Boswell's Bus Pass Part 2

Entering Kirkaldy I looked for the floodlights of Stark's Park, the football stadium which parodies in miniature the one at the centre of Lowry's Match Day. Its turnstiles will still only admit one whippet-thin supporter at a time. Soon a gloomy son of the manse will cower anonymously on the terracing sucking warmth but no comfort from a polystyrene cup. Prime Minister no more, a paunchy wraith, condemned to wander the wastelands of Fife for the rest of his days. He will find the perfect reflection of his own fallen glory in the fortunes of Raith Rovers.

Striking up an innocent conversation about free travel with an elderly woman in the bus station queue was a mistake. Animated with genuine bitterness she embarked on a loud tirade about the grannies down the town who could easily afford to pay for their fares if they didn't spend all their money on toys for their spoiled grandchildren. Seeking, but not finding, support from others in the queue for her rant against families in general she developed her increasingly self-absorbed monologue. Yes, she had lived in Kirkcaldy for 59 years but no, she couldn't lose her English accent. She wasn't to be deflected. No, she and her late husband had not had any children. And why would they, given what it had been like for her being brought up in a family of fourteen? Her parents had no time for any of them, and fought all the time. And what about people who claim it's great living down the road from their sons and daughters? How often do they actually see them? How many of the kids will even go to visit them unless they want money? With these rhetorical questions hanging in the air we joined the embarra.s.sed line to board the X54 Dundee bus.

Something must be said about the quiet rituals of courtesy that govern the behaviour of elderly bus travellers. Where old people join the queue is determined not by who got there first but by where they can find a seat in the shelter, where it is most convenient to leave shopping trolleys as big as themselves and by which friends they have spotted. When the bus arrives the original order of arrival is skilfully recreated, polite questions asked to determine priority, followed by a slow motion tea dance before anyone gets on board.

Once on the road I guessed at the average age of my fellow travellers. This difficult calculation led me to misinterpret a neon sign proclaiming 80's CLUB NIGHT EVERY WEDNESDAY. I could hear the surly bouncers rejecting desperate clubbers with 'You're not a day over 79. p.i.s.s off!' I could just see the rack by the cloakroom for hanging colostomy bags and any prosthetic limbs that might get in the way of dancing.

A striking feature of Kirkcaldy is the way in which you turn a corner and see an ocean-going tanker neatly framed by the tenements that slope downwards. Equally striking but less dramatic was the plague of inflatable Santas that could be seen abseiling up the walls of semi detached houses, reminiscent of television images from the siege of the Libyan emba.s.sy in the 80's. Many of the gardens even in the poorest schemes boasted huge trampolines that made the equally numerous satellite dishes seem like innocent prototypes. As a consequence of this literal wish to keep up with the neighbours the Victoria Hospital has a specially trained trauma unit that specialises in putting back together small children whose bodies have been impaled on clothes poles and broken on coal bunkers.

One of the strangest but most revealing of pa.s.sages from Boswell's entire account describes the thoughts he had on the road to St. Andrews. 'We had a dreary drive in a dusky night to St. Andrews, where we arrived late. I saw, either in a dream or vision, my child, dead, then her face eaten by worms, then a skeleton of her head. Was shocked and dreary. I was sunk. Mr Johnson complained I did not hear in the chaise, and said it was half abstraction. I must try to help this.'

It is difficult to sustain a view of Boswell as a sycophantic buffoon when he is capable of such disclosure. I wonder if he hasn't given honest expression to the thought that dare not speak its name in the hearts of most parents. For his part Johnson was no stranger to the terror that can come in the night and was frequently visited by dreams of his brother Nathaniel who died young.

Boswell and Johnson made the most of their time in St Andrews. They enjoyed a candle-lit walk to St Leonard's College. They ate well at the houses of the Professors; 'salmon, mackerel, herrings, ham, chicken, roast beef, apple pie'. There must have been many opportunities for chewing the cud and hen clucking. They inspected the student accommodation which they found to be 'very commodious'. They make no mention of the stereos, iPods, Pot Noodles, discarded underwear, Snap Faxes, stolen police bollards, posters, pin ups, and condoms bought, as ever, more in hope than expectation. Boswell would certainly have noted the condoms had he seen any. He may even have stolen one or two as they were something of a specialist interest given the frequency of their appearance in his London Journal, but were not always available judging by the existence of his illegitimate children.

