Kettled

Davy and Jack were drunk. This was not an unusual occurrence. When finances allowed, this was very much the status quo. Now and again though, these brothers would fight. This was one of those nights. They’d niggled and narked all day and now it had blown up into a battle. There was only ever one winner on these occasions. Davy, the younger brother, was fiercer and stronger than Jack. Davy had the look of a Jacobite warrior, a ‘bare-arsed banditti’ with his long frizzy hair and beard the colour of irn bru. He fought ferociously with fist, feet and head.

This night he chose to fight with a kettle.

Maybe his hands had become sore with beating Jack on the head, because Jack, though beaten from the start, would not give up. At one point in the melee Davy had headered Jack all the way down the stairs of the house. Thump – right from top to bottom. They say drunk men don’t break and it’s just as well. Jack got up, crying now in frustration, and came back up the stair for another go. Davy began hitting him over the head with the kettle, an old tin affair with a whistle. Thump Bang Wallop he knocked Jack near unconscious and into final submission.

Next morning we had to use a pot to boil water for the tea. The kettle was mangled almost beyond recognition.

The Offal Truth

I remember a Brigadoon moment when I thought I had died and gone there.

It was in Clays Lane and I awoke to the sound of bagpipes on the breeze. I looked around at Lesley and she confirmed this Caledonian-tinged dawning. Turns out there was a 'Scottish' festival over at the bike track yonder.

We went over there and partook of early morning wellie-flinging and I entered the haggis eating comp. Each entrant got a free dram which for me was a much welcome hair of the large hound that had bit my ass the night before. Each contestant was also offered a heated tin of Baxter's haggis and encouraged to gobble it down in record time.

I'd barely got a fork-full to my mouth when the winner, an experienced campaigner who'd chowed his way to offal-greatness the previous three years, had finished his can and sat smiling and triumphant.

I wonder if he's still competing in this way - champion bike-track haggis eater, still undefeated.

Tartan Tinnitus

Tartan tourist shops do not aid the meditative process. I know this from personal experience. My favourite church in Edinburgh is St John’s way up the west end of Princes Street. It is a placid place and I like to sit for half an hour and clear my head and just breathe. This I attempted to do the other day, grab a little urban peace in the warm city, but I was prevented from doing so by a rather unexpected source.

I don’t know if I just hadn’t heard it before, or wasn’t aware of it, but I became conscious of the irritating combination of bagpipes and a rock-style backing track. At first I was trying to discern what the tune was (once you’ve heard ‘Hey Jude’ played by bagpipes there’s no going back, you have to deal with it and move on), but having done that, my attention was consumed by how incessant it was; one tune just morphed into another. Could be the old classic ‘Ye Cannae Shove Yer Granny Aff the Bus’ and straight into ‘No Woman No Cry’. Whoever had compiled this nightmare tape was either on some state-sponsored work programme for the emotionally distraught, or an evil, cackling japester on strong dope. Whatever was the case, my meditation was ruined.

Some while later I happened to be in one of those very-same bagpipe boutiques looking for some little oddity or amusement to buy my niece. A Loch Ness monster gonk or a ‘see-you-jimmy’ Tam O’Shanter perhaps (Russ Abbot has a lot to answer for). I happened to ask a couple of the staff there whether the music drove them mad. They both looked at each other and then back at me and nodded in the affirmative, one said in an accent either Spanish or Italian, ‘yes, very much’.

These poor people, I thought. Hard enough living in a strange country, but to have to endure this? I could imagine them after a long days shift with no escape from the continuous dirge and drone of bagpipes massacring otherwise pleasant tunes one after another, sitting in a quiet bar together trying to shake the bagpipe induced tinnitus out of their heads, and plotting a way back to the relative sanity of the Mediterranean.

The Acid Test

Have you ever found yourself laughing uncontrollably while a madman is throwing heavy hammers at you?

 Well, I have.

