Later I was invited to a memorial service for Douglas at his old university, St. Andrew's. Douglas Young should have been awarded a professorship at St. Andrew's but, being the most conservative of all the Scottish universities, Douglas Young did not fit. He was a founder member of The Scottish National Party, a pacifist and a conscientious objector during the Second World War. Not the kind of person to be rewarded by St. Andrew's and so he had had to look elsewhere for his professorship. I could not therefore suppress feelings of, 'too little too late', by this institution which had done him such a disservice. Nevertheless a huge group of academics filed into the choir stalls of the medieval church of St. Salvator and the panegyrics were delivered with great feeling. At the end, the doors of the church were thrown open and outside a lone piper played "The Flowers of the Forest." The hairs stood out on the back of my neck.

Hugh MacDiarmid readily agreed to my proposal with a simple letter. Later I took a paving slab of, "The Little White Rose", to his cottage home of Brownsbank near Biggar. I was met by his wife Valda, a proud Cornish woman, and an impressive character with her hair dyed red. She immediately handed me a spade and instructed that I should straightaway set it in the ground at the doorstep to the house. In my stays in Edinburgh in the sixties I had been in MacDiarmid's company several times in the poet's pub, Milne'Bar in Hanover Street, but had not really got to know him. Mostly I had heard and read that he was a very 'difficult' person. On that day nothing could have accounted for that description. He was generous and friendly. A local worthy came in and one could detect that this was a frequent visitor with a tendency to bore. MacDiarmid was full of attentive charm. The poetry slab is still there and it recently featured in a play on Radio 4 about Valda after the poet's death.

The Little White Rose
The rose of all the world is not for me.
I want for my part only the little white rose of Scotland
That smells sharp and sweet and breaks the heart.

A meeting in Milne's Bar with Sydney Goodsir Smith was enough to gain his approval to use his poem. Later I used two other poems; "Image O' God" by Joe Corrie, the miner's poet from Fife, and "Winter's Here" by Bud Neill. Neill was, of course, a national icon, his strip cartoons in the Scottish 'dailies' had reached cult status. I was amazed to discover that he had lived a few doors from me in Glenrothes. He had moved there in an attempt to beat the bottle but had died before I had begun to do the pavement poems. In both of the latter cases the families gave me permission to use the poems.

Finally I collaborated with Alan Bold to make several works incorporating his poetry. After his time in the writer's cottage he had moved to another cottage on the Balbirnie estate. Together we created the 'Poetry Path.' The neat right-angled paths created by architects around grassed areas are often subverted by people taking the shortest distance between two points - across the grass. These are beautifully described by planners as, 'desire lines.' In the winter they become muddy and begin to meander as people try to avoid the worst parts. Where I could, I paved them. As part of an improvement project in the oldest part of the town, I got the opportunity to pave a rather long one with 90, 3' x 2' slabs. I suggested to Alan that, by placing a word in the top left corner of each slab in both directions, half the poem could be read on the way to the shops and the other half read on the way back. Alan duly delivered. It is worth mentioning the technique I employed. I had the letters cut in black acrylicÉ.(this is going to take too long! A sketch would be better) On completion I said to the manager of the factory that I hoped that the process hadn't held up his production. He replied that in fact the ninety slabs had been produced more speedily than normal production times!

'Path Poem', with Alan Bold. 1976 Click images to view large image [opens pop up window]

While on the whole I always had good and supportive relationships with the architects there was no doubt that they often saw me as a threat or as stealing their thunder. As one put it, I got all the 'juicy bits.' I do not yet know what he meant. Nevertheless one of my most successful collaborations was with the architect Jan Miezitis. He was from Latvia and, during the Nazi occupation of his country, had escaped using his skills as a gymnast to leap over the fences of his internment camp. He had had to struggle to become a qualified architect but was very clever, creative and a disciplined professional. We had a mutual respect and some of my most successful works were executed on his projects. 'The Henge' was for me the most significant. It is formed by 13 concrete slabs ascending in height from 1.5 to 2 metres, set in a spiral formation with a 'diameter' of about 3 metres. The inside faces of the slabs are in relief, each one referring to one of my 20th century heroes/heroines; Pele, Che Guevara, Gandhi, The Beatles, Martin Luther King and Mother Theresa among others. It must be entered to experience it and it forms the major marker for entering the Pitteuchar neighbourhood. I was told that a detective inspector of police had said that every time he went into it he learned something new. I designed a large sand-filled play area with sculptures which won The National Playing Fields Association annual award for best new play area. Also in the area is the first group of the 'Hippos'. I wrote a small booklet of 24 or so pages containing lots of photographs of the works entitled, 'The Glenrothes Town Artist.' It was edited by Nigel East of the corporation's PR department. - a good friend and supporter of my work, It sold out and an updated edition was published. It has always been a regret of mine that it was not re-issued since, as time went on, my work became more and more conceptual.