Creative Drinking

The teacher fella said you should write about what you know. This is what has got me thinking and, quite honestly, I’m finding the whole thing quite depressing. My whole life, I realised, was geared precisely not to think about things at all; not serious things at any rate. Horse-racing, getting a bevvy, having a laugh with mates, maybe getting a bird to shag; that’s been my whole life, really, and I’m really beginning to regret starting this Creative Writing class at the local ‘centre’. I was trying to give up the drink and saw the brochure in the library; I’ve always fancied I was a good letter writer so I thought why not; at least it’ll keep me occupied.

But, write what you know about? Failed relationships? He wasn’t the sort of bloke to have ‘relationships’. He shagged women, he even showed them affection more than occasionally, he even fathered children by them – five weans, five grandchildren though one was half-caste, a grandchild, not one of his own – not a bad total that. He went with the sort of women who demanded to be hit; asked for it. He wasn’t above head-butting them too if they got wide, and they could get plenty wide. Feral, cunning women not used to soft men.

Building sites, bookies, nights in the pubs, carry-oots, a kick in the haw-maws and a sore face, a few weeks in pokey and the delight of shagging a bird when they let you oot.

In my early days (even these days, if truth be told) it would be a wee bit o’ speed and a spliff. Got nicked once walking down the road wi’ ma big mate Jackie to Joe McSkag’s for a coupla tabs of acid. Outstanding child-support or fines or some such shite. Just as well I wasn’t walking back; especially if I’d swallowed one. Imagine gettin’ lifted just on the cusp of a whizz-bang trip on the old LSD? Fucking nightmare. Anyway; three weeks in Pentonville for ma sins and Big Jackie stayin’ wi’ ma burd in oor wee bedsit in Walthamstow. Hope he knows to behave himself, I remember thinking. Wouldn’t trust ma mad nympho burd as far as I could chuck her, which wouldnae be far, the fucking heffer.

Prison was tough and lonely as it was my first time (been in again since like!). I had to make a stand with the screws and refused to go in my cell until they’d given it a good mop and a clean as it was rank wi’ the smell o’ pish. They acted tough but they could see I wouldn’t budge, and I was a mad looking bastard back then, ‘like a fucking Jacobite’ my big mate Jackie would tell me. I wasn’t really sure what he was on about, but it seemed to suit my big frizz of red hair and beard and, though not fearless by any means, I’d never back down. Still won’t.

The main focus of my life without any doubt has been drink. Everything I’ve ever done whether it be work, signing-on, palling aboot wi’ chums, all centred around drink. My whole life has been drink.

Me and Big Jackie met in a pub up the High Road here and became bosom pals overnight. He’d nowhere to live at the time and we were baith blootered so he ended up coming back with me to the wee bedsit I shared wi’ the burd. He insisted on sleeping on the floor but with drunken generosity (and possibly because it was his tax rebate that we were pissing up the wa’) I told him to get in the bed wi’ me and her. No funny business you understand, although once or twice I’d climb on her bones while he pretended to be asleep.

But, it’s all been about the drink. Still is, though I sometimes try to get on the wagon. So difficult though, unless you just live with yourself all the time; stay in every night, watch the racing by yourself. The greatest thing is to be with a group of lads on the bevvy, so I always give in to it. I can understand that Gazza fella perfectly. He’s chasing past memories of glorious nights out with his friends, but I don’t think he’ll ever find them again.

I’m not a completely stupid man, though. I was, for quite a while, a manager of a Mecca bookies. Magic as a settler I was, could count them up in my head, trebles, accumulators. Got sacked in the end for ‘borrowing’ a little too much from the till. Was always gonna pay it back but it just got a little out of hand. And, what was the money for? You guessed it.

I don’t have much contact with my brother, Sammy, anymore, though he only lives up the road there with his bird, the most boring woman who ever drew breath. The main reason I don’t see him is because he’s stopped drinking. Biggest bevvy-merchant in London oor Sammy until she said it’s me or the drink. I know which one I’d have chosen but he told me he saw his future as a lonely drunk and shat it. Maybe, deep down, that’s why I cannae face seeing him, apart from huvin tae put up wi’ droopy drawers and him there sookin ehs sweeties, maybe I’ve become what he feared.

