The Ballad of Forbes McGurk

Who in their right mind around here would call their offspring ‘Forbes’ especially when the family name is McGurk? Forbes McGurk for Christ-sake! Poor kid better be able to fight. The thought-process, though. What shall we call the newborn? Jim, asks Sadie McGurk. Why not ‘Forbes’? says Sadie because women, by and large, seem blissfully unaware of the travails that may face a boy-man in this world of stereotypical expectations.

This is a mother who later would have no hesitation in sending the boy out in strange purple baseball boots and an old seaman’s sweater that she’d purchased at a jumble sale. It smelled ever so sweetly of sewage and could well have occasioned young Forbes being dishonoured with the name ‘Smelly’ only his peers considered Forbes to be more socially embarrassing.

When a boy is ridiculed thus it is either ‘fight or flight’ and, unfortunately for our boy, it was most certainly the latter. He became known for it. And the more you don’t fight the more you are taunted for it, the more you are bullied.

O now and then he’d fling a feeble punch but this only seemed to enrage his foes until he thought better of even this tiny aggression. And so, eventually he walked alone unless accompanied by a straggle of other outcasts and, for a time, even by the one who was forced to accept the ‘Smelly’ moniker.

Barrhead High Flats are cold, grey lumps of stone in which people lived situated in the cold, grey wastelands of East Renfrewshire. The best thing that could be said about Barrhead*is that it made neighbouring Paisley seem like Las Vegas and Glasgow twelve miles away like the Pleasuredome of Venus herself.

Actually, the ‘very’ best thing about Barrhead was that it was the proud producer of Armitage Shanks toilets. The town was gladdened on a daily basis by the existence of its shit and piss (and occasionally vomit) based industry. It could be proud that folk the world over hunched in some manner or other over their locally made ceramic produce.

* or ‘Borr-Heid. You had to say it with this masculine hardness attached to avoid being accused of latent homosexuality. Places were like that. Bridgeton was the pronunciation for toffs, Brig-ton with the hard ‘g’ was how the locals said it. These social distinctions were important and should not be easily dismissed.

When, sometime back in the 40s or 50s perhaps, one town planner or cooncilor said to another “Heh, Davie! Whit colour and style for the new cooncil scheme?” Davie answered back “Grey and drab, Erchie, grey and drab”. “Jist grey, Davie?” said Erchie hoping for a wee tate variety for the poor folk having to live there. “Awrite, well, Erchie. Light grey and dark grey, but I must insist on drab!”

This grey and drab motif became uniform across Scotland and Barrhead was no different although diarrhoea brown was added in the seventies by way of variety in honour of glam-rock.

The very idea of such as Marc Bolan living in social housing in a place like Barrhead is laughable in its absurdity never mind him holding down a position at Armitage Shanks or as barman at The Mallet Sheugh. He’d spend his weekends looking out of his bedroom window and weeping, his sunken face like a galleon.

Once it had been warm in Barrhead, only the once. The summer of 1976 to be precise and the tar fair broiled on the roads. Auld wifie’s shed their woollen coats and old men’s bunnets were cast aside. Forbes McGurk had only just persuaded his mum he should possess a Bay City Rollers-style jumper and, so determined was he to flaunt it, that he sweated all through that long summer losing about a stone in the process.

This is despite the fact that his mum had knitted the damn thing using second-hand wool from a sweater of his dad’s (lurid orange) and some left-over wool from a sleep-suit (pink) she’d fashioned for a distant relatives newborn. The design of the finished item was a series of broad hoops and collars and cuffs in successive colours. Folk couldn’t decide if he resembled a dolly mixture or a Belisha Beacon gone wrong. Short-sighted people stood beside him to cross the road. So miasmic was it that many people simply refused to look at it for fear of vomiting.

The effect of his new stylish jumper was further ruined by him wearing his Auntie Val’s old yellow loon pants and his Uncle Bill’s army brogues. He wandered around the scheme followed by his little troupe looking like Charlie Corolli a popular clown of the time. All he needed was the red nose to complete the effect.

In the middle of Barrhead town centre there is a plinth atop of which there is nothing. It is in fact just a column with a flat top where a statue of the founder of Armitage Shanks, Sir Eric ‘Flush’ McIvor, ought to have been before, that is, they’d found out all about his bestiality and abandoned the project. One day in that hot summer Forbes McGurk had decided to become a Stylite..

A stylite was a mystic of olden times who meditated cross-legged on a plinth for days,, even months on end and occasionally stood up and raged at the crowds below for their godlessness.

Forbes could well see himself in this role. He could visualise himself delivering dreadful threats to the people of Barrhead from on high on his plinth and gesturing at once like Mussolini and then a la Martin Luther King. At any rate impressively before sitting back down cross-legged and meditating in spite of their taunts. His little troupe, including Smelly, would become his disciples and gather around the base of his column singing his praises and banging tambourines while at the same time trying to prevent local youths flinging harmful objects at the trancing pillar-saint.

In this vision he wore on his head a red tarboosh and white robes covered his whole frame to the ground. I this regard he resembled something between Jesus and Tommy Cooper.

But what would Forbes preach from his plinth? Merely his human grievances or something of a more religious nature? He opted to begin with Zoroastrianism, a religion it seemed to him so broad and obscure that, no matter what he claimed about it, it wouldn’t be decried by the multitudes. As far as he knew, there were no rival Zoroastrians in even the vicinity of Barrhead so the field would be his. Also; the word itself – Zoroastrian – held almost occult connotations and he could surely think up rituals that involved semi-naked females.