At several points in St Andrews Johnson insisted on doffing his cap whenever he came across ecclesiastical demolition perpetrated in the name of the Reformation. David suggested his reaction was mirrored by most in the West when the news bulletins showed the mutilation by the Taliban of the Buddhas in Bamiyan Valley.

Writing to Mrs Thrale, Johnson describes meeting an old woman who lived with her cat in a semi-collapsed vault under the cathedral ruins. She claimed to be of royal extraction, thought her sons were probably dead and exalted in her two main possessions, these being a heap of turf for burning and 'b.a.l.l.s of coal dust'. When she told Boswell that her main occupation was wandering though the graveyard at night he asked if she had met any ghosts. She replied that although her evening strolls were largely ghost-free she always had premonitions before hearing that a relative had died. Perhaps her sons had chosen to avoid even this method of contacting their mum.

I struggle with St Andrews. Yes, it's attractive and smart but I can't get beyond my own prejudices. It still feels elitist and unnecessarily exclusive with pretensions beyond its status. Although Gla.s.s's Inn where the two of them enjoyed 'a good supper of rissered haddocks and mutton chops' is no longer there we had agreed to buy a pint in the pub nearest the original site. This was easier said than done. The Castle Tavern was bricked up. Most of the adjacent premises bore names such as Psychic World, The Miller's Tale and Anyone for Tennis. Not a decent boozer within 100 yards. Eventually we settled for the Central Bar and squeezed in alongside troops of yahs happily braying their way through the menu and ordering food that should have been beyond the means of your typical student.

There was one other customer who looked as if he might join us in a quick burst of cla.s.s war if push came to shove but even he displayed odd tendencies. He would disappear at intervals but not before carefully placing beer mats on the top of each of his three pints. Was he fearful that pa.s.sing bats might defecate in his ale? Was it a defence against someone spiking his drink with Ritalin? On reflection, unless he had bladder problems he was sneaking out the back for frequent smokes and was using beer mat semaph.o.r.e to warn unsuspecting bar staff against pouring his temporarily neglected drinks down the sink.

Samuel Johnson chose St Andrews to deliver his thoughts on smoking; 'To be sure, it is a shocking thing-blowing smoke out of our mouths into other people's mouths, eyes, and noses, and having the same thing done to us. Yet I cannot account why a thing which requires so little exertion and yet preserves the mind from total vacuity should have gone out. Every man has something by which he calms himself: beating with his feet or so.'

FOREST could use the words in their pro-smoking propaganda. The idea of beating your feet as a method of preserving the mind from total vacuity although undeniably cheaper than smoking has not caught on greatly.

David finally achieved closure in his earlier fixation by stuffing a huge baguette in his mouth while declaring happily 'You can stick your mutton up your jumper!' It was unclear if this was a promise or a threat.

There was nothing pretentious about the second hand bookshop at the foot of South Street. The proprietor seemed genuinely pleased to see potential customers and on asking if he could be of help in any way David replied with a positively Johnsonian flourish, 'I would like to purchase the one first edition in your shop that is outrageously underpriced'. Thankfully this piece of facetiousness was received with good grace and there followed one of those perennial discussions with booksellers about the one that got away. On this occasion it was a first of Ian Rankin's Knots and Crosses which had been unknowingly tossed into the pound box outside.

Dr Johnson's father had been a second hand book seller and binder before overreaching himself with a doomed paper-making venture. Father and son enjoyed a complex, often acrimonious relations.h.i.+p. When he left Oxford Samuel declined the opportunity to work in the family business, and on an occasion that returned to haunt him, refused even to accompany his father to Uttoxeter market where he had a bookstall. In later life he underwent a public show of repentance: 'I went to Uttoxeter in the rain, on the spot where my father's stall used to stand. In contrition I stood, and hoped the penance was expiatory.'

Although it was raining when we left the shop there was no large ungainly figure in frock coat rocking and muttering to himself.

Just at the moment when I thought I might have misjudged St. Andrews, a young man emerged from a bijou property onto the street and complained in sulky but formidably upper crust tones that 'Apart from anything else my b.l.o.o.d.y jumper is on inside out!'

He needed a good skelp from his mammy.

The short bus journey in the dusk to Leuchars was notable for the fleeting image of an agricultural worker, his tractor nearby, setting fire to a single small bale of hay. What was he doing? It wasn't the time of year for stubble burning. Was he addicted to the evocative smell; was he a lone rural arsonist? Was he destroying evidence?

