Besotted

Have you ever been besotted? I know I have, and it’s not the best idea. Eyes meet across crowded room sort of carry on then can’t leave each other’s side for a second kind of style. Gradually, over the next weeks and months, you discover other stuff; the ‘real’ stuff of folk’s lives. The criminal insanity and the love affair with next doors Pomapoo. The uncle that no-one talks about and the fact emerges that the entire family supports a team fae Govan.

That was the case with Charlie McBride and his Doreen. Got her up the duff and had to marry her and from then on his life wasn’t worth living. It became apparent over time that she was a devotee of the Russian monk, Rasputin who had once beguiled the Tsarina and had been bludgeoned to death and thrown into the Nevka River (she said he had ‘soft eyes’).

Doreen and her mates would have ‘Rasputin nights’ when there would be wild talk of stealing horses and pornographic Tupperware with Boney M blasting away in the background. Their poor kid she even named Grigori and sent him to school wearing a cowl.

Things came to a head when she demanded flagellation. Charlie could only find a fish slice which failed to satisfy her need for pain while he stumbled over words reading her extracts from Doctor Zhivago.

Strangely, he met a Russian lassie named Tatiana and they now live in a two bed up in Castlemilk.

Doreen settled down wi’ a riveter called Davie. He disnae even know who Rasputin is.

But he soon will.

The Hostess

Frank McTaggart, landlord of The Pished As Fuck’ public house in Clerwood liked to dress up as people who were ‘vaguely familiar but no-one could quite put a finger on who they actually were’.

They’d say “who is that, they’re vaguely familiar?” and the response would always be “I’m not quite sure. Can’t quite bring the name to mind”

Another would say (cos Clerwood folk are aye on the look-out for famous folk) “is that no’ that David Dickenson aff the telly, old cheap as chips?” and another would tut and reply “don’t be stupit, that’s Ellen Bell’s lassie, Cheyenne. She’s jist back fae Tenerife”

Frank would torment his customers by appearing behind the bar looking a vagueness, a simulacrum of somebody that might or might not have been well known, and even if they were, they weren’t really all that well known in the first place.

Punters would be gaun daft “Did he play once with Nazareth?” “The lassie fae Niddrie that won the lottery?” “Cannae be Bible John!”

When, in fact, he’d dressed and made-up to look like a boy that had played twice for the Hibs first team in pre-season friendlies but had since drastically changed his hair stlyle. Plus, it was all 20 years ago.

Some man, the Frank…!

Parasite

“Sure everyone should pull their weight if they can” so said Tommy McCracken, only two of his bellies hanging over the not so sturdy table in the bar of The Marksman

“I’m a great avocado of the welfare state but it’s gone too far, surely?” This was a rhetorical question for Tommy McCracken had no interest in being interrupted.

The mad McCracken was half man half drinking machine. When he urinated in the mornings the very fumes had the effect of re-inebriation. He didn’t so much drink as ‘guzzle’ alcohol in much the same way as a 4x4 guzzles petrol. A key difference that the large petroleum corporations had any interest in fighting any wars whatsoever over Tommy McCracken.

Drink makes a man many things: drunk being the foremost of these, but also aggressive, morose, excessively merry and imprisoned. With Tommy McCracken, it made him none of these things. Instead he became moral philosopher, judge, jury, chat show guest and chief arbiter of the world around him.

No subject was below or above him. ..

Climate change: away ye go. Weather’s aye changin’. Jist look at Bonnyrigg!

The Middle-East – They heid towels in that roasting heat would make anyone bad-tempered!

What is a parallel universe? and could there potentially be ones that contain doppelgängers of everyone on Earth?  - If there are, says Tommy, they’ll be drinking in The Central Bar…!

Such a man as Tommy McCracken is a human phenomenon. A man who knows very little about anything but believes he knows everything about everything.

You’ll find his like in every town…!

Lighthouses

See at first, they didn’t want the lighthouses. The beach scrimagers and the coastal dwellers. Hated the very idea. They’d rather sailors continued to perish in their thousands than have a big shining light to save them from their doom.