So, in addition to being a budding stylite - a street preacher – he was now a devout Zoroastrian without having the slightest clue what that may entail: did he proclaim one god or many god’s? How expensive were the outfits? Would he have to be celibate? All these questions and no-one to ask.

“Da, whit’s a Zoroastrian?”

“The Mark of Zorro? I’m no’ sure, son. Ask yer teacher”

“Mr Taylor. What’s a Zoroastrian?”

“It’s a Persian religion, Forbes. They let vultures eat their dead”

Christ!, thought Forbes, although he was probably very little to do with it. Vultures eating dead folk? He surely couldn’t stand on his plinth talking about that.

“Become a Zoroastrian like me, folks, and let vultures eat your flesh when you die!”

The day was dark and it was obvious a storm was brewing. Forbes McGurk had decided that this was the day to begin his preaching. His apostles – Smelly, Ginger Tom and Sally Groin, a penitent prostitute from Paisley – helped Brother Forbes up onto his plinth by holding the ladder steady. Ten feet up he must have been above the little crowd who had stopped their Saturday morning shop to witness this curiosity. This man with the fez and the flowing robes fashioned from an old bedspread and covered with aphorisms and names like it was an old stookie.

He started slowly and nervously and in a halting voice proclaimed “Repent, ye sinners” before breaking out in a fit of coughing. He took a deep slurp from his bottle of Tizer before continuing.

“The Barrhead Brotherhood of Zoroastrians as k you to consider your purpose in life. Are you clean of thought and limb?”

He wasn’t sure why he was asking about their limbs but it sounded like the holy thing to say.

Some bright spark from the crowd shouted out “The Barrhead Brotherhood of whit?”

“We are Zoroastrians who live among you to bring you the word of...er….Zorro”

The wind began to pick up and his words were dispersed by it.

“The feathery volutes of ancient Carthage….” and “The dendrites who lived in the trees such was their devotion”

The sky rumbled and thunder roared over the Fereneze Hills. The small crowd ran for the shops and the disciples cowered below their messiah.

“This is truly er, Zorro, er God speaking to us from above and he is not a happy, er, God, as you can no doubt hear”

Of a sudden a bolt and a flash of lightning crashed in the skies like a million bin lids on a corrugated roof and the oration stopped. For the danger of speaking from a plinth in a thunder storm is surely clear to anyone. Forbes McGurk was nought now but a heap of dust. Only his boots and his fez survived.

Smelly, Ginger Tom and Sally Groin gathered on Brownside Braes on a more clement morning some days later. A small plinth was erected using an upturned bin filled with broken bricks from a nearby wall. His boots and fez were buried in a hole two feet deep ‘to stop the cats digging them up’.

As a commemoration they all hummed the theme tune to ‘The Mark of Zorro’ making it apparent that they too had no idea about Zoroastrianism and couldn’t even spell it.

“I was brought up on torrential downpours”

The cold icy winds of East Kilbride, Siberian in texture, ye wondered at a young age if that was all there was to weather. The Fenwick Moors were our Steppes and the rain arrived marked ‘Ayrshire and fucking cauld’. One day the sun came out and I ran indoors in a panic telling my mammy that space aliens were arriving.

“That’s the sun, son” she said. The sun-sun? Were they another species and if so, why was my honest-to-god mother so unperturbed? What did the sun-sun want?

Doon at the shops, there was a place my da had coined ‘Cochrane’s Corner’. Ye turned round that corner where the wee self-service grocer ‘supermarket’ wis and you were stopped in your tracks: you had maybe entered a wind-tunnel? If you opened up your bomber-jacket (‘windcheater’ in East Kilbride was a misnomer) like wings you could fly off as far as Hamilton and save on bus fares. Citizens of EK had been found as far-afield as Eaglesham crumpled in heaps in fields (The truth about Rudolf Hess was that he’d landed in a field near Eaglesham in 1941 took a step out of his plane and was soaked in a second said “Fuck this for a game of soldiers” then buggered off back to Germany).

Any days of weather clemency were immediately declared Bank Holidays by local employers who then populated the local private golf courses while the plebs played on the scrubby old ‘corpy courses’. These ‘courses’ were littered with lager tins and empty Lanliq bottles and the odd corpse would be discovered in the rough (which could actually be a fairway). Words like ‘sclaff’ and ‘howked-it’ were invented in these places to describe erroneous contact with wee white orb occasioning it to ‘skite’ into terrain well short and sideways to the target.

My father invented new swear-words on the Corpy course him and I played on where greenkeepers fees could be avoided if one turned up early enough in the morning as the dew was merely settling on the grass. Caught in a bunker filled with compact, industrial sand as yielding as tarmacadam, he would go all Tasmanian Devil, arms flailing and flinging golf clubs far and wide and mouthing oaths that rent through the morning air and insulting elderly couples as far away as Carmunnock.

“Whiiiiit isssss the fuuuuuuuuuuuuckiiiiiiiiiiing point?” he would roar as his ball skittered off into the trees to be mistaken for food by gangs of squirrels who would secrete it high amid leafy branches.

My dad didn’t learn to ‘treat himself’ until later on in life. Brought up by parsimonious, acquisitive parents it was ‘make do and mend’ and washing the dishes in cold water to save the pennies. Golf clubs should have whip in the shaft meaning there had to be some bend involved. My fathers half-set were bone-brittle and as unyielding as a bad-tempered woman on her dabs. They were to the game of golf what Margaret Thatcher was to Anarcho-Syndicalism.