It was a long time ago on a housing scheme in east London. I had treated a friend to a tab of LSD on his birthday. It was kicking in fine and we were sitting there laughing hysterically while Jack spoke to the Christmas tree in the corner of the room when there came a knock on the door. Jacks girlfriend answered it to 'Moonie' a fellow-Glaswegian acquaintance of ours. He'd come round to find out if we wanted to buy some ironware from him as he'd robbed a load from Woolworths (he was always doing this, he once stole a Kango Gun from a building site and had taken it around the pubs trying to sell it. Not everybody’s idea of an impulse buy is it, a kango gun?). He had door-locks and spanners and such in a plastic bag.

He also had hammers.

Jack and I were in an increasing state of apoplexy as he was giving us this unlikely sales spiel of why we might need a spare chubb lock or whatever, and Moonie was getting increasingly enraged by our laughter, despite the fact we told him we had taken the acid.

He went apeshit and started taking hammers out of the bag and throwing them wildly in our direction. We dodged behind the couch still laughing like hyenas while these hammers were banging off the wall behind us.

Jack's girlfriend tried to calm Moonie down. She did this admirably and he headed toward the door still mouthing oaths.

As a final gesture of rage he threw a hammer through the front window. A neighbour phoned the police about this without our knowledge.

The police arrived mob-handed with snarling police dogs.

Have you ever been questioned by the police about a violent incident when you are off your face on hallucinogenic drugs?

It's not a good idea.

Glaswegians in London

Jack was a Jekyll and Hyde drunk. Sober, he was as good-humoured and well-mannered an individual as you would wish to meet. Drunk, he was a nightmare and a real nuisance. Whisky energised him, it wouldn’t send him to sleep until every available drop had been drunk and he’d insulted and upset everyone present. He’d want to stay up all night in your room until he’d sung along to every one of your records.

”I know what he wants you for..!” he’d wail in an unearthly celtic scream.

“It’s your brand new leopard-skin pillbox hat..!” he’d howl triumphantly, leaping from his chair.

He got us thrown out of a showing of ‘The Song Remains the Same’ in record time. He had stood up as the opening chords rang out, exalted and badly drunk, shouting “Been a long time since I rock and rolled...” The people around us were shitting themselves in fright.

That was the night he garnered the dentist’s tunic.

Jack and I had gone on a bender for which we paid dear (Davy was none too chuffed not to be included, and ordered Theresa not to cook any more meals for us).

It was payday for Jack and I had cajoled him, without over-much difficulty, to go carousing up west. Sensible folk don’t do such things. Jack had missed work because of this and had managed to spend a whole weeks wages in two days but we were reckless not sensible, so such behaviour was acceptable. Drink and recreation held precedence over everything else.

Scots, you may have noticed, seem to think they can behave as badly as they like when abroad. Why this should be the case I’ve no idea, maybe they want to confirm as many stereotypes as possible while they have the chance.

Jack and I bundled around the Soho area in an example of drunken ribaldry, managing to get thrown out of a cinema and Pizza Express, and ending up wading in the pool outside Centre Point and being cautioned by the police who, bizarrely, suspected us of being Irish terrorists. Why they thought our behaviour could be construed as inimitable to IRA bombers is something I’ll never know. Unless the chosen disguise of your hardened republican is to wade drunkenly in a pool in central London singing ‘Maggie May’ while dressed in a dentists tunic, but I doubt this is the case. This is further puzzling due to the fact that neither of us is actually Irish.

Ah! The dentist’s tunic..!

We’d met a drunken Canadian dentist in a pub on Oxford Street (as you do...). He had taken a shine to Jack who had regaled him for some considerable time and at some considerable volume with a selection of Neil Young songs (to Jacks mind that would be how Canadians liked to be greeted). The Canadian had been shopping for a new, crisp-white tunic appropriate to his profession, and had this with him in a shopping bag. Jack wanted to try it on and the friendly dentist was only too pleased to let him. The night wore on, and Jack liked his new attire so much he forgot to give it back.

