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..!)

Chicken Fiddlers

 Every year they came (no pun intended). Soon as the card went up on the board. ‘Fertility Technicians Wanted – Usual Rates, Experience Much Preferred’. Every year I wondered how the interviews went.

“Well, Marjorie. You’ve applied for the post of ‘Fertility Technician. What do you understand about the role?”

“Well, Mt Clunge, it’s wanking off chickens, innit?”

And indeed that is exactly what it was. For two months every summer, there’d be about 50 folk on the farmlands surrounding Southport manually extracting semen from chickens to further the objective of artificial insemination. Never have so few done so much for so many. Because of the chicken wankers of Britain, those unknown heroes, there’d be chicken on every table.

But, they couldn’t look you in the eye these fowl molesters.

I didn’t have a lot to do with them but I knew someone who did. He’d be their first point of contact in the job centre and he said liked to ask the females what aptitude they had for the job; had they the experience required? Did they think they’d be ‘handy’ at it, etc? They’d look at him and know exactly what he was talking about.

And the chickens? Well, if you’re gonna end up butchered on someone’s plate, might as well go out with a smile.

A Wee Bit of Buddha in the Central Bar

 “You are continually reborn until you find your way out”

So said Tam McGuire who was never socially-distanced enough for anyone’s liking. You’d be standing there at the bar supping your pint and being quite delighted with it and, suddenly, he’d come out with these things and your quietude and calm disappeared in a blink.

“Whit’s that Tam?” some dolt would ask him.

“Central tenet of Buddhist thought” he’d inform us. We who were mere drinkers in the Central Bar on Leith Walk and not Buddhists at all.

“We have several lives and transitions before we achieve enlightenment” he extrapolates no longer quite sure what he’s talking about.

“Does Buddha say anything about mair drink? It’s your round ya auld chancer!” This offered somewhat unkindly by Brian ‘Tich’ Thompson who is called Tich because he’s absolutely huge – as big as a Buddha, in fact. He was this globular shape either because he has a profound glandular problem or because he’s a greedy bastard.

That the Buddha should be discussed at all in this old boozer was incongruous enough but the topic of reincarnation was a compelling one.

“Tam. Whit’s interesting about reincarnation is that in a previous life you’d still be an annoying prick” This offered by Stevie ‘Jolly’ Taylor who was thus named because he hadn’t a cheerful word to say about anything or anybody.

Outside there was early winter sunshine and the sound of kango-gun breaking up concrete where they were laying the new tracks for the tram extension nobody seemed to want. The thing about Edinburgh Council was that it just did things seemingly regardless of popular opinion. To call it a democratic institution would be like calling Vladimir Putin a well-known CBBC presenter.

This auld pub had seen some sights over the years even appearing in the film Trainspotting as the venue in which Begbie starts a fight by chucking a beer glass over the balcony. Some gadgie even brought in tourists to gaze around it. No doubt they were puzzled by the seeming mundanity of the place and would only be cheered by auld Brewer sitting in the corner swearing at them in a stereotypically Celtic manner. No doubt they thought this was a plant, a feature of the tour but it was merely because he suffered from a version of Tourette’s that permanently drunk people had.

“Away ya f’in touristy bazza’s”. That kind of thing. They’d all be rushing back to Albuquerque or Tokyo or wherever saying they saw a real Scottish character like the film. Between Harry Lauder and Irvine Welsh we had sure conjured up an interesting international profile of auld be-kilted misers wielding sticks and auld jakeys hardly able to stand. Independence be fuck? More like needing treatment for dependency.

Indeed, the Central Bar stood within the structure that used to be Leith Central train station. That was why the film was called Trainspotting. Cos the junkies used to shoot up in what had become the empty shell of the station.

“In a future life I’d like to come back as a woman” So said Tam McGuire and the near silence in the pub changed to total.

This nervous hush was broken by a clearing of the throat of Hedwig Beaker who everyone knew as ‘The Spy’ due to his German name.

“Why’s that Tam?” and we waited an age for his answer which was enigmatic.

“Jist tae see whit I looked like in the bath!”

None present chose to ponder on that thought.

