Giants in the Forest: Interlude to Chapter 5

From Wat Phra Kaew

It is with a sense of melancholy that I know look back on my adventures across Scotland in search of Giants in the Forest. Not just that the summer is twisting slowly back down into the autumn: they have already become memories of a healthier Vile, one who could cycle for a good hour, all the time meditating on the nature of national identity.

In the aftermath of the Fringe, I am not able to walk for more than ten minutes: I have taken to digging out old articles to put on-line, since typing encourages shooting pains along my arms. When I stand, I am stiff and bent. My sole pleasures in life are lying very still and thinking. Like a character in a Beckett play, I remember and re-dismember, and the joys of the past only emphasises the misery of the future. In the click of my knee, I hear an oracle of my demise.

Much better times were had on the open road. The brief bursts of hitching made me think I was a beat poet (a delusion I had had during my early twenties, when I worked in a hospital and read Foucault on the wards). Cycling was beautiful, the fields and the rivers rising up to welcome me - the sheer pleasure of beating the 'suggested time' given for the distance between Aberdeen and Drum Castle on Google Maps rushed me back to childhood games. And trains, and buses: no longer the weary prisons for the commute to work, but chariots of flame that split the road open to reveal the vistas beneath and beyond...

And for three glorious weeks, the stage was not the place I looked upon to provide respite from a life of quiet desperation. The clouds and breezes, the ache of my thighs as I marched into the drive of Bowhill Country Estate, Selkirk, the car that stopped and picked me up from the side of the road (and me in my suit and carrying a rucksack thinking this combination of smart and loose would have its own symbolism): to travel was the destination, and every other cliché that I can steal.

I have explained that I am a critic because I have seen in theatre (especially dance, especially dance that comes from Belgian or has Iona Kewney in it) an intensity that seems to break the veil of illusion, that cracks open the truth hidden behind the mundane. And those moments still happen: Red Bastard did it... but what I found out in the countryside was different. It was a serene awareness, tiring, but not a sentimental rush...

Perhaps it was... perhaps it fades... perhaps the ghost of post-modern cleverness absorbs me again and I slip back into the quest for spiritual pleasure in an essentially spirit-less, urban world... do you know, by the time I got to Drum Castle, I had got into the habit of talking to the Giants (only this time I was given a tour and had to be rational or else they'd wonder about me...)