Try waking up the morning after the night before, trying to remember why you’re wearing a dentist’s tunic. It’ll boggle your mind.

That Care Home/Vulcan Thing

Care homes are interesting places. Sometimes you’d wonder who was in more need of care, the residents or the staff.

I worked in one in South Woodford, Essex for a few months. It was a large house with a big garden which catered for the residential needs of people with cerebral palsy and others with a range of behavioural and physical disorders.

I guess it would be in bad taste to do a sit-com about such a place, which is a shame, cos it would be a gas. The cast of characters I witnessed in my time there couldn’t have been bettered by the BBC.

My immediate superior – a chief assistant social worker, whatever that means – was a rather strange female who claimed to be able to speak fluent Vulcan. She was a devout ‘trekkie’ who had reached the same rank as Spock and was obliged, apparently, to learn this ‘language’ which was devised by devotees of Star Trek.

I was peeling the potatoes for the residents’ Sunday dinner when she gave me a demonstration. Another first, I thought, a nutcase speaking Vulcan to me while I’m peeling spuds in a care home.

She herself, had no sense of humour about any of this, or any sense of humour at all as I remember. Myself and my co-worker persuaded her to come to work wearing her Spock uniform. The residents didn’t seem to notice.

It’s as well they didn’t notice either the general wackiness of their carers, it may have made them nervous. There was a fair sprinkling of Doris Stokes fanatics among the work-force, they would hold séances during the night shift when the residents were in bed. Sometimes they would attempt to make contact with dead residents. I used to find this bizarre. Without wishing to dwell over-long in bad taste, most of them were pretty incoherent when they were alive, let alone coming through the ether from the after-life;

“Is anybody there..?”

“Nnn.. Nnnn.. Nnnnugh...!

The Belt

As a child, particularly at secondary school, and due to my natural tendency to be the ‘funny boy’, I became an expert participant-observer of the employment of the ‘tawse’, as used by my ‘teachers’ to enforce ‘corporal punishment. (I say ‘teachers’ in this way as I don’t remember them being particularly instructive in anything else, maybe I wasn’t being overly attentive but I’m pretty sure I left school only with the ability to read, write and count and with the hitherto useless knowledge that Richard Nixon’s middle-name was Milhouse).

The ‘tawse’ was a leather strap split in two about 5 inches from the end presumably to give it an enhanced ‘whip’ effect over a wider area of the hand.

I won a Dunlop65 golf ball in the second year for receiving ‘the strap’ (or ‘the belt’ as it was more colloquially called) more than any other pupil. I would have been the owner of a collection of these balls if it was an annual prize such was my propensity toward this punishment.

On one occasion a Mr Fraser, frustrated at only being ‘legally’ entitled to administer six heavy strokes (he had a vicious ‘whipping’ technique which he aimed at your wrists), sent me to the Art Teacher Mr Masson for a further four (some school where the art teachers a fucking sadist).

Some teachers enjoyed giving the belt when there was snow on the ground. Try getting your hand severely warmed in arctic temperatures, it’s an experience.

I remember a pupil, a rival no-doubt for my crown, who deliberately separated his hands as the belt came whipping down towards them, thus leaving the fire-faced teacher to receive the kinetic force of his efforts on his own shins. Such fury did this engender that he attacked the lad. This resulted in pupil and teacher grappling and flailing about on the classroom floor to the collective joy of all others present.

Ah the joys of youth..

What Heaven's Like For Comedians

Tommy Cooper was practicing a new trick, and his sleight of hand was perfect – too perfect to be considered funny at all. Even if he tried he couldn’t cock it up in the brilliantly comic style that had allowed him such success when he had existed on earth. Yet, he couldn’t feel frustrated at all as he glowed with an inner happiness he had never known in his mortal life. The same went for his friend Les Dawson who was unable to hit even one comic wrong note on his celestial piano, playing as he did with the poise and skill of Franz Liszt. Lizst, who was on the century below, couldn’t play for toffee, and between himself Mozart and Paganini on violin made an unholy racket. Unholy because none of the holy overlords could bear to listen to it, and deliberately ‘went out’ any time the trio started up.