The Name's Smelly, Just Smelly!

Loners and outsiders don’t make friends with each other because they want to. In fact, in many instances, they’d really rather not become friends at all. They are friends due to the morbid fate of being loners and outsiders. Without each other, they’d have no-one at all.

Even among such sad-sack groupings there are stark and sometimes very subtle gradations. Chaps or chappesses who are referred to by the commonality as ‘Smelly’ are beyond the pale even for this lowly congregation. They are very firmly ‘on their own’ as far as even the bleakest social scene is concerned. No-one was even sure what Smelly’s real name was excepting the teachers who must have read their name out at register but it hadn’t ‘registered’ with any of their peers who after all delighted in the appellation ‘Smelly’.

“Ahm no’ sittin’ beside Smelly, Miss. He’s honkin’ the place oot”

Presumably, the teachers never resorted to this lazy insult.

“Right, Smelly, what’s the capital of Brazil?”

But, there was a hierarchy among the rest of the generally despised. Wee specky runts, gentle giants that couldn’t/wouldn’t fight back, posh kids and lassies accused of having incestuous relations with their brothers (actually, they weren’t always as unpopular as you’d think among the post-puberty male generality).

The leader would maybe be an otherwise acceptable boy who’d been found masturbating in the school toilets by his peers and, to compound his embarrassment, this viewing would have also exposed skid-marked underwear (this is in no way an autobiographical account). He would, quite naturally, despise the other membership of his little troupe of losers, as they did nothing but reflect on his own recently diminished status. In fact, he’d bully them thinking maybe this would exact a re-introduction into a more normal grouping.

You’ll never see a social website named ‘Loners and Outsiders Re-United’ though there is one, I believe, for Smelly’s.

Third Light

Superstition is rife everywhere you look, whole swathes of superstitious practices and thought the world over.

My old granny was as practical-minded a person as you could ever meet but she wouldn’t let me in the door one new years day before she’d shoved a packet of custard creams through her letterbox so I wouldn’t ‘first-foot’ without an offering denoting future prosperity (and hell mend you if you ever opened an umbrella in her house or put shoes on a table).

Some years ago I was commissioned to dig a hole for the internment of someone’s ashes and, having done this, I couldn’t rest until I’d re-dug it and re-positioned the urn so it was lying ‘just right’ in the excavation. I felt that ‘resting in peace’ was endangered by my seeming sloppiness.

At the extreme, some folk are superstitious to the point of OCD. Visiting a friend's house one day we were leaving for a drive in her car when she stopped and said “look at this”.

A young girl was attempting to leave a house opposite with her dog on a leash. She’d close the door, shove it about five times to ensure it was shut, take five steps away with the dog then return to the door to begin the whole process again. I swear she must have done this about fifty times until whatever fevered calculation her brain was making was somehow satisfied (some extended multiple of five it seemed like) and she managed to take the puzzled and yanked about dog for its walk (I wondered afterwards if maybe the hound developed the doggy version of OCD thinking it was some sort of command to behave in this repetitive back and forward fashion and also if it developed neck strain).

Myself? It is multiples of three and originates from fear of my dad dying if I didn’t perform certain actions and one day I met a friend who suffered the same affliction. Wee Davy (I was Big Davy) could be manipulated by me (and consequently I by him) into doing the very weirdest things if I pulled the trigger of his morbid superstition. One night while sitting bored in the pub over a couple of pints we were discussing our mutual idiosyncrasy when I of a sudden suggested he must perform a ‘goat dance’ around the pool table completing three circuits to avoid the almost immediate extinction of at least one of his parents sitting oblivious to their impending doom in the family homestead 400 miles away in Cumbernauld.

To the evident surprise and amusement to the other regulars and, certainly, the two chaps enjoying a game of pool, Davy completed this bizarre task without question. Such is the power of superstition. I paid for this later by performing the utterly drunken and juvenile act of hurling a brick through a window of the DHSS offices on the way home, thus saving my father from a gruesome end.