If you didn’t connect with the ball ‘just right’ – maybe and god-forbid you connected with the ground first – a shudder of seismic proportions seized your whole body in a jarring effect that left you sore and trembling. This wasn’t golf, it was sado-masochism!

But, for some reason, one looked forward to these days. You could find yourself trudging on muddy ground up the par-5 sixth having already played five but not yet half-way to the hole, the wind would be whistling around your chill-blained ears and the rain soaking your sannies but you’d still be hoping for that one sweet shot that seemed to make it all worthwhile.

I’m not sure it ever came!

The Dog's Bollocks!

Daniel Mackie discovered that he’d turned into a dog at roughly the same time that he found he could lick his own testicles and was rather enjoying doing so. Also, this ‘Dan’ thing was interesting. ‘C’mere, Dan, and get your collar’ or ‘Dan….Dan...DAN...over here boy’. What was he, the family pet? To be summoned and stroked and chided according, it seemed, to human whim?

This diminution of his social position was alarming to him. As far as he could remember he’d been a senior civil servant in Scottish Government responsible for Media and Communications and now he was shitting on the beach and licking his balls.

A metamorphosis of Kafkian proportions had occurred. Some sort of osmosis: a physiological transmogrification on quite a staggering scale. Anthropomorphism of existential dimensions. Changed from a human man to a dog.

And his new owners? Why they were his own wee family, his wife and his two wee bairns. Did they not realise it was him, husband and father both, that was now supplicating himself shamelessly in the hope of chicken scraps?

Didn’t they miss their dad at all? Didn’t she miss her loving husband? And who was this fella that was visiting more and more? First chance I get I’m going to lay into his bollocks whoever he is. Bite them right off. That’ll take care of any licentious thoughts he may be harbouring.

Why were they always whispering in his presence? Surely, if they believe me merely canine, they can’t think me capable of understanding their human words no matter how loudly they speak.

‘Humanely’ and ‘put to sleep’ seemed to feature quite a bit.

Surely not!

Maradona and Me

Diego Maradona was 40 days older than me but I have to admit he was a much better footballer than I ever was. Where he had speed and trickery I lolloped much like a lazy gazelle. Where he had style and stocky strength I wilted like a schoolgirl experiencing her first romantic rejection. Where he had guile and exquisite skill I possessed all the physical and mental agility of a slow-worm on ketamine.

I offered football what Hale and Pace had offered comedy: mediocrity and the unfailing ability not to impress.

There was once, though, just once and on a mild day out on the Civil Service Sports Grounds out Chiswick way when I turned out for the Inland Revenue twelfth team that I showed a natural aptitude to be a natural goalscorer of the ‘poacher’ type. It should have been a hat-trick but the referee ruled one perfectly good goal off for offside. My first goal, but? It was Dalgishian in its guile and craft. Maybe it was all those years watching the great man as a Celtic player. I collected a ball passed to me at the edge of the penalty box while shielding it from a closing defender then just rounded him leaving him in my wake and angled it subtly past the advancing goalie and into the net. All in one movement I had created a football symphony: a soccer ballet in one act.

Meanwhile in Buenos Aries, a young man in a shantytown felt the air move. Had a butterfly fluttered its wings in west London.

Me and the Queen

I think me and the Queen would get on pretty well. This is despite me being a staunch republican and thinking the whole monarchy thing is a sick joke. I’d say that to her right off. I’d say ‘Here you! You and your feeble tribe are just a big racket and yeez must be pishing yourselves watchin’ us aw bow and scrape afore ye. Yoor jist a wee auld wummin, that’s aw, but I must admit I used tae fancy yer sister’.

She’d giggle at that in a coquettish way she keeps for a bit o’ rough she fancies and she’d think mibbe she’d met her very own John Brown (although admittedly, I cannae fish, hunt or shoot an’ I widnae know a grouse fae a peacock).

“That Rolf Harris but, eh?. Did ye no’ suss he wis a creepy cunt?”

“How dare you swear in front of me when I was first you fucking peasant”

At this we’d both howl with laughter and I’d tickle her one remaining corgi under its wee hairy chin.

Mozart Was Pish!

Yons pish, man, yon Mozart stuff they pit on the phone when yer waitin’ tae talk tae the dole, man. Meant tae chill ye oot, man, bit it jist gets me aw stressed, well, even mair stressed than ye always ur waitin’ tae talk tae they cunts.

It’s Vivaldi, is it? Well, it’s still pish, man. They should pit somethin’ decent oan, man, since they’ve goat ye waitin’ so long, that stuff jist dis yer heid in. Wee bit Paul Weller or that,; somethin’ wi’ a tune tae it. An’ words. There’s nae words wi’ that Vivlaldi shit; pit some Stone Roses oan ye widnae mind sae much. Mibbe even huv a wee puff while ye wait, man, ‘steed ae that depressin’ shite. Fuckin’ Mozarty pish!

The Quality of Uniforms

See uniforms, man? uniforms are great social indicators. Policemen, firemen, paramedics, such as they need good quality functional uniforms. They must command trust and respect, therefore they must be made well and look smart. You can even tell that they community polis types are deliberately less valued. It’s definitely no’ a proper polis uniform they’ve got, it is a lesser one, of lesser design and an insufficiency of quality. They’re mair on a par with that much-despised breed the traffic warden (tho I bet they’re not called that now. Probably Road Transport Misdemeanour Regulator’s or some such shite).

