Dear Diary, Just another ho hum Monday.
Spent the day chatting with a couple of pensioners. The usual stuff. In the morning talking about sex (and Sean Connery) with Willie McIlvanney. In the afternoon talking about sex (and Billy Connolly) with Pamela Stephenson. With a few hundred folk blatantly eavesdropping. Heaven knows what they get up to at night. But that’s douce old Edinburgh for you.
And that’s the unpredictable essence of its International Book Festival. Self-evidently about literature and lofty philosophical themes, but also about love and sex, conflict and death and the complexity of very human relationships in all their guises.
McIlvanney is wryly bemused in public, and doubtless privately wounded, by his inability to find a publisher for his current writing. He’s coined a new collective noun for the occasion – “a flight of publishers”. More fool they.
He blames his lack of a London profile; his Scottishness. Yet the themes he covers in his tentatively titled Dictionary of Personal Experience are nothing if not universal; the enforced honesty of the sexual encounter; the betrayal of bodily parts and functions as they stubbornly age ahead of the mind still notionally in charge of them; the choice of facing transitions with resignation or rebellion; the struggle to impose your personal terms of engagement on the grim reaper.
You wonder at the reasoning of publishing houses so swift to reject the elegantly worded wisdom of the prose he offered to his audience this week. There may be casual ageism involved; he’s admitted he’s contrived to run up his biblically allotted timespan. Yet it’s because of that richly lived and carefully examined life that he can deliver the acute observations born of personal experience. Great wines, good cheeses, and fine writers invariably increase the pleasure quotient of their consumers with the passage of time.
Pamela Stephenson Connolly in many ways embodies the McIlvanney philosophy that if old age is an inevitable visitor it’s going to have one hell of a time kicking in the front door. She’s perfected the art of survival through re-invention; from comedienne and actress, to psycho- therapist, documentary film maker, reality TV star, and mobile advert for the joys of sex and sensuality still available to women of a certain age. It has to be conceded that not many women of Stephenson’s vintage could carry off an Argentinian Tango with a smouldering partner on the modestly proportioned dais of the main book festival tent.
Her own proportions have grown significantly more modest after the gruelling weeks of training and performing on Strictly Come Dancing, but the remaining curves are very evidently in all the right places and were showcased in a little red number so tight half the audience could hardly breathe. Yet this weekend she’ll doubtless be featuring something be-tweeded and tastefully tartan as she joins Mr Connolly at Candacraig to celebrate their annual Highland Games.
Her latest book is about sex and how people deal with it in different decades of their lives. (Warning: the chapters on the seventies and eighties might cause as much alarm as anticipation.) Some might argue McIlvanney and Stephenson are not as other mortals; that their very celebrity confers on them a special status and different rules. It doesn’t work that way. Neither of these glamorous pilgrims has evaded serious personal challenges along the road. Nobody does. It’s not what befalls you that defines you, as Mr McIlvanney wisely observes, it’s how you deal with it.
(It’s easier to be clear-headed and pragmatic when the path ahead isn’t cluttered with financial woes or persistent ill health. The posse of ministers intoning about the fecklessness of youth and inadequacy of parenting have probably never had to do hard sums featuring a job- seeker’s allowance and three teenagers.)
But transitions are a recurrent feature of the human condition and thus this space will house a different tenant from next week. My laptop and I migrate to the Society page, another forum where all human life abides. Hope to see you there.
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