I'VE BEEN assailed regularly during my journalistic career by citizens telling me, in conspiratorial tones accompanied by wide-eyed expressions, that councillors are taking "brown envelopes" and that this system is the basis of the planning system in particular.
I look over my reading glasses sceptically and inquire: "What evidence do you have for this?"
And they say: "Everybody knows it."
And I say: "It is, in other words, an urban myth."
And they look stumped, before offering: "Well, what about Deacon Brodie?"
It is a bad point, ineptly made. But there's no doubt that Mr William Brodie, an Embra city councillor and Deacon of the Guild of Wrights and Masons, tarnished the PR image of local representatives for centuries to come.
You'll know the tale, particularly if you watched Sgeulachd (The Story of) Deacon Brodie on the excellent BBC Alba channel last night.
Brodie was the classic pillock of society, outwardly respectable, inwardly a schemer fond of cheap thrills. Said thrills came principally from his mistresses, of whom he had two (who bore him five baby Brodies), and from gambling and drinking.
Many Herald readers will be familiar with such excesses, and will know you need a fair few bawbees aboot your person to make a success of them. Let us be clear, as the politicians say before clouding matters: Brodie didn't do brown envelopes. He merely instituted a system of wealth redistribution, from society to himself, by the undemocratic method of stealing.
Councillors may beg for votes but rarely steal from the lieges. Most, I venture rashly, may have double chins but do not lead double lives.
Brodie had a brass neck. His day-job of cabinetmaker involved installing and repairing locks. This allowed him to copy keys using wax impressions. He pulled his first heist on a bank in 1768, getting away with £800, but fell a cropper in 1788 after an armed raid on an Excise office.
His accomplices grassed him up and, while there was little further evidence, the jury found him guilty. Whereas today he'd be given two hours' community service and an Open University course, back then the traditional punishment for councillors was hanging by the neck until deselected.
A crowd of 40,000 watched the entertainment, which is understandable given the lack of television and no Hibs nor yet Hearts. Brodie, enterprising to the last, wore a steel collar round his brass neck in the hope of avoiding strangulation, and supposedly made arrangements for his extant body to be revived later. His optimism is a lesson to us all. A lesson not to bother.
For, while rumours circulated of his being seen in Paris later, it's pretty certain that he booted the bucket and, shortly thereafter, ascended to stand before the celestial ways and means sub-committee. Even so, many councillors today still wear steel collars to public meetings and hustings.
Brodie's legacy runs deeper than that. There's a Deacon Brodie's pub near the spot where he was hanged, an unlucky locale for me as once, when a young man, I arrived there for a date to find the broad under advisement had invited half a dozen other guys.
I reached the last two then blew it when I ridiculed David Bowie for calling his son Zowie. The wench had afflicted her sprog similarly - what were the chances? - and I exited stage-left with remnants in my hair of a packet of cheese and onion crisps emptied thereon.
At an arguably more intellectual level, the story of Deacon Brodie created an odd obsession in Scottish literary and even political circles with the idea of a double-life.
Robert Louis Stevenson was inspired by the tale to write The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which was perhaps more accurately about a split personality.
Politically, Scotia Minor is weel kent for its split personality (Scottish/British; chest-beating/running away) but, years before the independence referendum, way back in the Eighties, magazines like Radical Scotland and Cencrastus used to refer frequently to the "Caledonian Antisyzygy".
The latter word infuriated me, as I didn't know how to say it and found no echo of it in my ancient linguistic cellars. Supposedly, it refers to contradictory aspects in one brain or culture.
Hugh MacDiarmid wrote about it in the 1930s, with reference to Gaelic. I hope BBC Alba don't make a programme about that too. Deacon Brodie is one thing. And he was another thing too.
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