Shipwrecks were a livelihood for these communities. They’d go to church and pray for shipwrecks. See where you see the lighthouses now? Well, that’s where ships used to founder on the rocks most often. Round the Lothians and up in Angus and further and over west in Ayrshire. Christ! Have you ever seen the western islands? Death-traps everywhere.

Naw they had no interest in the lighthouses. It was the shipping merchants and the insurers that says haud oan a minute here, we’re losing millions! Get them built.

Try building a lighthouse on top of the rocks in the middle of the North Sea. I bet you couldnae do it! 

Funereal Fancies

I don’t know why but I’ve long been attracted to women in the funeral industry. Maybe it’s the black clothing and the necessarily sombre looks? Maybe I associate sex with death? I’m sure an analyst could have a field day with it. Maybe I want to make love in the bowels of a crematorium or in a coffin or something, I’m not sure. This affliction, if such it is, is beginning to get me noticed around several of the funeral shops in the local area and I’m going to have to stop visiting them before I get arrested for stalking. I’ve even started visiting them in disguise but I don’t think they’re fooled.

“How much are your value funerals?” I’ll ask.

“You mean our Customized Plan funerals, sir! Well,….”

“Is there a two-for-one deal?”

“I don’t know what you mean, sir”.

By this time, she’s a little flustered. She’s blonde, around forty, black skirt and waistcoat over a crisp white blouse. I visualise its black stockings she’s wearing but it’s more likely tights. It’s the third time I’ve been in in a fortnight and I don’t think she’s buying the false beard and the crutches. I look like a size foot four Long John Silver and I’ve actually got a blow-up parrot which I stupidly forgot to bring.

I hobble out pretending disgruntlement and move on to the next establishment where the receptionist is small but perfectly proportioned.

Seafield Sanctuary

Brian Dunt spent far too much time hanging around graveyards, but they held a fascination for him. They also offered him a sense of peace and serenity that he could not seem to find in any other arena of life if you’ll excuse the inadvertent pun.

At school, he had been treated as no better than a punch bag, and now at work – although they couldn’t actually hit him – they sniggered at him and denied him keys to important cupboards.

For Brian, the cemetery offered him an avenue of placidity and, within its outlay, of trees. An avenue of beech trees served as its centre aisle and often, in the summer months, the sun dappled through the rich verdancy on to the very bench he chose to sit on opposite his mentor and very great friend, Arthur Zebedee Brake.

Of course, he hadn’t known Arthur in any way other than this present relationship. He, Brian Dunt, born April First 1968: he, Arthur, died July 26^th 1963. They’d missed each other by a mere five years or so but, well, it may as well have been a lifetime!

When the weather was clement a gentle breeze whispered its way around the headstones and rustled the ancient stems left by folk that, for all we knew, were now gone themselves. Maybe they even shared the grave where they’d placed the once-vibrant blooms. Graveyards are full of such metaphors.

Brian Dunt ruminates as he sits in the soothing shade.

Arthur asked me the other day if he was buried anywhere near The Links. I told him he was right next to them and he was well pleased by this, even gave a little sigh of satisfaction as if this was a puzzle he’d needed answering for quite some time. How are The Hibs doing, he’d asked. Still Turnbull, Bobby Johnson, Ormond and all of those? I had to tell him naw, that was all long gone, though they’d finally managed a Scottish Cup in 2016. At this, he fair roared. Neever, he shouted in disbelief. Aye three-two against Rangers at Hampden. This seemed to make him even more delighted. Never could stand those bastards, he rumbled from beneath the soil.

I ask him about his middle name. Mother. Religious nutter. I ask him how he died and there is silence. He will tell me, though, that he worked in a local brewery. Well, Younger’s in Abbeyhill. Tram up Easter Road. Still got the trams. Naw, nae mair trams, Arthur. Unless you count the big fancy wan cost millions runs along Princes Street.

In all this time he asks Brian Dunt nothing about his own life.

