The Importance of Oral History

“Did you know that your Granda played the banjo?”

“Naw, I didn’t know that”

“Aye, he played it round the halls. Masonic Halls, those sort of places, you know he was a blue-nose. That’s what he used to call me. He used to kid on and dance with me saying ‘Come on, Jean, at least you’re a blue-nose’. You know, with your Da supporting Celtic and that. Ha ha. He could be a right laugh your Granda Wylie. Had to be, living wi’ that auld scunner. She wisnae right you know, in the head and that”

“So he played gigs and that…with his banjo?”

“I suppose so, aye. Yer Da told me he played for the neighbours in the air-raids during in the war. Would be playing his banjo in his Anderson shelter while the bombs dropped. But, you know what your Da was like with his stories. Couldn’t believe a word could you? But he’d sing at parties and that. Always ‘The Chocolate Coloured Coon”

“Christ! Ye couldnae sing that noo”

“Aye, but people wurnae aware like that in those days. That woman across the road that lives in the big house in the corner. She was in the Black and White Minstrels, I think I told you. Pour soul has dementia now. You see her sometimes just wandering about”

I imagine her in deep dementia, poor soul right enough, finding her old stage clothes and cavorting black-minstrel style on her front lawn. I picture the African family next looking down at her in perplexed wonder.

“Yer Granny was a mental case, though. A doctor even said she was, what did he say now, ah cannae mind, but it meant she wasn’t all there, you know, in the head. She used to call me all sorts of names, terrible she was. Could cause a war in an empty room”

I try to steer her back to less hurtful memories.

“She was a grafter though eh, very determined?”

“Oh aye, she polished coffins, you know. French polisher in a coffin manufactury at Parkhead Cross”

“Wylie and Lochead”

“Aye, that’s right. How do you know these things? Amazing. But yer Da would have to wait in the greenhouse until she came home which was sometimes well on into the evening. He’d be in there for hours. Wisnae allowed to let himself in incase he dirtied the carpets. Yer Da had nightmares about that for years, and never took to gardening like his Da”

The starlings chatter on the depleted blossom tree outside. All of a sudden they zoom and there is silence.

“Your mother, though, my Granny MacCallum. She was a weaver, is that right?”

“Aye, a weaver, son, at Templeton’s on Glasgow Green. Tough work!”

“That’ll account for her fore-arms. She used to wash my hair with Sunlight Lemon Liquid in the kitchen sink. I used to have bruises”

“Aye, she could be rough handed alright. Ye didnae want a skelp from her. But, she had it tough with my father. I sometimes wonder how she put up with it for so long. I was put in a home for getting the police to him. My mother was angry about that as well, even though I did it to protect her and my wee sisters. He was going mad. I was never forgiven for that though. The police was worse than him being violent apparently”

“Eventually she left him, though?”

“Aye, divorced him as well, which wasn’t really the done thing back then. You were expected just to stay with your man. But she’d had enough. That’s when she she got that place in Bridgeton. Madras Street. You’ll remember that as a wee boy?”

“Aye. Davie’s sweet shop. Used to give me sweets cos I had the same name.”

“That’s right. That hoose had rats and mice and all sorts. The bloke that lived next door had an air rifle and used to shoot them.”

The Brigton of my youth (you only said Bridgeton if you were posh, which meant you weren’t really from around there and lived in the leafy lanes of Denistoun). Plenty parks and greens, chip shops in bountiful supply, wee sweet shops as I’ve said, and a pub for each human denizen. A dieticians nightmare, though the residents self-culled in other more violent ways. This was, after all, the locale of the razor gangs. The Clyde riverman and his hook were kept ower-busy fishing casualties from the murky depths.

“Before she got that flat she lived with your Auntie Joan in a room and kitchen with my Auntie Mary who lost her man in the war”

“He fought in the war?”

“Aye, but not the second one, the First World War where he’d lost a leg. It turned to gangrene some time during the Second World War and he died in the Erskine Hospital. Yer Auntie Mary was with him when he died and she had to walk home to Bridgeton during the black-out to mind her children”

“Jeez o! Was that no’ some walk? Must be fifteen miles”

“Aye, in the black-out as well. He was a lovely man, my Uncle Wullie. Used to let us play with his wooden leg”

“I aye remember aw yer Aunties by you talking about them. There was Lettie and Nettie and…”

“My Auntie Jeannie as well, and Mary. That was your Grannies four sisters. Your Granny was the youngest. She had three brothers as well. Nettie lived up at Dobie’s Loan with her husband my Uncle Jimmy. He was a Catholic and we were all Protestants which was unusual then. A friend of the family, a Francis Patrick, had a child out of wedlock, a wee boy, and my Auntie Lettie who couldn’t have children took him in and that was my cousin, Jim McGuire who was a lovely man. I remember being there when he found out at his twenty-first birthday party and him standing there crying. He never knew his real mother and father.

