A small stir of Scots

I wonder how much my enthusiasm for Alexander McCall Smith’s stories about Precious Ramotswe, the founder of The Ladies No. 1 Detective Agency, came from reading them while in a French hospital recovering from an emergency operation? Grateful to be transported from my hospital bed to Botswana and find myself in her company I wouldn’t have heard a word against her. And when his first Edinburgh book came out called 44 Scotland Street, where years ago I once had digs, did I allow a nostalgic bias to creep in? But here’s Love Over Scotland, and I have no excuse for any bias, nostalgic or otherwise.

Many of the original cast reappear. Bertie is still the same compulsively truthful, precocious six-year-old who greatly endeared himself to me by setting fire to the Guardian while his father was still reading it. Thanks to his mother he’s even more fluent in Italian and a good enough saxophonist to get into a teenage orchestra, despite being 13 years too young for it, by his heart-stopping rendering of ‘As Time Goes By’. But he’s so ashamed of being seen with his mother in public he permits himself a lie by saying she’s not his mother but a lunatic only occasionally allowed out of her asylum. Bertie is also convinced his psychiatrist is mad because he published a book called Shattered to Pieces: Ego Dissolution in a Three-Year-Old-Tyrant, and you can’t get much madder than that. In Paris with the orchestra he gets left behind, but undaunted he takes his saxophone, goes busking and money pours in as the haunting notes of ‘As Time Goes By’ drift down the boulevards.