Some folk are just self, self, self.

These days Brian talks Mrs Euphemia McLaughlin who died aged 83 in 1924. At least she asks if he’s married.

The Toy Coffin

When I was young my mum had a friend who lived out on Great Western Road – let’s call her Mrs Mavor, for I’ve forgotten her name and I don’t want to upset my old mum by asking her. The whole thing left quite a bad taste. Mrs Mavor appeared a kindly old soul but whenever I was left alone with her, which, admittedly, wasn’t very often, she began to behave very oddly indeed.

“D’ye like the lassies, ma wee man, or will it be the boys for you? Yes, I think the boys”

Then my mum would re-appear with the tea tray – Mrs Mavor pretended to be less able than she actually was – and everything would be bland and normal again.

Then, on a visit some days before a Christmas and just after I’d turned seven or eight, Mrs Mavor gave me a gift. It was quite well wrapped in Christmas paper, but I could tell immediately by its shape that this was no ordinary gift that you might give a young boy; an Action Man or a board game.

As was traditional I was told not to open it before Christmas day and when we got home I laid it under the tree with the other gifts. I was spooked though because somewhere in my young psyche I knew exactly what it was.

Sure enough, come the big day, me and my tiny brother were up at the crack of dawn and everything was excitement. My da got the tea and toast on and we settled down to open the presents. My mum loved the mittens and the bar of Old Jamaica I’d carefully wrapped for her and my da got his after shave and a nice new comb. My wee brother who was only two got some wee sweeties and a nice wool bonnet my ma had knitted. There was one present remaining and it was the one from Mrs Mavor.

“Open it then, son. I’m dying to see what it is. It looks so strange”

I lifted it up, gulped a bit, then peeled the paper away to reveal, horror of horrors…!

A tiny wooden coffin!

A tiny wooden, brown coffin with miniature handles and wee screws for you to screw it tight shut. Inside was a satiny fabric all ruffled and bright red and, lying there, a doll the size of a toy soldier which looked exactly like me!

I froze in horror, but the most horrifying thing was the reaction of my mum and dad.

“Oh, look at that” they cooed almost as one. My little brother gurgled gleefully in my mum’s arms and reached out to touch the macabre toy.

“What an unusual toy” my dad exclaimed with his eyes wide and a big smile on his face.

“But…!” I spluttered, horrified at this affable reaction to what to me was a terrifying event.

“How thoughtful” chirped my mother merrily as if what in front of her wasn’t the distressing sight of her own son being portrayed in miniature in the worst piece of furniture that anyone could possibly gaze upon.

“And so well made” proclaimed my dad who was by trade a woodworker.

I still have that toy coffin, and, because of its existence, I make a point of never straying over to the west of the city. It gives me the creeps.

Mrs Mavor died - thankfully - before my mum had the chance to drag me over there once more. My mum attended the funeral and said it was a shame it was so poorly attended as Mrs Mavor was a lovely, gentle and kind person.

Was she fuck!

The Walk to Muswell Hill

Muswell Hill is at the top of Londonworld. Home of the botoxed and well-to-do Bohemians and marketing consultants, it offers a panoramic view of the city and the Surrey Downs as clear and open as this fresh-warm April day.

This is a ‘desirable’ area. Not the most desirable but in the top quarter. I have no idea what people do for a living to be able to live in such a place but I’m pretty sure it’s nothing I can offer. Hampstead, Highgate ‘then’ Muswell Hill, and if you’re only ‘assistant’ head of media and marketing (without portfolio) at BafflingFuckWittery Productions, then maybe it’s only Palmer’s Green for now.

There are Turks in Palmer’s Green, young and old, possibly even Greeks bearing gifts from Iceland. It’s The Mediterranean in north London, though they tone down the natural macho-ness so as not to unnerve the local Guardian-reading intelligentsia. Big cars and kebab shops, songs of home. Work, family, property and maybe the od Besiktas game live at the local social club. London is multi-cultural but its cultures can be insular and exclusive.