My Uncle Jimmy was a lamp-lighter, you know, a gas-lighter. They sent young Jim to a Catholic school but he came home crying saying he was scared the statue of the Virgin Mary in the school hall-way was going to fall on him so he went to a Protestant one after that”

“Lettie sounds quite a character”

“O she was. A bit of a wheeler-dealer you’d call her now. Bought pawn tickets off folk then sold them on. She worked for Summers the Plumbers for a while up at the Round Toll going out towards Possilpark”

The starlings come back for further chirps and more wan blossoms fall to the ground. Downstairs the Cypriot woman chants her Orthodox prayers and my mother says “are you sure your comfortable there, son, here, have another cushion” for perhaps the seventh time and tells me about her Auntie Nettie’s man, Jim, who delivered Barr’s Irn Bru on a horse-drawn cart.

MacCallum and the Barmaid

“His birdsong is written, like a new moon in the sky”

MacCallum had been on about it for weeks, months even, to the point where he was now forced to follow through with the idea. As far as he remembered - and many hundred pints had been swallowed in the meantime - he’d first broached the notion that he was one of life’s impulsive free spirits, was to impress Meeta the cute and curvy little Asian barmaid.

“Ach, I might just bugger off to the continent and busk my way around like I used to”

One week in France he was referring to when he’d come home after a week having run out of money.

“Ah get restless ye know, and have to just get away. Call of the wilds you might call it”.

The pretty barmaid who could barely understand MacCallum’s Glaswegian accent (she thought he was Australian) was barely listening to him anyway. She’d heard her fair measure of male shite over her years pulling pints and, anyway, to her literal Indian mind, he if he wanted to be elsewhere why was he stood here annoying her. Let him chase his dreams not simply speak of them.

Other drinking buddies too were growing tired of MacCallum’s meanderings. “Aye, right” they’d begun to say when he started on his Wild Rover dialogue. Were they not well used to MacCallum’s lies and fantasies. Had he not told them he belonged to the Glasgow gangster clan of Jimmy Boyle and was down here ‘in hiding while some heat died down’. MacCallum, it was evident to all but the most suggestible, in his ragged denim jacket and torn plimsolls, was no more a gangster than he was a captain of industry or a Monseigneur in the Catholic Church.

And so, for prides sake if nothing else, he had to make good on his promise and come giro day had bought a one-way coach and ferry ticket to Paris, France.

They had a farewell drink for him the evening before, after insisting on viewing the ticket, and bade him a hearty trip, and only after he’d finally left for an early bed (about one am) did they confer on what a ‘silly tube’ he was.

MacCallum had barely walked an hour on the streets of Paris when, overtaken by a feeling of bleak, forlorn loneliness, he returned forthwith and was back in Leytonstone that very same night. They’d said at school that he possessed ‘no character to speak of’ and this was him proving it once again.

His problem now was to remain undetected for a decent length of time (say, a month) without being spotted by those that knew him. That way he could at least pretend he’d achieved what he’d set out to do, even if only to a limited degree.

In such a close-knit community, mind, this would not be so easy. The pubs were obviously out of bounds as would be the local shops, tube station, and even walking the streets would pose the obvious risks of bumping into someone that knew him, or someone that knew someone who knew him.

He’d either have to stay indoors for the duration, or….

Don an effective disguise.

Now, Leytonstone in those days was not unacquainted with the odd eccentric not to mention the odd weirdly dressed character. Early cross-dressers, proto-punks, retro-hippies, residents from Leytonstone House the local home for the mentally impaired, it was often hard to figure who were the sane and who were not.

There was Gimpy Ron who drew attention away from his extravagant, bow-legged sailors limp by wearing a threadbare old cabaret tuxedo he’d found in a skip outside a dry cleaners. Over the years it had acquired a culinary odour reminiscent of a brackish soup and what looked like a skid-mark motif as if he had been wiping cats arses with it. In a generous twilight he looked like an ageing Barry Manilow, if Barry Manilow had been bald, toothless and owned a pallor any self-respecting embalmer would be deeply ashamed of.

It was Gimpy Ron who was the first to espy the apparition that was MacCallum in disguise. He sees him scuttleshuffling through the trees in Forest Glade. Like some down-at-heel SAS veteran he hides-and-peeks half camouflaged by a green balaclava and makeshift battle fatigues (autumn-leaf yellow plus fours and a brown mock-leather bomber jacket, red baseball boots and a Scotland scarf make up the overall look).

MacCallum is kicking at the autumn leaves as if looking for lost keys but it’s actually an errant golf ball he seeks. He has a wedge club in his right hand with which he whips the lower branches of trees and shrubbery. He appears to be mumbling angrily to himself.