Yer community polis is someone the public, miscreant or otherwise, do not respect and that proper polis look down on as a pesky nuisance they have to pay lip service to at training seminars.

Yet the really scabby uniforms belong to those such as poor old bus drivers. Sent out to look smart in the scabbiest of uniforms. Naebdy could look smart in those. Yer Made in China cotton/polyester jobs, shiny and ill-fitting. And these poor conveyors of commuters., they are not always the most trim and athletic of the working community sitting as they do on sweaty arses for long shifts such as the number 30 Lothian service which visits two time zones and has a channel crossing in its schedule. Thus, some of these plastic-looking uniforms are voluminous and could be re-shaped as family tents or parachutes. The entire suit of bus driver clothing smacks of Shoe Express and Matalan.

Security guards, though, eh? Security guards. There is little good to be said about the uniform of the average security guard. If they were made to degrade an individual then they do a fine job. A man can possess dignity and pride in his appearance but not – never – in a LIDLs security guard uniform. It is not possible to achieve sartorial prestige wearing clothing even your own employers wouldn’t sell.

Whatever shitty, sub-standard material it is made from and manufactured in some Pacific Rim workhouse it seems to want to ‘droop’ when worn. It is a fabric called droop-wear. It is a fabric made of auld dusters, cheap-range plastic bags from Semichem and worn-out pieces of linoleum from the great days of Kirkcaldy. It isn’t a uniform it is a shroud. It would take Sean Connery in his prime to fill out such an outfit, maybe Arnie Schwarzenneger.

Supermarket security guards should be dressed like kings. They should be ermine-robed and crowned and paid to suit. Our new post-Covid society should honour such as these. For who else would put their lives potentially at risk over a stolen stollen cake or a pilfered 3-litre bottle of industrial cider?

Not, I!!

If one were brutally honest at a job interview.

 “Good morning Mr Nausea”

“Call me Boab”

“Erm, ok. Good morning, erm...Boab”

“Mornin’, pal”

“Erm, yes...I’m Brian Scudbook and this is my colleague Marjory Pumpyknickers. We’d like to ask you a few competency-based questions: twelve in total…”

“Christ!”

“Yes, rather a lot I suppose. Firstly from Marjory. Erm...Marjory?”

“Thanks, Brian. Good morning, Boab”

“Mornin’ Marjory, hen”

“Erm...yes, first of all, can you tell us about a time when you dealt with a challenging situation?”

“Erm… do you mean like somebody wanting to fight me. A square-go like?

“Ahem, not exactly. An unexpected obstacle that you need to find a solution to. In the workplace or in life generally”

“Aw right, aye. When that Lady Di got killed I didnae get my giro the next week cos aw the postmen stayed aff fur the funeral. That kind of thing? Pure mortified so ah wiz. Couldnae buy a bevvy an’ aw there wis on the telly wis a bloody funeral”

Brian and Marjory glance at each other in puzzlement and not a little amusement. A fly lands on a computer screen somewhere in Argentina and no-one cares.

“And how did you deal with that situation? What action did you take?”

“Well, Marjory. Luckily I’d done a few extra sperm-donoring shifts an’ even mair luckily they’d pit that money intae ma account, so everything wis sweet. So I guess you could say that wis ‘handy’ karma, know whit ahm sayin’?”

Brian and Marjory were both secretly glad that this was being recorded on film and couldn’t wait to show it at the Christmas party.

Fatal Flyers

Years ago when I was about 17 and beginning a stellar career as a civil servant in London I was standing on the platform at Liverpool Street Station awaiting a central line tube train to take me home to Leytonstone. Those were the pre-computer days when the civil service was crammed full of people doing fuck all except ‘look busy’ with a pencil and a box of paper.

As usual, being rush-hour, the platform was packed and I was right at the edge (an amazing act of trust, really. Any passing pyscho could have signed my doom with the merest nudge). I noticed this young woman urgently pressing her way through the throng and eventually ending up beside me. Must be desperate for a seat. I thought. Getting a seat this time of day was like winning the pools and engendered one with an air of smugness.

The train came rushing through the tunnel and ‘whoosh’ the young lady stepped off and in front of it. I have an image of this in my mind’s eye to this day. I was stunned by this and went into a mental dwam while others around me shrieked and somehow stepped back and away from the edge. A few of us were questioned by transport police afterwards but the let go to be on our way.

Poor wee soul and I hope she at last found peace from whatever torment drove her to such an act but, the sod of it was that I had to get back to bloody Leytonstone via a very circuitous route indeed (Victoria line to Walthamstow then a 262 bus, if you must know). This gave me an idea the outline of which I sent to London Transport in a letter.

In it I suggested they employ staff on a premium rate to utelise an hour – say 3am – for those to wished to commit self-murder under a train to be allowed to do so. We could call this a Happy, or Un-Happy Hour. Thus, their gruesome mission would be achieved AND the public would not be inconvenienced in the slightest. It was a win-win situation.

I didn’t even receive the courtesy of a reply.

Imagine my surprise reading in the latest Private Eye of a new scheme the Tories have come up with to decrease public spending. You will agree it is not so dissimilar to mine. The idea is that they employ suicidal, psychopathic or staunchly right-wing pilots or even fervent jihadists to make up half (or so) of this project (the other half (or so) will be just normal well-adjusted flyers). You then give your average benefit claimant, old or disabled person or immigrant a choice. Either they will take a flight and be flown into a mountain by a nutcase or survive the journey and have their pension, benefit, etc. doubled and be left alone without harassment for the rest of their days.

