Going back

A concert in memory of Kenneth Elliott had me back at Glasgow University last night. Oddly, I felt most at home actually in the Memorial Chapel, to the right of this picture of the Arts Quadrangle, although in my first year I seemed to spend an unconscionable amount of time queuing in the corner where the lights are, in the icy wind that seemed to whirl round the quad in October. The Latin lecture theatre - or Humanity, if you prefer - was right in the corner, and I have a feeling we accessed our English lectures somewhere nearby. Not that I ever queued for Latin, for the lecture in first year was at 9am and if you were foolish enough to arrive a minute after 9 the door was locked and you had to go through the prof's room and sit, isolated, in the window bay with a splendid view of Glasgow and the red face of the marked one. I was always on time.

There was a moment of consternation last night when I realised that the huge, freezing loos that used to lurk at the foot of the stairs up to the Arts quad (or the Science stairs for the chaps) had gone, replaced by offices. They always seemed to be open; I don't know what evening visitors do now. The staff toilets, however, where we were directed from the Chapel, were a far cry from the old provision.

But the chapel seemed less changed than other places. To be sure, there are new, back-damaging wooden chairs lower at the rear than at the front, linked so close that it was as well that we were sitting with old friends, but the choir stalls where we sat were the same - except that the choir wasn't singing from there last night but from the area round the communion table. There was an exhibition on the walls as part of the dubiously-named Lent Fest, but otherwise it was the same lofty, strangely godless but acoustically interesting space as ever - great for singing, difficult for speech. (Though I do think that someone who works in the Uni ought to be better able to project his voice than the chap who introduced the concert).

The Chapel Choir sang beautifully - some lovely sopranos - and much of the music was very familiar to me. So I noticed when there were ... deviations. Ah well.  Afterwards, we chatted outside with friends,  as we might have done had we been going for the bus to Broomhill - only we were heading for the midnight ferry.  No chance, then, of remaining in the past ...

Edwin Morgan: a farewell

Edwin Morgan: last rites
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

The Bute Hall, Glasgow University. I haven't been in this place since the late '60s, but it looks unchanged. I'm here for the funeral of Edwin Morgan, whose photo hangs above the plain coffin on the dais - a coffin on which lies a single thistle. The face in the photo is the one I saw when I was a student - the big, black-framed specs, the thick hair, the unmistakable smile. It doesn't seem real, somehow, that he is dead - but the blue ranks of seats are filled with people come to say goodbye to the man and to say his words and remember.

It's an entirely secular funeral, and as others I've been to seems longer than the average church ceremony. Maybe there is felt a need to say more, to let everyone contribute in the absence of set ritual; most of the contributions are more wordy than the poet would allow in his work. The best moments glow - David Kinloch reading Strawberries; Tommy Smith's keening saxophone and sudden wolf-howl in front of the coffin; John Butt's organ playing Maxwell Davies' Farewell to Stromness. I sit on the hard seat, and think of the lightness and unassuming grace of the man we're remembering, and some of the Chapel Choir sing A Man's a Man and I long for a less pedestrian setting.

We're all invited to take a dram and a bit of shortbread in the University Chapel. There are also hot drinks, but I stick with the whisky and sip it as I suddenly realise that's Bernard McLaverty over there, and see Alex Salmond and Jack McConnell - and George Reid who was Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament and who spoke at length ...

There are folk, mostly men, who look as if they should be important, in a literary sort of a way, and there are the quietly ordinary ones who turn out to be seriously important but don't seem to have realised it. Sir Kenneth Calman, the Chancellor, has mislaid Liz Lochhead, and Jackie Kay passes and smiles. I realise I've still not had any lunch - a cereal bar eaten in the sunny Arts Quad before the ceremony doesn't really count - and feel it's time to leave. I walk down the chapel steps to the Professors' Quadrangle for the first time since my wedding day forty years ago, into the warm sun that never seemed to shine in term-time. I think of being young, and uncertain, and of how the wind whistled round the quadrangles as we queued for classes, and how unreal university felt, that first year in 1964.

Life is very short, really - even for a 90 year old. Thank God for the poetry.