The Gimpster trundles away unevenly. His gimpy right leg strikes out sharply like a badly executed karate kick then folds back into even tread like a tram on a tram-line. His left leg has become so used to compensating that it is bowed like an archway. He appeared like a deeply arthritic Fred Astaire attempting to recreate better times. If this method of perambulation were an Olympic sport no one would watch.

He wonders at the behaviour of MacCallum whom he only knows through mutual friends. All the Scots of Leytonstone were acquainted by some strand or other, like they were a family of travellers from the north with a family tree in common. They had come to London to re-inforce certain stereotypes, principally drinking and fighting and ‘acting the cunt’. In this, they were performing admirably.

He would have to consult this syndicate of Celts (although many of them would hate to be named as such) about their ‘cousin in the woods’.

MacCallum had taken to spending the nights as well as the days in the Forest Glade. He had an old sleeping bag that kept him reasonably warm and he washed himself in Hollow Ponds each morning (and drank the water though it was reputedly ‘full of cow dung’). As for the herd of cows that came from he knew not where he greeted them cheerily and tore up clumps of weedy grass for them to eat. He’d began naming them but, with them being largely indistinguishable from one another he quickly became confused as to which was which and referred to them generically as ‘coo’.

“Mornin’ Coo”

The ‘coo’s’ were somewhat afraid of MacCallum. Perhaps the balaclava encouraged in them atavistic bovine fears of cattle rustlers.

 His was now a chiaroscuro existence. He was a shadow in the lee of Whipps Cross hospital, a vast NHS Gormenghast of a place, it sprawled like a giant spider, one corridor alone – the central one – a mile long. He’d always liked hospitals but had no idea why. Maybe, he thought, because they were places of human caring and safe-keeping? This notion appealed to MacCallum. Hospitals contained the best features of humanity whereas outwith their domains the world could be a colder place.

MacCallum liked the old hospital best when it rained: it stained the red brick with a good soak turning it ochre and its black roof slates gleamed like black jewels. The rain pelted on MacCallum through the thinning leaves and he felt as free as the squirrels that scampered up the tree boughs. The nights were closing in with the changing season and the dawn was slow to rise over Snaresbrook courthouse. MacCallum had become expert at detecting its first blue-black stirrings. On a good day these turned to orange and then lemon and then the first hint of heat on the ground. He stretched his limbs and luxuriated in its warm glow.

Every week he had to visit the dole office on Hoe Street to sign on. Now that he was ‘no fixed abode’ he picked up his money on the day. He’d buy nuts for the squirrels and seeds and bread for the birds and ducks on the pond. For himself, he lived on a diet of porridge oats and honey and was quite happy until one day a delegation of three came to visit his little cubby hole in the woods.

“Fuck ye up tae, Davie. Yer a fucken laughing stock”

They’d brought a carry-out of about four dozen beers and two bottles of whisky (Scots never went anywhere under-stocked with booze, you never knew when disaster would strike and it would run out).

Tam Bain and the McCulloch brothers.

MacCallum refused a can that was offered to him.

“Take a drink!!” they all shouted at once. He took a drink and felt drunk after only one gulp.

“We a’ thought you were in Paris. Whit happened tae that idea?”

MacCallum shrugged an answer. The three synchronised exasperated expressions as if they were addressing a three-year-old that had just shit his pants…..again!

“I came back to live in the woods. Here in the Glade. At first it was just a way of hiding from folk who were thinking I was in Paris but then I realised that it was all meant to be. I’m much the happier chap living here in the woods and the ponds with just the beasties, squirrels and the coos. Who told you anyway?”

“Gimpy Ron” they all said as one.

The Gimpster, eyeing an opportunity for fame and a little financial award, spilled the beans to the Waltham Forest Guardian about ‘the man who lived in the woods’ and they had duly plastered the story all over their front page. This forced the police to arrive and evict MacCallum from his home in the woods.

Now he lives his sad old life of drinking and falling down a lot in public. He visits his animal friends when he can and, truth be told, he has achieved a certain notoriety. When he starts on with his ‘call of the wilds’ fantasies, even Meeta the luscious barmaid eyes him with somewhat renewed respect.

You never knew with MacCallum….

A Giant in the Woods

This was a time when you could still buy five Park Drive. When men wore bum-freezer jackets and the young women all looked like the Queen. The air was different back then: it was redolent of grease and the smell of fish and chip shops, sour pale ale, and farts parped beside coal fires. My grandparents smelled of apples and Pledge and welcomed you at the door cheerily then were parsimonious within. Sex had only just been invented and, somewhere near Blantyre a man saw his wife naked for the first time after eight years of marriage and filed for divorce.

Chimneys were set alight on a regular basis by burning sheets of The Citizen, a paper which regularly published my father's socialism in letter form and his opinion on away grounds that he’d watched his beloved Celtic play at. For this reason, he was never again safe to visit Motherwell.

The weather was either gloomy or bright. When the wind blew it moved the slates on the roof. Public transport wasn’t necessary as one simply spread one’s coat like wings and hang-glided to nearby towns and back again.