Repititive Song Injury

The guy that occupies the next room in this high rangy suburban house plays the same tape with the same four pop songs on it over and over on each weekend. Exactly the same tape with exactly the same songs. Forever Autumn by Justin Hayward, Love Grows by Edison Lighthouse, some Suzi Quatro song that didn’t chart and Mull of Kintyre by Wings. There is only one of those songs that I like (Love Grows) but that is beside the point. OK, I know he’s pissed out of his mind on Stella but isn’t he getting a little tired of those four songs? I know all too well that I an!

He’s a creature of habit this chap and appears to be profoundly depressed (although he often expresses worry that our drinking water is laced with anti-depressants, I would have thought he’d be glad!). He works in education in some capacity and when he comes home he makes the same rice and fish meal every evening and, if I’m foolish enough to be in the kitchen at the same time, he’ll tell me the health benefits of his diet. The irony is, of course, the fact that he then spends most of the weekend getting sloshed but this seems not to have occurred to him.

The same four songs, though! I asked him why once and he told me it was the only tape he had.

I heard him crying in his room one Sunday, but we’re not supposed to notice each others foibles so nothing was said.

He’s the spit of Osama Bin Laden though he’s not middle eastern in any way. He’s as English as they come. He just has a sallow complexion to go with his gloomy mien and a similar style of beard and a bald dome. He tells me he thinks this is what repels women.

I suspect, he’s actually gay but is deeply ashamed of this.

This is bed-sit London Winchmore Hill style. Green Dragon Lane to be exact just down from a Spanish-style villa Michael Portillo used to live in before he lost his seat in ‘97.

There’s me and Osama, a gay Israelite and a blonde tarty looking girl who seems to prefer black guys downstairs and a white South African and a black Zimbabwean lady upstairs. We all use the communal kitchen and toilet which is downstairs. The toilet also has a really duff shower which dribbles water at you. The kitchen has a washing machine and a tumble dryer one or both of which is constantly in use and I’ve already annoyed everyone by requesting that nine in the evening be the ‘last wash’.

Sharing amenities with other folk is a pain but this is London early in the present century and for most, sharing is the only way unless you are earning loads. Thatcher wanted landlords to prosper not poor folk be housed by councils so this was the deal: sharing amenities with a bunch of total strangers until one had sold one's soul enough to afford to enter the property game or else move the fuck out of the giddy metropolis altogether.

The landlord was a merry Irish soul named, predictably, Mick, who’d made his wad in the building game and was now coining it by charging us all an extortionate rent to exist in his property. I told Mick that I’d once lived in County Wicklow and he seemed about as impressed as if I’d said once opened a can of beans with a brick. Mick had the one interest and that was rent.

Except for Osama. He’s worried about Osama.

“D’ye think he’s suicidal? I mean you said you heard him crying.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me. Lonely man in bedsit and all that!”

“And just the same four songs over and over?”

“Aye, and he may not be the only one who’s suicidal if he doesn’t stop playing them. I’m thinking of buying him some new tunes for Christmas”

Mick considers this.

“Sure I have some tapes in the house, meself”

“No Irish dirges and laments I hope?”

Two verses of ‘Kevin Barry’ and I think he’d be hanging from the light fitting!

Phony Footballer

William Bryant was looking out of the little training office window across at the terraced houses opposite. There was a woman sitting on what was quite obviously a toilet bowl. There were no curtains or shades to conceal her as she went about her business. Now she wiped herself and got up to re-arrange her undergarments and now she was looking at a mirror and fixing her hair. Should he pop over and inform her of her public display? Maybe she knew. Maybe she was some sort of exhibitionist and craved the attention. Maybe if he went over she’d pull hem inside and shag him. His young mind was fevered with such thoughts so much so that he had mentally cut himself off from the conversation behind him in the training room.

The trainer bloke was also a football coach for one of the lesser civil service teams. The Department of Employment Easy London Eleven or somesuch.

“So William! Eastcraigs Boys Club then a trial at the famous Celtic Boys Club? That’s some level”

He was an East Londoner but he knew his stuff and was clearly more interested in the football side of things than he was in ‘Customer Service: Dealing with Difficult Situations’. All in attendance worked in one London job centre or other so they all had to have some sort of briefing about folk going mental because they’d just had their money cut or had been told to go on some rubbish course or other to learn how to hold a pen and not spit at potential employers at interviews.

