Free Boswell's Bus Pass by Stuart Campbell

doubled as the local taxi driver. The negotiated exorbitant fare left me fearing bankruptcy while Linda was dreaming of replacing her aging Cadillac with a completely new model before driving in the general direction of a Tuscan sunset, a restored villa with vineyard and a new life.
    Lord Monboddo was obviously barking mad. Tucked away in one of his six volumes of
Ancient Metaphysics
is the assertion that ‘not only are there tailed men extant, but such as the ancients describe Satyrs have been found, who had not only tails, but the feet of goats, and horns on their heads … We have the authority of a father of the Church for a greater singularity of the human form, and that is of men without heads but with eyes in their breasts … There is another singularity as great or greater than any I have hitherto mentioned, and that is of men with the heads of dogs.’ Neither of the farm workers we passed had dog heads but their possibly all-seeing-breasts were covered.
    Although he may have eventually gained a tongue-in-cheekreputation as an evolutionist before his time Monboddo’s research findings seem rooted in the opium pipe and a very full moon.
    He also tried to convince a gullible public that the orang-utan was ‘a character mild and gentle, affectionate too, and capable of friendship , with the sense of what is decent and becoming.’ This translates as no picking fleas off each other or dropping banana skins.
    Lord Monboddo was an early exponent of the benefits of frequent cold baths. Such a view would have been anathema to Johnson who was never known to take a bath, warm or cold. Because of his determination to plunge his own children into cold water the amiable landowner attracted a degree of criticism from the authorities. Had there been an At Risk register in eighteenth century Angus the young Monboddos would have been on it.
    ‘I knew that he and Dr Johnson did not love each other; yet I was unwilling not to visit his Lordship, and was also curious to see them together.’
    Not loving each other is an understatement given Monboddo’s belief that Johnson had compiled a dictionary ‘of a barbarous language , a work which a man of real genius rather than undertake would choose to die of hunger’. Perhaps the reference to hunger provides a clue as to why, once they met, they both got on splendidly. They dined on ‘an admirable soup, ham, peas, and moor-fowl and parted the best of friends’.
    Although on this occasion Boswell’s instinct proved well-founded he still too often resembles an impresario with an obsession for arranging intellectual cock fights and freak shows. He was a social alchemist whose party trick was to bring together combustible elements and then sharpen his quill to cement his reputation.
    As the Cadillac negotiated farm tracks it was difficult to connect with the wild moor that Boswell saw. Linda told me that, in any case, I was three months too late as the previous owner who loved showing his house off to complete strangers had sold up and moved to Stonehaven. Increasingly paranoid, I half expected to hear that the house had been next on the young chuckling arsonist’s list or had been ransacked by a vengeful orangutan. My fears were partially realised. The new owners, being ridiculously young, had ordered that the home be gutted, stripped and transformed.
    I was greeted by another bulldozer, more scaffolding and a lurching Portaloo. One of the workmen confirmed that the new owners werenot about and invited me to look inside the temple soon to be dedicated to IKEA. It was a totally unedifying experience. Back in the garden I peered in vain at the rhododendrons hoping for at least a glimpse of a goat-footed satyr or a stray dog with a man’s head.
    After asking Linda to drive me to an Auto Bank, the entire contents of which I emptied in an attempt to pay her, I waited again for the number nine bus to take me back into Montrose. The driver, a one man harbinger of doom, regaled me and the