Ten books I'm glad that I read

10: Pride and Prejudice

It is a fact universally acknowledged that a 17 year old boy, in possession of his own motorbike, isn't likely to be overjoyed at having to read a book by Jane Austen.

I hated Pride and Prejudice. Rather than read it, I let each word roll past my eyes as if they were items on a conveyor belt in a stultifyingly-boring production line job. In a rare act of rebellion, I wrote a bitterly sarcastic essay about the novel. Rather than beat me about the head with the complete works of Jane Austin, my English teacher said that he was sorry I hadn't enjoyed it. I should put it aside and come back to the book later. Mr Jimmy Anderson, I owe you. I did come back to the book, and everything the 17 year old Steele said about it was wrong.

9: The Thirty-Nine Steps

"Here's a good book, son," said my much-loved grandfather, handing me a Penguin original from a shelf under his television. I have never read anything that captures the Scottish landscape so vividly. When I was stuck in a study room revising for my finals, I'd escape into the outdoors with this book back at my flat. I read other Buchan works and they took me into literary territory I'd never otherwise have visited, including Stevenson and Hogg.

8: Laidlaw

William McIlvanney's Laidlaw is a crime novel and probably set the precedent for the literary Scottish detective story. Like the Thirty Nine Steps, it led me to books I might otherwise never have read. I like detective stories, literary or otherwise. No apologies.

7: 100 Years of Solitude

I simply didn't get this book by Gabriel García Márquez. I didn't enjoy it at all, yet I'm glad I read it. Why? Because people whose opinion I respect say it's great. This leads me to believe that I've still got lots to learn. Perhaps it's Pride and Prejudice all over again.

6: Brave New World

This was on the reading list issued for our Higher English class. I wish I still had that list, because everything I can remember from it has been worth reading. I don't read much science fiction now, but science fiction was the hook that got me into this book and Orwell's 1984.

5: Born on a Blue Day

Autistic savant Daniel Tammet's autobiography gives a remarkable insight into a kind of mind that at first seems very far from typical. Can you recite 20, 00 digits of pi? And yet, what's fascinating is not so much the differences as the similarities - his grief at the death of a pet, for example. Tammet experiences synaesthesia. One manifestation is that he associates different colours with each day of the week. Come to think of it, so do I.

4: Unreliable Memoirs

The first volume of Clive James' autobiography was a great influence on me when I tried to write about my teaching experiences in the TESS. I will never match its brilliance - on describing a large girl landing on top of a small boy after leaping over a vaulting horse, James writes, "She drove him into the ground like a tack" - but it's still something to aspire to.

2= But n Ben a-go-go

When I finish a book, I always take a little time to come out of it, to readjust to the world outside it. Part of me never left But n Ben. It rewired my head. With its use of the Scots language in a future world it changed Scottish literature, and it changed me.

2= And the Land Lay Still

Which James Robertson book to choose? And the Land Lay Still isn't as popular as Gideon Mack, but I think it's even better. No other book that I've read has told the story of Scotland's recent history through characters that I find so poignantly recognisable.

1: Five Go Off in a Caravan

This is number 1 because it was number 1. Aged seven, I was in hospital for a minor operation. My parents gave me this Enid Blyton book because they had just bougyt a caravan and we were about to go off in it ourselves. It was the first real book I'd read and I was astonished. Astonished that someone could create something so engaging and exciting. I was right in there, Julian, Dick, George, Anne, Timmy the Dog and Gregor. The boy in the next bed kept throwing his toy donkey over to me. Briefly stepping out the book, I'd throw it back. He thought I was doing this because it was a game. I was doing it because he'd urinated on it. When life has metaphorically rained wee-soaked donkeys on me, I've always been able to escape into a book. This was the first and whatever I've read of greater worth, I've read because I started with Five Go Off in a Caravan and swung, like Tarzan going from creeper to creeper, from book to book ever after.

What's your name?

How many names do you have? Until I was fifteen, no one ever contracted my first name. Then one of my pals shortened Gregor to Greg and it stuck within a small group of friends at secondary school. I didn't mind, feeling that the new handle rather suited the would-be motorcyclist with a developing penchant for punk and rock music.

At university, I was almost exclusively Greg. I didn't mind, feeling that the no-longer-new handle rather suited the motorcyclist / minivan driver / cyclist with a liking for rock music and a developing appreciation for thoughtful lyrics, who could now and again actually be seen with a girlfriend on his arm. At teacher training college, Gregor was back. I didn't mind, feeling that the full name rather suited the man with the world's dullest sports jacket, who resented the fact that the Moray House disco never played Status Quo,  who had a LRT season ticket but dreamed of buying a convertible when he qualified. The longer name was mature but not boring, a sort of moustache of the psyche. Since then, it's been mostly Gregor, though one of the girls who was briefly seen on my friend Brian's arm at university became my wife several years later. I'm still Greg to her family.

At high school from first year, my nickname was Big G because my first initial was G and I wasn't a big hardman. It was a postmodern-ironic nickname in the days before postmodern irony. I didn't mind. Having a postmodern nickname was better than having no nickname at all. Nicknames were great for 12 year old boys. They belonged to your peer group, making you part of an almost-secret society. All the fun of the masons without having to roll up the legs on recently-acquired long trousers.