“Aye, aye, Eastcraigs, aye. Played up front, the number ten role”

William Bryant didn’t even know where Eastcraigs played. It was one of those prestigious boys football Mecca’s, he knew that.

“Tich Thompson’s hud Eastcraigs scouting him. Gen up!” and everybody gasped as if Tich Thompson had been invited to play the male lead in the new Emmanuel movie.

Why did he come out with these blatant lies? And why did he compound the felony with what he was about to say next.

“So you’ll come and give our wee team a try then William?”

“Aye, o aye. Look forward to it”

He’d never even played for his school team. In fact, when they were picking teams for a kick-a-boot he’d be way down the pecking order.

“O awrite, Bryant”

In football terms, his nickname would be ‘O awrite, Bryant’. A mediocrity who could just about kick a ball in the right direction towards the opposing teams goal and run after it.

The likes of Eastcraigs only catered for talented young boys, proto-Dalglishes and Baxter’s who had an obvious flare for the game. Not big drippy, lanky Willie Bryant who didn’t even have a pair of boots and would fall over them if he did.

This poor trainer guy was all excited now, like he’d found a pearl among the swine. He’d be away home for his tea and boring his wife with news of his lucky find.

He looked back over at the show-toilet to see if there was any more action and wondered why he had to put himself through such idle miseries.

Hiya!

You have to hand it to them. I mean, I couldn’t stick it for even an hour, sitting out there on the damp pavement outside LIDL or Tesco’s or next to the cash machines. I betcha they get dog’s abuse but not from me; they have my admiration.

I wonder if they hate us, yet they have to keep that cheery smile going, that ‘hiya’ which is possibly the only utterance they own in our language. ‘Hiya’ they go with a little supplication of a hand gesture inviting coinage or, perchance, notes.

God knows what they’re thinking. Probably they only have to achieve a level of income before they can go home and divi the spoils and we’re all walking by not even acknowledging their presence.

Makes perfect sense to me in this corrupt world of graft and avoidance. If you can make a living just by sitting on your arse and saying ‘hiya’ then fair play. While other folk are scurrying about delivering Amazon parcels to the wrong address or are zero-hour-contracted in some restaurant kitchen, these folk are prepared to sit in the cold for 8 or 10 hours while every one in a hundred flings them a pound.

I think maybe they are modern-day ascetics: those biblical folk who could sit in a cave and meditate for days on just a sip of fig juice and a morsel of unleavened bread. They’re probably tuned into some higher power or philosophy while we’re all tuned into our ruinous consumer culture, emerging from hypermarkets with trolleys full of plastic and baked beans.

Funny how we’re all trained to look down on the poor – in this case, literally - "bloody disgusting, coming over here and begging" – while the likes of Russian oligarchs and Saudi warlords are feted and fawned over and given every tax-break legal and otherwise. ‘Benefit scrounger’ is never on the same page as ‘hedge fund manager’ and ‘tax cheats’.

It’s easier, I guess, to disparage the powerless.

Good to Get Things Off Your Chest

I worked for Scottish Government for a while a few years ago and it was awful! The cliques, the pettiness, just awful. It reminded me of primary school though a lot less fun.

At the interview, of six ‘competency areas’ I scored six for each. 36 out of 36. I had a good degree and extensive research as well as life experience. So they stuck me on payroll, a role I was least suited to and utterly joyless. Except for this one guy, a nice fella who’d at least have a natter with you. I met him years later on Porty High Street and I asked him what his impressions were of working at SG. “Bloody terrible” he said “full of cliques and who you know. Like the bloody masons”

I remember a stale-mate with some sullen bitch on another section. She had the key to an archive cabinet I had to access on a fairly regular basis. In fact, oft-times I couldn’t do my job without it (legacy investigations – turgid, unfulfilling stuff but necessary). She did everything to prevent me accessing this key. The key belonged to her and her section and we couldn’t even get a copy of it for security reasons. No amount of argument could convince her and she believed she had right on her side. I went to the high heid-yins who hated me instantly for making it an issue as, palpably, they were scared of this lady and the least notion that they may be breaking any security regulations by a) insisting she share the key with me, or b) insisting on a copy.