They reckon that given a 60/40 ratio against survival they’ll save the taxpayer millions.

Naked Interview

Fuck sake! The bastarn things started an’ I huvnae even goat my shirt oan. Bastard pre-recorded interview fur the Department of Shirk and Truncheons. Cannae pause it it says. Got to keep goin’ now it’s started.

‘Tell us about a time when you had to deal with a difficult situation. What did you do and what was the result?’

Christ! I’m virtually topless here, shirt hauf oan an’ no’ even a tie. Well, obviously no’ a tie. That would look even worse, jist a tie an’ nae shirt. They’d think I wis looney-tunes if they didnae already. ‘This cunt here cannae even get it thegither tae get his claes oan. Fur aw we know he’s naked on the bottom half as well. Sittin’ ther in his bare arse!’.

I hud it aw set up fine but there must huv been a timer or suhink that I didnae know about.

“Erm, a difficult situation? Well, I was working in a job centre down south an’ ther wis this drunk guy shouting the odds an’ security escorted him out and he fell in a puddle and his head was bleeding, and I….”

‘Question 2. Tell us about a time when you influenced others. What was the reason and what did you do?’

Fuck sake!

Get To Beggary!

There’s a great many of these Mediterranean Mindfulness practitioners sitting outside supermarkets these days. Like they ascetics in the bible or Jainists in India. An auldish guy here sits outside ALDI for HOURS. Right fae it opens to damn near when it shuts. Maybe 9, 10 hours in the dreich cauld and pissing rain there he will be, stoic and immovable. He’s learnt ‘Hiya’ and ‘Merry Christmas’ and that’s his shift.

Ye huv tae applaud that. Personally, I wouldn’t last an hour. No way. Sitting there wi’ yer arse freezing an’ folk walking by ye or, worse, giving ye a hard time.

“Away back tae yer ain country an’ beg”. That kind of unnecessary shite that gives us all a bad name. So what if it’s a scam; everything is a scam. I don’t see these folk giving Philip Green or Boris Johnson a hard time and they type are fleecing us on a daily basis. Naw, but ye pick on some poor auld bloke, that’s really brave, eh?

How wis it auld Bobby Dylan put it “Steal a little and they throw you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king”. Spot on Bobby Boy. My Granny knew his maw. Or was it Frankie Miller?

I want tae talk tae this auld boay, even just to ask him what he thinks about all day? Probably ‘They scabby Scottish bastards. True whit they say aboot thum, tight as a peacock’s arsehole’. They’ll probably have sayings like that back in Armenia or wherever the fuck! ‘They are tight like arsehole of peahen’ they’ll say aw that Borat-y wiy. ‘May your mother have the breath of the town goat’. Shit like that they’ll be muttering when we think they’re bein aw nice an’ cheery and that.

I found a fiver on the street the other week and I says to masel’ that I’m gonna give it to the next beggar I see. Me bein’ an auld flirt, I was glad when it was the lassie selling the Big Issue ootside Scotmid’s. I gave her the fiver and noo I cannae go there any mair cos either she’ll be expecting that kind of behaviour on a regular basis or – and this is worse – she’ll feel we have a special connection and she’ll need to pay me special attention every time in acknowledgement of ‘the day of the fiver’.

If I wis ben hauf-way racist aboot I’d huv tae say that mibbe back in her country, Outer Monrovia or wherever, a fiver means she’s noo ma wife and I’m expected to faither her children. It’s a bastard anaw, cos Scotmid’s has ma favourite crisps!

Ancestors

Ah don’t know ma ancestors, man, hardly at all. It’s disgraceful. It’s like walking about no’ knowin’ yer own history; who came before ye. Yer own bloodline fer Christ’s sake. I mean racehorses know more about theirs than I do mine.

Before ma grannies and grandpas it’s jist a blur, a few reminiscences and hand-me-downs. I mean, jist the other week I’m talking to my ma on the phone (cannae visit due to 400 miles and a pandemic) and she blurts out about how her own grandfaither on her da’s side died in a down-and-out hostel in Tobago Street as his wife had flung him oot due to his drinkin’. I mean, what the fuck! That’s ma great-grandfaither. What’s the story, here?

My maws the most honest person I’ve ever known. If she tells you something you can be sure it’s true to the best of her knowledge. My da on the other hand. There would be a grain of truth and a lot of extrapolation. He’d tell you his auld Granda in Tollcross was Skipper Matthews, some auld Para Handy figure sailing oot the Clyde skippering a puffer boat doin’ trade up the Western Isles. A romantic tale which probably owed more to fiction than fact. Widnae surprise me if it turned out he worked on the Renfrew ferry.

Feel bad noo saying that. Let’s say he was actually a puffer skipper. What a fantastic life that sounds like. Floatin’ up and doon the watter for a livin’, Morag in every port and seeking the dangerous pleasures of whisky and beer at aw thae wee islands: Bute and Rhum and aw that. Seemed he only came hame to spawn a wean wi’ his poor auld wife (who the fuck was she while we’re at it?) then away he’d be again to his sailorly life on the watery substances.

My maw had these four aunties that she often talks about with no little affection: Nettie, Lettie, Jeannie and Mary. I keep getting them mixed up about who lived where and was married to who. I know that two of them were married to two brothers and that one of them was married to a good-hearted gas-lamp-lighter in the days when the world was black and white and rough and ready.

