Boswell's Bus Pass by Stuart Campbell Read Free Book Online Page A

travellers. Where old people join the queue is determined not by who got there first but by where they can find a seat in the shelter, where it is most convenient to leave shopping trolleys as big as themselves and by which friends they have spotted. When the bus arrives the original order of arrival is skilfully recreated, polite questions asked to determine priority, followed by a slow motion tea dance before anyone gets on board.
    Once on the road I guessed at the average age of my fellow travellers. This difficult calculation led me to misinterpret a neon sign proclaiming 80’s CLUB NIGHT EVERY WEDNESDAY. I could hear the surly bouncers rejecting desperate clubbers with ‘You’re not a day over 79. Piss off!’ I could just see the rack by the cloakroom forhanging colostomy bags and any prosthetic limbs that might get in the way of dancing.
    A striking feature of Kirkcaldy is the way in which you turn a corner and see an ocean-going tanker neatly framed by the tenements that slope downwards. Equally striking but less dramatic was the plague of inflatable Santas that could be seen abseiling up the walls of semi detached houses, reminiscent of television images from the siege of the Libyan embassy in the 80’s. Many of the gardens even in the poorest schemes boasted huge trampolines that made the equally numerous satellite dishes seem like innocent prototypes. As a consequence of this literal wish to keep up with the neighbours the Victoria Hospital has a specially trained trauma unit that specialises in putting back together small children whose bodies have been impaled on clothes poles and broken on coal bunkers.
    One of the strangest but most revealing of passages from Boswell’s entire account describes the thoughts he had on the road to St. Andrews. ‘We had a dreary drive in a dusky night to St. Andrews, where we arrived late. I
saw
, either in a dream or vision, my child, dead, then her face eaten by worms, then a skeleton of her head. Was shocked and dreary. I was sunk. Mr Johnson complained I did not hear in the chaise, and said it was half abstraction. I must try to help this.’
    It is difficult to sustain a view of Boswell as a sycophantic buffoon when he is capable of such disclosure. I wonder if he hasn’t given honest expression to the thought that dare not speak its name in the hearts of most parents. For his part Johnson was no stranger to the terror that can come in the night and was frequently visited by dreams of his brother Nathaniel who died young.
    Boswell and Johnson made the most of their time in St Andrews. They enjoyed a candle-lit walk to St Leonard’s College. They ate well at the houses of the Professors; ‘salmon, mackerel, herrings, ham, chicken, roast beef, apple pie’. There must have been many opportunities for chewing the cud and hen clucking. They inspected the student accommodation which they found to be ‘very commodious’. They make no mention of the stereos, iPods, Pot Noodles, discarded underwear, Snap Faxes, stolen police bollards, posters, pin ups, and condoms bought, as ever, more in hope than expectation. Boswell would certainly have noted the condoms had he seen any. He may even have stolen one or two as they were something of a specialist interest given the frequency of their appearance in his
London Journal
,but were not always available judging by the existence of his illegitimate children.
    At several points in St Andrews Johnson insisted on doffing his cap whenever he came across ecclesiastical demolition perpetrated in the name of the Reformation. David suggested his reaction was mirrored by most in the West when the news bulletins showed the mutilation by the Taliban of the Buddhas in Bamiyan Valley.
    Writing to Mrs Thrale, Johnson describes meeting an old woman who lived with her cat in a semi-collapsed vault under the cathedral ruins. She claimed to be of royal extraction, thought her sons were probably dead and exalted in her two main possessions, these