Men seemed perpetually drunk and women became expert at concealing black eyes with subtle make-up. If a wife had a ‘good man’ it meant he gave her ‘house-keeping’ promptly on a Friday evening then stayed at home to watch Z-Cars.

Kids sought out scrambles at the weekend where substantial silver and copper was fought over then spent on gobstoppers and ice poles.

Auld Rosie from upstairs traded pans of soup and potato fritters and, being Jewish, matzoh bread in exchange for loans for bottles of sherry wine.

No-one seemed to be bored or depressed though there was talk that the women from the corner house had swallowed weed-killer and died a painful death. Everyone else made daisy-chains and got on with ‘things’.

Protestants joined The Boy’s Brigade, Catholics couldn’t, even if they'd wanted to.

Language, certainly in the male world, seemed to be at a premium, like too much was to be given away by the use of words, though the women chirruped away like startled budgies when their men-folk were not around. Rumours spread around small communities like oxygenated bush-fires “Her man’s been sacked for organising a strike” “She’s left him and gone to live with yon gym teacher from the school. It’s the weans teacher, I believe” “Aye, tinned mince she served up. I heard he flung it at the wall”.

An aeroplane in the sky still evoked ‘ooohs’ and ‘aahs’.

Dougie Somner who later played for Partick Thistle crashed his Da’s car into the wall across the street.

My own father chucked a blazing chip pan out the kitchen window onto the wee verandah. You could still see the dent in the tarmacadam many years later.

One of the kids at school, a posh kid whose father was a doctor, invited me to tea at his house up near Brouster Hill. His house seemed like a gothic manse with a football-field sized garden at the back. His mother served us egg and chips for tea. Surely not their usual fair (I envisaged an Elizabethan banquet with hog’s heads and quails eggs). Were they dumbing down on the food to accommodate the council house boy? Kindness or patronage? Even at a young age I was class conscious.

As a child, I lived in an invisible world among trees and burns and the far-away (which was in reality no further than a five-mile radius). My imaginary friends, Solly and Bobo, were sufficient company to me. Where their names came from I have no idea but I was to fall out with Solly who emigrated to become a successful bookmaker in Australia. Bobo seemed to dissipate from the arena of my consciousness over time and as I got older, but I know he waits for me in the ether and, now in my fifties it is maybe time for a re-acquaintance, though I will now be like a grandparent to him, frozen as he is in time and on my whim.

I lived among trees and yet never knew their names. To me, they were giant climbing frames. Even to this day, I can size up a tree for climbing possibilities: where to put my feet for successful elevation. Yes, I think I’ll take that up again before it’s too late. Such a secret world, the verdant world of trees, and it’s true that they speak to each other, though their voices are not for human ears.

I think I saw a giant in the woods next to Murray Primary. A huge, spindly man with sharp teeth. He may even have looked at me. I couldn’t say; I was running away.

All my life, I’ve yearned to believe in ghosts and giants in the woods…

Ask Specky Al....!

In adversity, most of us suffer from a version of Stockholm Syndrome. Any little kind word or gesture is accepted with pathetic gratitude.

“I’m sorry, sir…erm…Mr Bryden, but we have no record of any claim under your name, or even under the National Insurance number you gave us. Nothing at all. Very sorry, sir”

This has been happening all day. No benefit claim, no bank account. Something very strange is going on.

He – Bernie – has a key to my flat. He tells me he’ll give me until the end of the month to find ‘somewhere else’. He even wears some of my clothes which seem to fit him even though I’m six four and he’s almost a midget (under four foot anyway). Of an evening he takes control of the remote and drinks my whisky. I’m scared to go out unless he changes the locks.

“You know, the landlord wants me to change the locks. He doesn’t know who you are and talks of getting the police. I always talk him around saying there’s no harm in you and you’ll do the right thing…in time”

He has a remarkably deep, authoritative voice for a midget and, as I rely on him for food, I don’t argue.

I’m Sam Bryden – or at least I used to be – and society seems to have wiped me from its records. My best friends claim to only faintly know me ‘from somewhere’. All of my personal paperwork has disappeared and seemingly can’t be replaced because I have no official identity. My N.I. number belongs to someone who is “deceased some time ago, sir. Obviously, we can’t divulge any further information”.

The only clue or guidance I’ve had so far is when the chap at Scottish Power advised me to “ask Specky Al”. He’d put the phone down before I could ask “Who’s Specky Al?”

I ponder my future. Does this new state of affairs make me free? Can I now roam the world unbidden? Well, obviously not is the quick answer. No passport, no documentation to obtain one. 

"Just the UK, then?"

“And what will you live on?” asks the midget Bernie who lives in my flat. "No cards, no money. You’ll be a vagrant as soon as you walk onto the street. Even the hostels won’t take you in without proof of identity”

I looked in my wallet again to find not even a library card.