Subsequent research offered a perspective on his furtive behaviour. Stubble burning is an illegal activity in England under the Crop Residues (Burning) regulations of 1993. Although there is no express ban on stubble burning in Scotland it is strongly discouraged by environmental regulators particularly when it causes dark smoke to be released. Proximity to roads is another important factor.

I was surprised to discover that there was more to Leuchars than a railway station and ma.s.sive RAF base. How many utterly tedious days had I endured at the air show over the years? Never able to reveal to my younger son the depth of my antipathy, I would enthuse over high-octane and testosterone-fuelled vertical ascents of NATO's latest killing machines, breathe the rank burgers and put my hand into my pocket to buy yet another Airfix model.

Boswell wrote '... observing at Leuchars a church with an old tower we stopped to look at it.' We did the same.

St Athelstane's, built in 1182, dominates the housing scheme that surrounds it. Against the night sky it loomed black, a stranded architectural dinosaur overlooked by the reformation and left to suffer in exile from its own times. The iron ring on the door was not for turning. Just as well lest the black arch shot a hot breath of fried imps into the night before we both tumbled into the dark nightmare shaft.

Part of the journey that didn't happen:

That night I dreamed not of Mandalay but of two excursions with Johnson. If I had kept a pen by my bed I could have recalled more details.

In a forest of deciduous trees, green as a painting by Gauguin Dr Johnson's attention was drawn by the guide to a stack of huge fallen trees piled one on top of the other and still smouldering. They were hollow. As he approached it was just possible to hear the wind playing the most delicate of tunes through the trees as if they were pan pipes.

Then we stood on a viaduct overlooking Warrington, somewhere I've never visited. This time the landscape was more Bruegel with tiny figures toiling in pastel coloured fields. The whole area was punctuated by the smoke from hundreds of small steam locomotives.

Gla.s.s's Inn St Andrews 19th August 1773 My Dearest Margaret, My heart drop to my boots when I see your beautiful face at Edinburgh window as you wave and bite on kerchief. I hope you find letter in closet. I stare at Margaret picture now.

My body aches, Joseph's bones are bruising because we spend whole day b.u.mping our way up Scotland. The chaise is made for dwarf, tiny persons like child not three big men. The Doctor, as you know, is a big, big man with big books and a stick like a tree that he will not be parted with. The master is like mad puppet weasel pointing and jumping every time we see countryman with no shoes or pa.s.s a field of not very good cabbages.(1) As you know there are no seas in Bohemia. I am not a friend of seas and big water. So when we get on little boat to go to the island I am very feared. But I am not coward like my master. He close his eyes whole journey and is very sick. The Doctor is very pleased and standing up shout at the waves, I think it is Latin like in church. But he stand up and the boat goes under the water little way. My master is screaming like a baby and puts his head under a blanket. (2) Scotland is very beautiful. I think happy thoughts that I am in Bohemia lands. The master does not let doctor rest but always asks him question in silly voice that he use in London when he want to seem full of clever and wit. I think he wants to hear own voice. At last the master fall asleep and the doctor he speak to me. Joseph, he says in voice my home priest use when he see me come from inn, Joseph you are a good and kind man but I think sometimes you would rather serve your mistress than your master but he give me big smile and push coin into my hand. He man who see all things.

St Andrews is fine place but too much sea for Joseph. The Doctor will stand in front of old church buildings that have fall down and go very silent I think he prays so I also cross myself and ask G.o.d to s.h.i.+ne on my Margaret.

A strange thing happen at night. My master is not in his room. I try to find him. The innkeeper he say that my master is gone out. I go look for him. I see him going back to old woman we talk with during the day. I think she is witch. She is very poor and has no money. She lives in a cave. I wait for long time then I see my master leaving. He tying up his breeches. My dearest Margaret I say this not to upset you but this lady is not clean and you tell me in past that you get pox from your husband. You must not go with him when he return. (3) (4) This thought make me sad and my taper is dying. I will leave you now my dearest but I know you will come in dreams to me and to make me sleep I will think of when you sighed as we and put your

THIS PART OF THE LETTER IS INDECIPHERABLE.

Sleep Well Your loving Joe (1) Both shoes and cabbages frequently feature in Johnson's narrative.

(2) This anecdote if true would appear to antic.i.p.ate the later voyage to Coll during which Boswell became so consumed with panic that the boatman, intending to distract him, gave him a rope and insisted he hold it for the duration of the trip.

