Month: April 2021

Peter Scott, as in Gentleman Thief

Peter Scott, as in Gentleman Thief

Photo © PA

Peter Craig Gulston AKA Peter Scott (1931-2013)

1995

24 November, Friday

Peter Scott was on the Late Late Show, on a different level altogether from Gay Byrne, the audience and the idiots who rang in to give out. As Scott replied, you don’t get rich from robbing prefabs in Catford.

2001

13 March, Monday

I think John Aspinall died last year. First I ever heard of him was when Peter Scott (Gentleman Thief, I must get that book) described his great pleasure in “robbing that bastard Aspinall”. He’s easiest to refer to as “the guy with the zoo” but, reading Alan Clark, I see a footnote on p. 85 says he actually had two of them. Clark was friendly with him and James Goldsmith. Remember that pathetic ‘artist’ who topped himself after Goldsmith pronounced a sentence of social death on him for drawing a picture for a paper showing the Mayfair set i.e. Goldsmith and Lucan at the same table. Dying of cancer at 64 must have been such a blow to Goldsmith’s pride. 

2015

12 June, Friday

Lyon

In the garden of the Musée des Beaux Arts I came to the part of Gentleman Thief where he robbed “that bastard” Aspinall (the one with two zoos). In L’Antidote last night I realised it’s one of those books that, a quarter into it, I regret there are only three quarters left…

I’m just past the half-way point of Gentleman Thief, having finished the chapter where he impaled himself on a railing. It’s an extraordinary book, even allowing for the odd sleazy sexual episode. His fondness for fellow Irish people is a constant; he has rejected* the bigotry in his Northern Presbyterian background. More importantly, the book is constantly exciting, constantly surreally funny.

When I got back to the hotel a bunch of Americans were trying to check in. A woman among them turned to me and asked was there a lift, as they had “boxes and boxes” of wine outside. I said there wasn’t but didn’t bother adding that I was in the wrong room. Transporting a sensationally heavy cellar up a winding stair was their own daunting mission, should they choose to accept it and not just leave the wine shop where they parked.

14 June, Sunday

By three I had fewer than a hundred pages of Gentleman Thief to go. Of course he was mad; he looked more depraved the older he got. The photos confirm that much, though I liked him when I first saw him, on the Late Late Show twenty years ago. The madness went beyond having the soul of a clown. He suffered some terrible injuries at it but it’s clear too he had extraordinary energy and toughness, whatever drove them. It involves a tweak to Nietzsche. Under conditions of peace the warlike man attacks himself – and/or the “fleshpots” he made his life’s work. Yet he wasn’t a violent criminal, though capable of fighting. Who in his right mind makes a base of a tennis club? In his own words, every man has his own game.

16 June, Tuesday

A small by-line under a picture of Peter Scott reveals his was the Daily Telegraph’s most-read obituary of 2013. He would have liked that corroboration of his assertion that millions had secretly cheered him on.

2018

15 October, Monday

A chapter into the memoir of the Bolton Forger since last night (“a one-man Renaissance” according to Waldemar Januszczak). Early on, Greenhalgh mentions visiting the Manchester Museum in 2004 with nothing in particular in mind and this reminded me of Peter Scott, except that the former was generally looking for something to fake, the latter for something to nick.

*At one point in the book he tells a finger-pointing Belfast uncle that becoming a thief had been a small price to pay to escape them.

Germano Facetti in the Colony Room

Germano Facetti in the Colony Room

Germano Facetti (1926-2006) was head of design at Penguin from 1962 to 1971, when he went home to Milan.

The Colony Room was a drinking den in Soho in London.

Hell comes in many guises.

2020

30 April, Thursday

J. gave me a book called Tales from the Colony Room (D. Coffield).

6 May, Wednesday

Facetti hated it, any time he had to go into the Colony. Some publishing tart describes him as being as comfortable there as a shark in a goldfish bowl. He had survived Mauthausen. Typically for those bitches (m & f), she adds he only survived because he was good-looking and (this bit sounds somewhat odd) good at art.

His Guardian obituary quotes him as saying three things were necessary to stay alive in Mauthausen:

(a) learning German;

(b) never looking a Kapo in the eye;

(c) standing up straight because slouching made the cold worse.

He was there when a rate of one hundred and fifty deaths a day among the slave labourers was normal. I’m not discounting that he was preyed upon too but the spin is repulsive… yet true to the club members.

P.S.

More on Mauthausen…

The Quarry at Mauthausen – Dr. John Flynn (wordpress.com)

Waterford Greenway : a Comedy of Manners

Waterford Greenway : a Comedy of Manners

The Waterford Greenway is a 46 km amenity that follows the route of the old railway between Dungarvan and Waterford city. The video link included below (available on YouTube) is the invaluable work of an intrepid cyclist who covered the entire route to Dungarvan and the sea in a little over two and a half hours.