“What should I do?”

“Ask Specky Al”

I pick up my guitar and find I no longer know how to play. Not even a basic chord. I clear my throat to sing, and what emanates is a strangled squawk like a seagull having something larger than himself shoved up his shiter.

I walk the beach. Dogs run up to me and sniff, their owner’s squint their eyes as if they can’t see me properly under the suns glare. I look for my reflection in a café window and find I’m becoming increasingly, well….indistinct!

I stop approaching people I know from church as it’s upsetting when good Christian folk claim not to know who you are, although some scrunch up their eyes and say “didn’t you used to do my gardening?”

I’m becoming no more than semi-visible.

I visit the priest who tells me “the bins are around the back, young man”. I explain what’s happening and he eyes me warily then tells me “you’re being taught a lesson in humility. You’ve thought rather a lot of yourself – your talents, your cleverness, your sharp-wittedness – and now you’re being brought down a peg or two. ‘All is vanity’ – Ecclesiastes 1:12”

“Is it perhaps erm…God who’s teaching me this lesson?” Maybe if it’s God, I think, then he can just make everything all right again?

“No, it’s not God, actually. It’s…..”

I leave quickly before I hear the name.

So now I just sit on the beach invisible to the world. The dogs still sniff around me sensing my presence but their owners just call them back thinking they’ve found some dog-shite. I fight with the gulls for the fast-food scraps left behind by the revellers and fish and chip wrappers left by Maw. Paw and the weans. 

Now and again I think of my past life – the singing, the songs I wrote, the recordings, the gigs I played – and realise it was all an illusion. I was a fraud and a phoney, only it needed a higher power to show me this, to take away my ill-conceived ambitions, even if it left me a non-person, sitting invisible and semi-starving on a beach.

When the winds and the rains come I coory-up next to the old disused toilets at the end of the beach. One day I saw a poster badly glued and fluttering on the concrete wall..

“Don’t miss the multi-talented, the wonderful, the genius of Granton…”

I read no further but go back to my shivering slumber.

It seems I’m to continue learning my lesson.

Red Shoes

A boy-child is waiting at a bus stop with his mother. The wind-blown rain makes the horizon blurry, traffic fizzes spray and pedestrians, the few bedraggled souls there are, watch out for gushes splashed up by passing cars or, heaven forbid, buses. Waiting here on Dalmarnock Road for twenty-five minutes, the red SMT bus is notoriously late. It’s the week before Christmas and cheap baubles illuminate fake trees in dark tenement windows.

The weekly visit to Granny is over; boy-child is chuffed with his shilling. There was laughter but there were also niggles; family niggles, unique and unexplainable to any but those involved (not even those, if we’re honest). The mother with her boy standing in the rain is chary of niggles. She is, without doubt, the family scapegoat, the one most hurt and devastated by her kin. This ‘fact’ has been tacitly understood among them for longer than any can remember. If they were a pride of lions, she’d have been left behind for the jackals long ago. 

They pick her clean, the raw pulse of her kind, well-meaning heart left exposed to the icy Glasgow winds of ill-judgement, No love for the meek in this slate-grey metropolis. They should ‘take to the drink’ to hide their angst and appear more sociable. The city’s motto should be ‘Take a drink and keep quiet’.

The boy-child is wearing red shoes the same colour as the bus which eventually arrives. Chances were they’d be off the bus by the Cathkin Braes due to his troublesome ‘bus-sickness’. Mother only shows gentle irritation at this common occurrence but it means double bus fares, an expenditure she can ill-afford with black-listed father forced on to the dole for his militant activities.

No other child that he knew wore red shoes.

Rain spackled, anoraked and rain-mated, the two wait for yet another bus out in the airy, misty braes. You can see nearly all of Glasgow from here, ominous and high-rised below old-man-grey clouds. In the gathering gloom you can see the fevered lights of the new high-rises and the general luminescence of sodium street lighting covering the metropolis like a lime-orange umbrella.

Heavenly Visit

I had a visit to heaven to see my Dad. It wasn’t what I expected as it somehow resembled the station café at Paisley Central, the bit I was in any way.

He looked just like he had done when I was a wee boy in East Kilbride when he’d have been in his early thirties, a-glowing with health and vitality like he was all ready to take me into town for pie and chips at RS McColl’s and then off to Parkhead to see the Celts pummel the latest opposition.

“Great to see you, son”

“Great to see you too Da. I’ve missed you. We all have”

“I know that, son, and it’s appreciated”

I stare at him like I can’t believe this is happening.

“You don’t believe this is happening, dae ye son?”

“Aye, aye, I dae” Because I want it to be so badly.

I start to tell him what’s been going on in his absence but he says he knows and anyway, he’s not been wholly absent.

