We Cry For Ourselves!

“The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun”

I was living on a temporary basis in Kilmarnock when the Lockerbie bombing happened. Just down the road 90 miles Pan Am flight 103 death toll rising with every news report, a devastated area the size of London. Carnage on a massive scale: indescribable; beyond words. Seven in the evening settling down to watch the Christmas edition of Emmerdale Farm after your tea next minute; obliteration; end of days.

Expect the unexpected, by Christ!

A lady still in her aircraft chair found in a tall tree: human beings plummeting at a hundred-odd miles an hour in the freezing night sky, blown to smithereens by strangers.

I’m amazed now at how little all of this registered with me at the time.

I was in my own little world of pain and the carnage of my own emotions: sent back from Ireland on a boat, rejected and discarded. She said I didn’t love her enough but the opposite was more like the thing.

I’m reminded of a time when I would be about seven or eight and there had been a gas explosion at Clarkston train station, East Renfrewshire killing about eight, I think. My paternal grandparents would have been living in that town at the time in their detached bungalow high on a hill. In East Kilbride, we were merely five miles away and I remember the lady upstairs being concerned at the late arrival home of her husband who travelled through that way from Glasgow (he later arrived home the worst for wear and oblivious of his possible peril).

For many months the rubble from the explosion lay in huge heaps at the side of the tracks, and I was fascinated by it. There had been death here but the world moved on as normal.

I missed the carnage of 7/7 by a couple of tubes (although I wouldn’t have been going as far as Russell Square). I was decanted from the tube system at Finsbury Park due to ‘an incident’ in Central London. Even though heading for my workplace at Euston Tower I was carrying my guitar in a case (I’d written a play to perform for some high-end tax officials depicting Flexible Working Practices and intended to sing Don’t Fence Me In at the start) and I must have made an odd vision schlepping into town as if to busk amid the exploding buses and general mayhem.

“I see a bad moon a-rising…”

And 9/11? Happened on the very day that J told me we needed not to see each other again: that it was over. I watched the footage on the telly, but the tears I shed were for myself only!