by Michael Bloor
[first published in Saragun Springsc, July 22nd, 2025]
Bob Duncan, like a lot of ex-policemen, is of a philosophical turn-of-mind. He reckons that the Inverallan Allotments are a bit like the army in the days of the old National Service, where all sorts of people had to learn to mix in together. Misunderstandings might occur across the class barriers, disputes might flare up from time to time, but we all learn to jog along together in the common struggle against Mother Nature and the bloody weather. He was enlarging on this to Willie Brown and myself as we all took shelter from a sudden, vicious shower in the old allotment summerhouse.
Willie laughed: ‘All sorts, Bob? Well, I havena’ seen that Beyoncé on a plot yet. Nor the Duke o’ Buccleuch… Unless he’s that new fella in the blue floppy hat that’s got old Ellen’s plot, over beside the railway.’
‘Talk of the Devil,’ I nodded towards a man in a blue floppy hat hurrying through the downpour to the summerhouse.
He shook himself and gasped out a greeting as he came in the door. I shifted an old seed catalogue off the bench to make way for him. He introduced himself as Andrew MacSorley – a large man with a florid complexion. To be sociable, I asked him how long he’d been on the waiting list before he’d got a plot.
‘Two and a half years. I’m pleased with the plot, though. Especially the fruit bushes.’ He spoke with the long drawn-out vowels of the Scottish boarding schools. ‘And I was lucky, because I got the plot in October, just a month before I retired.’ This struck a chord and we all then spent a few minutes in a collective hymn of praise to Retirement. Then Willie asked him what he’s done before he’d retired. He replied that he’d been a forensic psychiatrist.
There was a moment of stunned silence and then I, rather lamely, said: ‘Wow. Interesting job!’
He stretched out his legs from the bench: ‘Terrible job. Before you ask me why, I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you what was the final straw…
‘You’ll maybe know that an important part of a forensic psychiatrist’s job is that of assessing for the courts whether or not arrested persons are fit to plead. Well, this case I’m going to tell you about wasn’t all that untypical, but it was just one case too many as far as I was concerned.
‘He was a lad in his late teens. He’d gone into the toilets in the square in Crieff, the ones where you pay the attendant 30p. When he went into the Gents, the attendant noticed that he had a chisel sticking out of his back pocket. Well, there’d been a rash of graffiti and minor vandalism in the toilets, and the attendant got suspicious when this lad was a while in the cubicle and not coming out. There were a couple of cops on foot patrol in the square, so she called ‘em over to investigate.
‘Apparently, he took a bit of coaxing to get out of the cubicle and when he came out he still had the chisel. Now, there was no damage to the cubicle, but when the cops asked him what he was doing with the chisel, he said it was to protect himself from man-eating spiders. If he’d said he was an apprentice cabinet-maker – no problem. But to ward off man-eating spiders?? So…
‘They booked him – possession of an offensive weapon. When I saw him he’d already been in the jail for a fortnight, on remand. Was he in a good state of health? Emphatically, he was not. In his terms, he was caught in a giant spider’s web.’*
He paused. ‘Ah, the rain’s almost off, I see. Nice to meet you lads!’
Bob and Willie and I watched him go. Thoughts of jogging along with his fellow-allotmenteers seemingly suspended, Bob turned to me: ‘So whit wiz the polis supposed tae dae? Help the lad fight off they man-eating spiders?? Forbye, that’s nae the reason he’s nae longer working. Ma niece cleans his flat: he wis suspended cos he turned up fo’ work pished…’
*I heard the radical psychiatrist, R.D. Laing, tell the story about the man-eating spiders at a meeting in Cambridge in 1968. It’s stayed with me me ever since.