Now, I know I'm in danger of becoming like Big Bang Theory legend Howard Wolowitz who turned every conversation round to space after his spell in the ISS, but I'm going to mention China again. Our guide on a trip to the Zhouzhuang Water Town introduced herself as Linda. A hotel receptionist had a badge with "Peter" on it. It also had his Chinese family name - Pan. Someone was having a laugh. I sometimes Skype with an interpreter called Brenda. Honestly, I'd be happy to use these people's given names. In solidarity, I've visited a website called Mandarintools and acquired a new name for myself. Move over Gregor, Greg and Big G. You can call me Shi Ge Rui from now on, if you find it easier to say.

Linda - not her real name, and they aren't real stairs either.

Language Barriers

When I started secondary school, I told my pal Minto that I was looking forward to learning how to speak French. And I was. It seemed such a cool idea, learning a new language, being able to speak to French people. It was almost a super power. Minto stared at me as if I was nuts. He was repeating first year. He knew that the odds that I was about to be disillusioned were about three to one.
Our S1 French teacher was severe. She had little time for levity and shot from the hip when any misbehaviour put its head out the saloon door. I got on well in her class because I was fairly smart and didn't misbehave. Minto, who was no clown, hated her. He had a model Volkswagen Beetle which he had painted with an iron cross and the French teacher's room number (she was also a German teacher) claiming it was her car. Actually, she had an Austin 1100. I noticed things like that.
In S2, we got a great guy for French. He was funny and related to us on a personal level. Unfortunately, having coped well with French in first year, I was put in a German class in second year, instead of technical. Our German teacher was 90 or so. Due to staff shortages, she had made more comebacks from retirement than Status Quo. I used to imagine her opening a cupboard in her house and being buried beneath a deluge of carriage clocks and engraved trays.
She hated modern music, fashion and comprehensive schools. I thought she hated me but she wrote in my report that I was a delightful pupil.
I dropped German after S2. That summer summer, I made up a song, to the tune of the Wild Rover, about how I would "nae never, nae mair" get this teacher. Wrong. I had her for O grade French, two years of it.
I met both these frosty teachers after I left and they were exceptionally nice. What made them the way they were in class? Was it an assumption that people, particularly boys, disliked their subjects intensely and could thus be given no truck? What's French for "vicious circle"?
I took French up to Higher and learned more about grammar in those classes than I ever did in English. I wouldn't know what it means to conjugate a verb if it wasn't for modern language lessons in school. The story goes, though, that in the seventies pupils were too busy giving verbs their conjugal rights to learn to speak to people. This should be deplored, but to the adolescent Scottish boy, trying to re-master English with a broken voice, it suited fine.
Whenever I go abroad, I try to learn a few words of the host country's language. I get laughed at by my family, mostly because of a single occasion when a street vendor said, "Say in English, then I understand". This doesn't stop me. When I went to China, I made sure I had the words for "hello" and "thank you" at the ready. I became more ambitious too, though on reflection this might not have been wise. Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language - "ma" can mean five different things depending on whether you tone rises, falls, stays the same and so on. Still, the desire to obtain a new superpower was as strong as it was forty years ago. I bought apps. I bought books. When I came home, I discovered an online translator. Imagine my delight when I said, in Mandarin, "what is your name?" and it knew what I meant. Imagine my horror when it translated "wife" as "77" and "where do you come from?" as "where do you empty?" What on earth had I been saying to people during my business trip?
I persist. The best advice I ever had about speaking French was not to worry about sounding like a caricature of a French person. I note that my book on Mandarin tells me that I shouldn't be embarrassed about making funny faces when learning tones.
Sadly, any advice on not being embarrassed or feeling awkward and even any suggestion that learning a language could be fun was missing from 90% of my own modern languages education. Please tell me it's not a case of "Plus ça change..."

Smiling Beijing Traffic Police

I've been in my current job for seven years almost to the week. When I joined, I hoped for a bit of travel around Scotland but never expected to go on a trip to China. Two weeks ago, I left for Beijing. One week ago, I returned and the question you might ask is, "Why has someone who suffers from Writers' Ego taken so long to get a piece about his trip out there for others to read?"

Arriving in Beijing during a photochemical smog that would make world news, I quickly decided that I'd have a wheen of  amusing things to say about Chinese driving. Cheating death under a bitter-lemon sky, I felt there was a lot that could be said about a nation that has gone from bicycle to car perhaps too quickly. There was a metaphor in there that, like an electric moped, I couldn't quite hear but which sooner or later would bowl me over. Then there were the signs. Beside the Path to the Tombs, "Cherish Flower and Grass to Care About Future". 

To my shame, when I first saw that, I marked the occasion with a slight twist to one side of my mouth. When we stopped to picture the Olympic Stadium, I spent more time trying to capture a gantry sign with two cartoon cops and the words, "Smiling Beijing Traffic Police".

After a week, "Keep of the Grass" seemed cold and harsh. There was nothing wrong with calling a pile of rocks in the garden of the Forbidden City "The Hill of Accumulated Elegance". When we arrived at a science teaching equipment factory to find our names in lights over the entrance, I knew that had I remained in Scotland and heard about this happening to colleagues, I would have laughed. And not necessarily in a good way. In Shanghai, no. 

Two factors were at play. First off, from the moment we met our mentor Mr Sun, as he stood holding a card with our names on it at the arrivals area of Beijing Airport, we were treated with warmth and kindness. To laugh at something that was yet another example of the thoughtfulness that characterised our dealings with Chinese colleagues would be a betrayal of our hosts. Secondly, it's all genuine. Perhaps the "Cherish..." notice clunks a bit due to translation, but it does the right thing, backing up the message about the way you should behave with the reason you should behave that way.

I do wonder, though, if the Beijing Traffic Police really do have much to smile about.

(Great visit - some non-business photos here if you're interested.)