Should auld acquaintance be forgot?

Fireworks over the castle and crowds on Calton Hill. This Hogmanay in Edinburgh may look like any other, but when the new year dawns and the fog of whisky fumes has cleared, something will be different.

Like a glacier advancing, political opinion has slowly shifted in this city over the past year. Behind genteel Georgian façades I’ve seen dinner parties descend into shouting matches; listened in bars as people, once Labour supporters, talked about “taking control of our own lives”. Interviewees have turned the tables on me and asked: “You’re the journalist. You must know. Are we going to be independent?”

It’s the biggest question Scotland has faced for 300 years, let alone in my lifetime. Just months after the SNP’s historic election victory, pale-faced “unionists” (in Scotland the SNP has even seized control of vocabulary) stare at each over their coffee cups, enumerating the forces lined up in the great debate. The nationalists have a leader, a message, they appeal to youngsters and have the best and richest campaign machine in the country. On the other side, the Brits have ... well, no leader and apparently no campaign at all.

Every week has brought some new sign of the SNP’s onward march: the almost daily spectacle of Alex Salmond riding roughshod over his political rivals in Scotland; his constant point-scoring over Westminster. Whether it’s public-sector strikes or European walkouts, the First Minister deftly blames the coalition Government for all Scotland’s ills.

At SNP HQ there is, these days, an almost palpable confidence in the air. Without once uttering the word “zeitgeist”, Peter Murrell, the chief executive, argues that the party is almost completely in tune with “the nation”. The latter is a term he uses often.

The Scottish nationalism of people like Murrell, who has the mild demeanour of a clergyman, is far removed from the hairy, firebrand politics of its ancient heroes. These days it feeds off focus groups and consensus politics, fires up young people and embraces incomers from Pakistan and Poland, binding allcomers to the cause. “Outside of the political classes, people tend to say ‘Why not?’ and that gives us confidence,” says Murrell, who used to work for the Church of Scotland. “We’ve already come a long way. We are heading towards the final bit of the journey.”

This view appears to have a firm foundation. This month, the annual Scottish Social Attitudes Survey, produced by the National Centre for Social Research, confirmed that most Scots favour a revised constitutional settlement known as “devo max”. In other words, a system of government that would give Holyrood control over all tax and spend decisions, yielding only defence and foreign policy to Westminster. These findings, as Murrell points out, demonstrate that the population already wants more powers for Scotland than any political party — apart from his own — has so far been prepared to offer.

“People simply don’t want the status quo,” he says. “The nation is far ahead of Labour, two thirds of the way towards the independence position. Our responsibility is to define the independence bit of it, and that is what we are starting to do.” Then, with a tight little smile: “We can have everything.”

Everything? Unionists will mutter, “There they go again”. But in fact, what “everything” means to the SNP remains a moot point. Around the Scottish Parliament, the party’s MSPs and researchers are working on a “referendum prospectus”, a holy book that will define a vision for the new Scotland. It has already emerged that the SNP wants to retain at least two great British institutions, the monarchy and the BBC. Up for discussion are the economic settlement and the division of oil revenues, the roles of the Civil Service and the military. One senior Nationalist has already raised a question, apparently crucial for his party: “Is there a need for a separate DVLA or even Ordnance Survey?”

According to Nationalist logic, separation from the rest of Britain will be made palatable to doubters by “the social union”, the mesh of family ties that link those 800,000 Scots-born people in England with the folks back home, not to mention the connections shared by 400,000 English people who have drifted north of Hadrian’s Wall. Why these myriad family ties should work in favour of nationalism is not immediately obvious but, according to Angus Robertson, MP, the social union will apply a kind of healing balm to those inflamed by the notion of an independent Scotland.

“Independence will be underpinned by that sense of shared historical experience — the fact that we are not strangers or foreigners in the nations of these islands,” he tells me when I speak to him at Westminster. In other words, there will be no need for border controls or passports, at least from a Scottish perspective. (English politicians may have other ideas should economic migrants head to Scotland, and then decide to take the high road south.) 

With so many weighty matters on their minds, it’s little wonder that the SNP is keen to postpone the referendum. That, and the fact that they suddenly have the resources to fight a long campaign. When the poet Edwin Morgan died this year, he left the party £1 million. A couple of months later, Chris and Colin Weir won £161 million in the Euromillions lottery, and gifted a million, with (so rumour has it) much more to come. SNP activists talk excitedly about having £20 million to spend up until June 24, 2014, when, it’s a fair bet, the referendum will be called. That date, after all, is the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn.

The party is rich in another way. Murrell and his team are the best campaigners in Scotland by a very long street. The digital strategy at the heart of May’s victory has drawn much admiring attention from beyond Holyrood. Daniel Teweles has worked in the White House with Barack Obama as a digital consultant, and advises on politics and social media all over the world. He watched the Scottish election with growing excitement.