(3) This would explain why Boswell strangely makes no mention of their meeting with the old woman although Johnson in his account waxes enthusiastically about their conversation.

(4) This concern is not without foundation as Boswell's s.e.xual health remained an issue throughout his life. By his own calculation he experienced nineteen manifestations of venereal attack over a period of more than thirty years.

STAGE THREE.

FIFE, ANGUS AND ABERDEEN.

A lorry driver Behaving Strangely A brief Theological Speculation A Truly Shocking Sight, not for the Faint-hearted An Abbey A Deluge of Spitting Kindness from a Deaf and Dumb Woman A Flagrant Violation of the Rules Orang-utans and Satyrs An Unpleasant Bigot Several Popular Road Kill Recipes Revolting Eating Habits Described An unsettling Encounter with Ghosts

Leuchars Dundee Arbroath

When David and I resumed our journey North from Leuchars we had both survived Christmas and Scotland was in the throes of its worst winter for fifty years. Gas supplies were being rationed, roads closed, the prospect of ever being able to watch football again had become a distant fantasy. The transformation of Cowdenbeath into an Alpine haven was a miracle only normally achieved with the aid of Cla.s.s A drugs or a psychotic episode. Even Sodom and Gomorrah would look attractive in these circ.u.mstances, dependent of course on their proximity to good schools.

A small sense of euphoria was enhanced by sitting in the front upstairs seat with the hip-flask strategically positioned on the window ledge, presumably in breach of numerous by-laws and regulations; repeat offending would render the perpetrators liable to having their bus pa.s.ses publicly shredded and their bits cut off.

Either way it was a far cry from the days when only Nicotinics and dogs climbed upstairs to suffocate in the heavy green fug of f.a.gs. Did buses have ash trays then or did everyone stand in a mulch of damp discarded filters, a foul carpet of yellow scarabs? Certainly, small children regularly disappeared into the acrid pea soupers never to be seen again and the life expectancy of conductors was approximately three journeys. Even Y-fronts had to be fumigated after a journey upstairs.

There would have been no stopping at snowy woods and speculating as to their owners.h.i.+p for Johnson for whom the lack of trees on the East coast of Scotland, despite my dream, remained both a source of perplexity and a confirmation of England's innate superiority.

'The roads of Scotland afford little diversion to the traveller, who seldom sees himself either encountered or overtaken, and who has nothing to contemplate but grounds that have no visible boundary, or are separated by walls of loose stone. From the bank of the Tweed to St. Andrews I had never seen a single tree ... The variety of sun and shade is here utterly unknown. There is no tree for either shelter or timber. The oak and the thorn is equally a stranger, and the whole country is extended in uniform nakedness, except that in the road between Kirkcaldy and Cowpar, I pa.s.sed for a few yards between two hedges. A tree might be a show in Scotland as a horse in Venice. At St. Andrews Mr. Boswell found only one, and recommended it to my notice ...'

He would have been pleasantly surprised then to gaze on the fir plantations laden with their white and heavy harvest of snow. He would have been even more surprised to have seen the single palm tree which was plonked in the middle of a strange complex, well off the beaten track but obviously on the itinerary of the 96A, which apart from the tree consisted of a Dobbies Garden Centre, a MacDonald's and a David Lloyd Sports Complex. Why would anyone want to explore the wider world beyond this consumerist oasis? By accident we had stumbled on the inspiration behind Maslow's hierarchy of human needs.

Elsewhere an entire field was sown with geese resting on their flight across oceans to warm lands only glimpsed in dreams and toddlers' story books. Their grey messiness was an affront to the unspoiled whiteness. There were two other cameos that had not featured on anyone's Christmas card: for some reason a plantation of sprouts had refused to succ.u.mb to the snow, the stumpy growths flaunting their anomalous greenness; in the adjacent field the worlds of rumination, defecation and fertiliser were evidenced by three monstrous yellow steaming heaps of dung.

From the bus it was possible to spot other occasional violations caused by foot and hoof prints. There were long lines of indentations mostly leading nowhere or etched like Spiralgraph patterns round the occasional swing park. There was a surprising lack of children; there were no sledges, no cold tantrums. This was conclusive evidence that we live in a cosseted age where children are kept indoors by anxious parents swayed by Daily Mail tales of a world peopled in the main by paedophiles and predators. The lure of virtual snow on Winter Apocalypse, or whatever computer software Santa had brought, proved greater than the real thing. There is much more fun to be had from staining the landscape with the blood of slaughtered Yetis and nomad Zombies.

