Tam O' Shanter

Ae Spring, by my husband, Alan Lees

Back in June 1996, BBC R4 broadcast my play on the writing of Tam O' Shanter : the narrative, comic poem by our greatest national poet, Robert Burns. That was back when I was writing plenty of radio drama, and at that time, was lucky enough to work with an international award winning producer/director, the late Hamish Wilson. The play was commissioned to mark the 200th anniversary of the death of the poet, on 21st July 1796. 

A few days ago, a friend flagged up to me on Facebook that R4 Extra were broadcasting repeats of the production. It's still available online, and will be for the next 25 days, which I'm pleased about since we were in the middle of a prolonged Storm Eowyn powercut at the time! 

I wanted to evoke the older Burns, who seems to have been inspired to write the poem circa 1790, for the second volume of Francis Grose's Antiquities of Scotland. This was when he, his wife Jean and his family were living at Ellisland Farm, not far from Dumfries. The poet was farming and working as an exciseman, all while writing and remaining, by all accounts, a loving father.

I also wanted to look back to the inspiration behind the poem, when a very young Rab spent time in Kirkoswald, not far from his mother's home town of Maybole, learning 'mensuration' or mathematics, but also walking across to the nearby Carrick coast with his friend Willie Niven. It was there that he met Douglas Graham of Shanter Farm, about half a mile from the village of Maidens. Duncan was the model for Tam. He had a formidable wife, and a drinking crony called John Davidson - 'Souter Johnnie', the Kirkoswald shoemaker, whose house you can still visit today.

Essentially, this is a tale of a very drunken Tam setting off home to Shanter Farm after a successful market day in Ayr, riding his 'grey mare Meg'. Increasingly beset by stormy weather and the fear of ghosts and goblins, he is heading for the River Doon, that marks the border between Kyle and Carrick when ...

'glimmering thro’ the groaning trees,
Kirk-Alloway seem’d in a bleeze;
Thro’ ilka bore the beams were glancing;
And loud resounded mirth and dancing.—


Drunkenly determined to investigate, Tam advances on the ruins, only to see a dance of witches, 'rigwoodie hags' with the devil himself, Auld Nick, playing the pipes to accompany them. Unfortunately for Tam (or his horse) one of the witches, Nannie, is young and pretty, dancing madly in a very short shift, a 'cutty-sark', leaving little to Tam's imagination. He is so excited that he takes leave of his senses altogether and cries out 'weel done Cutty-sark!' whereupon - as the poet tells us - 'in an instant all was dark.' 

The 'hellish legion' sallies forth to chase him. 'In hell they'll roast thee like a herrin'. But witches and warlocks dare not cross running water and 'Maggie' is a noble steed. They 'win the key-stane of the brig' just as the athletic Nannie catches hold of Meg's tail. 

'The carlin claught her by the rump,
And left poor Maggie scarce a stump.'

It is a wonderful poem: witty and wise and perfectly structured, with a use of language second to none. I have always loved Burns's poetry and have written a good deal about him and his wife over the years - but I still think this poem is my favourite. 

In writing the play, I was keen to weave in some of the folkloric inspiration behind the poem, stories that the poet would have heard at his mother's knee and that his wife too would have been well aware of during her Mauchline childhood. 

I also wanted to evoke the poem's composition - not in the single inspiration that later commentators invented - but as a creative process. The poet clearly enjoyed himself, and it shows in the perfection and wit of the completed poem. 

The cast included, among various talented Scottish actors, Ayrshire lad Liam Brennan as Rab, Gerda Stevenson with a perfect voice to evoke Jean Armour's 'wood notes wild' - and an appearance by Billy Boyd who went on to play Pippin in The Lord of the Rings. You can hear Liam reading the whole poem, beautifully, at the very end of the play. 

Like all Hamish's productions, it was a happy project. He was skilful, talented, caring and kindly. 