“Let’s be honest, Scottish politics were not really on the international map — but they firmly placed it there,” Teweles tells me. Starting from second place in the opinion polls, in the 60 days before the May election the SNP transformed its prospects, in part at least, by cleverly integrating its doorstep campaign with, in geek-speak, a “single digital platform”.

In other words, activists were able to use a new party website linked to Twitter and Facebook feeds to swap information continually between their online campaign and party workers on the streets. In practice, this meant that SNP workers could trace every user who typed “SNP” into social media boxes. From watching online conversations they identified non-members who were championing the party. They could track down any user who was interested enough to open an e-mail from the party. That one digital platform helped the canvas, raised funds and dragged out the vote. It was quite simply brilliant, says Teweles. “They didn’t separate online and offline at all. It’s an arbitrary difference anyway. In the Western world we live our lives between online and offline, with our phones and laptops. The SNP understood that.”

So is the union doomed? The party’s opponents take their crumbs of comfort from a notion that the Nationalist surge in the May poll was apparently little to do with rising support for independence. This a thought confirmed by John Curtice, professor of Politics at the University of Strathclyde, who has worked on the Scottish Social Attitudes survey since 1999. 

“As SNP support grew over the last four weeks of the election, it became less and less of an independence vote,” Curtice tells me. “You could see that very clearly if you tracked YouGov’s polls. The Labour Party had no vision and ran a useless campaign against one of the most charismatic politicians in the UK, and a government which was seen as effective in representing Scotland’s interests. This just wasn’t a contest.”

Where Murrell and his team see support for “devo max” leading inexorably to independence, others discern a line in the sand once those tax powers have been granted to Holyrood. A crucial question arises when people are asked: would Scotland be better or worse off with independence? 

“In most areas of life, people think independence won’t make a difference,” says Curtice. “The one area where that isn’t so true is when you come to the economy. Then opinion splits — a third think things will better under independence, a third no difference, the rest think it will be worse. This is the most vital part of the argument that the SNP has still to win. Once you start trying to predict for and against independence, the economy is very important.”

Factor in the sovereign debt crisis and the traumas in the Eurozone, and other questions arise. “In the short run, the SNP want to keep sterling — but who’s going to let them keep sterling?” muses Curtice. “The UK Treasury? Without conditions? Does the UK Treasury want an independent Scotland to be using the pound and potentially engaging in debt? Then, by the time Scotland joins the euro, there will have been consolidation. So does independence offer more fiscal freedom than ‘devo max’? It’s not so obvious any more.”

Back at SNP HQ, Murrell, unflappable, believes that there is time enough to make the economic case. And if the opposition arrives at the referendum, as they did at the election, with no leader, no message and no strategy, who knows what can happen? On that Curtice agrees. “The unionists ought to win,” he says. “But so far they have displayed a remarkable ability to screw things up.”

"I went to art school to meet exciting people and luckily I did"

Everywhere Martin Boyce goes in Glasgow School of Art someone calls his name, extends a hand or offers a disbelieving smile. It starts in the foyer, where Seona Reid, the school’s director, has asked to meet him briefly to offer her congratulations. Next, a man in the lift, grinning from ear to ear, shouts his praise. Then a slack-jawed student almost drops her sheaf of prints as she sees the artist walking along the corridor.

This, apparently, is the price of fame in Glasgow’s friendly world of contemporary art. On Monday night, after ten years or more on the judges’ long-list, Boyce, 44, was finally awarded the Turner Prize, after Richard Wright and Susan Philipsz, the third successive graduate of this school to claim the prize.

 In his dignified acceptance speech on Monday, Boyce had no doubt about the importance of this great institution in his own development. After thanking the Baltic (the gallery is the first non-Tate institution to host the show and it has been a barnstorming success, with 120,000 visitors to date) and his mum and dad, he ended by saying: “I want to acknowledge the importance of teachers.” It’s why we’re meeting here. His worries are now for the next generation, who may never get the same opportunities he experienced.

 “Would I go to art school today? I don’t know. It was easier to go to then. Just the sheer economics of it today ... Funding, cuts and all these kinds of things. The fees ... ” He lets that thought linger.

In Scotland, home-grown students don’t have to pay fees, but English, Welsh and Northern Irish incomers can expect to pay £27,000 if they arrive in Glasgow to study art. It’s even worse in other schools, particularly English colleges, where the number of arts applications is down by 16 per cent, according to the National Union of Students. For architecture you might need the Turner Prize winnings of £25,000 and half as much again to complete the five-year degree these days. There are grumblings among teaching staff on both side of the Border that art schools are becoming elitist playgrounds and the arts will suffer if only a certain type of person can afford them.