When we both bevvied we had some spectacular fights which I would always, always win. He was a gemmie wee fucker and sometimes I had to mash his cranium with a kettle or whatever was handy to stop him. One time I heidered him right doon a flight of stairs and the wee bastard still got up for more. Big Jackie was like Harry fuckin’ Gibbs trying to calm us doon and keep us away from the burd who was pregnant at the time wi’ wee Jason, my eldest. But, he didn’t understand what it was all about. Brothers need to fight because deep inside, brothers hate each other and they have to get all this bile out so that they can love each other again. I liked Big Jackie a lot but he was a fucking poof when it came to fighting.

I don’t have much connection with ma weans and grand-weans. There’s nothing really I can give them. The odd time I’ll chip in, if it’s an important birthday or anniversary, but other than that I’m not really interested. I had one ‘ex’ who tried to get me done for non-maintenance and that got pretty nasty, but I sorted her out eventually.

Noo I’ve just got the horses and the drink and I’m hitting sixty next month. I’ve got a load of pals (so long as I keep drinking) and a fair bit of respect around this wee community in north-east London. Last I heard Big Jackie was some sort of teacher fella in a ‘university’ up north, though he was always telling porkies. He used to say he’d done time in the Bar-L, but had he fuck!

So, if this creative writing bloke wants to read this, then this is what I know about. I’ve no regrets, really. I’d maybe have liked to be still managing a bookies but it disnae keep me awake at night. I’d have been sacked ten times by now. I don’t miss Scotland and I don’t get all soppy about no’ seeing my family and weans. I do things the way I think they should be done, everybody has to look out for themselves in this world, you live it as you see it. I’m no alcoholic, it’s just that my chosen life-style – pubs, banter, cards, pool, racing – includes the bevvy at its central core and, without it, none of the rest is worth a candle. My gravestone should say…

“He drank when he could and never cried about it”

But, Im no feart o’ death, though I kind of know it could be slow and painful, but I’ll still drink and have a fag if I’m able.

Hopefully, I’ll drap doon deid in the street.

That would be best…..

Never Give Someone With OCD a Check-list....

Never give someone with OCD a checklist, it could hold the entire enterprise up for days.

Take Doyle and the caravans...!

Big long list to check electrics, smoke alarms, appliances, Check under beds for consumerly debris; check the beds for stains; stuff left in cupboards; shite's left in toilets.

Three weeks ago he was given the list and he's still down there, checking everything for the umpteenth time. Soon as he'd ticked everything off, he had to do it another twice otherwise something awful was gonna happen to his maw; then another three times or it was going to be his brother meeting calamity. Then that made a six in total and that was no good because that meant everyone he knew that was still eligible (i.e. under sixty) was going to die in their sixties and that was no age, so another three rounds of checking to make it a nine which was a 'safe' number. Yer nineties was an OK time to be dying.

After four days of this he'd managed to get on a bus home from the caravan site but had to get off and head back after half-way convinced that he'd left a cooker on in number eighty-six. In whatever rational mind he'd by this time managed to retain, he was close to a hundred per cent sure that he had not left any cooker on anywhere, but rationality wasn't in control here.

He sat on the bed-couch looking at the cooker. If he looked at it long enough he'd manage to convince himself that all of it's rings, it's grill and oven were off, meaning that the gas was not in fact turned on and hissing quietly so that the next resident to light a fag wouldn't blow themselves and their young family to buggery, leaving himself as the responsible party facing questions of a highly serious nature in Edinburgh Sheriff Court.

The next time, he didn't even make the bus stop. Surely he'd left the door unlocked at number eighty-seven, and at least a window at eighty-five.

Never give a man with OCD a checklist....he will end up blowing the place sky-high....

We Are Family

Ye find ye can communicate with complete strangers more satisfyingly than you can with your own family. Words can often get in the way, as the old song says. Sensitivities and old sores are like land mines; the merest hint of criticism or rebuke is like twenty Becher’s Brooks to jump. Relatives possess antennae that the world’s radar specialists are yet to replicate. And yet, the love….

Conversations among these people are like faulty engines spluttering and farting out fuel and smoke and stalling and bucking up a busy road like Keystone Cops or Laurel and Hardy and a car just about to fall apart; first the doors, then the wheels and finally Ollie is left holding just a steering wheel and Stan is wondering how it inevitably came to be his fault.

“Aye, but” “I didnae mean it that way” “That was just a joke” “I know she was good in other ways” 

“My mother never even cuddled me or ever told me she loved me” “Aye, but?”

Different conceptions, mis-perceptions, allegiances, different stories understood in different ways. A lifetime of hurts and squashed feelings. Squandered emotions.

And yet the love lies yearning, latent and ready....