As a postscript to this, you may want to read a little more about Hamish himself. After his death, I wrote a piece about him for this blog, later republished on the Sutton Elms Blog. Sadly the BBC decided that this award winning producer was surplus to requirements and made him redundant. Among much else, he had been a juror and jury chairman in the Prix Italia, Prix Futura Berlin and the Prix Europa - but he wore his distinction lightly. Perhaps too lightly for the BBC that jettisoned him as casually as they have jettisoned so many others over the years - myself included, some years later. My last radio production was in 2007. We were, as somebody pointed out to me much later, 'tainted by experience.' 

It turned out to be a good thing for me. After an initial period of mourning for the radio career I once had, I moved on to many other enjoyable and successful creative projects - and a writing career is always a switchback. Not quite so for Hamish, sadly. I've often thought that if these things had happened just a few years later, he would have been able to go it alone, much as so many writers like myself do nowadays. He was one of the best and I still miss him.

Meanwhile, if you can visit Ellisland, probably the most atmospheric of all the places associated with the poet, don't forget to walk along the River Nith, where the poet walked and remembered his youth and imagined  the first drafts of the tale of Tam o' Shanter. You might like to listen to the play as well! You can find it here for the next three weeks or so: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0027csp


River Nith near Ellisland






How Not To Be A Writer - Part Thirteen: Accept That You Are Running a Small Business

 





When I was first starting out on a writing career, I wish that somebody had sat me down and pointed out that I was about to set up a small business. That I was about to be a sole trader and that I had better believe it and act accordingly, rather than imagining myself to be some kind of acolyte, knocking at the doors of literature.

Actually, if I'm honest, they did. Or tried to. I joined the Society of Authors but over the years, they seemed to chicken out of the kind of robust advice they had once offered. Somewhere along the way, I remember booking an advice session with the Cultural Enterprise Office in Glasgow. It still exists, but back then it was proactive and well funded and you could book one to one sessions with people who knew what they were talking about. I also attended a few information days and events with my freelance woodcarver and artist husband, all aimed at prompting us be more businesslike. Although sometimes those sessions consisted of wildly successful people telling us how wildly successful they had been, rather than giving us any concrete advice about how they had done it. 

A few things are preying on my mind as I write this. 

1 I use Amazon a lot, both for shopping - we live in a rural area, and their deliveries are very good - and for publishing eBooks and excellent quality print-on-demand paperbacks. I don't make any fortunes out of the publishing, but Amazon pays me every month, on the nail, with tremendous regularity. They also supply me with data that I can understand. If you've never engaged with a traditional publisher, you will have no idea how rare this is. Hen's teeth doesn't even begin to describe it. 

2 Over the Christmas period, I noticed that most, if not all, of my various Amazon deliveries were accompanied by a small note of some kind. Like this one, from PetShop, the company that supplies me with No Mess Bird Seed, to feed the ravening hordes in my garden:  'Our company was founded with the help of a Prince's Trust loan in 2010.' The letter goes on to describe how one of the founders had moved back home and saw his mother, who had arthritis, struggling to carry pet food. The company aim to supply and deliver pet and wild bird food directly to the customer. And they do, efficiently and at a reasonable price. Another company, supplying my husband's acrylic paint added a cheerful leaflet announcing that they are 'new to Amazon Marketplace' even though they have bricks and mortar stores in the south and are eminently contactable in other ways.

3 Many of my writer friends routinely and very vocally boycott Amazon. Some of them have publishers that sell books on the platform, so I never quite know how they square this with their consciences, but they do. And yes - I'm well aware that most traditional publishers are no fans of the big beast for various valid reasons - but then the whole 'sale or return' set-up that persists for book sales is pretty faulty, wherever they are sold. Most artists and artisans will have discovered by bitter experience that any kind of sale or return deal with a store is a very bad idea. My woodcarver husband once loaned out a hand carved rocking horse to a supposedly reputable shop, only to have it returned with coffee mug stains and scratches all over the stand. On another occasion we had to execute a 'sting' to recover a large rocking horse from a store that we had been reliably informed was about to go bust, taking £3000 worth of his hard work with it. These are extreme examples, but it is a truth universally acknowledged that businesses don't value what they haven't paid for.