I know her Auntie Mary who was bandy leggit through rickets was married to an amputee who had a prosthetic leg that he let the weans play wi’. Gangrene done for his leg in the First World War and it did for him some twenty yeas later dying as he did in the Erskine Hospital. Wee Mary his devoted wife was by his bedside when he went and it was she who had to walk the dozen or so miles along the Clyde and back to Glasgow and her weans in the black-out. I can’t even imagine what that would have been like for her: jist losin’ yer husband, the faither of your bairns, and walking all that way in the pitch black.

It’s just one of the many family stories that I seem to huv tae learn piece-meal. But do ye no’ think they’re important? I dae!

German Nutter

That boays aw ower the place! Ah ken him anaw. He wis at some meeting or other tellin us about finding a dead boady in Berlin, a murder or summat. Harrowing tale fae a harrowing life by every account. Cheesy wiz less charitable…

“As if we didnae huv enough nutters in this country we hiv tae stert importin thum”

He’s freakin that lassie oot oan the seat in front of him as he’s mutterin sumthin unintelligable and rockin back and furrit in his chair. Christ knows if he’s oan sumthin or that’s jist his usual wiy o’ behavin’?

Wan thing fir sure ahm no’ gonnie re-introduce masel tae him. Ahm in enough hassle without old krauty boy jinin’ in anaw. Ye hud tae wonder whit was goin’ doon for him in Germany that he hus tae be ower here in Leith, bit we’re aw too polite tae ask him. Might take it as racist or suhink. Cannae say fuck all tae neabdy these days!

“Jist askin’ ye, pal. Were ye a loop-de-loop ower there anaw an’ they flung ye oot? We’d aw really like to hear the story!”

Steed ae that ye jist hid tae kid on the boay wis normal although he is evidently anythin’ but. Could be a real heid-the-baw, a murderer or that. Mibbe it wis him that killed someone in Berlin?

Noo he’s jist aboot sitting in the luggage rack bit an’ the wee lassie is getting’ well nervous. Who knows whit her story might be. Maybe she was molested once oan a bus an’ noo it’s lookin’ like happenin’ again?

I kin hardly go up to her and say ‘Dinnae worry, hen! He’s jist a mad, German druggie. His Bach is worse than his bite!’. I mean she might no’ get the joke and she’d be thinkin’ she’s goat me tae contend wi’ anaw.

German nutters, man!

Nostrodamus’ Horny Jam

Euphemia Cheap, a housemaid fae Dundee, was puzzled chiefly by two things. Firstly; what was she doing in C16th France when she belonged, as far as she understood things, in C19th Scotland? and, secondly; what was it about this Nostrodamus chappie and his jam?

“Michel” she would say “have you no cheese or meat with your bread? Always with the plum jam!”

The beardy apothecary smiled mysteriously (it was the only way he could smile for he had no idea what she was saying). He only knew to keep plying this gorgeous, if slightly smelly, woman with his juicy jam laden as it was with stuff to make her own juices flow like a little river of lust. Skin of a mandrake apple and some Cretan wine to taste. Wee sprinkle ae nutmeg and Bob's yer uncle and Fanny is, well....!

“My knickers are aye wringin’ when I come to see auld Nosty. Yet the sight of him repels me” she would think “his neck has traces of plague buboes and his breath is rank like yesterdays haggis”.

Michel de Nostrodame was meant to be this and he was meant to be that. He could ‘see’ the future and predict all kinds of things but it was all so much chin music. In reality, he was an old-style chemist that could make horny jam.

“Yeh, yeh, big war twentieth century, bitter wee guy with a mustache and bad breath”

He told them all sorts ae shite and they lapped it up.

O and his transporter machine. Young Euphemia of the moistened lips and a taste for jam would have perished in the Tay Bridge disaster had it not been for that.

“Any mair o’ that jam, Nosty?”

"J’Aimee! j’Aimee, j’Aimee, j’Aimee, j’Aimee", as Bryan Ferry would one day sing!

My Friend Rab

When I was young and green and not entirely content with my lot I ran about with a mate from Arden name of Rab White. Looking back these 40-odd years I can’t say I remember what he looked like, just a vague facsimile of a podgy boy in a black Harrington bomber jacket (later on I imagine he resembled his namesake C Nesbitt).

Arden was a scheme on the far south-side of Glasgow in which they had a pub the locals referred to as ‘Vietnam’. That’s all you need to know about Arden. I lived in the nearby and, as yet, slightly less notorious Kennishead High Flats. I lost on the ‘schemie’ stakes anyway as Rab had a cousin in a List D school which was huge kudos.

In reality, we only lived on a scheme because my staunchly socialist father deemed this necessary. He was one of only two individuals I’ve known who was deliberately ‘downwardly mobile’ (the other is Vomity Man). The very idea of ‘bettering yourself’ or buying a house or any other of the items of social cache was anathema to my dad and indicative of ‘selling out’. In fact, if he could have engineered to live in a Stalinist collective in Soviet Russia or even a Siberian gulag I believe he would have considered it. He was ‘gulag-daft’, my Da and may well have enjoyed the privations and the intense cold.

Rab was a good natured and unaggressive boy who seemed to like my company (my self-esteem was so diminished by this time that it puzzled me why anyone did). He also liked the band Slade; a lot! So much did he like them that he determinedly refused to hear a word against My Friend Stan, and refused to see it as a decline in form and perhaps the waning of the bands star in the fickle sky of glam-rock fame-dom.