Heaven is run on a sort of cooperative basis, each incumbent, one-hundred and six billion, four-hundred and thirty-two million, seven-hundred and sixty-two thousand, nine hundred and fifty-three of them, have an equal share of ownership. Each millennia, all seven-hundred and two thousand of them, are represented by an Executive Committee (or soviet as V.I.Lenin insisted upon calling them, he’s very persuasive, and so loves his politics), which is subdivided into death centuries each occupying a heavenly strata or floor. A committee exists on each floor to decide what resources it needs, access to mediums, etc. and tenders its bid through the soviets to the Infinite Fund of Plenty, though this has long been thought (for the past one-hundred and seventy thousand millennia at least) to be a ridiculous name; the misnomer being that the word plenty is superfluous following the word infinite which suggests definitively that there is an endless supply of everything.

In a spiritual sense heaven is all about conundrums, and writing words in italics for emphasis. The conundrums that existed for humans on earth are unravelled (told you) and solved in heaven.

That’s why R.D.Laing’s sitting over there with his cocoa, left to ponder why someone who wrote so wisely about the destructive effects of family dynamics could allow himself to be such a god-awful father.

It was why Tommy Cooper couldn’t be funny. Because, in life, being constantly funny had made him unhappy. He was an unhappy funny-man. The other part of that conundrum was why people had laughed at him, like they’d laughed at other unhappy funny-men – Tony Hancock, Fatty Arbuckle. Why did people laugh at unhappy men?

Tony Hancock was over there – look – pulling faces at an audience of women from his own generation who were crying remembering his unhappiness.

One conundrum that a sub-committee of elder’s had been discussing was how they were going to treat Paul Daniels when he finally snuffed it, and why anyone on earth had found him funny in the first place?

They decided in the end that he utter the word ‘dinner-set’ before everything he says, thus his famous catch phrase would be adulterated to ‘dinner-set you’ll like this...not a lot, but you’ll like it’ and be rendered puzzling at best.

A Family of Comedians

                                                               

‘We’re a family of comedians’ was how my dad described us to his bemused Oncologist, after he and I had maybe wise-cracked about the lamentable list of the weird and not-so-wonderful ailments he seemed to carry through his life like perverse badges of honour.

Talk about dark humour..!

As a child, to me my father was the funniest man in the world. Even my friends found him hilarious. ‘I wish my dad was like yours’ was a statement I heard often from my young contemporaries. He wasn’t like any of their fathers, who seemed dull as dishwater and somehow divorced, separate, from their very own families.

Though quite strict, my dad had a zany humour. He was a Goon’s protégée like many men of his generation. You’d be sitting there watching the TV and eating your tea with your mum and brother and he’d be behind the living room door slowly edging his eye round to look at you. He’d spend ages doing this, and we all knew he was there, we knew the routine. My mum would be the first to crack

‘Bobby..!’ and we’d be chuckling away.

‘Bobby, stop that please..?’ Still nothing, we’d see his fore-head still edging round the door, until eventually he’d go away cackling.

As a young child he’d invite me into his strange world of names he’d made up – ‘Segula Smudge’ was one that has stayed with me. Another was ‘Neek, Neek, Nak the Nook’, though this could be extended ad infinitum depending on how long he, and eventually I, could be bothered with it – what seemed like minutes sometimes – Neek, Neek, Nak, Neek, Neek, Nak, Neek ,Nak,Neek, Neek, Neek, Neek, Zak, Neek, Nak.....and on until breathless and laughing hysterically you’d have to stop.

To my mother, my father, apart from being infuriating, was the funny man in her life. It was laughter between a man and a wife, not really for outsiders, though any mutual friends they had always thought my dad was ‘a scream’. He had little mannerisms and quirks that she loved to laugh at and just annoyed the rest of us. We’d go ‘Da....!’ in an admonishing, embarrassed tone while my mum would be howling with laughter.

