. Chase the dragon., buy the fuckin’ book!’
Perhaps Sandstone could arrange to have the book translated into various African languages to make buying a copy more attractive to the beleagured asylum and refugee community who are the College’s near neighbours. After all RLS left his homeland, pretended to be happy in the South Seas and hankered to return to a rainy wind wrenched Edinburgh. He would understand. And he felt passionate about minority groups as he showed in San Francisco when he championed the persecuted Chinese. Wave this small volume at the muggers and racists and they will see the error of their ways.
And then they started to trickle in from the carpark. Any Field of Dreams analogy would be far fetched but ‘they came’. Loyal friends, work colleagues, and bugger me, folk I didn’t know. This was scary although their presence did serve as a reminder that this was in fact a book launch and not an early glimpse at my funeral guest list.
And then it was over in the proverbial flash. One hundred people. Lots of words, Polite applause and the surreal sense of looking down at myself writing my name on books. Perhaps I should not have mentioned the book’s working title The Love of Two Fannies, but hey,we were all adults, apart that is from the children present who were, well, children.
The highlights were Morag my wife singing Bright is the Ring of Words an then Over the Land of April, beautifully set to music by Sarah Kurt Eli, and meeting Paul Henderson Scott who boomed in a stentorian voice ‘I’m going to review this book for one of the broadsheets which he then proceeded to do by penning some nice words for The Scotsman. According to the blurb on his autobiography (dust jacket by Alasdair Gray) Paul had previously met with De Gaulle, Fidel Castro, Bertrand Russell, Graham Greene, and is reputed to have single handedly solved the 1963 missile crisis.
At the end of the night when the wine was finished the rabbits returned to the carpark and the gnomes dipped their rods.