I was stuck in a curious limbo and it would be me who would be blamed if my work was not being done due to not being able to access the archives.

I tried to get the union involved and, even though I’d been the only one to join a strike from my entire lily-livered section, but they wouldn’t touch it with the proverbial.

Eventually, the bitch-lady was encouraged to see her way to a compromise. If I gave three days notice and complete a request slip she’d devised giving reasons why I needed the key and promised to have it returned after every task then that would be OK with her.

Problem!

I couldn’t give her the reasons I needed it for security reasons.

As I say; primary school.

A Grove of Graves

Jake Taggart was eight years old and lonely. He was as lonely as a fish out in the ocean. As lonely as a star in the night sky. A lonely wee Scottish boy in this big city of Edinburgh. O he had his school and the other kids in the foster home. He had his Uncle Tam who gave him money for sweeties and gifts on his birthday and at Christmas. He had the Sensi at the karate club who always ruffled his hair and taught him little tricks from Jujitsu. But, he didn’t have a mum and dad, and this made him feel like a jigsaw puzzle with a big hole missing in the middle.

There was one place where he didn’t feel this loneliness, as if someone or something had plucked the awful sorrow straight out of him leaving him feeling light and filled with a strange relief and joy.

That place was the local graveyard.

Seafield graveyard has a tree-lined avenue running through its centre and in the summer months these trees are luscious and verdant and the sun sends beams through their branches to dapple the gravel pathway. The grave-stones, old and new, stand like sentries along its length.

‘Arthur Zebedee Brake’ died in in 1963 while only 48 yet his wife Jenny lived on another 40 years into the present century. Now here they were buried together. Jack liked the name Zebedee and wondered what the man had been like. Was he a sailor attached to the Leith docks, maybe? Jack had been told the story about scurvy and how it was in Leith that Rose’s lime cordial was invented which treated the disease. And what about Jenny, did she not find a replacement husband, or did she live the rest of her life as Arthur’s widow?

Jake was more interested in the lives of the dead than he was in the lives of the living. The dead were gentle somehow and couldn’t hurt him. He even resented other people coming into ‘his’ graveyard but accepted that they may well have more right to it, maybe having relatives buried here. He watched them. Saw how they tidied and fussed meticulously, not house-proud but grave-proud. Maybe they were making up for a lack of concern when the dead person was alive? As if somehow they had to wait until the loved one was dead before they could show tenderness.

“You spend too much time in that graveyard, wee Jake. It’s morbid!” This from his Uncle Tam who spent too much time in his favourite pubs up and around Leith Walk.

“Ye need to get yerself some pals that are among the living”

Jake dreaded being fostered again in case it took him far from this area. Although he cheered himself by knowing he’d find another graveyard. The dead were everywhere.

Chips and Vinegar

Glasgow is not-so-secretly proud of its wild rep (the wild west?). It likes the world to think we’re aw heid-the-ba’s. Edinburgh plays possum knowing that it too has its square-go masters, scheme’s where you’d be brave to live. A rep is hard to shift and masks a truer story. City of poverty and personal pain and too much drink and Presbyterians intent on repatriating Catholics at least to the scabby outlands. City of artists and poets and kindness and hippies.

“Whit aboot the swingin’ sixties, Da?”

“Didnae happen in East Kilbride, son!”

Hard, aye, but flawed like everyone else. Jimmy Boyle – a sculptor of faces.  Who would have known that underneath he was a sculptor….of faces?

It’s little wonder that in a city where it can be June in January and January in June that there a few mental anomalies. The wind skitters and squalls in Glasgow like thoughts in an errant mind. The rain drenches the colour out of your clothes leaving you free to fully understand the meaning of words like drab and dreich. When the sun eventually shines for that one week in August the city’s denizens barely have time to realise it and shed layers before it’s gone again and the world is once more monochrome.