Was my mum ever funny? Even as the only female dealing with three males all competing for the limelight she could be funny at times. If the mood took her she’d rush into the living room and say ‘keech, toly, bum, fart’ and then howl laughing. Or she’d do a daft wee dance with my dad’s bunnet on and hoiking her skirts up. These incidents are funny in memory but as a fourteen year old were greeted with sullen poutiness. I regret this now, as I do so much more. The dynamics of a family are not always such that the obvious behaviours are applied.

My father would take my brother and I around to Forest Glades in Leytonstone where we’d play his own improvised version of cricket – near-away tree was four runs, far-away six, etc. He’d give us names to represent us.  I would be Benjamin Netanyahu; my brother would be Bishop Muzorewa, leaders of Israel and Zimbabwe respectively. Even in play we were being given a political education.

I never did find out who Nabadinge Sitole was...

The Gospel Truth

                                                        
Sitting here in the Fourways Bar, Fraser felt like a foreigner in his own town. The trendies who organised this Open Mic night really only did so to listen to each other and themselves. If exposed to a truth serum they’d have to reveal that they’d really rather that anyone outside of their own little social clique didn’t play and sing at all. He sat nursing his pint, didn’t want slurred speech when his turn came, if it ever did.

Tanya Torrance (or Tanya Twee as Fraser called her, though not to her face for she was as hard as nails) was busy playing her latest Norah Jones-esque opus, which was actually closer to Norah Batty in its lyrical content and musical worth – you’d begin forgetting it while she was actually still singing it. Still, she thought she was good – they all did! Which was why what they, the meagre Tuesday night audience, were about to witness was so wrong on so many levels. Tanya, and her equally untalented and banal friend Penny Presley (‘The Illiterate Alliterates’, as Fraser had dubbed them) had announced earlier that ‘Tonight Matthew..’ they were going to introduce their new gospel quartet.

This he had to see.

Four middle-class white women from the outskirts of Edinburgh were going to attempt to sing black American gospel music. A music borne through the indignities of slavery and degradation of hundreds of years was going to be done justice by a quartet of privileged white women who wouldn’t recognise indignity if they sold it in Harvey Nicks. Apart from the fact that you had to have a certain ‘quality’ of voice to sing gospel , you didn’t have to be Mahalia Jackson but something along those lines was definitely desirable, quite a vocal ‘range’ was required not to say ‘power’ and ‘soul’. Unless they transformed dramatically within the next hour or so, Fraser had not witnessed any evidence whatsoever of any of these qualities among those comprising the quartet. ‘Insipid’, ‘mediocre’ and definitely ‘soulless’ these were words that more readily sprang to mind when witnessing their collective or individual performances.

Such arrogance amazed him, and a complete lack of any sense of irony, and a very dark irony it was too. It left him aghast in the same way that he couldn’t believe that a crowd of middle-class, rugby-loving, solicitor types could adopt ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’ a song from the plantations of nineteenth century America, as a way of serenading their ball-chasing heroes. And they were English too!  Slave-traders extraordinaire! And yet, no-one ever commented on the cruel irony of this appropriation. Now a similar criminal act was to be committed in the Fourways Bar in Hartsburgh, East Lothian.

He was up next. Introduced by Tanya herself

‘Someone you’ve all heard many times before...’

‘Thanks for the big sell Tanya...’

The audience may have thought this was gentle verbal sparring but the protagonists knew it was ignited from mutual loathing. He was beginning to think he only attended these nights to spite these people. The enmity was barely concealed.

‘This is a song by Laura Cantrell about premature ejaculation. It’s called ‘Two Seconds of Your Love’’

They hated his crudity. These were your po-faced, middle-class Scots and he hated them for that.

They were from the other side of the town – the ‘good’ side. Where the ‘alternative therapy’ crowd lived. Life coaches, reiki healers.

