Our Scottish visitors, man and wife, came bearing lavish gifts: a beribboned fruit cake in a Union Jack cake tin; a bottle of Bollinger; a bottle of Bailie Nicol Jarvie old Scotch Whisky (their favourite tipple); a bottle of nubile white Burgundy; four ‘Katie Morag’ children’s books; The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson, which made them both laugh in bed; a heavy, 19in high relief sculpture of Eos, Titan goddess of the dawn (she of the rosy fingers); a circular plaster plaque featuring a bust, in relief, of their jaw-droppingly beautiful middle daughter Sophie, clad in a toga, her head informally decorated with thistles, olives and olive leaves.
And for me a T-shirt. White cotton. He designed it himself, said the man. On the front, a black line drawing of a leafy shrub, possibly marijuana. And underneath this shrub, the words ‘Legalise it’.
I pulled off the shirt I was wearing and put it on immediately. The leaves were acanthus leaves, the man explained. The sculpted leaves one sees on capitals, urns and friezes of classical antiquity are usually acanthus leaves. The Romans loved them. Today, the classical tradition of sculpture and architecture attracts from modernists that blind hatred peculiar to all leftists. And because the leftists are winning, or have already won, the ideological battle in this field, as in every other field, with the possible exception of natural human relations, the prestige of the acanthus leaf has been downgraded to the level of, say, the Nazi oak leaf. His T-shirt design is therefore a gentle, humorous plea for sanity, proportion and a little respect for the ancients.
‘I see,’ I said.
Then the three of us went out for a long walk along the coast path. Early on, I was able to point to the mouth of the estuary and inform them it was Tennyson’s inspiration for his famous poem ‘Crossing the Bar’. Tennyson’s reputation has been scotched by the same kind of ideologues who hate the acanthus leaf, he said. Then we Googled ‘Crossing the Bar’ on his wife’s BlackBerry, and he read it out, there on the cliff above that same bar. It’s not an easy poem to read aloud, and he was squinting at the phone’s screen with his glasses off and beads of sweat standing out on his brow, but he captured the sense, rhythm and meaning perfectly, and afterwards all three of us were momentarily a little stunned by it.
I’d planned a circular walk for us, stopping at a village pub for lunch. Our Scottish visitors were amazed by the beauty of the coastal scenery, which admittedly was looking its very best. The flowers were surprising in their profusion and variety, and a stiff sea breeze had everything in motion, lending drama. Our scenery reminded the man, he said, of the Pre-Raphaelite painting ‘Our English Coasts’ by Holman Hunt, forcing me to confess that it was not one I knew. (When I Googled the painting afterwards, I saw that he was quite right — it was very much like it.)
We arrived at the pub as it was on the point of closing for the afternoon. However, the barmaid implied that the word ‘closing’ was a much looser term here than it was elsewhere, and that if we sat outside at the wooden tables, and were willing to help ourselves to drinks, and were reasonably honest, we would see that it in fact meant ‘still open’. So we took our beers outside and joined a dozen other people seated at the sun-baked tables, some of whom were not only extremely drunk but were also passing spliffs around. And it was here that I realised that my new T-shirt was going to be a passport to raging social success.
Everyone sitting outside the pub immediately assumed that the foliage depicted on the front of it was meant to be marijuana, and I was welcomed with small, discreet salutes of approbation: a thumbs-up here, a clenched fist there. I was reminded of Paul Pennyfeather’s unfortunate choice of tie on the night of the Bollinger Club’s riotous annual dinner, after which ‘the difference of a quarter of an inch in the width of the stripes was not one that Lumsden of Strathdrummond was likely to appreciate’.
Except that, in my case, the effect was entirely positive. We even had a sinewy traveller-type male person come over to our table to apologise humbly to the lady for his deerhound lurcher’s spontaneous erection which wouldn’t go away, and was the source of much merriment. ‘Good to meet you, man,’ he said finally to me. And then we did that brotherly sideways handclasp thing, while his lovely woman reinforced it with a complicit smile. ‘You know what, man?’ I said to my Scottish visitors. ‘I like this T-shirt. Thank you very much.’
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