 

Broomfield Park is where Stevie Smith wrote her poems of humanity. She told us there was angst and sadness behind the frilly curtains. ‘Not waving but drowning’. Today the park is well attended and the sun shines on the frolics of all God’s children (it is Holy Week, after all). I thought I saw a sketcher but it turned out she was uncovering numbers on a scratch-card with a new pound coin.

People live in Bounds Green. There is a Bounds Green Community. I have nothing more to add about Bounds Green except it leads one to Alexandra Park Road where, at least, they felt a little pinch of guilt when they didn’t vote for Jeremy Corbyn (I suspect the politically bland Sir Keir is far more their kidney). Canny, muesli-fed urban gentry with a social conscience that stretches as far as the Amnesty International stall at the weekly Farmer’s Market where a chunk of organic cheddar will cost you half your ESA payment.

And on, further up the hill.

In Muswell Hill, I look for newly knighted Ray Davies ambling around the charity shops looking for copies of his own albums and rueing the utter absence of a ‘Working Man’s Café’ in his native area. No chance, Ray. You’d sooner find a TKMaxx or a shop that sells lice-powder. This is designer coffee-shop land. This is where the charity shops charge more than the book originally cost. This is where there is a ‘craft’ porridge and muesli shop. This is where the down-at-heel genius, Vivien Stanshall set himself ablaze after doing a George Price and giving the local derelicts the run of the house. The Ginger Geezer went up in ginger flames.

I head back to Enfield Town after a pleasing visit with my brother and his karate-tough daughter, past Green Dragon Lane where, in some shared amenities accommodation, I uncharacteristically hit a man because he annoyed me intensely.

Enfield Cricket Club epitomises much, but what it epitomises most is an ‘easy’ Englishness: the yeoman class at play with maybe the odd Thane in charge. The Englishness of moderation in all or most things. Of vying for promotion. Play up and play the game but win at all costs. Mike Gatting lives around here, ex-England captain who took the Packer cash and went to apartheid South Africa.

Beardy little tit. May his testicles shrivel and forever smell strongly of mushrooms.

White Lady Got the Blues!

Eddie had an ear for the blues, pretty good player too. That’s why he had enrolled at Camden Community College, because they offered classes on playing the blues. Strange thing was all the other cats were white, except Eddie. Twenty-one white cats, one white tutor and Eddie, the only black guy in the class.

Can white folk play the blues? This white lady he’d been talking to – or she’d been talking to him – nice lady, well-dressed, well-groomed, well-mannered, lives in Belsize Park. Why does she want to play the blues? What has she got the blues about? Nobody’s hittin’ down on her. Why then?

“I so looove the blues”

 

Eddie started thinking. He thought she better have something to sing the blues about, and he emphasised the word ‘better’ in his head. Then, he revised that thought. Maybe she just likes the ‘sound’ of blues music. A lot of white folk do. In fact, mostly white folk do. Black folk don’t seem to bother with it. To be reminded of it. It is redolent of booze, tragedy and virtual illiteracy. It’s borne of poverty and hard times. Why would you want reminding of that? Its only champion was white folk. Some made money from it; others loved it for another reason.

He asked the lady “Why?”

She answered “It’s soooo authentic”

It sure is.

The Anniversary Dinner

Kenny's Ma and Da were always giving him problems, and this was no different. It seemed, at least according his sister, Agnes, a self-employed pin-seller from Kinning Park, that his parents wanted a very special event when commemorating their 50th wedding anniversary. (Kenny had been thinking of buying them a 'buy-one-get-one-free' funeral plan.)

Basically, they wanted celebrity chef, the three-Michelin-starred, Gordon Ramsay to cook a special meal.

Kenny decided to write him a letter, which went like this..

"Dear Gordon, face like a bag of chisels Rangers supporting bastard’ Ramsay,

Please consider cooking a special meal for my folk's Golden wedding anniversary. No expense spared for this magical occasion.

Yours Kenny McTim-Tim"

Despite the tone of this request, Ramsay agreed he would but wanted a rough outline about what to cook.