As far as Amazon is concerned, the animus is mostly to do with corporation taxes, avoided (but not evaded) by the giant, but many of my colleagues seem unaware that Amazon hosts thousands of small businesses, (2 million small and medium enterprises at the last count) many of which would not survive without the efficiency of the site underpinning their sales. And these days, most UK SMEs, hit hard by Brexit and the near impossibility of selling to the EU without incurring spiralling costs, need all the help that they can get.

These are small businesses that submit tax returns and pay their taxes

If you think Amazon itself (as opposed to those selling on the platform) should pay more taxes, lobby your MP.  And bear in mind that if you are aiming to publish and sell your creative work in any way, you are also running a small business. Act accordingly. Look out for yourself. Don't fall for the sob stories.

I should add that I wish I had followed my own advice years ago. But then, years ago, the option to self publish didn't exist as it does now, in various forms. I only wish it had.








Poor, Dear, Unfortunate Jean.

 

 


It has been brought to my attention that the National Trust for Scotland is holding a Jean Armour Supper in Burns Cottage on 24th January. Presumably in case potential attendees are otherwise engaged on the Bard's actual birthday on the 25th. Tickets are £100 a pop, so it's only for 'those and such as those' as the locals would say. 

Back in 2016, I researched, wrote and published what was generally accepted to be the definitive book about Jean Armour, albeit in novel form  - The Jewel. It's still available, both in paperback and as an eBook, which you will find here. Until then, she had been a mere footnote in the life of the poet. In the historical note to my novel, I point out that 'too many Victorian scholars seem to have been content to maintain the fiction that in marrying Jean, a reasonably prosperous stonemason's daughter, the poet was somehow marrying beneath him.'  Catherine Carson went so far as to call her an 'unfeeling heifer'.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. 

The poet called her his muse, in this loveliest of songs - O Were I On Parnassus Hill - one that another poet would later dismiss as a 'strained and vapid lyric.' He should be so lucky as to have somebody write such splendid words about him

In spite of living some eight miles away from Burns Cottage, in spite of the fact that the Burns Museum sold my books, and I had actually done a talk for them - admittedly on a different subject - last year, I found out about the event only when it popped up on my FB feed and when a few people asked if I would be there. If there were invitations, one of them wasn't for me. But perhaps it's just as well. 

Here's the publicity for the event. Can you spot the problem? 

It’s time the ladies had their own supper! Celebrate the life, love, and legacy of Robert Burns through the eyes of his muse, Jean Armour.

So it's not about Jean at all, is it? It's about the life, love and legacy of her famous husband with Jean as an also-ran. A 'ladies' addendum to Burns night. Because we can't possibly celebrate this fine woman in her own right, can we?

Back when the book was first published, I attended a particularly wonderful Jean Armour Supper. It was held in Troon's Lochgreen Hotel, it was organised by the Ayrshire Business Women, and the only men in the room were the waiters. I toasted the Immortal Memory of Jean. It still stands out as one of the high points of my working life, one of the most enjoyable events I've ever participated in. 

I sometimes wonder if my big mistake was in writing Jean's story as a piece of fiction. Well, I don't regret it, because I am first and foremost a novelist, and I wanted to get inside her head. But I'm a historian as well, and everything in the novel either did happen or could have happened. Mostly the former. A little while ago, I found myself chatting to somebody on Facebook who had been doing some research on his family's own connection with Jean. Much of what he was saying was what I had discovered as well. When I innocently asked him if he had read my book, his reply was 'LOL no!' 

I'm still not sure what was so funny about the notion of reading a well researched, glowingly reviewed book, fiction or not, about the very topic you're researching.

All this is on my mind because, among other things, I'm currently working on a play about Jean, one that will involve dramatising parts of my own book. There's a definite likelihood of a production. And perhaps we can make it a celebration of Jean herself, without placing her firmly in the long shadow cast by her husband. Who after their marriage, and even though he had once called her his 'poor, dear, unfortunate Jean', always gave her her due. 

'Then come, sweet Muse, inspire my lay! 
For a' the lee-lang simmer's day, 
I couldna sing, I couldna say, 
How much, how dear, I love thee.'



Ellisland near Dumfries, where Jean is properly celebrated.