Never Beige

My father was certainly the only one at the wedding adorned with calf-length cowboy boots and wearing a brown pin-striped suit. He looked like an Albanian at a job interview, and puffing on cigars no less.

This was during my father’s cigar-smoking period, another seemingly conventional habit that he could make singularly odd. Why he’d started smoking cigars was a mystery to my mother and brother and I: if he inhaled he had to walk around the block for twenty minutes to clear his head and quell the resultant nausea. In characteristic style he’d smoke them down as far as he could, to maybe three-quarters of an inch then stick a pin in the end to allow him to smoke it down further without burning his lips. He wasn’t mean, just peculiar.

He once took up ‘blues harp’ style harmonica, fancying himself as the Scottish (and white) Sonny Boy Williamson. He drove my poor mother demented for many weeks as he endeavoured, as is appropriate to this musical idiom, to ‘bend’ a note in imitation of a hobo-filled train passing a jailhouse on a lonesome Mississippi night. But, this was a Kilmarnock afternoon and not the musical accompaniment my mother needed during her viewing of ‘Home and Away’.

She refused to walk with him as he insisted on wearing a beret. No-one else in Ayrshire let alone Kilmarnock wore a beret. Maybe ‘up Byers Road’ or in posher parts of Edinburgh you’d get away with this Bohemian look, but Kilmarnock is not, and never will be, Bohemia. The ‘bunnet’ was considered respectable headwear for the working class Scot, and usually this was what he would wear, but for reasons known only to himself he had decided to purchase a beret which he now wished to perch jauntily and Gallic-ally on his napper and my mother was having none of it.

It’s as if the man sought deliberately to be unconventional. To support ‘the wrong team’ in whatever way he could. From good upper-working class aspirant stock he seemed to want nothing more than to live in a tower block in a housing scheme.  He was one of the few people you’d meet, outside of religious sects pursuing singularly devout monastic leanings, who was actively ‘downwardly mobile’.