The well-connected people.

Fraser – Davie Fraser – had spent his life on the other side of town with the unemployed and the shop workers, and the bar staff from The Fourways, the alkies and the jakeys, the damaged and the damned.

Even the beach in this little Lothian haven was unofficially segregated. Go east from the bottom of Fore Street and you got Beach House cafes that sold sandwiches made from bread other than pan, plain or broon and kayak clubs. They had their veggie barbecues on the beach nights and Tai Chi at sundown. Go west from Fore Street and you had two amusement arcades, a chippy and a Wimpy bar. There they drank tinned lager and flung balls for their devil-dugs.

And never the twain shall meet.

The punters at the bar liked him. They cheered and bought him pints after he’d done his little turn. He understood that this was not wholly in appreciation of his talents and more because they knew that it annoyed the interlopers who took over their pub every second Tuesday.

He got little applause from them.

They had on occasion stopped him playing at all, saying all the ‘spots’ had been filled, usually by their friends and friends of friends from the music college in Edinburgh, people they’d ‘networked’, who were deemed worth knowing, but they weren’t always able to rig this and had then no alternative but to let him play.

The gospel choristers made their way to the tiny stage, giggling excitedly and obviously in their own little bubble of anticipation. Maybe they’d been practising this for a while and were now keen to expose their new joint persona to a bemused and largely disinterested public. Everyone but they and their little coterie seemed to think this was a bad idea and were gearing themselves to cringe.

And cringe they did, for what followed was excruciatingly bad. Even Fraser didn’t expect it to be so appallingly awful.

White women from East Lothian cannot sing gospel music.

But, they sure as hell would try.

‘Go tell it on the Mountain’ was the first song they battered to death. Tanya on shaky lead vocal and the others ‘oohing’ and harmonising sometimes dangerously close to the tune. They smiled and beamed at each other as if they were The Southern Gospel Singers incarnate. Desecration was the word closest to Davie Fraser’s mind, an assault on something sacred, and they couldn’t and would never see it that way. To them it was a tribute, probably to black sisterhood or some other equally twee and fatuous notion. It would have been far more of a tribute if they’d killed the whole idea at birth.

After the inevitable and tortuous rendition of Amazing Grace they left the stage to whoops and hollers from their own little group and a tired spatter of hand-claps from those at the bar.

In their own little self-interested, cosy world they’d talk of this night as a triumph; when they, the sisters of East Lothian had joined hands with the oppressed and disenfranchised. To show they really were all one, that music could cross boundaries of culture, race and creed.

-Silly bastards, thought Davie Fraser turning west towards home.

An Exile Returns To Intemperate Weather

Walking around in the sinus-battering wind and drizzle I realise how utterly dismal the Scottish weather can be. That’s not to say that life down south was lived basking in sunshine and light breezes – it wasn’t, the climate’s typically dreary down there too. It’s just that there’s a unique quality to weather up here. When it’s cold its bloody cold; when it rains, its cold rain; when it’s dark, its pitch black. And the wind? Living in this micro-climate on the Firth of Forth is like living in a wind tunnel with behavioural problems. It whirls and skirls like a highland reel. It stops you in your tracks and blows you off your feet. It whooshes in four directions at once. It buffets your windows to breaking-point. You arrive home distressed, dishevelled and drenched muttering “why did I want to come back to this?”

I am reminded of my childhood in East Kilbride, one of the most exposed places in Britain, possibly on earth, outside of Siberia, surrounded as it is by moors and flatlands. My father dubbed a particular part of Princes Square, the central shopping precinct, as ‘Cochrane’s Corner’ after the self-service grocer shop that was situated there (I once stole a bottle of Soda Water and a Napoleon Solo magazine from there, I can still feel the thrill 40-odd years on). On a windy day (and those were plenty) you turned around this corner and were literally stopped in your tracks by the gusts of wind. If you had a bomber jacket on you could stretch it out bat-style like a parachute and fly away toward Glasgow.