Doggin' It

When I was a boy growing up in the west, the best thing about going to school was most certainly not going there at all. For this reason, and a few others besides, I started off top class, first year and ended up bottom class, fourth year. I started it off with all the bungalow kids from the better catchment areas and ended up playing three-card-brag at the back of the class with kids from out where the buses don’t necessarily go.

Best thing of all though was ‘dogging it’ or, sometimes better still, convincing your ma that you were near fatally ill and should be kept off if only for fear that you’ll bring about a fresh plague outbreak (poking sharpened bits of bog paper up my nostrils was a favourite of mine for a while; the resultant sneezing bursts being alarming enough for your mum to lock you in your room and chuck in the odd bottle of Ferguzade every now and again).

‘Doggin’ it’ made you feel so free though and fearful implications such as grown men battering your lily-white hands with lumps of leather pushed determinedly to the back of one’s mind. Like a cross between Tam Weir and Jack Kerouac (funny place, Scotland) off you’d stroll around the streets of nearby shopping districts.

Pollockshaws and Shawlands were reckoned safe – though, I once - gloriously - got a wee lift home from the polis while truanting in the latter. They chased me under a big rhododendron bush in Queen’s Park and I got the nee-naw nee-naw back to the school, emerging from the Panda like some Cool Hand Luke character or Bogart as he beats the rap.

You’d head about the place with your head in some juvenile dreamland; half-cogitated notions of lonely housewives beckoning you over to their Mansewood palaces, naked flesh peeking seductively through bri-nylon nightwear. You’d dream about never going back to school at all (I kept this up for about a week once, virtually living in the woods behind the seventh green at Cowglen’s Golf Club, peeking furtively out at putters, more Huckleberry Hound than Finn. By this time I had turned into some non-carnivorous Sawney Bean muttering ‘a right rickmatic o’ fowk the day! Aw Booyang and gledgy-eyed’ without any notion of what I was on about and probably suffering from some mad delirium brought on by living in woods behind golf greens.)

You were always but always found out in the end. The police would get you or some nosey neighbour would grass you up to your mother. “Your David no weel, Mrs Wylie? Jist that ah saw him down the shops wi’ some other boys”. Us doggers had to keep away from the highways and byways of the generality to elude detection. I imagine Glasgow in the 1970s whose parks and tree-lands were scattered with school-avoiding teenagers of a certain social stamp all furtively keeking from behind trees and bushes: all Winston Smith’s attempting to confound the Thought Police.