Diary of a Shopkeeper, 26th March

I studied philosophy at Edinburgh University. Practically-minded friends and family told me that was a waste of time and would never lead to gainful employment. How wrong they were! It was ideal training for standing at the cheese counter pondering the eternal questions of life: ‘To Brie or not to Brie.’

Philosophy also gave me a teacher who became a dear friend until his death a few years ago at the age of 97. Richard Hamilton was born just after the first world war, his father a miner, his mother a domestic servant. He grew up in Musselburgh in what we’d now consider grinding poverty, but rose, through support from a Miners’ Welfare fund, to study and eventually teach at several leading universities.

At first glance he might have seemed to confirm to donnish stereotypes: the tweed jacket, the Shakespeare quotation for every occasion, the study lined with a library of ancient volumes. But a moment or two of conversation and his radicalism became apparent. A lifelong socialist and pacifist, he was a conscientious objector during World War Two. Career-oriented students sometimes complained that he wasn’t providing them with the answers required to pass their exams. ‘Education isn’t about passing exams,’ he’d reply, ‘It’s about learning to think.’ Maybe that’s why he was never promoted to a professorship.

Richard introduced me to many writers he thought I should read and think about. Some were typical of his age and vocation – Matthew Arnold, AE Houseman – others revealed his radical streak – Mikhail Bulgakov, Arthur Koestler. He also introduced me to the appreciation of whisky. He believed in moderate consumption of all the fine things in life and especially in a good dram dram between friends. His favourite was peaty Islay, and it was a bottle of this that taught me a lasting philosophical lesson.

I met Richard in Chambers Street one day, looking ashen. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked. ‘I’ve just been faced with a serious dilemma,’ he replied. ‘As I stepped out of Oddbins, I dropped my bottle of Laphroaig 16 Year Old. What to do? Only one thing: go back in without hesitation and buy another. Future pleasures should not be sacrificed on the altar of past losses.’

It was Richard who gave me a classic old wine tome, Notes on a Cellar Book by George Saintsbury. It’s fusty and verbose; even when it was published, in 1920, it must have read like something from another age. Yet it’s full of fascinating recollection and rumination on wines none of us will ever experience:

The bouquet was rather like that of the less sweet wall-flower. And as to the flavour one might easily go into dithyrambs. Wine-slang talks of the ‘finish’ in such cases, but this was so full and so complicated that it never seemed to finish. You could meditate on it; and it kept up with your meditations. This was a red Hermitage of 1846.

Last month I attended a wonderful wedding in Glasgow. The happy couple are great readers, so each table was named after a favourite writer, and decorated with artfully strewn antique books. At the end of the evening we were invited to take a volume or two, as they were otherwise being returned to the charity shop they’d come from.

I picked up and put down several cheap reprints of Dickens and Walter Scott, then lingered over an entirely forgotten book by an almost forgotten author: On Translating Homer, by Matthew Arnold. I leafed to the title page and found an owner’s signature in familiar neat handwriting: Richard Hamilton, 12-xi-40.

Later that night I raised a glass of Laphroaig in honour of a good friend, and the other fine things of life.

This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 29th March 2023. A new one appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations., and occasional small corrections or additions