I watched the Concert for Ukraine from Perth Concert Hall last night and it was a moving experience. In fact, I spent a fair bit of it in tears, and I’m not an emotional person by nature. The last time I remember such a thing happening was in 1989, and the reasons for my response last night can be traced all the way back to then. Here is the junction of the personal and the public, the way our past shapes our present.
On 22nd December 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up over Lockerbie in the Scottish borders. As it happens, I drove past the site two days later, on my way home for Christmas. I’d been living in England for just over a year at that time, and loving life, but it still felt like “going home”. The connection was still strong. I tried not to look at the devastation to the right of the motorway and focused on Christmas, family, life, “home”.
Those were more innocent days. My generation had grown up with no knowledge of war. Terrorism wasn’t yet a consideration of daily life. Lockerbie literally came out of thin air, the first major terrorist atrocity to impinge on my consciousness, and none of us could have realised how inured we would become to such events in the years that followed, how much they would come to shape our lives.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a terrorist atrocity. Don’t dignify it with the word war.
A few weeks after Lockerbie, ITV aired highlights from Folk
Aid for Lockerbie, a concert in Dumfries pulled together by the folk music
community in aid of victims, just as Jim Mackintosh, Duncan Chisholm and co
have done now for Ukraine. I videotaped it and watched it over and over. It was
spinetingling. The connection between performers and audience was palpable,
even through the TV screen. Sheena Wellington said going on stage was like
walking into a big roomful of love.
And then Dougie MacLean came on. But more of that later.
Heraclitus said you can’t step in the same stream twice. That quote has intrigued me my whole life. I’ve even written a novel about it, Cloudland, the best thing I’ve ever written. Here’s a quote from it:
“I always try to think where it must be now. That patch of water. Right in front of you. Now it’s there, down there. And now it’s further on. In a minute it’ll be at Braidhaugh. Another five minutes, it’ll be in Muthill. I used to try to figure out what time it’ll reach the sea.”
There is no teleology, there is no end, just the eternal pulse and flow of existence. So here I am, measuring out my life with molecules of water, that memory then, this one, yon one. You remember? Aye.
Jim Malcolm, last night, accompanied by his daughter. His daughter! Must be over twenty-five years ago we first saw him. James, he was called then, Sconeward the album. “And my motor’s working harder as it climbs tae Auchterarder.” His version of “The Wild Geese”, second only to the great Jim Reid’s version, the song I sing every time I cross the border, every time I “go home”.
Duncan Chisholm. Ah, Wolfstone of my youth. I was so much younger then, I’m older than that now. And Duncan introduced the next guest, Jonny Hardie, playing with Matthew Zajac while my mind sailed down the rivers of time. Jonny with Old Blind Dogs, the Lumpie on Gallowgate, tall ships in the harbour, Jonny and Davy and Buzzby kicking up a storm in Gosport, Jonny with Gavin Marwick, The Quiet Man set, the soundtrack they’ll play when they film Cloudland to mark the happiest moment of Ash Harker’s life, Johnnie and Gavin chasing each other up and down the fiddle, the tune rising and rising in joy and happiness.
“Leith tae Kiev, Don to Gairloch”, tears for the new layer of meaning now overlaid on Hamish’s words, solidarity in peace, solidarity in war, o horo, the gillie mor. Hamish, the man who defined everything.
Ross Ainslie and Duncan Chisholm played Gordon Duncan’s The Sleeping Tune as the river of time pulsed with memories of the supremely talented Gordon, memories of Gordon’s brother Ian, who was my Maths teacher at school, memories of our headmaster John MacLean. Once my mother was the MacLeans’ cleaner and I, a child of three or four, was introduced by him to his brother, “a very great man” he told me, and he was right, and that was my brush with the genius that was Sorley MacLean. I shook hands with a giant.
From one MacLean to another. In Folk Aid for Lockerbie the encore was by Dougie MacLean, “This love will carry, this love will carry me, I know this love will carry me.” How they sang! That audience, congregation of the good in celebration of the true, in repudiation of evil, weaving their words of love into a spell of magic. Fast forward, April 20th 2022, and the finale, Dougie and “This Love Will Carry.” New evil and a new congregation of the good ensuring this love will carry again and again and again. 1989, 2022, the past and the present, together in search of the future.
Heraclitus said you can’t step in the same stream twice. It’s true. And it’s false. The stream bears on, the same molecules exist, in different combinations, new from old, handing down from posterity into eternity, my memories, my hopes, elisions, decisions, all of them merging with yours, and yours, and yours, and yours and forming, shaping something new, something wonderful. As ever Hamish Henderson got there first:
Maker, you maun sing them…
Tomorrow, songs
Will flow free again and new
voices
Be borne on the carrying stream.
And the carrying stream will bear us all, democrats of the world, together in peace and harmony. Our culture will survive. Our hopes will see the morning.
Great stuff. Sorley MacLean eh, I thought I did well meeting Gerard Butler! 🤣
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