The Cabin
Tel: 0141 569 1036
Entering The Cabin is rather like stepping back in time. It looks like a cross between the Queen Mary (indeed it’s a cat’s whisker from where that great liner was built) and a 1930’s suburban living room. The ceiling is low, there are brass fittings and nautical striped blinds, a cosy sideboard, gorgeous vintage ship-shaped lamps and flowers on all the tables. Not measly florist’s offcuts either but big bunches of daffs and tulips. It was very pretty and welcoming, and just about small enough to cope with the fact that there were only two other tables in. This seemed rather a shame for a Thursday night, but we settled down and ordered a bottle of Rioja Crianza 1999 Conde de Valdena (£16).
“Ahh, Jim m’lad, reminds me of my time on the
Goat’s cheese is never my favourite meat-free starter, so I ordered it with roast Mediterranean vegetables (£4.95) more out of necessity rather than inclination. A slice of cheese that was generous to a fault sat atop a crouton surrounded by salad, veg and balsamic reduction. As expected, it was just a little too heavy for the beginning of a meal. Silver’s confit of duck leg with flageolet beans and vegetables (£5.95) sounded like a main course, but what arrived was a perfect little mound of tasty stew topped with succulent meat.
“Never can tell when you’ll be marooned,” he said, gnawing the bone clean with gusto. I told him to mind his table manners or he’d find himself in Ben Gunn’s shoes, and given the choice, I’d rather be abandoned on a tropical island than in Whiteinch.
The starters came with soda bread, which vanished in a flash. Our waiter, Dennis, explained that he baked it fresh every day. Actually it seems churlish to call him our waiter. He was more of a host, and definitely the captain of this ship, checking everything was okay, chatting about Donegal with other diners, refusing a glass of wine from a table of regulars.
Silver’s herb roast rack of lamb with red wine thyme jus (£13.95) came with a small timbale of potato gratin and some nice carrots and sugar snaps. When I suggested that the meat erred slightly too far towards the pink side he said it was perfect, and threatened to shiver my timbers. I swiftly turned my attention back to my gruyere and spring onion tartlets (£7.95). There had been two veggie dishes of the day, and I chose these over the aubergine couscous. Again it was a healthy helping, and even with Silver’s help I couldn’t finish both of them, especially as they had a deliciously rich creamy filling of the kind that it’s incredibly difficult to get to remain in the pastry case. Despite this, I did manage to tuck in to the big dish of colcannon that arrived for us to share. Given the mark up on food, I always resent paying extra for side orders, so it was a pleasant relief to have this, and the wonderful soda bread, included.
Perhaps it was the Rioja, but although The Cabin was quiet, it wasn’t lacking in atmosphere. It’s been going for fifteen years, so I guess it’s developed a bit of personality in that time. We’d certainly found our sea legs by the time the cheese (£5.25) arrived, daintily served on a wooden plate. “Just like on board the
At the end of the evening Dennis passed us the black spot, or as he called it, the bill. It certainly wasn’t pieces of eight, but nor was it enough to induce apoplexy. The weekend set menu is a little pricier, but then it includes Wilma. Which leads me to a small confession. I’d been to The Cabin once before, some time ago, for the leaving party of a friend of a friend. Unfortunately one of the friends of the friend of a friend (are you still with me here?) was unwell, and retreated to the toilet to vomit between courses. As I’ve said, The Cabin is a small place, and we were right next to the bathroom. Perhaps not surprisingly, I could hardly remember what the food was like. Back to Wilma though. At weekends there’s a single sitting for the set menu, and afterwards, Wilma sings. Now this was something I enjoyed very much, but if you prefer not to end your evening sobbing into your wine while a buxom Glaswegian chanteuse belts out torch songs, well, shame on you. Go on a weeknight. If you do fancy it, be warned, you have to book about four weeks in advance.
I might have missed the chance to request some spirited sea shanties on my return visit, but the food didn’t disappoint. Our cab drew up and Dennis waved a cheery goodbye as he popped over to the Seaman’s
Dinner for two: £43 excluding drinks and tip
There are things about ourselves that we’re supposed to want to change. We’re actively encouraged to take pills which make us happy, we demand pills to make us horny, and millions of us waste money on pills that promise to make us thin. But what if there was an anti-homosexual pill, one that miraculously turned gay people straight? Surely, as the Gay Liberation Front spent so long teaching us, gay is good.
