BONNIE DUNDEE

Mid-February, and yet another adventure. The night was penguin black, and cold. I was in Dundee, in foreign territory. I didn’t know what to expect. I was pleasantly surprised. I wandered around the city centre in the dark, so I didn’t see whether or not it was dirty or clean. It seemed clean. Many of the streets had been pedestrianised, using blocks of natural stone. One of the streets had inlaid tram tracks alongside the cobbles, a testament to when the city’s trams rattled along these very roads. I stood beside the imposing statue of Desperate Dan and his dog. A young woman leaned casually against Dan’s back, studying a text message. She was dwarfed by the cow-pie-eating giant, as was Minnie the Minx, crouched mischievously behind him. The McManus Gallery is being refurbished. It’s brilliant, easily the pick of the buildings I saw. Revival gothic, a scaled-down St Pancras. I dined in a huge old Victorian barn of a bar, called ‘The Town’. I ate a club sandwich and potato wedges and read ‘The Scotsman’. A journalist in the newspaper was calling for a single National Police Force, rather than the octet of forces we have just now, governed by elected members and MSPs, that would decide, for example, whether use of taser guns was appropriate, rather than leave that to the Police themselves. ‘At the very least’, the journalist said, ‘we’ll be able to get rid of seven chief constables.’ The bar was occupied mainly by students, who giggled a lot and made a glass of Coca-Cola last the evening. There was a lugubrious chap sitting alone at the table behind me who dragged a game leg when he walked and seemed clouded in the deepest gloom. He wore a scruffy leather jacket and threadbare trousers. He sucked occasionally at a near-empty glass of beer and radiated the room with his melancholy. I had to read the piece about the chief constables twice to cheer me up. I came out of the bar and promptly got lost. I walked past the bus station twice before correcting myself and retracing my steps. As luck would have it, I picked up the tram tracks again which led me to the City Square, and it was plain sailing from then on. A thuggish-looking chap walked towards me with the mandatory Staffordshire Bull Terrier. He spat on the pavement and cursed the dog roundly as I hurried across the road, away from this modern-day Bill Sykes. I stayed in the Victorian Queen’s Hotel, not far from the rather ordinary and unlovely 1970s railway station. Winston Churchill stayed at the hotel many times between 1908 and 1923, when he was Dundee’s sitting Member of Parliament. A plaque said that once, in 1913, he complained about a maggot in his breakfast. I think they have decorated the hotel since, but I’m not sure. I couldn’t care less – I loved it there. The floorboards creaked like a three-masted clipper in a force nine gale and there wasn’t a straight wall in the place, but there was room to swing several moggies, and I had a bidet, albeit a very old-fashioned one that looked like a large kidney-dish. I forgot my razor, so the kindly woman behind the reception desk gave me a shaving kit comprising a lightweight disposable razor and a tube of Gilchrist and Soames shaving cream. I cut myself to bits with the razor later on. The view from my third-floor window was fantastic. I could see right across the massive and mesmeric Tay to Newport and Wormit on the other bank, and the sodium lamps of the river district twinkled like little suns under a huge velvet canopy. I was so moved by the Jute City that I felt a touch of McGonagall coming on, so I wrote, in the style of the Master:

‘The night crept o’er Bonnie Dundee town
Which fact did not even bring me down
I could still see out of the corner of my eye the silvery Tay
Which seems to weary travellers to help them on their way
God Bless you Bonnie Dundee and keep you safe and sound
My friends are telling me it’s my turn to buy another round.’

Inspired, or what?