This Good Book

Publishing as an industry is obsessed with new – books yet to come out… but what about the brilliant books that have already been published? Each month we spotlight a different author whose book was published more than a year ago, which you might be yet to meet… This month we hear from Iain Hood with the start of another story from the This Good Bookiverse…

Shuffling the Shelves: This Good Book by Iain Hood

The Pavarotti's Story Part 1

At some point in the 80s, I’m thinking 1985 or 1986 here, when MacLeod and I were both still at the Art School, she caught my eye and I sidled up to her in the Mac library. I said something vague and weird, just to catch her attention, that a phone call had told me to blow up the Art School or something. Just daft stuff. She turned and looking up at me she said, Is that right? She had such a beautiful wee smile on her face, and the light in the library, can’t remember if it was natural or electric, seemed to bounce up off the page of the book she was looking at and light up her face from below. She looked a wee bit angelic to me in that moment. I asked her if mibby she was free that evening she’d like to grab some pasta at this place Pavarotti’s in Coocaddens, just close to the Art School in Garnethill. Also in Garnethill is St Aloysius’s, the Catholic private school, which will become important in a minute. Pavarotti’s was one of these old-style Italian Glasgow institutions, I think, all white linen tablecloths and dark panelling, pretty formal. All the waiters were plump, tall, no-nonsense men. It’s not there anymore. Could it still have existed into these days? Or did it inevitably become a died-out dinosaur? The waiters were full of chat with us, and I suspect with all their customers. The one who showed us to a table with the words, This way, lady and gentleman, had taken our coats with a flourish, shaken them as he hung them on a coatrack (there was a light dusting of sleety rain on them). When we were giving another waiter our order, MacLeod happened to mention to me that she hoped the pasta wouldn’t be too salty, she didn’t like it too salty. The waiter broke in and said to us that all pasta had to be boiled in water that was salted to exactly the extent the sea water in Naples Bay was. This, he said, was an unbreakable rule. He didn’t mention how salty that was or how he knew the boiling water used for the pasta was exactly as salty as this sea water. When our pasta arrived, a couple of vegetarian dishes – we were at that part of the 80s when everyone seemed to have gone vegetarian, though mibby it was because they were cheaper, which my mother said we would give up on when we got some cash behind us and she wasn’t wrong in my case if not MacLeod’s – the waiter who had taken our order and now served us asked if we wanted additional grated parmigiana. We’d both only ever heard of the cheese put on pasta being called parmesan, but after he’d walked away we said to each other that mibby this was only the word parmesan in Italian, which isn’t wholly wrong. Then the waiter confused the whole issue again by saying, Grana pedano! as he actually grated the cheese from a block over our dishes. He was just flying a third name or designation or something for the cheese, but I’m not sure MacLeod or I knew what the hell was going on. For us back then, at home, parmesan came desiccated in a round tube from Kraft foods and had a regurgitated quality: warmed, it smelled of sick and kind of tasted that way too. The texture was something else. Like cheesy grit. Even in some places you could eat Italian food, or let’s call it Scots-Italian food, like the Spaghetti Factory on Gibson Street and The University Café on Byres Road, I seem to remember we got a slightly upmarket version of the same thing, a tube of grit sick but branded Galbani Parmesan. This Pavarotti’s stuff, fresh from a block, fluffy and melty, was a thousand miles from anything we had experienced before. We were so young and naïve, really. When it then came to grinding a huge grinder for black pepper, the waiter approved of our wish for this to be done, and generously, acknowledging this with a nod and the words, There can never be too much black pepper! It was all pretty funny as far as performance waitering goes.

After a little while longer the same avuncular waiter came over and lifted the open wine bottle to the lip of MacLeod’s glass. Then he paused and said to me, Can the girl have more wine? She and I were sort of stunned, then I laughed and said, Of course. When the waiter had filled my glass as well then receded into the background, Susan Alison and I just dissolved into laughter and more laughter until we were in tears. Is it just a part of the whole performance? she asked me. I had no idea. Mibby, I said, trying to think it through, Mibby this is, well, it’s so likely to be the posh haunt of those grand and not so grand Italo-Scots families, owners of chip shops and ice cream places, pizza places and other Italian restaurants big and small, who send their kids to St Aloysius’s. And I knew that St Aloysius’s had only a few years back let girls in. My guess was that there were a bunch of St Aloysius fifth- and sixth-year boys, still spangled from having actual girls right there, in their school, sitting right next to them in class, and hoping to impress them on dates, with the added debauchery of being allowed to drink wine as a couple of late teenagers due to table rules. So of course they brought them to their parents’ favourite, Pavarotti’s, saved up their pocket money to swing it. MacLeod looked appalled and delighted at this idea. Do you really think so? she said. It’s plausible, I said, and plausible is all you ever really need.

When we started eating, I remember saying to MacLeod, This pasta’s a bit weird. Oh yes? Susan Alison said. Good weird or bad weird? I’m no really sure, I said. It’s a bit… kinda hard. Hard? she said. It’s the way it’s supposed to be. It’s called al dente. God, even my mithair knows to cook pasta that way. I think I made a misguided guess from the little Italian, Spanish I had that it was something to do with teeth. It just means what it means, al dente, cooked right, Susan Alison said.

A thing I don’t think has been mentioned until now is that MacLeod was always young looking for her age. And tiny, petite, five foot, you know? She could have passed for a St Aloysius sixth former no problem, even a fifth former. A girl, as the waiter said.

I can’t remember much more about that specific time. Except that it was winter and back then, and well into the 90s as far as I remember it, there was never any central heating in the rented flats we used to live in as students. We were always bloody freezing. But it had been nice and warm in Pavarotti’s.

– Iain Hood, July 2025


August 2025 special offer: This month only, get Iain Hood's My Book of Revelations (signed Renard Press Edition) free if you order This Good Book (Renard Press Edition)

Up next…

We asked Iain to choose the next book to join the shuffled shelves, so join us here to find out more about Never Laura.
Iain said:

Never Laura is a rare thing: a novel of prescient and pressing ideas wholly in the service of the emotional human need to know who we are.