Not so, says David Akinsanya, subject of a BBC documentary to be broadcast this week. If there was such a pill, he’d pop it in a nanosecond. Failing that, his obsession with how great it must be to be straight leads him to Jesus. After watching a hysterical god squad ad in which the “living proof” of Christ’s power to change homosexuals is an array of splendidly moustachioed men who look as if they’ve strutted off a Tom of Finland drawing, David signs up for a Love In Action sexual reorientation course. Although it’s difficult to believe he does so for any other reason than it looks sure to make great telly, he isn’t alone. There are 120 “ex-gay” ministries in the
David is quick to deny he’s ashamed of his sexuality. It’s just that he’s been there, done that. “I’ve been out on the scene for twenty years,” he says, “And it’s not really done anything to enhance my life.”
I’m not surprised. If I’d spent twenty years on the gay scene I’d be more than depressed, I’d be suicidal. Gay may be good, but the gay scene isn’t, or not for me. More of my straight friends go to gay clubs these days, and if anyone has actually found the love of their life amid that heaving morass of sweaty male torsos bopping away to incessantly hideous euro-pop remixes, well good on them. The term “gay village” isn’t a misnomer. It’s invariably claustrophobic, incestuous and bitchy. Little wonder that David’s gay relationships haven’t made him feel good about himself. Even those who like that kind of thing tire of it, and twenty years sounds like a life sentence.
In fairness, David’s past is far from happy. His English mother abandoned him at birth and when he was nine his father returned to
“I’m tired of the lifestyle and have been single for years,” he complains. “What I want is a nuclear family. Wife, kids, the lot.”
The casual misogyny of this statement is astounding. Likewise Josh, a graduate of the Love In Action programme, feels he’s now “open to the possibility of a woman”. He hasn’t “acted out with another person for well over a year” but still “struggles with same sex attraction”. Pity the poor females who end up entangled with these guys, destined only to be lifestyle accessories and brood mares. Besides, when nuclear families reach critical mass, the emotional fallout isn’t necessarily any less damaging.
Craving heterosexuality seems a bit extreme given that the family dream is edging towards reality for gay people now. Same sex couples have full legal recognition in the
Not everyone wants to get married, and many gay people will welcome the move towards equality but eschew the ceremony as an essentially hetero construct. One male couple I know have no intention of tying the knot but are planning a family, whether by adoption or with the help of a lesbian couple in the same position. They both love children, are financially secure, and have supportive relatives themselves, so they feel they can create a secure environment for their kids. It’s a natural progression for them, and yes, it’s completely based on David’s ideal – minus the wife.
If anything gay people have to put much more thought into becoming parents than straight ones. There are no little accidents, no missed pills or burst condoms. Every child is planned and wanted. When gay couples become parents they must also have to confront a whole new set of issues, especially if their offspring turn out to share their sexuality. Have they taught them to be so, or passed on a gay gene? Although every gay parent must be concerned about their child being bullied at school for having two mummies or daddies, or perhaps having sufficient access to male and female role models, I can’t imagine anyone preferring that their progeny be straight.
Although my knee jerk reaction to David wasn’t favourable, as I watched the documentary, I found myself considering his position more seriously. Could it really be more than a case of the grass being not only straighter, but greener? I began to wonder if I was being prejudiced myself. After all, why shouldn’t someone reject the gay label? There’s little doubt that your best chance at an easy life comes from being born Western, male, white and straight, and if I could temporarily turn into a man to see what it’s like, I’d jump at the chance. I sought the opinion of a friend. Like David, he’s been openly gay for at least twenty years. He’s single but sexually active. If the fictitious anti-gay pill was reversible, he said he’d take it like a shot. Partly out of understandable curiosity (he’s never “acted out” as heterosexual); partly for the same reason as David, an urge to reproduce and form a family. To be hetero might offer a greater chance of happiness. “If you love your parents, there’s always a sadness there,” he said. “Even if they don’t show it, you know you’ve disappointed them by frustrating their dreams of grandchildren. By being gay.”
I consider myself lucky: liberal parents, no great traumas, no angst about my sexuality at all. It’s never nice coming out, but that’s more because it’s a public airing of private feelings. For some it’s such a daunting process that openness becomes the be all and end all. Telling friends and family, being out and proud, dancing to Madonna in some sticky floored gay bar, is seen as an end in itself when really it’s only the beginning. For me, the decision to identify as lesbian came after forming a serious relationship. It was far easier to introduce a partner, to place love where it belongs, at the centre of the issue. And it certainly made me happier than wittering on to friends about how I wasn’t “entirely straight” and bumbling about the gay scene being mistaken for a fag hag or castigated for my lipstick.
