MANY otherwise decent ratepayers in Leith will be asking themselves this weekend: “I wonder if I should put in a bid at auction for the prison cell toilet seat that was once the object of micturition by one Francis ‘Franco’ Begbie, sometime psychopath of this parish?” The controversial commode is just one of 316 items from the film T2 Trainspotting that are being auctioned tomorrow in aid of charities (The Junction, in Edinburgh, and Calton Athletic, in Glasgow).
Other items available at Mulberry Bank Auctions, Glasgow, include two empty bottles of Buckfast and one of Malbec, bloodied clothing worn by M Renton Esq, and the entire Port Sunshine horseshoe bar, complete with beer taps, steel sinks and Hibernian FC paraphernalia.
The bar has been priced at between £500 and £700, while the lavatorial furnishing is expected to reach between £50 and £70, which seems a bargain for such an iconic item of cludgerie.
I hope the sale goes well, while wondering at the appeal of such memorabilia. I have no right to wonder. Although I’ve never purchased anything, I’ve often gone on websites looking for items from the Lord of the Rings movies (before I turned against them for their heresy), such as Aragorn’s sword or a button from Bilbo Baggins’s waistcoat. However, I might argue that The Lord of the Rings is a guide to living one’s life – by residing in a hole and hoping that a wizard will turn up to make everything all right – while Trainspotting is a manual for how not to live one’s life. One might, I suppose, gaze upon the stainless steel cludgie and think: “There but for the grace of the Void go I.”
In Trainspotting, it’s fair to say, there are few Aragorn-style characters to emulate. That said, during the course of compiling this uplifting sermon, I came across Rab “Second Prize” McLaughlin, a minor character about whom I’d forgotten and of whom my deep throat, Wikipedia, notes: “He travels to London … and spends the whole time inebriated.” This is uncomfortable, as the similar soubriquet Rab “Second Prize” McNeil has something of an authentic ring to it. However, there the similarity ends, as I do not travel to London. Indeed, like Bilbo Baggins, I rarely leave the house and dislike all adventures. True, I go to yoga – ooh! – in Leith every week and frequently pass by junkies in one particular spot (where there is a dispensing chemist) which makes me think that, in Trainspotting, art was imitating life.
But, just as The Lord of the Rings had a profound effect on my life, leading me to wear a cloak to the supermarket for example, I wonder about the effect of Trainspotting on an area of Scotland with which I’m quite familiar. Certainly, visiting footer fans often make junkie gestures with imaginary needles.
But Leith has much more to it than that. Obviously, such impropriety hardly touches the vast majority of the port’s people and, indeed, from what I remember of Trainspotting and other works in Irvine Welsh’s oeuvre, much of the debauchery takes place in neighbouring districts.
To give you some geography, Leith, with its docks, lies north of Edinburgh proper (the mot juste). Travelling west along the shore brings intrepid explorers to the old fishing port of Newhaven, then Trinity (the rich person’s Leith, with its sea captains’ mansions), then a triumvirate of names familiar to Welsh aficionados – Granton, Pilton, and Muirhouse – before the leafier suburb of Silverknowes. All face Fife and the Firth of Forth. Indeed, Welsh could have made more of north Edinburgh’s dramatic, Middle Earth-style vistas and should have had talking trees dotted about the municipal dustbowls surrounding blocks of flats.
It was also a mistake on the author’s part not to give his characters warm, rune-decorated cloaks, magic biscuits and chibs that light up when the police are approaching. Had these been up for auction tomorrow, I might have bid for them.
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