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.