Glasgow’s magnificent Mackintosh Building bears the marks of straitened times. Boyce, a friendly self-effacing guide, has agreed to lead a tour of the school’s famous building. Designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, it’s a mad, ornate, draughty and utterly marvellous place. The most famous rooms — the library, the lecture hall, the Mackintosh Room itself — are places to linger, and think. But even the eerie stairwells and dark wood corridors are full of inspiration: a name and date — “Izzi 78” — carved into the wall is a jagged echo of the details in some of Boyce’s own work.

 When he was a schoolboy, this place inspired him, and even now Boyce can hardly contain himself. “There was something about the art school, before I came here, and this incredible building,” he says. “I wanted to come here; then to be accepted as part of it; then to come to the building every day.”

His success at Monday’s Turner prize-giving, along with the triumphs of his immediate predecessors, suggests that the Turner’s shock factor, epitomised by Damien Hirst’s Mother and Child Divided and Tracey Emin’s My Bed (which didn’t even win) has receded. How would he describe his work? “Ooof,” he exclaims, as if he had never been asked. “You really could say it is like landscape painting. It’s not far off that.”

At the Baltic in Gateshead, Boyce converted three large white gallery pillars into concrete trees, scattered leaves from wax-coated crepe paper across the floor, and introduced a wonky, out-of-place library table (scarred with what appears to be student graffiti). He sealed in the strangeness of the setting with a canopy of white-metal leaf-like panels.

“I was always interested in arrangements of things,” he says. “You collect things, you arrange them in your bedroom or on your wall. In a way it’s an extension of that process. I guess I’m as interested in an idea of a place as much as the things themselves. There’s something, a relationship with memory, but the installation also triggers snapshots of things, fragments that come together.”

 By now we are wandering along a ground-floor corridor, with Boyce leading the way past the college war memorial and a phalanx of Classical statues. Outside a studio, he fills in the chronology. Born and raised in Hamilton, it was a gifted schoolteacher who switched him on to art and piqued an interest in post-punk design.

Cosseted by a student grant (remember those?) he matriculated in 1986, arriving serendipitously, just after a key moment in the school’s history. A couple of years earlier a department that once had been “murals and stained glass” was transformed by tutors Sam Ainsley and David Harding into something called environmental art. At that point, says Boyce, there was a rebellion by “determined, mouthy, dynamic” students — Douglas Gordon, Roderick Buchanan, Iain Kettles, Nathan Coley, Ross Sinclair, Christine Borland — and Harding decided he should sit down and redraft the course curriculum with his lippy undergraduates.

It was a teaching revolution. By the time Boyce arrived, the department had acquired a magic all of its own, and was based in a former girls’ school, near the Mackintosh Building. This too was an alluring place: Boyce remembers a couple of intertwined staircases; you could walk all the way up and hear someone coming down, but never meet the person.

“David Harding said context had to be 50 per cent of the work,” says Boyce. “The classes and the teaching extended into the bars and people’s flats, with folk throwing parties and socialising all the time. David and Sam were great at getting people together. David would start a song and people would sing. It was natural for David, and his personality just rubbed off on the students.”

This was an irresistible mix to a 19-year-old, who studied environmental art from the beginning of his second year. “It was the kind of people as much as anything,” he agrees. “I remember seeing the work coming out of the department. There was a bit of a pop sensibility, it seemed interesting, something was going on. But the people you saw in the Vic Bar [the college bar] and around the school — they were so open and friendly. I remember when I was accepted on to the course, Roddy Buchanan stopped me in the street and congratulated me and welcomed me into the department. That kind of feel is important.”

During studio time, there was no sense of hierarchy. “Even in my second year I’d be doing a project and stay late, and I’d go down to the old gym hall, where Roddy and Douglas and the others were in ‘the Big Studio’, and I’d hang out, talking late into the night. There was no sense of, ‘beat it’. There was a desire to engage. I loved it. It was the whole reason I went to art school, to meet those kinds of people. You have an idea that you will meet exciting people, and luckily I did.”

The broad definition of environmental art — it really just meant “art in a place” — opened a window on every kind of discipline. Painting and sculpture, collage and film could all be studied and purloined from inside the Mackintosh Building. Scavenging had a literal meaning too, in the streets around the college.

“People used to get into the old Metropole theatre and drag out all sorts of amazing things,” recalls Boyce. “There was the whole thing of using found objects. There was — not quite a gang mentality — but a group identity within environmental art. There was a sense of doing things together.”

After graduation, that sense of togetherness remained. Many of the school’s young artists lived in Garnethill, just a street away from the Mackintosh building. “We were always in and out of each other’s flats, especially the ones who made good soup,” recalls Boyce. “We used to joke that it was a little like that scene in the Beatles movie where they all walk into separate front doors of terrace houses only to reappear in the same big open house.”

This shared experience translated into Transmission, an artist-run gallery in Glasgow, and quickly into international collaborations and worldwide recognition. Douglas Gordon was the first Glasgow-trained Turner prizewinner, in 1996. Boyce, too, rapidly emerged with shows across Europe culminating in Our Love is Like the Flowers, the Rain, the Sea and the Hours at Glasgow’s Tramway in 2002. “You should have won the Turner for that,” another well-wisher tells him, as he passes on a gloomy staircase.

