Moving to Kilmarnock by Mistake

In my younger days as a waif and straif in London, venturing nowhere other than public houses, I decided to move back to Scotland to spend some time with my folks. For reasons of their own they’d decided to re-locate to the East Ayshire town of Kilmarnock, though they were both Glasgow folk (it may have been because my father’s younger brother, William, lived in nearby Ayr, merely a bus-ride away).

I therefore arrived to live in a town I hadn’t even visited. Stepping off the train I felt immediately home-sick, not for any particular place just anywhere except Kilmarnock. Mind you, it was raining heavily (‘peltin’ doon’ is the town motto) and wind whipped around your trousers like angry rattle- snakes.

Later, while having a walk around my new, though hopefully temporary home, I entered The Burns Mall, a tatty wee plastic construction in honour of the classy bard. Burns gets used for every tourist/commodity angle around these parts, from underpants (rightly so considering he rarely kept them on) to hotel names (he slept around we all know but not in as many wee B&Bs as is claimed, surely).

The one word to describe Burns Mall and its seeming resident inhabitants was ‘jaded’. Sitting around the plastic seating smoking titchy wee roll-ups  and drinking from some giant communal bottle of industrial booze which had the words ‘White Lightning’ flashed across it. Why give it a name? Who was kidding who? I can imagine a marketing team discussing demographics of poverty so that they can hit their target markets accurately and consistently. There’s a lot of money to be made from people in this state. You feel the White Lightning people know all their giro days. “Klaus” (you suspect they’re all German) “Jimmy McMenemy has had his JSA sanctioned again, ten less bottles at Scotmid’s, Kilmarnock and target other drinkers in the area to compensate. Have them approached if you have to”

There is a Quicksave’s with milk spilt in the foyer and a Lambert and Butler poster on the window proclaiming ‘the very best smoke for you’. ‘Lookin’ Trendy’ is a little clothes shops showing the latest tatty fashions, whatever Jason and Kylie are wearing at the moment even though west of Scotland weather is just a tad less sun-kissed than wherever Ramsey Street is on the other side of the world. Ubiquitous bookies – two in fact, A Corrals and a William Hill – in case, presumably, one burns down suddenly and there’s nowhere to back a dog at Powederhall.

There’s a pub The Guardsman populated by the odd be-bunetted auld yin, barman rubbing at a glass or reading The Record. Two young mullets play a tedious game of pool: nothing worse than watching pool players that can’t pot a ball (well, perhaps having to have your hand nailed to a table, or being forced tom watch repeated Rangers/Heart games).

Even then, in those days, it was becoming clear that poorer folk could no longer afford to drink in pubs. The prices were just getting too high and one could get equally blootered far cheaper on the streets or at home with your cheap ciders and beer in 2 and 3 litre containers. Like many other cultural pursuits, pubs would become more and more a middle class option (or well-earning working class) and be seen more as where you went for a good meal rather than a right good bucket with a rammy afterwards.

One day, after I’d been living there a few weeks, there was a curious buzz around the town; the excitement was palpable. It transpired that a branch of the record store Our Price would be opening on the High Street the following Saturday. There was Mardi Gras fever in town. Nothing of this magnitude had happened in anyone’s living memory, not even when Johnny Beattie had brought his Christmas show to the local Pavilion and had been forced to cancel to everyone’s delight, even Johnny Beattie’s.

The day of the opening saw parades and marching bands. Crowds were cheering as local football club captain, Crunchie McCracken cut the ribbon and folk piled in to gasp at the records and posters for sale. Free broth was ladled out along with a well-fired roll. The birth-rate was to increase in the town roughly nine months later.

At the back of my parents wee bungalow at the top of Brighousehill Rd in the Shortlees area of the town was a disused quarry. My Father, frustrated at his mistake of leaving Bohemian London behind to life in this parochial little town where it was hard to purchase a copy The Guardian (this was considered a strange request in a town where The Daily Record and The Sun informed people).

Some nights, toward dusk with only the moon as witness he would trudge over the scrub-hill to the quarry. If my mother turned the volume on the telly off and we listened carefully we could faintly hear his roared oaths and yelps of frustration. This would last for a while and then ten minutes later he would return home with a blissful look on his face as if he had been ridden of demons. No words were ever shared about this.

Sometimes, to take the sting out of his despair and frustration I’d say;

“Da?”

“Aye son” I sometimes thought he knew what was next.

“Fancy a walk to the gonk shop?” The gonk shop was actually a Scottish outfitters shop up by the kirk in the centre of town. It just happened to have a wee tartan bag-piping gonk in the window.

A smirk would appear on his lips, no doubt he was considering the ludicrousness of my request, and he’d say…

“Aye son, why not”