In a lay-by a lorry driver was glimpsed kneeling down and scooping up handfuls of snow. Was it his first trip abroad from his native Namibia? Can you develop a snow fetish?

Johnson and Boswell paid four s.h.i.+llings to have their chaise ferried over the Tay which when we swept over the bridge was floating with ice and providing temporary shelter to two North Sea oil rigs.

Neither traveller had been especially impressed with the city: 'We stopped a while at Dundee, where I remember nothing remarkable' from the one and 'Came to Dundee about three. Good busy town' from the other. Johnson was less neutral in his letter to Mrs Thrale in which he describes the town as 'dirty, despicable'.

The connecting bus to Arbroath arrived so promptly as to fuel speculation that the SNP nurse Mussolini inspired aspirations for the country's transport system. The bus's card reading system, so efficient that it could spot a pensioner's pa.s.s through an inch thick wallet, is a prototype for the full body scanners being installed at airports to enhance security. Angus drivers are also undertaking trauma training to prepare them for the shock of viewing the unclothed outlines of their fellow citizens.

We were privy, if that is the best word, to the staccato conversation of a three generation family who crowded noisily into several seats. As their enthusiastic discussion embraced the topics of theft, imprisonment, beatings, arson attempts and sundry judicial proceedings it was important not to make eye contact with any of them in case it was construed as an affront to the family honour, an action which would, in turn, lead inexorably to the aforementioned eyes being gouged from their owners' respective sockets and eaten.

Once they left I told David that at this point on the original journey Boswell had sounded Johnson out about his views on transubstantiation. Despite Boswell's self deprecating disclaimer, 'This is an awful subject,' I asked David for his thoughts. After an impressive atheistic rant about all world religions he said the debate was as pointless as discussing whether fairy eyes were pink or green. I saw his point but read to him Johnson's observation that 'If G.o.d had never spoken figuratively, we might hold that he speaks literally when he says "This is my body'''. This gave rise to speculation, as Boswell might have said, about the precise number of words directly spoken by Christ in the New Testament. Apart from the Sermon on the Mount we couldn't think of many between us and both agreed, without any real conviction, that we would look up the answer.

At the ironic wave of a wand Arbroath had become a bijou apres ski resort. By munic.i.p.al decree puffed out pastel-shaded anoraks and multi-coloured woollen hats were now mandatory. The seagulls lined up on a wall pecked at edelweiss instead of pizza. Shopkeepers dispensed Gluhwein and bonhomie before slapping each other's thighs and humming the chorus of Tomorrow Belongs to Me.

The illusion was soon shattered by one of the ugliest sights encountered so far and for which there is no equivalent in the accounts of Johnson or Boswell. We were confronted by an obese man bending down beside his car. His trousers and underpants had surrendered to gravity and sunk to an area of his anatomy best defined as lower b.u.t.tock, revealing a cleavage more suited to parking a bike. It was a brave, existential, but truly shocking gesture in these sub-arctic temperatures.

Dr Johnson declared 'I should scarcely have regretted my journey, had it afforded nothing more than the sight of Aberbrothick.' He was referring to the ruined abbey, the size of which astonished him. It was still impressive and timeless when we visited. Its brown stones stood stark against the turquoise winter sky glimpsed through the ancient round windows.

Johnson records how his travelling companion made a fool of himself by climbing over the ruin 'Mr Boswell, whose inquisitiveness is seconded by great activity, scrambled in at a high window, but found the stairs within broken and could not reach the top.' We were unable to emulate his childish enthusiasm as the abbey and grounds were closed. The sign told us that they only ever opened on a whim during very hot days, and only if the local porcine society were performing acrobatics in the sky.

Frozen to the very core we sidled into the Victoria Bar near the station. To have attempted any manoeuvre more ambitious than a sidle would have disrupted the snooker game in progress. The punter resting on his cue may have modelled his stance on a Vettriano print but any attempt at cool was compromised by the pit-bull lookalike at his feet ravaging a plastic toy.

On the train back to Edinburgh David realised that he had left his souvenir packet of Arbroath Smokies, a token gift for his wife Jan, in the pub close to the snooker table. Ever resourceful and generous he rang the barman suggesting that he give the fish to a deserving customer but not, under any circ.u.mstances, to the dog.