Yet amazingly, all this recognition began with something like abject failure. Boyce was unsuccessful in his first application to the school, and spent a year signed up to life-drawing classes in the Mackintosh Building, creating a new portfolio for his second attempt. “You got one lesson a week,” he recalls. “But full-time students from the college would come in too, to get an extra lesson. I was talking to this guy and he thought I was a proper student. That made me think. I started coming in twice a week and sitting in the students’ lesson when I wasn’t meant to. So I got extra lessons. It seemed to work.”

By now, we have reached the basement studio, where Boyce spent that first year at college. The famous Turner prizewinner pushes open a door to reveal a strange and colourful interior of fabrics and felt, occupied by a middle-aged woman, a would-be student who is putting the final touches to the portfolio that she hopes will gain her entry to the college next year. This large lady looks up from her desk and regards Boyce with irritation. “Who are you? Do you work in the college?” It is perhaps as well that Boyce is indifferent to fame. “No, I’m an artist,” he says, with a wan smile. “I occasionally come in . . . every so often they ask me to come in.”

Portrait by James Glossop

"We're all in this together"

From first light in Edinburgh city centre, it was obvious that something was up.  Every government office, each law court, museum, clinic and hospital,   had its own little crowd,  the gaggle  of people that signified the biggest public sector strike  for a generation was under way.

The last time  people came together en masse like this was   — as many Scots would have it — in the dark days of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership.

Yesterday’s action, like those of the 1980s, might simply be caricatured as a battle between resolute government and self-serving union leaders. But now, as then (in Scotland at least) it would be a foolish politician who chose to ignore the sense of dignified outrage among these protesters.

By the end of the afternoon, the strikers’ case against government attacks on public sector pensions had been articulated by many an earnest speaker. Hours before in the bright morning sunshine, Alex McKay, a picket outside the High Court,  put it as well as anyone.

“Public sector workers are just a ridiculously easy target for the government,” said Mr  McKay, who on any other day would wear a little white wig, and go about his business as a clerk of the court. “They don’t look at Trust Funds, or stopping tax frauds, they just take the easy option.

“The Government like to play off the private sector and the public sector, but the truth is we’re all in the same boat. The people who run supermarkets might say ‘Well, we pay a huge amount of tax’, but it is the government who has to fund tax credits, to help out all the low paid staff who work for them.  We should come together and say, ‘Enough is enough’.”

 This was a protest, that, like the beer adverts of old, hit  parts of the establishment that other protests don’t  hit. It wasn’t just the courts that suffered. A mass walkout by 34 members of UCATT closed the stonemasons and carpentry workshop at the Palace of Holyroodhouse, the Queen’s residence in Edinburgh; Pete Smith, the only carpenter at Edinburgh Castle withdrew his labour for the day.

Nurses  were quick to try to scotch the notion that they had put lives at risk or had even so much as upset a passing patient. 

At the Edinburgh Eye Pavilion, Paula Johnston, a  Unison shop steward, said that members had decided not to picket outside the Sick Kids Hospital, because it was “inappropriate to picket a paediatric hospital or alarm the kids at all”.    

Outside the Blood Transfusion Centre, another health service picket, Tom Hiddleston, made a different kind of point. “We’re allowing the collection of apheresis platelets,” he said, “the kind of red blood cells that which might be used in children’s operations of cancer treatments.”

Gradually, to the toots of support from passing motorists, all these people assembled themselves into a march of 10,000, delighted apparently to find themselves among so many of like mind. Among them were many who might be have once considered themselves  Conservative, or Liberal Democrat,  parties which have become endangered species in Scotland.

But it is not only the Coalition Government who the strikers have in their sights. The SNP administration at Holyrood, whose ministers spent much the day criss-crossing  picket lines are also under scrutiny.

“We welcome the verbal support of many of the issues  from the Scottish Government but this is about actions,” said Jude Ritchie, Edinburgh organiser for the PCS trade union.

“If they just pass on the cuts that will make no difference to our members.  They are better than the Tories, but they can’t just pass the buck.”


Pic by James Glossop

Mr Pooter comes to Scotland

“We settle down in our new home, and I resolve to keep a diary.” Not since these Charles Pooter’s opening words in Diary of A Nobody, has the journal of an ordinary bloke gone on to cause such a sensation. Yesterday, scarcely 18 months after Sir Peter Housden moved from London to take up his post as permanent secretary to the Scottish Government, his collected business bulletins were published. And, to the astonishment of critics, a sheaf of on-line documents revealed – unintentionally or otherwise – a comic masterpiece.