“I’ve become omnipotent, like I always wanted”

He smiles his wry, kind smile at this and I ask him what has been going on with him, and specifically, why this place looks like the tea-bar on old Paisley station?

“Me and your Uncle Billy share this place as it’s the site where we were most happy on the terrestrial plane. A tiny bit blootered after a Celtic/St Mirren game. We laughed a lot that day, like two fond brothers should. You should treasure the times you spend with your own brother”

He doesn’t say this in an admonishing way, more wise and knowing, like he always was.

“So what else happens in heaven?”

“I got to meet Miles last week and sing with his band”

“Miles Davis?”

“The very same. Lovely man now. Wasn’t always”

I’m blown away by this, then am blown away by the fact that I’m blown away by this as I’m sitting here talking with my Dad who’s been dead eleven years. Surely, now, anything is possible…

“Will you always be around for us Da? I mean you won’t have to leave us at some point?”

“I’ll always be here, son. And we’ll spend more time when you’re up here yourself, but that’s not for some time yet…”

I smile and he smiles back. A bond that has never been broken.

“What did you sing with Miles?”

“My Funny Valentine. I sung it for yer maw. She heard it but she thinks she was dreaming”

After a heavenly visit, by the way, you don’t come down some heavenly stairs to celestial music or anything like that. You get the train back from Paisley to Glasgow where it’s pishing down and a man with a big white beard begs a pound off you on Renfield Street and then disappears in the blink of an eye.

Glasgow Central

 I don’t know why I have such fond regard for all things Glasgow, it certainly never liked me. I like it best without its people; a deserted grey monolith, just streets and train stations, and preferably raining. Glaswegians are playing the part of being perpetual Glaswegians – smart, funny, quick-witted, it can get really tiring. 

Perhaps what I like best is the way out of it: Glasgow Central train station. A baroque palace of possibilities and other destinations preferably past Motherwell.

Like Ayr. Ayr train station is airy and redolent of the sea. Kiddies laugh and scream with joy on its platforms and cry and moan at the end of the long day in the sun, candy floss sticky on cheeks and bellies full of chips and limeade.

St. Enoch’s was the best: dark and gothic, it stood on a hill and looked like you could catch a train to Transylvania to meet Dracula for a late supper. But they tore it down to make way for a plexi-glass mall that you could find replicated in a hundred cities.

O’Connell Street station, Dublin was where she waved goodbye.

Liverpool Lime Street where we maybe said hello again.

The best thing about Birkenhead Central is that it affords the welcome opportunity to flee Birkenhead.

Southport station was my favourite because it meant being with her; my unlikely femme fatale. After Birkenhead, Southport is Las Vegas. Its Floral Hall a Caesar’s Palace and Lord Street is The Strip.

But, Glasgow Central is iconic; the heartbeat of the city. I mind the day, I mind the day. I mind the day, said Shuggie Gallagher, the ghost of Glasgow Central. I mind the day when everyone wore a flat bunnet, even the women.

Folk that ‘commuted’ through Glasgow Central on a weekday worked in the shops and the offices. They were dressed in suits and ties and polished shoes, white blouses and high heels (women were a lot sexier in those days, precisely because they didn’t mean to be, though they had lines up the back of their stockings as if leading you to the promised land that no-one ever talked about. It was a wonder to everyone how procreation took place at all).

At the weekends it was a free-for-all of excitable juveniles aiming for Lewis’s toy department and women off to Arnott Simpson’s to try on perfume while their men-folk headed east for Parkhead or South-west to Ibrox (maybe, too, the odd mental case bound for Firhill or Shawfield but folk that followed Queen’s Park travelled in Vauxhall vehicles or not at all).

The ghost of Glasgow Central saw them all and often had cause to laugh at their antics. Drunk. Moroculus. Pished. Blootered. Glasgow had names for inebriation like no other place. Howling. Hammered. Reekin’. Steamboats.

“We were aw hammered man, it wis great. Hammy fell under a train”

Only poor folk use buses. You notice when its posh folk not used to this mode of transport. They think it’s ok to ask the driver all sorts of questions or to not know the correct fare and how to pay. Anything that holds the bus up will do for them; smug bastards with their strident voices; whole bus can hear about their self-importance. But, mainly it’s just ordinary Joe’s.

There’s a guy arguing with the driver up at the front. Slight American tinge to his accent with wee Scottish words thrown in. Foreigners do that, they pick up words and phrases and end up talking in pidgin dialects. He says the fare is only £11.40 and the driver’s saying it’s £11.60. I, myself, along with several others have after a few minutes of this offered the guy twenty pence to put an end to this charade but he’s having none of it. It seems to be a point of principle but pretty soon it’s apparent that the bloke is not quite the full shilling.

This is another phenomenon on long-haul bus trips, folk that maybe need a check-up from the neck-up.