A further correspondence...

"Dear Orange poofy drawers,

My father has rarely eaten anything other than minced beef. Recent medical examinations have shown that he may actually consist of 100% of the stuff. Doctors are stunned. The only time, during WW2, as a prisoner of the Japanese, that he had no access to mince; he chose to eat his own foot rather than the meagre rice offered.

If your eventual dish consists of anything other than mince, and/or it is in any way exotically garnished i.e. with herbs or spices, I predict that he will aim sharp cutlery at your groinal area. Carrots, onion, and no more than half an Oxo cube will suffice.

Also, for pudding; custard or evaporated milk is acceptable as is rice pudding. However, this must be accompanied by mince or cling-peaches. Please note that pineapple chunks are considered perverted and inflammatory north of the Tweed.

Hope this helps. Your money will be under the wally dug on the side-board.

PS No Rangers songs, even during food preparation".

He never replied...!

Ghosts And Giants

There was a time when you could still buy five Park Drive. When men wore bum-freezer jackets and the young women all looked like the Queen. The air was different back then: it was redolent of grease and the smell of fish and chip shops, sour pale ale, and farts parped beside coal fires. My grandparents smelled of apples and Pledge and welcomed you at the door cheerily then were parsimonious within. Sex had only just been invented and, somewhere near Blantyre a man saw his wife naked for the first time after eight years of marriage and filed for divorce.

Chimneys were set alight on a regular basis by burning sheets of The Citizen, a paper which regularly published my father’s socialism in letter form and his opinion on away grounds that he’d watched his beloved Celtic play at. For this reason, he was never again safe to visit Motherwell.

The weather was either gloomy or bright. When the wind blew it moved the slates on the roof. Public transport wasn’t necessary as one simply spread one’s coat like wings and hang-glid to nearby towns and back again with the reverse wind.

Men seemed perpetually drunk and women became expert at concealing black eyes with subtle make-up. If a wife had a ‘good man’ it meant he gave her ‘house-keeping’ promptly on a Friday evening then stayed at home to watch Z-Cars.

 Kids sought out scrambles at the weekend where substantial silver and copper was fought over then spent on gobstoppers and ice poles.

Auld Rosie the Jewish woman from upstairs traded pans of soup and potato fritters and matzo bread in exchange for loans for bottles of sherry wine. I wish I had been older and able to speak to Rosie and ask her gently about her life. Never easy being Jewish anywhere in the world, it seemed, always folk had something snidey against them. Maybe she had folk who hadn’t survived the Nazis? Maybe there was a reason for her proclivity toward the booze?

No-one seemed to be bored or depressed though there was talk that the women from the corner house had swallowed weed-killer and died a painful death. Everyone else made daisy-chains and got on with ‘things’.

Protestants joined The Boy’s Brigade, Catholics couldn’t even if they’d wanted to.

Language, certainly in the male world, seemed to be at a premium, like too much was to be given away by the use of words, though the women chirruped away like startled budgies when their men-folk were not around. Rumours spread around small communities like oxygenated bush-fires “Her man’s been sacked for organising a strike” “She’s left him and gone to live with yon gym teacher from the school. It’s the weans teacher, I believe” “Aye, tinned mince she served up. I heard he flung it at the wall”.

An aeroplane in the sky still evoked ‘ooohs’ and ‘aahs’.

Dougie Somner who later played for Partick Thistle crashed his Da’s car into the wall across the street.

My own father chucked a blazing chip pan out the kitchen window onto the wee verandah. You could still see the dent in the tarmacadam many years later.

One of the kids at school, a posh kid whose father was a doctor, invited me to tea at his house up near Brouster Hill. His house seemed like a gothic manse with a football-field sized garden at the back. His mother served us egg and chips for tea. Surely not their usual fare (I envisaged an Elizabethan banquet with hog’s heads and quails eggs). Were they dumbing down on the food to accommodate the council house boy? Kindness or patronage? Even at a young age I was class conscious.