My partner and I tend to meet with very positive responses. Admittedly we work in the arts and live in the west end of Glasgow (once known as “bohemian”, now for house prices and an excess of coffee shops), and we don’t look particularly threatening, which perhaps makes us easy to dissociate from those potentially subversive butches. In fact, we’re most often expected to bask in beneficent, open-minded approval. It’s straight people who’re crying out that gay is good, which can be just a teensy bit patronising, though immeasurably better than the truly horrendous treatment meted out to gays in many other parts of the world (not that hate crime is by any means unknown here). Recent reactions have ranged from “How sweet!” to: “You two have a lovely relationship. You’re just like sisters.” Which is true, if by sisters you mean non-blood relations who like shagging each other senseless.
Sex is undoubtedly the problem, as nobody seems able to dissociate the physical act from the wider context, and lesbian sex has a very visible niche in popular culture. Glossy soap The L Word gets rave reviews in Heat magazine. Makosi’s faux-dyke fumblings keep everyone glued to Big Brother. Pornography still harbours a soft (or should that be hard?) spot for silicone-breasted Sapphists with unfeasible nail extensions. Presumably some people find lesbian sex distasteful (indeed the women that do usually end up reviewing my books), but as long as it fits straight expectations and comes with a smidgen of glamour, it’s fine. We may be here, we may be queer, but there’s a palpable sense of disappointment if we confess that sometimes we’d prefer a nice cup of tea.
The idea of gay men having it off is far more threatening. Gay vicars have grudgingly been accepted, as long as they’re celibate. Lay people can have gay partners, but according to the Anglicans clergy “cannot claim the liberty to enter into sexually active homophile relationships”. Gay men in the media can be Carrie Bradshaw’s GBF, or figures of fun like Will and Jack. They can redesign celebrity homes and revamp tired wardrobes. They can even go out with David Furnish, but not since Queer As Folk have they been portrayed as actually having sex, and even then it was somehow sanitised, because they were marketed as objects of lust for straight women and of aspiration for metrosexual males. Witness the recent comments of Andrew “prime-time dildo” Davies, who is adapting Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker-winning novel The Line of Beauty for the small screen. “The gay sex makes me queasy,” Davies told The Times, “I suspect the television audience also finds it awkward.” Instead of the loving detail he brought to Tipping the Velvet, male actors will follow the soft-focus direction: “they make love”. Davies is, he claims, “more interested in the emotions of the characters than in the sex act”. Ah yes, that really came across in his Moll Flanders. Especially the “uncut” video version. It seems there’s a subtle distinction between “prime-time dildo” and “utter tool”.
It’s disappointing, because visibility does fight prejudice. For many gay people it becomes an inescapable duty, even if you don’t especially wish your sex life to become your defining characteristic. Although I wouldn’t have chosen the same comparison, I was surprised to find myself agreeing with Love In Action’s executive director, John Smid. He argues that homosexuality doesn’t work as a label. It’s like describing someone as an alcoholic. It doesn’t say anything about who you are as a person, it just applies to the one part of your life that relates to your relationship with alcohol. I wouldn’t have chosen the same comparison given that alcoholism is generally a negative trait, and homosexuality emphatically isn’t, but I can’t help yearning for a future in which we don’t have such a propensity for categorisation. In which sexuality just isn’t an issue at all.
So does David Akinsanya manage to harness the power of Jesus and turn himself straight? Take a wild guess. If there really was an anti-gay pill, would he swallow it? I don’t think so. Either way, it’s reductive and stupid to suggest that being either gay or straight is enough to make you happy. David’s problem isn’t that he prefers men; it’s that he’s single, nearing forty, and a bit fed up. That’s something that no pill can cure.
Julia Briggs
7th April 2005
But, you may say, what more could conceivably be written about Virginia Woolf? Well, we’re often so busy thinking of her as a mad, abused, lesbian adulteress that we forget she was, as Hermione Lee said in her exemplary 1996 biography, “one of the most professional, energetic, courageous and committed writers in the language”, not to mention Joyce’s fiercest modernist rival.
Giving the Rede Lecture two months after Woolf’s suicide in 1941, her critic and friend E M Forster baulked at any attempt to “sum up” a life and work of such complexity. However, he surmised, “There is after all one little life-line to catch hold of – she liked writing. These words, which usually mean so little, must be applied to her with all possible intensity.”