Written every week for the benefit of thousands of civil staff, Sir Peter’s letters to his subordinates might be expected to show the cares of state weighing heavily on such a powerful mandarin. Not a bit of it. From the adventures of his cat, to his domestic struggles with a damp proof course, this author gives his domestic life equal billing with government business.

Many of his most painful agonies are felt, not in the concrete corridors of Holyrood, but out on the golf course, thumping balls around in the rough. "I won’t tell you about my quite disastrous 106 in the Spring Competition,” he writes. “Suffice it to say that I lost four balls in the first four holes, and a fifth later on. I wish I could blame the wind.”

But whatever the trials of his own life, Sir Peter — who earns £175,000 — appears to know how to fire up his colleagues with enthusiasm. Every letter is signed off: “Have a great week.”

This first collection of the permanent secretary’s writings appeared in response to a freedom of Information request, but earlier this year, some teasing extracts were released. Those seemed to show that Sir Peter had “gone native” and actively supported Alex Salmond’s drive for independence. He criticised the Coalition Government’s plans to devolve more powers to Holyrood as “lost in the mists of time” and, responding to the SNP’s election victory in May, urged his staff to recognise the “new political trajectory”.

The unexpurgated text however reveals the man in full, in all his humdrum glory: his love of vinyl records, the shopping trips down Rose Street, the afternoon teas in the modern art gallery (“don’t they do a good soup?”). 

On an Away Day with the Culture Division he falls - “inevitably” into a discussion about music. “When pressed,” writes Sir Peter, “I did ask Culture colleagues to reflect on the absolute perfection of ‘Echo Beach’ by Martha & the Muffins. Lots of people nodded. Well, a few anyway.”

Throw away paragraphs are deliberately comical. When Sir Peter turns up on “Wear Your Trainers to Work Day” he is devastated to find he is the only one who has joined in the fun, and scours the building looking for any besuited civil servant shod in Nike.

“Finally, I saw a woman zipping across the forecourt in trainers and stopped to congratulate her,” he writes. “She shouted back over her shoulder that she didn’ae work here, and was just dropping off her husband.”

Over one weekend he’s delighted to visit the public rubbish tip three times and by his purchase of “one of the those pressure washers”, a reflection that immediately puts him in mind of his wife. He adds: “Thursday was the 38th anniversary of the first time that Maureen and I went out with each other. I am the one who remembers these things in our house.”

The letters bear witness to the rapid tartanising of Sir Peter’s cultural reference points. In the early bulletins, from June last year, he remains solidly metropolitan, musing of the failings of the English football team, watching cricket at Lords and walking from St John’s Wood to Holland Park “to see a beautifully sung Fidelio.”

By the turn of the year, Scotland has entered his veins. His cultural highlights of 2010, he writes, are And the Land Lay Still, a pro-nationalist novel by James Robertson, Caledonia, a play about the Darien adventure – a key moment in the history of political union – and a performance of the Marriage of Figaro, by Scottish Opera.

Then, suddenly, after months of writing, Sir Peter’s tone changes. Her patience eroded by the weekly maunderings of her boss, one of the cabinet secretary’s minions has finally snapped, and fired in a letter of complaint.

It is a chastened Sir Peter who returns to his keyboard on September 12 this year. “Last week,” he says, “I was very nicely taken to task by a correspondent for not giving enough information in this column on the work I am doing.” Finally, he is ready to tackle the question, “What do I actually do?”

For the next 800 words he picks over his duties, including a hospital visit, the approving of a paper on Corporation Tax, a forthcoming cabinet meeting, and a date with some Hong Kong dignitaries - but the poor man cannot help himself, at the end looking forward “hopefully, (to) a trip to the range over the weekend to do something about my short game.”

Sir Peter’s diary ends last month, with a comment on David Croft, whose death is a cause for reflection on the scriptwriter’s TV comedy creation, Are You Being Served?

“I was struck,” writes Sir Peter, “by the character of Captain Peacock. Lower-middle class England of my youth was somehow full of lost souls like him, using their military titles and not quite finding their place in Civvy Street... I wondered whether it is just in fictional representations that such characters are so prevalent, and this has fed back into memory. Appearance and reality, eh?”

Too right. Who would have thought that in real life, a comic book Pepys from the English shires could rise so effortlessly up the greasy pole in Scotland?

Have a great week.

Written on the body

The artist Alison Watt could hardly have found a more apt title for  her latest exhibition, opening today in Edinburgh. Hiding in Full View is  a portrait of humanity, in all its tender beauty and sadness, and yet not a single painted image of the human face can be seen on the walls of the Ingleby Gallery. 

The show  is a collaboration between Watt  and  the poet Don Paterson, and has grown out their joint meditation on the life and work of Francesca Woodman, whose elusive self-portrait, taken as a 13-year-old, is one of the first pictures  in the exhibtion. 