As a child, I lived in an invisible world among trees and burns and the far-away (which was in reality no further than a five-mile radius). My imaginary friends, Solly and Bobo, were sufficient company to me. Where their names came from I have no idea but I was to fall out with Solly who emigrated to become a successful bookmaker in Australia. Bobo seemed to dissipate from the arena of my consciousness over time and as I got older, but I know he waits for me in the ether and, now in my fifties it is maybe time for a re-acquaintance, though I will now be like a grandparent to him, frozen as he is in time and on my whim.

I lived among trees and yet never knew their names. To me, they were giant climbing frames. Even to this day, I can size up a tree for climbing possibilities: where to put my feet for successful elevation. Yes, I think I’ll take that up again before it’s too late. Such a deciduous world, the verdant world of trees, and it’s true that they speak to each other, though their voices are not for human ears.

 I think I saw a giant in the woods next to Murray Primary. A huge, spindly man with sharp teeth. He may even have looked at me. I couldn’t say; I was running away.

All my life, I’ve yearned to believe in ghosts and giants in the woods…!

Righter Than White

 Charles ‘Horst’ Wessell was so right-wing he’d almost fallen off the human spectrum altogether. Capital punishment, hormone treatment for homosexuals (of which persuasion, hypocritically, he was a roaring example), women all-but lashed to kitchen furniture, the de-abolition of slavery – there really was nothing too right-wing for him. He made Thatcher seem like a political bed-fellow of her nemesis, Arthur Scargill (Wessell thought she should have had all striking miners deported to Van Dieman’s Land, or, failing that, Scotland, which he considered an even worse fate).

Indeed, further, than merely give ‘the whinging Jocks’ their independence, Wessell believed the land of Britain should be cleaved apart physically by some super-heavy cutting machinery, leaving Scotland stranded alone in the cold winds of ‘reality’ with England (and reluctantly, Wales) in the deserving sunshine, isolated and supreme.

He also prided himself on never having read a book. “Nothing to be learned from some perv, lefty author that can’t be learned between the willing thighs of a good woman or a horse” was what he proclaimed at the book group he insisted on joining every Friday night at the local library who’s membership now consisted of only himself and a deaf woman who turned up to save on her heating.

The attractive thing about the far-right is that it has no critical or analytical tendencies. It harks to primitive urges as if the intellectualism of the enlightenment had never occurred. It asks you only to turn up at events and shout violent support for whatever neo-jackboot opportunist that wants to make a few bob selling swastika fridge magnets.

Wessell now had 174 swastika fridge magnets and was hoarse from shouting.

That he was married to twenty-four year-old stunner, Simone O’Foreigner was, to him, no anomaly. Many a good English bigot took a foreign wife. Witness half the Kings of England (granted, not too many of them were actually English) and Sir Nigel Farage who even has a foreign name.

Charles, who had sexual perversions the Earl of Hell himself would blanche that, was proud to be called a white supremacist. The irony was that, like all others of that bigotted persuasion, no-one else could work out what precisely was supreme about him.

 

Birkenhead Blues

I don’t remember why but I do remember being a somewhat mature paper boy in the Birkenhead/Tranmere area. The Wirral Globe it was but not just the local rag but all the bloody supplements as well. Must have been I badly needed even the meagre income offered by this arduous task. Last term of degree and having just been ejected from the nuptial home I needed all the cash I could get just to cross the academic line.

 I lived in a room above a restaurant run by a Dutch couple. This was Higher Tranmere and I had a view of the boats and ships on the Mersey. They were a friendly couple and typically Dutch and pragmatic. Now and again, they’d pass up to me a delicious lemon meringue pie that was going spare. Ironically, what with me and P splitting up, the Dutchers asked us to be witnesses at their registry office marriage.

 I was expecting a few papers to trot around with but what they delivered for me was two or three big bundles which all had to be put into order then hoiked about in a big in two or three shifts. Fourteen quid for all this they were getting their money’s worth.