These words might equally have been Julia Briggs’ starting point in her attempt to square the paradox inherent in writing any life of Virginia Woolf: while being part of the seething mass of sexual intrigue and artistic jealousy that was the Bloomsbury set, Woolf “always felt that the life of the mind was the only ‘real life’: its ‘great events & revolutions’ were always, for her, the most affecting, the most absorbing, even though ‘people talk of war & politics’”. She wrote to Stephen Spender that, “‘I think action generally unreal. Its the thing we do in the dark that is more real; the thing we do because peoples eyes are on us seems to me histrionic, small boyish’”. Likewise her fiction was primarily concerned with “the inner life, and finding ways of re-creating that life in narrative”.
Here Briggs aims to represent and make interesting, “‘this thinking; this sitting in a chair day in, day out, with a cigarette and a sheet of paper and a pen and an inkpot’” which so frustrated
As well as being a prolific writer of fiction and criticism, she was a keen writer of her own life - “‘How I interest myself!’” – and Briggs’ main and much-quoted source is Woolf’s diary. During the writing of The Waves in particular, “Woolf’s careful self-documentation (‘I want to trace my own process’) unfolds a story of the artist’s extraordinary faith in her own vision long before she could see where it might take her – the somnambulist picking her way along the tightrope of words.” Yet she was equally prone to ghastly dips in confidence (“‘Shall I ever write another novel?’”), perhaps not an uncommon opposition amongst writers.
Despite this autobiographical streak, Briggs notes “how little we actually know of her thoughts and reading”.
The context of the work adds poignancy. Flush, her biography of the Browning’s pet spaniel, is one of Woolf’s jollier books despite the tragic circumstances which surrounded its writing. Conceived as a parody of Lytton Strachey’s Queen
Biography succeeds when the author loves their subject passionately, but not blindly. That Briggs adores Woolf is written across every page, but she’s well aware of her subject’s less savoury characteristics. Woolf knew she was a snob, and acknowledged the trouble she had writing about “the lower classes”. In 1930 she agreed to write an introduction to a collection of testaments gathered from working class women by her friend Margaret Llewelyn Davies, then a few years later she sacked her cook Nelly after eighteen years of service. Conversely,
In the Epilogue Briggs comes full circle and concludes that “Woolf’s life, like that of Sylvia Plath, is too often read in terms of her death, as if that was the most interesting or significant thing that happened to her.” And yet it seems her death cannot be ignored. Her suicide note is reprinted here, “‘I feel certain that I am going mad again . . . I begin to hear voices. I can’t concentrate’”, and we are left with that haunting image prefigured by so many references to drowning in her work and her diaries:
It’s written in an immensely readable style, and Briggs tightrope walks the line between biography and literary criticism admirably. Most of all she allows her subject space to breathe, to reveal herself through her writings, creating a deliciously furtive sense of peering over Virginia’s shoulder as she sat at her table in Monk’s House, paper before her, pen and cigarette in hand. Rereading Woolf’s work becomes irresistible, and I found myself referring back to the novels with renewed enthusiasm and increased knowledge. What better display of the success of a literary biography?
Max Egremont
Picador, £20
Siegfried Sassoon starts as a cliché, turns into a contradiction, and ends up a Catholic. Some might feel inclined to add another word beginning with C to this alliterative introduction to the man who shaped so many of our thoughts about the Great War. That’s the problem with Sassoon. He can come across on paper as a thoroughly dislikeable character, but by all accounts people of both sexes were never done falling in love with him. He must have been far more appealing in life than in black and white.
The favourite son of a doting mother, Sassoon spent his privileged childhood horse-riding and collecting fine volumes for his library. Although ostensibly a delicate child, as well as an animal lover, he soon discovered what was to be a lifelong passion for foxhunting, during which young Englishmen “could prove their manhood to each other . . . In the British army, it was thought to be useful preparation for war and did not count as leave.”
From then on Sassoon’s life is punctuated by a roll call of binary oppositions: Jewish anti-Semite, married homosexual, snobbish socialist, chaste man prone to ‘sex fevers’. There’s ‘Mad Jack’ storming a German trench single-handedly, scattering bombs and shouting ‘View Halloa!’ versus Siegfried the pacifist, facing a potential court martial for his “‘act of wilful defiance’” against a “‘war of aggression and conquest’”.
Not least of these contradictions is the fact that Sassoon is a writer whose work is not necessarily the prime source of interest. However much we admire “Counter Attack” and respect his angry satire, we know that Wilfred Owen was the better war poet, and the relentless Englishness of Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man can grate on readers of a less bucolic bent. Sassoon was outmoded relatively early on in his writing career, and remained stubbornly resistant to the Modernists despite being surrounded by the Bright Young Things immortalised by Waugh.