Eventually, the police are called and a few passengers are getting into arguments with the guy, but he’s sticking to his guns and is now sitting on a seat behind the driver. I envisage that he may be a hi-jacker just gearing up to clobbering the driver with a hammer he has hidden up his jook then driving us all off to Troon to be held for ransom. In many ways, this would be more exciting than just toodling along to Glasgow which is what we eventually do when the troublesome chap gives up before the police finally arrive. He trundles toward Haymarket train station no doubt intent in repeating his mayhem there. Maybe he has some grudge against people attempting to travel to Glasgow.

Or maybe he once lived there and is getting his own back...

Julie - Queen of Leytonstone

I guess what was remarkable and startling was seeing the name of your friend on the roster for that days cremation services.

‘Julie Stephenson – 3pm’

Rather blunt and to the point for an event so poignant but there you have it: your old friend was having her dead remains burned to ashes at three o’clock and there was very little one could do about it.

Preston Crematorium she would not have liked. “Just as well she’s dead” I mused while strolling around the little manicured gardens. Everything here was manicured, even the trees, lining as they did the long, solemn driveway into the business part of the place. Julie who craved a certain type of conformity but led a ramshackle life would have hated the seriousness of this place and occasion. She’d have wanted to ‘fun it up’ with a few mad people and maybe a juggling clown or two (and, believe me, she would have known where to find juggling clowns). She’d certainly have hated the quietude.

Her poor old body (fifty-four but took a wee bit of a pummelling on the way) was being black-motored up from London where a celebration service had taken place the previous Saturday in St John’s Church in the centre of her beloved Leytonstone. Three hundred had attended and it had even made the front page of the local rag – the Waltham Forest Guardian - “Local Good Samaritan – A Life Celebrated”. She’d have loved that: the final validation of her life in Leytonstone and outer confines. Pity indeed, that it had had to be won in death.

I miss her now more than I missed her that day of her cremation.

She’d have castigated me for not attending the London gig and the pub party afterwards. I facilitate the excuse that I live in Edinburgh and can only really be expected to bumble down to Preston for the burning, but this isn’t true. She didn’t even come from Preston; she came from the far more atmospheric Lancaster which has the spectacularly gloomy River Lune running through it.

Julie was either bi-polar or just plain crazy: I suspect some mixture of the two. When she was down she was down and when she was up…? Well, let’s just say she could have run the country better and much more colourfully than any incumbent since Lloyd George deliberately slowed down the proceedings at Versailles the more to expedite his amorous shenanigans.

My very first week as a mature student at Liverpool Polytechnic she turns up in the student bar having driven up from London in a hired car. In her giant red cardigan she looks like some Sephardic colossus striding across to the small bar. Folk stopped what they were doing as this fiery vision swept by them. Strangely, I was not surprised to see her.

Neither was I surprised when she whisked me and my new-found drinking buddy off on a bender to Lancaster where she was house-sitting for a holidaying sister-in-law and her family. She took us to the Midland Hotel in nearby Morecambe. The bay shimmered in the mid-September sun, a late lash of heat. A Lancashire, Indian summer. My friend and I laughed at the frivolity of it all. One minute drunk and happy in Liverpool, the next drunker and even happier sitting outside an Art Deco hotel looking out to sea. Mad Julie happy to see us happy (in all honesty, I think she was more than chuffed at the exotica that was my friend; a tall, gangly, dread-locked Londoner with a sly, toothsome grin), had become firm friends with roughly half of the hotel staff in not-but half an hour. Drinks and snacks were served to us like we were minor Royals just popped in unexpectedly, be-cardiganed Julie perhaps some head lady-in-waiting.

The air smelled chlorine fresh. Dogs were unleashed by their owners on the vast beach to run and scramble after balls and sticks. Humans could learn a lot from dogs; they knew how to be happy with simple things, and how to pine for love.

What did Julie chatter about? Nothing and everything. Now that I think, she would have been enamoured with Gary as he was later to be somewhat enamoured by one of her friends (he was also lured by a temptress from a religious sect at an after-hours disco they’d organised only to escape through a window and return to base at about three in the morning). Instead, she was stuck with my own drunken self, playing her brothers’ records on her brother’s super-loud sound system until all hours of the dark morning. We also drank all his booze.

Julie spoke in her native tongue when up north which was slightly distinct from the ‘ready to fit in’ accent she had become used to in London where she had trained as a social worker. Yet, she was not comfortable in her home town; it seemed to constrain her and she longed for the comparative social anarchy of the capital. The north judged her, the south not so much so.

Julie was at the same time grounded and soaring like a kite let loose on the wind. For others; grounded: for herself; hardly at all. She seemed not to care much for herself and deemed anyone that cared for her somehow more flawed than even she.

“Like the old Groucho Marx joke” she’d often say “I wouldn’t like to be a member and all that…” She never did seem to learn the rest of the quote but the gist was clear. One man who seemed to care for her rather deeply, she tended to treat abominably and then hate herself even more for doing so, though, perversely, he was the one she had the utmost respect for the rest of her life. She seemed to be attracted by men who treated her quite shabbily, like that was what she really deserved. Men who, somehow, wouldn’t stay.