 If I had encountered one or two lonely, negligee’d nubiles it wouldn’t have been so bad but all I got was Birkenhead in all weathers and, believe me, Birkenhead is not one of the world’s top tourist attractions. Once you’ve seen the auld motorbikes and pianola’s in the Williamson Gallery and commented on how the park was the model for the bigger one in Manhatten that’s it, it’s the Tam O’Shanter urban farm or fuck all!

 I used to stand weeping and skint at the Wirral entrance of the Mersey Tunnel praying that a driver would stop and give me a lift through to the light on the other side. I even visited Bootle once for a bit of light relief.

 Eventually, I achieved parole and secured a move to Southport which, after the old Head of Birken, was like fucking Las Vegas in comparison. Southport was Funland while Birkenhead was like being a gay atheist in the heart of the American Bible Belt. I mind once taking my girlfriend to the local picture house and being taken aback by the audience standing for God Save the Queen at the end and being glared it Deliverance style for failing to follow suit.

 I should have fled right there and then but she was house price conscious so that was that. From the nice wee flat I’d secured for us through the LHT on Princes Ave to the outer darkness beyond the wide river and eventually reduced to delivering the local rag. A heartbroken delivery boy. A weeping, disconsolate local news courier.

The Dancin'

“Time is a tangle in her head”

We sit, she indoors, me by the door of her conservatory.

“Am I going a bit doolally, David?”

“Of course not. We all forget things!”

With some older folk, the memory of things fifty years ago are vivid and precise while they can’t remember what they were talking about 10 seconds ago. The dancing is a case in point. For various cultural reasons, working-class Scottish folk were ‘dancin’ daft’ back in the day.

It was where you met your future husband or wife. If you were a bloke you ‘goat a lumber’ and you walked her home and if you ‘clicked’ you saw her again and so it went. The dancing was like a dating agency only it existed in a smoky world and there was crinoline involved.

Auld Margaret here met ‘her man’ at the dancing in Edinburgh. My own ma and da met at the dancing in Glasgow. She tells me she and her pal, both from The Colonies off Leith Links, would go to The Plaza up in Morningside their logic being that they were likely to meet a better class of man up there, and so it proved. Margaret married a polis who rose up the ranks to become an Inspector like Rebus.

I think my own ma and da met at The Locarno on Sauchiehall Street and their second ‘date’ was at The Barrowland where my da was due to sing in a competition.

“See if your da had been rid-rotten, son?”

“Aye, maw”

“You and yer brother widnae be here”

Me and wee Alan exist because of a cultural phenomenon and the fact my da could hold a tune!

Bryant and the Spider

“In Salutem Omnium

For the safety of all that means in the language of the Romans. In Salutem Omnium. And never has that Latin phrase been more appropriate to humankind.”

The spider in the bath didn’t seem to be listening. Bryant thought of the murky life of this spider he’d decided to name ‘Spidey’. Living down a plug-hole only to appear in the bath and get chased back down again; down into the murky, clatty depths with all the pubes and molecules of shite.

Maybe he, Bryant, would endeavour to give his new friend a better life-style than that. Maybe he’d pick the wee – well, quite big – fella up and place him on a plump cushion in front of the fire and treat him to a few choice nibbles from the fridge.

Had it really come to this? Befriending a spider? And yet…

This little black beast was more the artist than Bryant would ever be, capable as it was of weaving webs of fabulous intricacy simply to catch its food. The more art-sensitive flies gave themselves up to the fatal masterpiece simply for the love of it. Like Dali crucifying himself because he appreciated the image of it so much.

One day this spider would die, maybe down this very plughole, and its death would go unnoticed by all of the living beings then on the planet or in any of the many universes. What was its purpose: to keep down the fly population by a few hundred? Or, very probably it has created other spiders in its place.

“Spidey, son. You and me is gonnie be pals”

Again, silence. Spiders were good friends if you liked one-sided conversations.