In a written response to an out-of-town query as to what the Greenway was really like, I suggested that one might be better off walking the most attractive stretch, from Durrow to Clonea, outside Dungarvan, either early in the morning or late in the evening. I added that the cycling etiquette wasn’t top-notch, not least in the widespread disregard of ‘dismount’ signs outside tunnels.  

For the best stretch… there’s a car park handily placed on the left at 2:03:55.

At 2:14:10 there is some sort of tip against another cyclist, leading the cameraman to mutter “You f**kin’ eejit” in a Dublin accent.

I didn’t mention to my lady correspondent the fart from the dogged cameraman just before Durrow (1:56:21). The gradient must have been against him.

A friend with whom I did share that moment likened it to the sound of a liner coming into port.

Scandals in Bohemia

Scandals in Bohemia

The insect fancier Vladimir Nabokov once spent an entire essay wondering exactly what kind of beetle Gregor Samsa had turned into in Metamorphosis. He got nowhere but the real answer lies in the equivalent of the birds-of-a-feather proverb in the Irish language. Aithníonn ciaróg ciaróg eile (‘A beetle recognizes another beetle’).

Even when well played for laughs, as in Scorsese’s After Hours (1985), Kafka could never be quite as entertaining as, say, Bertolt Brecht v. the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947. Though he was no mug in English and he spoke for himself, Brecht was flanked by two lawyers, plus an interpreter, about whom a committee member can be overheard at one point interjecting.

I can’t understand the interpreter, any more than I can the witness.

Having greatly amused the watching media with his slippery responses, the accused man left America the very next day, never to return. He was too clever for his inquisitors and they ended up even thanking him for it. It was like Kafka’s Trial but in reverse.

They weren’t as bad as the Nazis. The Nazis would never have let me smoke. In Washington they let me have a cigar and I used it to manufacture pauses… between their questions and my answers.

Whatever about the Kafka Museum, the Prague locations I most wanted to see included the buildings in which the Thirty Years War was hatched, both in the planning and attempted execution of the Catholic imperial messengers who were shot out a palace window in 1618.

There was also the balcony where, on a snowy morning in 1948, Klement Gottwald emerged to emcee the communist take-over for a massive crowd below. The latter moment provides the anecdote of the un-purged hat that opens one of the dodgy Moravian Milan Kundera’s philosophico-sexual entertainments, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

At the time Kundera was outed as an informer (2008) he of course got the backing of several Nobel Prize winners who foolishly claimed Kundera had “refuted” the accusation. Others more subtly tried to shield him in the jargon of technicalities but when the scandal broke, no one for or against him (at least abroad) seems to have asked one basic question: what was he doing as prefect of the dormitory in the first place? In other words, what kind of student, what breed of person, would have landed that job in the Czechoslovakia of 1950?

As for Gottwald, he was later voted the worst-ever Czech in a TV poll, which was part of a different entertainment format, this time imported and licensed from the BBC.

Anyway, here are twelve commandments of the Czech language for foreigners:

During a NATO summit in late 2002, a man dressed in a First World War uniform and waving crutches turned up at a Prague protest against the impending invasion of Iraq. His demand to march on Baghdad echoes an early scene in Jaroslav Hašek’s novel The Good Soldier Švejk.

In the sanatorium hut of the Prague garrison prison, Švejk explains to the other inmates that he has rheumatism. Even the dying consumptive, who is shamming TB, joins in the laughter. It is already a war in there between the malingerers and the medics.

The dissolute atheist priest and army chaplain Otto Katz adopts Švejk for weeping at one of his sermons. Before long Katz loses Švejk at cards. Švejk then becomes the batman of Oberleutnant Lukáš. Complications set in after Švejk is told to obtain a dog. Unfortunately, a colonel soon encounters Lukáš walking the dog (his dog) on the street. Lukáš and Švejk are transferred to southern Bohemia, as a prelude to being sent to the East.

The second part of the book opens with the pair on a train, from which Švejk is removed after a mishap involving the emergency brake handle. This incident recalls a story told to me by a Jewish Englishman in a Belfast pub on a snowy day in 1987, the year I first read The Good Soldier Švejk.

In 1969, G. was on a train somewhere in Czechoslovakia, enjoying the luxury of a Cuban cigar, when a representative of state security slid back the door to tell him to put it out. The railways minister was in the next compartment and did not like the smell. After attempting to engage the minister in a fraternal socialist debate about the cigar, G. got thrown off the train at the next station.

P.S. For a fuller account of Brecht’s performance in Washington, please see… Escape from Washington – Dr. John Flynn (wordpress.com)