Letter from London: Braveheart Asymptote

I write this from a London hospital bed having—most powerfully—imagined bagpipes the moment I came round from my operation. Drugs will do that for you. The pipes—the great Highland bagpipe—will do that for you. Playing alongside was an anaesthetist, a surgeon into Bach (you always find out), plus nurses and student nurses. At one point an entire pipe band was marching through the frontal and parietal lobes. ‘Awa’ an bile yer heid,’ I should have told myself in broad Scots. (‘Go away and boil your head.’) The sound was furious and sweeping but everything in a sick world is relative. My irenic London hospital bed was soon flooded with images from social media of heinous dumpsites of dead bodies in Middle Eastern and African hospitals. The horror shows. The nowheres to go. The day-in day-out deaths of young children lined up with stickers on their heads.

As the hospital drugs wore off, I wondered if the conjured sounds were in fact something spiritual or because my bagpiper friend Antoin Doherty had recently messaged me from The World Pipe Band Championships in Scotland—that annual competition run by The Royal Scottish Pipe Band Association (RSPBA) on Glasgow Green. Armies of musicians had descended there from Hong Kong, Germany, Australia, plus the skirl-towns and cities of Scotland. My friend’s Manorcunningham Pipe Band from across the water in Donegal had already come third at The European Championships in Perth—from where he had already said they would try harder at ‘the Worlds’, where they came seventh in the end, third in piping, which was a massive achievement.

Many Scots—not just in Glasgow or in Perth—are protective of their culture—both ancient and contemporary–and such events as the Worlds speak volumes. Those of us who no longer live in Scotland can be maudlin in their praise or just like me hopelessly out of touch. But even here in London there are one or two outfits such as Scots in London with their First World War origins and not-for-profit promotions including grants to charities to ease the pain. In Scotland itself, an emergency petition last week demanded government keep a vow to raise investment in the arts there by £100 million a year, warning that not to do so risked ‘cultural catastrophe’. The arts along with the World Health Organisation (WHO) also joined forces recently for the world’s first ever nationwide festival there highlighting the direct public health benefits in cultural enrichment and engagement. This was produced by Scottish Ballet and the Jameel Arts & Health Lab, opening up what it hopes will be new funding streams. As many Scots know, art—especially at street level—increases empathy.

‘Is it not strange that sheep’s guts should hale souls out of men’s bodies?’ it says in Much Ado About Nothing. North of the border, the old clan chiefs had pipers lead men into battle and play at funerals. Today, following the end of the clan system, we still hear (sheep-gut) bagpipes the world over. I even know a Cambridge professor of security engineering who skilfully plays the pipes. Their first ever recorded use in Scotland however was at the Battle of Pinkie in 1547. This was precisely where 421 years later I would hear them at school in Musselburgh. As for when I first heard bagpipes in Jordan, it blasted my already sand-blasted head right back to the soft lawns, pounded paperbacks, and rugby posts of yore. There the bagpipes were, being played so evocatively in Amman by keffiyeh-wearing members of the Jordanian military. No wonder there is a well known giant piece of graffiti there depicting a bagpiper. Assumptions of colonial roots—such as with the bagpipes I heard in Lahore in Pakistan—are suitably confused today by the insistence for example that bagpipes are in fact Roman. (Nero is described in some texts as playing the tibia utricularis and that the Scots borrowed the idea from invading Romans.) One bagpipe sculpture found in what is now Turkey dates back—many tunes and dirges ago—to 1000 BC. An Irish friend even tells me their roots are Persian.

It was after returning to London from the Middle East that I first met my talented bagpiper friend Antoin. For what it is worth, this was following my departure from London for the US over five years earlier. NORAID was still big in New York and the bagpipes seemed always to be presented there as Irish, as noted when I wore my mother’s Scottish tartan—Shaw—in the East Village one day on my way to artist Gerald Laing’s uptown wedding in 1988 to Adaline Frelinghuysen when someone shouted from across Avenue A: ‘I love the Irish!’ Back in London, I would accompany my bagpiper friend regularly when he busked around central London. The half-lighted faces of tourists reminded me of children around a bonfire. Antoin would go on to dazzle audiences in Japan with the late John Mayall’s son Gaz and his prodigious band The Trojans. Trying to write about London’s buskers a year or so later, one particular favourite tossed up by my research was the man who looked after an entire family for years by walking around a box of matches all day, occasionally jumping over them.

But what exactly was it my friend’s bagpipes were doing for me during what was after all a time of deep reflection for me? I suppose that fused into their cosmic skirl was something wistful and full of mourning. To live in the hearts of those you love is not to die, as my grandmother had already alerted me. While I knew little in piping terms about the formalities of the salute, the gathering, or the lament, what I did know was what I liked. Some people on the other hand hated the sound of bagpipes. I can so easily hear Alfred Hitchcock’s ruminative and chewy voice saying, ‘I understand the inventor of the bagpipes was inspired when he saw a man carrying an indignant, asthmatic pig under his arm. Unfortunately, the man-made sound never equaled the purity of the sound achieved by the pig.’ I would actually later discover through someone’s handsome dedication that there was a great-uncle of mine—Donald Shaw—from the isle of Skye who defended magnificently in the courts the Vatersay, Eoligarry, Paiblesgarry, Harris, Laxdale, Lewis, Strathaird and Raasay raiders, even meeting up with Lloyd George in London on their spirited behalf. He, it transpired, was president of the Highland Pipers’ Society. I didn’t know that.

Today, Antoin Doherty plays Westminster Bridge three or more days a week when he is in London, also funerals and weddings and parties. He also helps bagpipers all over the world, with one ending each show for an American stand-up comedian at the Edinburgh Festival recently and another found work at a wedding in Bordeaux. He says it is the winter which is difficult because he doesn’t play the Bridge, only funerals and Burns Suppers. ‘My long plan is to horse it from Easter to the end of September,’ he says, ‘and go abroad in winter. Total Gypsy I am. I’ve always been a gentleman of the road.’

So what exact tune was it I was imagining from my hospital bed? I wish I could say it was the rousing equivalent of seventieth birthday greetings for my voyager friend CC O’Hanlon. I fear it more likely The Dark Island or The Battle of Sherramuir with its profound reflection on the consequence of war—geopolitical incompetence, as I have also heard it called. Mind you, there are over 5,500 bagpipe tunes out there. Not just the ones we hear from our hospital beds. Besides, these ones worked. I am feeling much better now, thank you.

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