Glasgow knows well over 152 different types of rain: as a boy I counted them, and not only that but each little district of Glasgow has rain that is synonymous with it. Toryglen has lashing, slanting rain that slashes horizontally up Prospecthill Road until you can escape it past Mount Florida. Carnwadric has a creeping misty drizzle which soaks you to your bones. The rain in the Gorbals is incessant and cold as if it has the flu and Springburn has April showers all year round in keeping with its name. In Shettleston, the grim trees droop with heavy precipitation until the wind scatters raindrops straight into the faces of passers-by. The word drizzle was invented in Dennistoun.

Glasgow is the city of rain. Even when it isn’t raining you have the feeling that it is in the post, it’s only having a breather to let the sewers empty. There’s been a black cloud hanging over Busby for the past seventy-five years, one day the sun peeked through and the Busbyites panicked, banging on church doors for untimely entry.

Glasgow is not twinned with other cities as contemporaries are; it is twinned with a rain forest in the Amazon Basin.

There’s something special about Glasgow but not as special as before when it seemed to feed on hardship often self-inflicted. Now it’s an old and new city ringed by motorways and carriageways to facilitate escape. Decisions have been made to make it look worse not better. Character has been replaced by the Gerry-built and temporary. Permanence replaced by fly-by-night. There’s more art and poetry in an auld Gorbals tenement than there is in the already-rusting new-builds that appear overnight like cankers. Once proud streets made non-descript by economics. Take a walk down Garscube Road a once bustling thoroughfare of bookies, gangsters, pubs and rain-mated wifie’s, now reduced to a strip of car dealerships and car wash outlets.

Something has been lost yet no-one seems to care. Progress they call it. I have a funny feeling that their idea of progress will lead to several different forms of cataclysm unless it is somehow stopped.

But Glasgow is just a place: just bricks and mortar, it disnae have a soul or a mind or a heart. The way we go on about it ye’d think it was alive, a living entity with thoughts and words and a script. It’s just a place we made up, a reflection of ourselves. Its churches were built by and for religious folk and Hillhead for the well-heeled. There were that many pubs cos we like a swally. We knocked down St Enoch’s cos we wanted a fancy mall and we chose First Bus cos it was cheap and maist of the Glesga folk were sick of all thae Irish tri-colours skitin’ about the toon.  And that river’s just a river that we dredged deep enough for the trading boats. The tobacco. The slaves. If you fell in it you’d get wet.

Glesga’s good and Glesga’s bad and everything else in between. It just happens to me toon and I have an inexplicable and abiding affection for it. Every time I smell chips and vinegar I think of it.

Glasgow is dialectic; a living document; a work in progress.

The Story of Isaac Tug-Gussett

It had come to Isaac Tug-Gussett in a dream of such clarity that he took it as a revelation. The reason he was doing so badly in life was that he was following to many norms. In other words, he was complying while failing. He was trying to be ‘good at computers’ but he wasn’t. He was trying to smooch and network but he was hopeless at this too. He was applying for jobs and not getting them. You talk too much, they said when he complied with their offer of feedback. You offer too little in your answers, would say another. Really, if they were honest they’d just say ‘Your face doesn’t fit well with us, Isaac Tug-Gussett. And what about that stupid name?’

So, in his dream it was clear. He should do the very opposite of what he’d been doing and here, in this simple methodolgy, he would find success. And, interestingly, it was at this point that the life of Isaac Tug-Gussett became infinitely less turgid and all the more interesting.

Since not being able to get a job had made him anxious and ill he decided he should claim Employment and Support Allowance as its name suggested sympathy and assistance. At his medical assessment which was conducted by an ex-binman named Hermann Monstrous who had surprisingly little medical experience or expertise he was asked what he felt his main health concerns were he replied.

“I believe I am the re-incarnation of popular and eclectic 1970s TV personality Roy Castle and that one day I’m going to die and come back as a shoe”

Mr. Monstrous sat stunned for a while before a cunning smile crossed his face.

“But you and Roy Castle were alive at the same time”

“Yes, I know. That’s what makes it all the more worrying!”

He was immediately put on the Higher Rate of support.

Emboldened, he turned up four and a half hours late for every appointment.