The war might have been the worst thing that happened to Sassoon as a man, but it made him as a poet. Almost all of his best work was written at this time, and his most popular books were thinly fictionalised and heavily censored memoirs. His war experience was not without its compensations either. Power over his masculine company fed his narcissism, “He enjoyed the effect on them of his kindness: the sexual thrill, for instance of Jim Laithwaite breaking down in tears when Sassoon had given him an emotional but severe warning on drunkenness”. More importantly, becoming an officer gave his life purpose. Here, according to his public-school ideal, was his chance to atone by showing his men how to die, “a debt payable for inherited advantages, an absolution for privilege”. A noble sentiment, except that he was wounded rather than killed. Instead, his statement of protest at the sacrifice of young soldiers in a war “‘deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it’” thrust him into the public eye. His subsequent treatment at Craiglockhart by the psychologist W H R Rivers - who gave him fatherly validation as well as the mental strength to go back to the Front - formed the basis of Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy.
Access to diaries and papers unseen by Jean Moorcroft Wilson, as well as the full cooperation of Sassoon’s son George, make this the most enlightening biography of Siegfried Sassoon yet. Egremont is a meticulously subtle writer, slipping into the shadows as narrator, allowing his frustrating, complicated subject free rein, and then ever so gently removing any rose-tinted reading specs with sharp social observations or parenthetical asides. Part of his skill is his novelist’s knack for telling detail: the family crest clipped out on the back of Sassoon’s aunt Rachel Beer’s black poodle, Sassoon practising the organ alone in the school chapel at
In tracing Sassoon’s life and loves, Egremont also paints a fascinating portrait of the higher echelons of the gay scene in the early parts of last century. He brings a documentary maker’s eye to the juiciest details of Sassoon’s love affair with Stephen Tennant, a strikingly effeminate aristocrat said to have been the model for Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited. This odd couple – “the craggy war hero and precious, shrieking aesthete” - often provoked scorn in friends as well as homophobic abuse in the streets, but Egremont portrays their tempestuous relationship perfectly, in a way that is at once tender and astute, a tragic literary love to rival Vita and Violet or Wilde and Bosie. Little wonder that Sassoon’s later marriage to Hester Gatty was doomed to failure.
Did I feel the urge to shout expletives at the page, decrying Sassoon as a misogynist and hypocrite? Sometimes, but I also found his constant striving towards a kind of masculinity that encompassed his homosexuality profoundly moving. Sadder still is the niggling hint at a truly exceptional life not lived to its full potential. As a child, Sassoon once announced “‘I am going to take a leap into the future’”, jumped out a tree and promptly knocked himself out. As an adult, one of his most attractive qualities was his tendency to throw himself wholeheartedly, if naively and often ill-fatedly, into everything from No Man’s Land to fatherhood. Yet he seems to have suffered a perennial sense of dissatisfaction, perhaps rooted in survivor’s guilt, or maybe in the knowledge that he didn’t ever become the poet of his dreams, a poet as good as his protégé Owen. His conversion to Roman Catholicism offered solace in his final solitary years, but I can’t help being glad that he didn’t live to see the ban on hunting with dogs.
I’ve written dozens of articles and reviews for newspapers and magazines. Some are serious and some much less so. As I spend so much time alone in my room, I like to get out and about and try different things . . .
Here’s a piece which first appeared in the Glasgow Herald Seven Days section. It’s called Sad to be Gay, and I’ve posted it because it’s probably the thing I’ve written which garnered the most response!
And here’s another piece from The Scotsman magazine about some of the inspiration behind my second novel, Spin Cycle.
I sometimes review books too, so here are a couple of lead reviews which first appeared in The Herald.
Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life by Julia Briggs (Allen Lane)
Siegfried Sasson: A Biography by Max Egremont (Picador)
Some articles are also online:
Queerspotting, an essay searching for gay subtexts in the work of Alan Warner and Irvine Welsh.
Existential Ecstasy, an interview with Alan Warner.
‘I Will Survive . . . A Night of Karaoke’ (and believe me, I really can’t sing).
Sexual Healing, my adventures attending an Annie Sprinkle sex workshop.
Colours by Numbers, an interview with synaethesic author Jane Yardley.
That’s Why the Lady is a Vamp, interview with Arlene Russo, author and vampire expert.
My inept attempt at learning some conjuring tricks, A Kind of Magic.
A review of The Mustard Seed in Inverness.
A review of Trattoria Trevi in Glasgow.
And here’s a restaurant review which never appeared in print, as the menu changed before publication date. I’m posting it because it was such a fun night: The Cabin, Glasgow