It is, as Watts says, an extraordinary and mysterious photograph. It shows Woodman sitting on a bench, her face obscured by her hair, as she reaches out to pull a chord and close the shutter of the camera.  The image was the first of hundreds of works  made by the American, in which she often pictured herself, nude or semi-clothed, in strangely distressed settings. Then, in 1981, aged 22, suffering horribly from depression, Woodman threw herself to her death from a high rise building in New York.   

Against that stark biography, Self Portrait at Thirteen seems a portentous work and it had, admitted Watt, a mesmeric effect on the painter. 

“It was produced by someone just out of childhood, but it is such a fluent, sophisticated image,” she said.

“It seemed from the moment of that photograph  her whole life was set. Everything she did afterwards was camouflaging, concealing, hiding herself and yet she had done  that from the very beginning. To have consistency of vision is a very difficult to achieve.” 

Watt, 45, is one of Scotland’s finest contemporary artists. Born in Greenock, she excelled at Glasgow School of Art and won the John Player Portrait Award in 1987 while still a student. More recently her prodigious talent was recognised by a two-year residency at London’s National Gallery. It speaks volumes for her international reputation  that Hiding in Full View follows perhaps her most prestigious commission, earlier  this year, from the Uffizi gallery in Florence. 

The new  show comprises six works, all of them pattered by  rich swirls of cloth that evoke the female form, with varying degrees of sexual charge.

She has not painted figures for years. Instead each of these works takes its contours from some aspect of a Woodman work, though Watt cannot pin down a precise reference point in any one photograph. 

“It’s not as linear as that," she said. "It’s hard to tell me exactly. I don’t think painting is necessarily about conscious thinking.  You have these long periods in the studio where you are unaware of time passing. That’s the way it happens for me - when you stop and look back, that's when you being to think about where the painting might go." 

Two of the new  works, Shoal and Fount, have a power that still baffles the artist herself though she has lived with them for months. “There is a darkness in that work that I can’t really explain,” said Watt, a “gothic quality” which believes shares with the photographer. 

There is a  something in these paintings that's defined by one of Watt’s friends as  “concupiscence” —  ardour or lustfulness —   but which might be better described as a deep and dark eroticism.  Complemented by six of Paterson’s 14  single-line poems  they form an unsettling  sonnet to the frailty of human life and love.   One of the monostichs reads: “We don’t exist; we only dream we're here.  This means we never die. We disappear.” 

The  artistic  collaboration between poet and painter was born when Watt first encountered Paterson after she had attended on of his   reading  at the Edinburgh International Book Festival a few years ago. He had stalked off to meet his public  in the book signing tent, when she joined the queue of admirers. 

“I thought I’d love to talk to him about his work, but it’s a difficult thing to do,” she says. “I was clutching a book of his poetry, and I spoke to him very briefly, but there was a massive line of people behind me. I  said, ‘If you are in London, do you want to come into the National Gallery? I’ll take you round.”

A great friendship was born, along with the a creative partnership,  which progressed from email converstaions, to regular meetings, as the Woodman project grew. 

The two found they shared an extraordinary attention to detail. Painting for Watt is a lonely and labourious, which begins with her notion of the simple geometry of a canvas, and ends, some three months, in a beautifully proportioned work. Paterson  approaches poetry, indeed the very arrangement of words on a page, with same obsessive verve. 

That much is apparent from the book published to accompany the show.  Watt is inordinately   proud of it, not least because so admires Paterson’s attitude in its composition.

“Don was very particular about the typeface his poems were going to be in - his letters have to be round,” she said. “He didn’t want his Os to be flattened. I love that. 

I’m obsessed with particular things in my painting,  Don is obsessed with typeface. Its like Concrete Poetry. They are like artforms, the way they are placed on the page.”  

Paterson, Professor of English at the University of St Andrews, is regarded by some critics as the best Scottish contemporary poet, but he can be a bleakly opague and difficult writer. Watt concedes that she does not understand all of his verse; sometimes though, “you just look at someone’s work  and  just get it”.

She went on:   “I’ve always thought painting  was analogous to poetry. It is a way of paring things down and editing, as a painter you are constantly editing what you see. Poets do the same thing.” 

“Don’s poems are  like looking at a truly great painting, because you keep going back to them. They can be awfully painful, but every time you go back, there is more to give.” 

This is why they both like Woodman’s work so much concludes Watt. 

 “Some of her work is so raw, it hurts,” she said. “ You have to look away you actually can’ look at some of the images. I think when work affects you that way, you have to pay attention.”  The same could said of Hiding  in Full View. 

* Alison Watt: Hiding in Full View. Ingleby Gallery 5 November - 28 January 2012

Alison's father, Jimmy, is a artist, whose work has chronicled the long, slow decline of the Clyde estuary. You can read about him here.


Photograph of Alison Watt by James Glossop

Fugitive 'justice' minister run to ground at last

After days of speculation about his precise whereabouts, a prominent member of Scotland’s all-powerful Salmond regime was yesterday tracked down to a tough housing scheme on the southern edge of Edinburgh.