Montrose Laurencekirk Aberdeen

Something also needs to be said about bus shelters; they deserve closer scrutiny. The current trend is to install a sloping ledge as an alternative to a full blown seat. Sitting is clearly to be discouraged as conducive to sloth. This puritanical urge finds a precedent in the ropes slung across the dormitories of nineteenth-century doss houses where sleep was frowned on as an unnecessary indulgence.

The shop window behind the shelter carried adjacent messages, one encouraging all depressed pa.s.sers-by to make contact with Angus a.s.sociation for Mental Health and the other a warning to dog owners that the local vet will only treat previously registered animals. Melancholia and dogs again.

I was already regretting the decision to travel this section on my own. Other potential travelling companions had much better things to do involving families and pleasure.

The only other traveller on the M9 bus was being evacuated from a First World War sanatorium. The pulmonary dredging suggested that his tuberculosis was at an advanced stage. Mercifully, having successfully realigned his lungs, he lapsed into a coma. Great expectorations, Pip old boy.

We pa.s.sed Pie Bob's Cafe and the Ghurkha Tandoori in quick succession. Locals have to choose between two Little and Large posters, one showing a smiling fat man, presumably Bob and the other depicting a more austere and undeniably hungrier figure thin as a whippet and fierce as a fierce thing in the face of the enemy.

On a sign above the windows an unnaturally grinning baby mouthed the imprecation Let's talk. In antic.i.p.ation of the campaign's success and the challenge of an emerging army of articulate, demanding toddlers, MENSA waiting lists have already been capped and tenders invited to build new elite universities for the under-fives.

A potential pa.s.senger spat belligerently in the general direction of the slowing bus. Dressed in army fatigues and of pensionable age he occupied the seat in front of me, affording a close up of a large scar down the back of his head that had proved impressively stubble-resistant. All facial or head scars invite speculation. Accidents happen, so do muggings and general badness leading to insomnia, anger and flash-backs, thoughts of revenge and self-blame.

Spitting was going to be the theme of the day; through the window a workman in a high visibility vest tossed an arc of saliva over a ditch that he was inspecting for a reason known only to the Roads Department and G.o.d.

Like all good buses the M9 refused to adhere to the route of the ubiquitous flying crow and shot into housing estates whenever the chance arose. A road in a rundown suburb of Arbroath provided the answer to one of the great mysteries of the universe: where do boy racers go when they are not boy racing? Consecutive semi-detached driveways were hosting identically garish hybrid vehicles with a surfeit of fins, darkened windows and stencilled monikers. They looked impotent, all thunder stolen. The disillusion was comparable to finding Cinderella's coach in a Tesco car park.

Two visual haikus from the outskirts of Montrose: A single red flower shone fiercely against gray stones in a church yard.

A garden overlooking the swollen sea basin a wind turbine and a pony.

'About eleven at night we arrived at Montrose. We found but a sorry inn, where we dined on haddocks, pickled salmon, veal cutlets and fowl, and I myself saw another waiter put a lump of sugar with his fingers into Dr Johnson's lemonade, for which he called him "Rascal!'' It put me in great glee that our landlord was an Englishman.'

The great lemonade scandal was turning into a national disaster. The Dishonourable Company of Waiters had been mobilised, and the word pa.s.sed among them, 'Put yer fingers in the big b.a.s.t.a.r.d's lemonade and watch him go aff his heid!'

The offending hostelry was the s.h.i.+p Inn at 107 High Street. The building is still there and is approached down a narrow close. I surprised myself by feeling a genuine frisson as I opened the gate between a Polish bakers and a bargain store. My reverential progress was observed by a friendly Irishman leaning out of an upper window in the close. His languid demeanour suggested that he might well have been leaning on his window sill for the last 250 years. The s.h.i.+p Inn is now a private home with chintz curtains.

From Montrose Johnson and Boswell travelled the few miles to Laurencekirk. Their incentive was to see the village where Ruddiman, a scholar they both admired, had been schoolmaster. A further incentive was the Gardenstone Arms named after the village's virtual owner and benefactor. Lord Gardenstone's misguided philanthropy had extended to endowing the local pub with an extraordinary collection of reading material for the benefit and erudition of any pa.s.sing tinkers, mountebanks or uncla.s.sifiable rogues. Any rancid pedlar could sit with a foaming tankard of Old Bedlam and lose himself in Magno's Observations on Anatomy in Latin or Boerhaave's Commentaries on the Aphorisms of Diseases, naturalised into English. If he wished to further hone his capacity for intrigue or indeed figure out how best to escape from the inn without paying he could always skip read Machiavelli in Italian.