Rab and I would go on long wanders on the summer evenings when it stayed light for ages. One of these nights we ended up in an evangelical church in Pollockshaws. I think they caught us peeking in the door and invited us in as two prospective cult-children or some-such or maybe they were just kindly Christian folk offering the hand of friendship like Jesus would have wanted them to. We found the whole thing hilarious!

Some American preacher bloke was giving it laldy about Jesus and The Good News and we was all sinners who must atone and choose the path of righteousness. It was like Elmer Gantry with all these wifies and auld Glesga blokes spouting Hallelujah and Say it Brother like this fella was Burt Lancaster or something.

We were giggling and spluttering like the daft schoolboys we were and we were politely asked to leave. We laughed all the way home but I was ashamed we weren’t more respectful.

Likely Stories

 My Da was a Glasgow tram conductor (for a short time he was a driver but was stripped of this advancement due to driving up a close. (Not easy in a tram if you think about it).

“Please describe details of the crash, driver”

“Didnae really see much, your honour. I was upstairs at the time”

His home garage was in Newlands not so far from his parents home in classy Clarkston where somebody may well have invented ‘swinging’. If he was on a late shift, he’d take his takings bag home with him where his auld maw would proceed to rifle it for coins (my grandparents were more than a little aspirant and evey penny went towards social progress). The fact that she may well be jeopardising her own son’s career prospects didn’t seem to enter her calculating head.

“How do you account for the short-fall in takings, Mister conductor-man?”

“My maw stole them to buy a new tea-cosy, Mister boss-man”

There was a tool a conductor needed to change tracks at the depot at the end of a route. My da told me this piece of crafted metal had another necessary purpose in repelling and threatening Saturday-night drunks and ne’er-do-well’s.

He had a great sense of humour my Da, Milliganesque and Glesga-honed, but like any self-respecting Glasgow father he was full o’ shite.

“A wellie and a clug, son, that’s whit I wore tae school. No’ only that but my troosers were patched wi’ auld bits o’ carpet”

Like every one of his extrapolations there was a modicum of truth in there somewhere. His auld maw –to save money, of course – could well have sent him out dressed rather bizarrely and certainly not in line with any accepted fashions (bare feet, impetigo scabs and assorted rags).

I could often sympathise with my father because when I was at school my mum got all my gear from the army and navy stores. Consider my embarrassment attending classes dressed as a Japanese Admiral!

Hampden Tales

All this no fans inside the ground stuff is anything but knew to me. As a youth I had a fascination with football grounds (particularly climbing into them free of charge). Quite regularly at one time I would visit that huge barn of a stadium, Hampden Park, where once 150 thousand had turned up for a game, to watch amateur minnows Queen’s Park play before as little as 200 fans.

Hampden was vast and open with a huge pitch with a speedway track running around it. Queens Park would be playing Brechin or Forfar or Stenhousemuir; one of those clubs supported by sad autograph hunters that couldn’t make friends at school and forged their meagre identity with the local football club.

The ‘away’ fans – all 43 of them – would, out of courtesy, be given the covered ‘Rangers end’ while the other 157 of us cavorted in the wide open plains of the opposite terrace or the vast enclosure or stand (the ‘stand’ is where you sat down).

The atmosphere would be about as febrile as a clap clinic on a wet Tuesday. One could hear the players and coaching staff clearly cursing “Get intae um, Malky. Fuckin’ stookie um” while Malky was busy tripping over his own boot-laces. Your neighbouring fan could be maybe thirty yards away leaning on a crush-barrier with his son looking as bored as Russell Brand on a vow of silence. Why did his father subject him to this? And didn’t he know his mum visited the provvy man when they were at these games?

I once witnessed an ironic pitch invasion during a night game against the behemoths of Partick Thistle. The Maryhill team were three up and the legion of Spiders fans decided to disrupt the game so that the referee would abandon the game and force a replay. He didn’t and the crowd dispersed back to the gloom of the terraces laughing.

Let the fans back in to Queen’s Park games and no-one will notice at all! 

Sock It To Me

You could hardly move for socks. The everyday apparel for keeping human feet warm were everywhere: on the floor was a deep pelt of them and they draped over curtain rods, coffee tables, microwaves, bathroom sink, everywhere, in fact. Everywhere you looked you were confronted by socks: woollen socks, nylon ones, stripey ones, austere blue, ones with pictures of Homer Simpson on them.

DS Padmore, a policeman of some 10 years experience wondered what the hell this was all about, even though he knew perfectly well. The last months in the smart little seaside town of Southport had seen reports even in the press of socks being stolen from washing lines, house-breakings where only socks were stolen and men being approached in pubs and asked to donate their socks for charity. What was it about socks? He’d heard of knicker-fetishists, shoes, even, but socks?

There was a funk in the air from the socks, a foetid funk, an unhealthy smell like from athlete’s foot. It made DS Padmore nauseous.

“Who lives in a house like this?” he thought in a David Frost-type voice in that programme where we all took an envious nosey around someone’s expensive abode. It would be some non-entity or other that David wanted to bang. The blonde yin out of Buck’s Fizz, perhaps. Mind you. Weren’t they all blonde in Buck’s Fizz?

What kind of kick did you get out of obsessively collecting men’s socks? DS Padmore had several images in his head at once and not one of them very welcome.

The socks had tags on them with details of the previous owner even if it was only the address they were stolen from. Many of them had polaroids attached with an image of the sock-donor while wearing the socks; a smiling man half-cut with a stupid grin and a thumbs-up gesture. The policeman recognised a few of the pubs from the décor. He even recognised some of the donors as petty-criminals he’d have thought too street-wise to agree to give up their socks, or anything else for that matter. There was Chubby Kane, for instance, a man who’d done serious time in Walton and in other nicks. His photo was attached to a pair of green and red argyle’s.