She’d lived in Turkey for some time with a Muslim soldier. She liked Muslim men and would die in the arms of one at the end.

“She’s looking for an angel

But, she’s not looking at the sky

She’s looking for an angel in your eyes”

The Robots and Hugo Chavez

Davidson struggled to make the connections. Firstly; on a very profound ‘labour value’ level and, secondly; in his bid to connect the travel dots. In making his seven o’clock start time he had to be like Michael Palin missing and improvising with the failings of global journeyings: in his, it was the tendency of the 5.30am Fife Circular setting off at 5.35 or on disastrous occasions – not at all. This eventuality had cost him a day’s wages, a censure from his ‘employers’ and a long-trek back to Moredun too angry and frustrated to re-connect on the old zzzz’s.

What had happened to the labour movement that it had reached such a low pitch of exploitation?

Today he’d been 12 minutes late due to the ‘Works Bus’ heading off early and him having to half-half/half-jog through the immense industrial estate down to the huge Amazon Warehouse on the M9, only to be told ‘his shift had been taken’ and that he could wait with the others to see ‘if a shift became available’. Very often, it didn’t. Like today.

And so, the day was wasted. No wages, but still the travel expenditure and the long trek home. This was reminiscent of the ‘hiring pens’ at the Liverpool docks when you had to keep favour with the foreman for half a day’s work.

Davidson’s ‘foreman’ was, in fact, a ‘forewoman’, a right bitch named Theresa who came from Venezuela. Davidson was a right pain in the butt to his Latin boss because he knew a little about the Venezuelan labour struggles; about Chavez and the Fifth Republic Movement, how he’d tried to release his country and its people from the capitalist and imperialistic yoke. When she did respond, which was seldom other than a slight sneer and an order to get on with his work, she spoke words like ‘losers’, ‘corrupt’ and ‘puppet of Fidel’. In other words, she knew nothing by right-wing propaganda about the history of her own country and here she was being embarrassed by this scruffy Scot.

He didn’t hate her for it although she’d deduct from his wages for the slightest ‘misdemeanour’ on the floor, like chatting to a colleague or going for a piss outside the allotted time. He could only imagine the life she may have had in some shithole in Caracas or forced to prostitution to feed a family. He didn’t know. That didn’t make it any easier to take that she was the bitch keeping his wages and conditions at the level that he was forced to visit the local Church food bank every Saturday.

That wasn’t her fault either. She was employed for this style of supervision; to keep us whipped into place. It was the usual faceless, pragmatic bureaucrats that had fixed this all rigidly into place. The Zero-Contract model’. ‘Be there or no pay’. Only it was even more brutal than that. Sometimes Davidson had turned up, on time and fit and ready to go, but ‘We get shifts mixed up, sorry. You go home, come back tomorrow’.

“But….but?”

No point arguing. They don’t need you. Sure they need somebody, but there are a dozen thousand somebodies that are desperate enough, or are forced by the DWP enough, and can be trained in a day to load these boxes so that they have a fair to middling chance of being delivered to the right addresses. To be taught that cleanliness of uniforms is a must and that cleanliness must be paid for out of your own pocket, and that the slightest lateness most probably their fault will mean loss of wages and that half-joking about Hugo Chavez and his glorious socialist ideas will bring you ever closer to the exit door my clever ‘loser’ friend.

In fact, Amazon is a largely excellent service. You get your new toaster sharp and safe by a guy or gal who’s being paid a pittance to work awful hard and with a very-concerned-for-his-job diligence.Yes sir, no mam, just sign there please mam. Cos I’m on fucking ‘piece work’ that doesn’t pay any extra. Like your postman! No longer the languorous community asset and friend to the elderly but an unapproachable figure in red haring around the housing estates being ‘time-and-motioned in his head. 

If I earned more money the faster I delivered then, at least that would be something, but I’m not. The faster I go, the faster Theresa and her bosses think I can go. I’m certainly not doing the next guy any favours. He’ll have to be some sort of Dervish, shouting ‘beep! beep! at folks, or barging them aside, and refusing to take a lunch, and refuelling at Amazon watering-points along the way (although he’ll have to pay for the water). Every night his uniform will be so ragged and sweaty, he’ll have to pay for another one and, thus, he’ll live only for and due to the Amazon Corporation of Venezuela and Beyond in perpetuity until…..one day, his wee local Dunfermline bus service is inexplicably late (driver was on the lash the night before) and he scurries down the motorway scree tearing the arse out of his new shiny Amazon livery only to be told..

“No work today scumbag, you’re fucking late”

And Theresa will seek someone even more subservient. Probably a robot. They know nothing of Hugo Chavez unless you tell them…