DIY Dads

The first yin, I swear, he was building another hoose! Everytime ye saw him he was wheelin a barrow full of cement. In fact D said much later during an attempt to rekindle an already fully doused romance that they’d hud to move house so he could start all over again. DIY addiction. He tried engaging me in conversation once about plaster-board but realised within a matter of seconds that I hudnae a scoobie and cared even less.

Plagued with them all through my amorous liaisons. Brutal. The only one that wisnae DIY mad was a vicar and that didnae work out too well either. Didnae go down too well with L that I offered him outside in a pub in Cromer over a disagreement concerning the validity of the post-war Atlee government. Ended up walking twelve miles through the Norfolk countryside after refusing to get back in his car.

Always a flaw in my make-up. Songwriter, considerate (sometimes over-considerate) lover, jokester, funster, academic, but couldnae put a shelf up that didnae look like it belonged in Fred Flintstone’s cave, so somehow, somewhere among the Gods of stereotype, manhood is questioned. And, and yet, some boorish, boring prick (and believe me, at least a couple of my DIY dads were boorish, boring pricks. One of them even won ‘Boorish, Boring Prick of the North-West Territories' seven years running) can knock up a patio and a barbecue set and he’s Man of the Year.

One wonders if the reason Van Gogh really went mad, artist-genius as he was, he found himself unable to assemble some Netherlandish version of a flat-pack kitchen unit and cut off his ear in shame. His last words were reported to be ‘fucking dowels…!’

The Man Who Needed to be Clever but Wasn't Very...

It rankled him for days after his father had asked him about the Fleur de Lis. It was a crossword clue 'French flag symbol pre-revolution'. He'd garbled some nonsense about the French having 'several pre-revolutionary flag symbols' but this feeble answer simply elicited a look of puzzled disappointment on his father's face; which was only compounded further by his mother piping up with 'Wasn't it Fleur de Lis?

Mysteriously, he'd been awarded a First Class History degree by a less-than-first-class 'university' (not even 'red-brick' more 'jerry-built'), and this had convinced his father that his eldest son must know everything about the history of the entire world. He wasn't aware of the term 'modular': that you could study little 'modules' of history with almost total disregard for the wider picture. It was true that he had studied aspects of European history but the Fleur de Lis along with so much more had never been mentioned.

Now that circumstances had seen him back living with his parents in their perfectly presentable one-bed flat in the leafy suburbs of London, he very quickly found himself vulnerable with regard to their evident predilection for crossword puzzles. To him they were as the sun was to Count Dracula. Morning, noon and night they'd fire questions at him, especially those of an historical nature, though they believed his intellect just as well disposed to Quantum Physics and the Natural Sciences, poems and poets and all philosophy back to Thales of Miletus. He would be called upon for dates of wars and names of chemical elements, through theology and how Disraeli liked his eggs. Did he not know the names of Aztec kings and queens and the noble dynasties of China?

He twitched and jerked with spasming nerves. His parents witnessed him leaping balletically out of his chair as they had only just began to genuflect a question  (he could read the signs with the precision of a Venus Fly-trap)..

"Just going to the toilet"

At night in bed they discussed whether he was suffering from some form of food-poisoning, diarrhea or some exotic strain of giardia, although they were sure he hadn't been living in the woods anytime recently. What they didn't know, and what would have perhaps alleviate their concern was also something he could never tell them. He, in fact, sat on the little toilet, feverishly hoping that they'd come up with the answer between themselves. He'd sometimes, though not very often, hear one of them go 'aahh Anne of Cleve's..!' or 'aaah Diogenes of Sinope..!' and then he could relax and re-appear only to risk further questioning.

In extreme conditions, he'd leave the house altogether, walking the leafy lanes on north London until he felt it was safe to return. Once such time, he'd insisted to his father that Churchill had reputedly said "To war-war is always better than to jaw-jaw" even when he knew he'd been mistaken and it was the other way around. His very soul shook with embarrassment and shame when he thought of his father, unwilling to challenge 'the brilliant scholar' but unable to hide the doubt and suspicion in his eyes. By the time he'd even partially recovered from the remorse of this colossal and imbecilic historical inaccuracy he'd walked the twelve miles into central London.

On his return, long past midnight, he at least expected the relief of finding his parents tucked up in bed, leaving the front room free for a bracing tincture and maybe watch a programme on the TV (not history related).

Imagine the ice-chilled terror as he crept along the hallway carpet only to hear the damning words emanating from an unlit bedroom..

"David! You'll know this...!"