He'd bet the sock-collector’s or perverts or whatever they were were scousers. There was humour here as well as theft and deviancy and these were all calling cards of your Liverpudlian scally. Tam Padmore was a Glaswegian and this gave him an insight into the scouse criminal mind because it wasn’t that far removed from the mentality of the less righteous of his townies. Cheeky and inventive and notoriously anti-establishment.

But where was the profit in this? What was the pay-off?

One day they would offer these socks back to the original owners. After all, it was their property. No-one would come forward to claim.

The Dalmeny Murders

I like the wee town of Dalmeny it’s very bonny but I wouldn’t want to live there even if I could afford to. Everyone would know your business within a week. They’d know if you were a bevvy-merchant, what your employment situation was and, indeed, whether you were over-fond of farmyard animals and this was the principle reason why you had moved to such a rural spot.

The town is a mile out of South Queensferry where all the bridges over the Forth Estuary are and about a half-hour by car north-west of Edinburgh so it’s handily placed. It’s not even a town but a village with a village green and wee village fetes, the whole bit. It has wee Trumpton-style houses which were built in the early C19th for estate workers. These days you’ll have big city commuters living here or executives from the nearby oil-storage plant. The Earl of Rosebery a former Prime Minister used to live nearby in Barnbougle Castle.

But, the wee hamlet is famous principally for one thing; the ‘rampant cannibalism’ scandal of the 1970s and the disappearance of several prominent residents who were never found. The place never really recovered from this and if you – a stranger – were to broach the subject you’d be met with a sullen silence and very quickly find you wanted to leave the village in an instant and crawl buck to the urban slum you emanated from. For the truth is that some of that previous generation still lived here and relatives of the ‘missing presumed eaten’ do as well.

There was a time you see when queues in post-offices weren’t a mile long because there was only one ‘teller’ in operation, the others having been re-deployed to work more cost-effective to the organisation (making up the daily prices for stamps, for example “let’s see if they’ll pay over a pound for a second-class? I bet they do”) or spying on the postmen to ensure that they kept running and didn’t communicate in any way with auld wifies hungry for a chat.

Those were the times when old Charlie Dimmock was the postie for Dalmeny. A friendly old scroat was Charlie who had been a postman on the Dalmeny Estate since the time of the Covenanters and there was nothing he didn’t know about the past, present and future of the village. Indeed this was what unnerved many of the residents he catered for; this seeming presience. He seemed to know what was in store for them all with a certainty that was spooky.

Many refused to talk to him for fear that he spilled the beans about some coming tragedy or upset but Charlie found a way of conveying this to them any way often surreptitiously by way of a greetings card..

“Happy Christmas and Best Wishes for the New Year from Charlie, your postman.

Ps Commiserations for your loss”

And sure enough, a matter of days later an elderly family member would have popped his or her clogs.

It was because of his soothsaying abilities that Charlie was the first person folk thought of when the disappearances started. Because he had predicted them all it was obvious he would be suspected when they actually materialised.

And this suspicion only gathered in weight when it was Charlie himself who disappeared.

Sawney Bean is a character in Scottish folklore. Alexander ‘Sawney’ Bean was a child of East Lothian as was his wife Black Agnes. Being pretty much useless at anything else (Sawney couldn’t even wire a plug) they took up incest, murder and cannibalism activities which, even in C16th Scotland were frowned upon. These were the days of the witch-hunts and the king, James VI, being very touchy about demons, so folk tended to keep themselves to themselves avoiding the cultivation of herb gardens and always putting their milk bottles out last thing at night. Aberrant behaviour was to be avoided at all costs so living in a giant cave in Ayrshire and eating passers-by would tend to be noticed after a while.

They chased Sawney and his clan down and smoked them out of their cave. The cave was so vast it had its own lake. Human entrails were scattered hither and thither, pieces of gut and bloody melts and skulls and bones, the remnants of a giant feast of humanity. Sawney had his genitals and limbs cut off and burned in a fire before him. Black Agnes was simply burned at the stake. They didn’t mess about in those days with rehabilitation and psychiatric evaluations.

“What is at the bottom of Mr Bean’s obvious psychosis. Was it a childhood trauma or was he just one bad wee bastard?”

Every Scottish child has been threatened with Sawney ever since.

“If you don’t behave, Sawney Bean’ll get you and eat you”

Charming!

Dalmeny was in the early years of the 1970s pretty much the same as it always was and always would be. Maybe young lassies had posters on the wall of Donny Osmond and David’s Essex and Cassidy. Maybe folk were forced to endure Mike Yarwood and Softly Softly on the telly of a Saturday night, but in essence, the village was the same sleepy wee place it had eyewis been. The trains rattled back and furrit across the Forth Rail Bridge and the odd stranger appeared for a drink in the Stable Bar then promptly disappeared (in the normal sense of the word).

The only difficulty with this bucolic normalcy was the gradual absence of some of its stalwart residents.

First, young Peggy McSwine. The McSwine’s were, as their name strongly indicates, pig farmers of long local repute. The Earl of Rosebery himself used to ride their prize sow into South Queensferry every year for the annual ‘Burn the Bastard’ festival when a local worthy was chosen to be at least badly charred at the stake.

Then there was the mass shaggings at nearby Drum Sands..!

(At this point the author got fed up with the theme and general trend of his story and went out and walked into the sea..!)