“I have my own time-zone” he would inform any disgruntled party who asked “Yours is a con and I refuse to comply with it. I’ve also banished November and December from my life so don’t try calling”

Isaac gained notoriety for his approach and word spread to newspapers and local radio and television. They all vied to interview him and all learned to turn up four and a half hours late for appointments with him. When they did this he applied new rules and was there in place at the original time they had stated though they, unfortunately, never were. This illusiveness only intrigued him more.

Soon employers offered him interviews that sometimes lasted hours, sometimes merely seconds depending on his whim and he never took the jobs they offered anyway.

He recorded a song ‘I Hate Christmas and I Hope You All Die Horribly’ and it was a solid number one for seven weeks over the festive period.

He found he had a following of people who refused to comply with norms and began to conduct themselves in increasingly quirky and contrarian ways: sitting on the top of trains instead of inside, sneezing in the face of lovers at the point of ejaculation, and one chap from Kirkcaldy even went to the extreme of picking fights with Americans on social websites.

It got to the point where being abnormal became the norm. Weak economies became vibrant and strong economies collapsed, near-celibates became sex-worshippers, church-goers began openly laughing at beggars on the street and the political system revealed itself to be the self-seeking sham it really was.

For Isaac Tug-Gussett the world became boring again. No matter what he did, how abhorrent or divergent his actions, the world applauded him. On Graham Norton he called the host ‘a bland arse-licker, probably literally’ and the camp Irishman roared with pleasure like he was going to orgasm on the spot (which maybe he did). On Newsnight, he asked Emily Maitlis if she had an eating disorder and called Boris Johnson a ‘blustering chump that even the thickest folk had seen through ages ago’. The PMs popularity rating sky-rocketed overnight.

Asked if he had designs on political office he replied that he would if he could sing Proclaimers songs all through Prime Ministers Questions.

Nothing he said shocked anyone anymore and he quickly became passe and disappeared from the public view.

O and he also lost his benefit for proving he was ‘fit for work’. Hermann Monstrous masturbated for the first time in years at the news.

The Devil's Proctologist

Tam Strang was just an ordinary guy from Northfield Broadway near Portobello on the east side of Edinburgh. Folk knew him as ‘Tam’ that worked as something other at ‘The Royal’ up at Little France. He went for a pint most Friday and Saturday evenings at The Scottie and there had once been a girlfriend but that relationship had kind of fizzled-out though no-one knew precisely why or ever even bothered to ask. Tam kept himself pretty much to himself so he didn’t invite enquiry. He supported the Hibs and for all anyone knew lived a quiet, unassuming life.

How little they knew! How very little.

For many years he was ‘employed’ by a very special individual on an as-and-when basis in a very peculiar role indeed. A role you couldn’t have guessed in a million years.

He was, in fact, the devil’s proctologist! Satan’s arse-doctor if you wanted to be crude about it. For Auld Nick for all his beastly powers was shit-scared (excuse the pun) of prostate cancer.

So Tam Strang was a trained proctologist, then? Well, no he wasn’t, but he owed the devil fella big time and the devil knew he could trust Tam Strang to keep his secret. Plus, it was actually quite easy to detect the onset or otherwise of prostate cancer and if Tam with his digit up the The Prince of Darkness’ dung tunnel detected any thickening of that little donut then that was enough for the devil to know.

Tam secretly suspected that the Earl of Hell had a liking for human objects up his rectum but had nowhere near the guts to even think as much though the cigarette afterwards and the sighs of satisfaction spooked the hell out of Tam, a profoundly heterosexual man.

One day he was sitting in the Famous Five Stand at Easter Road for a Hibs v Motherwell game. Nothing each at half-time and a pretty dull affair. Tam screwed the lid off his flask which contained his auld Ma’s delicious broth when this figure came and sat down in the seat beside him.

“Big man’s in a state. Says there was a speck o’ blood on one of his stools. In a pure panic about it. You know the score”

“Kin it no’ wait tae efter the game?”

“Nut!!”

“Fuck-sake”

The devil has a special portal for gaining entry to hell. Unfortunately for Tam the Hibbie it was up at Tynecastle.

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