With his enemies closing in, Kenny MacAskill had taken refuge in a school on the Craigmillar estate, and surrounded himself with a human shield of pasty-faced teenagers and their spritely teachers, all primed to express delight at the appearance in their midst of the justice secretary. But while some fed him biscuits and others posed for pictures, no-one seemed at ease.

These days the disquiet around Mr MacAskill is tangible. Fully two years ago, it was his decision to release Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, on compassionate grounds, that sparked worldwide protest. The Libyan had been found guilty by three Scottish judges of the worst terrorist atrocity in British history, killing 270 people when his bomb blew up Pan Am flight 103.

In August 2009, Al-Megrahi was said to have three months to live, before he succumbed to prostate cancer. Instead, until recently at least, he has been able to live out his life playing frisbee in a suburb of Tripoli, his sole duty in respect of his Scots law, the requirement to remain in telephone contact with East Renfrewshire Council, whose officials supervise his release.

No surprise then that in rare sightings, Mr MacAskill has cut an increasingly careworn figure. His recent remarks too to suggest a man who is losing control of events. It was no different at Castlebrae Community High. He was asked, had he been in contact with rebel leaders?

“Well obviously the UK government is speaking to them,” he said, embarking on the ramble of a man on the brink. “We are operating on a variety of fronts. From a media perspective, who goes where, who speaks to what, it’s difficult to fathom matters. That’s why we are waiting for the dust of battle to settle and in the interim to find out what is happening and to communicate through all appropriate routes.”

In a more lucid moment, Mr MacAskill did seek to deflect criticism, by turning the spotlight on those who had “glad-handed” the hated Libyan government of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, a reference to the infamous “deal in the desert” struck by Tony Blair, then Labour Prime Minister.

Unfortunately, Mr MacAskill’s charge of duplicity against his Labour enemies has begun to ring hollow in recent months.

In February, documents published in Westminster showed that senior government ministers and officials, including Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, were utterly convinced that they had been told in 2007 by the justice secretary himself, that the Scottish Government was ready to include Al-Megrahi in a prisoner transfer agreement, in return for concessions over firearms legislation and slopping out in prisons.

“There was then a conversation when he (MacAskill) asked for a deal,” Straw told The Times. “He obviously spoke to Salmond.”

Mr Salmond had gone on television himself to counter the claim of seeking a deal, but had found himself unable to call Mr Straw a liar. Would Mr MacAskill say that Mr Straw was a liar?

“I’m not bandying around matters here,” retorted Mr MacAskill, refusing to call Mr Straw a liar. “We stand on our record, north of the border, of having always been open, above board, the one authority that has acted with fairness and transparency throughout.”

In the fog of war, it all made as much sense as a placing a mass murderer, domiciled in Libya, in the care of a Renfrewshire parole officer.

* Pic James Glossop

"I'm not sure the government have it in them"

On the wall of Karyn McCluskey’s office is a photograph. It shows a man of about 30, his head oozing blood and his body slashed with ugly knife wounds. Almost out of frame, a doctor is trying to help, but above the medic's outstretched hand, a livid tattoo cries out his patient’s defiance: “Only God Can Judge Me”.

A brutal portrayal of gang culture? McCluskey grins. “That image epitomises Glasgow to me,” she says. “I had it framed but people still ask me why I have it the office. I am very unusual."

She is unusual not least because of her sudden notoriety. In the wake of three nights of rioting in English cities, an anti-gang regime pioneered by McCluskey and her colleague John Carnachan, of Strathclyde police, has been singled out by David Cameron as a model of success in combating street violence.

The Community Initiative to Reduce Violence (CIRV, pronounced “serve”), has exposed 400 gang members to psychological shock therapy to jolt them out of lives of gang crime. In three years, the offending rate among participants has dropped by 46% and even among gang members who have resisted, offences have fallen by a quarter.

McCluskey, garrulous and confiding, in defiance of the police stereotype, appears oblivious to prime ministerial praise. On the contrary, she applauds Ian Duncan Smith, who declared this week that the country “cannot arrest its way” out of social breakdown, and she dismissess Cameron’s notion that the riots in England were “criminality pure and simple”.

She says: “You cannot just look at enforcement. For me, this is Cameron’s problem.
“I know he has looked at CIRV but we are just one small part of it. I am proud of what we have done, but I’m proud of our work with the public services. It is all part of the same jigsaw.”
For McCluskey, the roots of gang violence lie insidde chaotic homes in places such as Ruchazie and Easterhouse, vast, ugly housing schemes where Glasgow’s gang culture has been endemic for the 60 years.

Here, she says, young children are cut adrift from opportunity as soon as they are born. “When I speak to kids and they aspire to nothing, I think that is the most crimnal. thing of all. I say, ‘What did you want to be when you were in primary shool?’ They can’t tell me. No astronauts. nothing.

“We need 21st century solutions to a 21st century problem. You need to support young people and kids in families. And give them an aspiration.”

McCluskey, from Falkirk, is a very singular police officer. A lone parent, she has no partner and admits getting pregnant “wasn’t in my career plan.” She is hugely proud of her 11-year-old daughter.

Off duty, she’s training for a half ironman, the most punishing of events, and giggles when she describes the masochistic training regime. She’s been knocked off her bike seven times by white van man and deplores attending the gym because of “all those perfect women looking calm and composed and me sweating like a badger”.

A forensic psychology graduate steeped in US and Scandinavian anti-violence theory, she arrived in Glasgow in 2002, after serving as head of intelligence for the West Mercia force. The difference in environment would have been laughable had it not been so tragic: from the Porsetshire of the Archers to Taggart's Glasgow.

“We’d have three killings in a year in West Mercia,” she says, “in Strathclyde all we got was murder, murder, murder (71 in her first year). I couldn’t grasp the scale of the problem. We’d had 30 years of hard policing, but it hadn’t made a difference”

Over a three-week holiday she wrote a report identifying violence as a disease. “That was a eureka moment,” she recalls. “Once you to talk like that to people, they get it. Violence is like measles: you catch it in the house from your mum and dad, from child abuse, from domestic abuse, and when you go out into the neighbourhood you pass it on. You form a gang, a team, and the violence goes round. You grow older, you get married and the whole cycle starts again.”
These days, with John Carnochan, she is co-director of Strathclyde’s Violence Reduction Unit, formed in 2004 in the wake of her report.

The unit was quickly in the forefront of campaigns against knives and alcohol, but soon afterwards she had a second eureka moment. At a violent crime summit in Boston, she met David Kennedy, the Harvard criminologist who pioneered Operation Ceasefire an initiative that used shock tactics against gang members to combat a soaring murder rate.

McCluskey immediately made the connection between young black Americans in Boston and the people she was dealing with in Glasgow. “Their lack of aspiration, the lives that weren't manageable; they had no communication skills, no empathy. I thought, 'This could work in Scotland.”

CIRV's success is built on a simplest of scenarios, known as a call-in. As many as 200 young men are dragooned into court and lined up to face representatives of communities they have terrorised. Then, under the strict regime of the presiding sheriff, they are harangued by senior police officers, doctors, and convicted murderers before they are finally presented with stark ultimatum. Reform, or your life will be hell.

If they sign a pledge to renounce violence, the men are offered help from social services and community groups.

The call-ins begin with short contribution from the chief constable. As CCTV images of the offenders flash around the court-room wall, he tells the young men that he knows where they live; that he can arrest them any time he likes; that they will all be hunted down if a single one of them commits another offence.

“We catch the feckless and the stupid,” says McCluskey. “You saw it in Manchester and London. We flash up their pictures, we show them their houses. At first they’re all pointing and saying, ‘There’s such and such…’ Then they suddenly realise. I love that look on their faces.”

The witnesses keep coming. A doctor describes the kinds of injuries he has treated, and the condition of the kids who have died. A convicted murderer describes the reality of prison. He asks them, “Who do you think will come to visit you in prison?”. He adds that within ten days of incarceration, a young offender’s best mate will be sleeping with his girl.

A bereaved mother makes the most powerful intervention of all. “It doesn't matter how crap their mums have been to them, they still love their them,” says McCluskey. “The mother says: ‘I lost my son and I'll never get over it. I go into his bedroom every single day. You boys might not care, you think you’ll live for ever - but this is what it like.’

“I thought Scots wouldn’t be able to show their emotions like the black guys in Boston. But it was exactly the same. They are shattered by it. You can see them sobbing.”

How does she react? “I’m sobbing too,” she says. “If you stopped being moved by this, then you need to go. I am zealot about his. It’s a big part of my life. John and I are relentless."
If it sounds like a story of unbounded hope, it is not, and McCluskey acknowledges as much. After seven years of the VRU, still, every six hours in Glasgow, someone receives a grievous knife injury. And, after falling to 41 in 2010, the murder rate had risen to 59 this summer, when the latest annual statistics were issued. In 2009, Strathclyde Police area, containing 43% of the population, had 55% of Scotland’s murders. Glasgow’s old, unwanted title, “the murder capital of Europe” is hard to shake off.

Locally and nationally, politicians will have to be “brave, resilient and aspirational” warns McCluskey. The national prognosis is not good.

“I’m not sure the government have it in them yet,” says McCluskey. “The bravery might be wavering a bit and the resilience is important - you can’t do it overnight. It has to go beyond the political imperative, the four-year government.

“They need some verbs in their sentences, some doing words. You can talk about changing things all you like, but you need to do things and shift your spend to those who need it most, even in a recession. That means some tough choices for them. Transferring money to difficult families is not going to please middle England. But you absolutely have to do it, because it will make middle England safer too.”