The Blaes Pitches

Playin’ fitba’ on a blaes pitch wi’ a mouldmaster ba’, that’s what being a kid in Scotland wis aw aboot back in the day. Sado-masochism for twelve-year-olds. Freezin’ cauld day, wind howlin’ roon the flats, thon really cauld rain that seems tae be jist a spit but has ye soddin’ in a matter of seconds. Yon drookit wiy where ye end up wi’ the flu and a boattle o’ Ferguzade beside yer sick-bed.

A Mouldmaster. A mouldie It’s made wi’ the same hard plastic they coat submarines wi’. It’s lethal. When it hit you, say on a thigh or, Christ help us, on yer ear it made a sound like ‘PANG’ and yir bodilly part was screaming such pain to yer brain or vice versa that you though ye’d die of it. Death by mouldmaster! It wisnae funny.

Or the blaes pitch, made fae cinders or the clinkers from the devil’s arse. Take a skid on that and you needed a skin transplant. There’s be bits embedded in yer knees for weeks. You could only imagine the goalies, who hud tae dive around on it were daein it as a punishment either that or they must have been sick bastards who loved pain.

Goalies have iy been a different breed. I palled around wi’ this guy once in London, lovely chap by the dodgy name of Richard Head. Either his parents were as innocent as lambs else they wur takin’ the piss! Auld Richard wis a mad hockey goalkeeper where no’ only have ye goat that mad wee puck thing but the players have goat sticks anaw tae rattle yer jaw wi’.

He wis one of thae mad fuckers just like ma da only wi’ ma da it wis fitba’. I remember him in goal in a ‘friendly’ game over at the pitches. In my mind I see him burlin’ oot at some centre-forward arms and legs flailing like some demented dervish and virtually attacking the poor guy before he could shoot.

“Take it easy, big man” said the visibly quaking forward.

“Aaaargggghh!!” responded my father as if to further emphasise his ferocity.

The Violent Poetry of the Lower Reaches of Scottish Football.

Gala Fairydean. Inverness Caledonian Thistle. Auchinleck Talbot. Hamilton Academicals. Hawick Royal Albert. These are names to send shivers down the spine (quite literally if you were ever to attend a game around this time of year). There are names like Crunchie McCracken who played for an always doomed East Stirling team that isn’t even in Stirling. Harry Haddock who was a 1950s legend for Clyde a team who now play nowhere near that particular river but in Cumbernauld, an open prison in Lanarkshire.

My father used to take me to the odd junior football match. Calling it ‘junior’ gives the impression of a juvenile pursuit practised by fresh-faced innocents when this was anything but the case. ‘Junior’ simply denotes that it was not ‘Senior’ football. Its teams were populated with could-have beens, has-beens, and might-still-have-beens and it was not football for the faint-hearted, in fact sometimes it was barely football at all but barely-legal thuggery.

He took me to see Pollock Juniors down at Newlands. They were playing Langside Institute for the Criminally Insane Thistle. I swear there was a wide burn with prams in it running through the middle of the pitch and at least one of the full-backs had a gun. Ten minutes into the second-half there was a loud scream as Pollock’s centre-forward, an ex-Nazi named Martin Bormann, attempted to amputate the opposing goalies head with a flick-knife.

It ended in a boring nil-nil draw.

Fatherless Females Only

I’ve heard that girls – women – are only ever looking for a version of their fathers in the spouses they choose and, through experience, I believe there is some truth in that. Indeed, a previous girlfriend of mine actually married a chap with the same name as her father and from what I gathered he was almost as tediously boring.

P’s father would only, it seemed, ever converse about table tennis, a pursuit he was passionate about in his plodding way. This was a man who could turn everything monochrome just by walking into a room: any vivacity or amusement that had previously existed would of an instant end.

This was true of another girlfriends father, as well. I was an academic which he didn’t credit as ‘real work’. He was one of these cunts that was really good at DIY and didn’t mind flaunting the fact, particularly, it seemed, as I was good-for-nothing in this department. I was to joinery and crafts what Harold Shipman was to the bedside manner. One year this girlfriend – a veritable pot-head of a girl – bought me a toolbox full of tools, presumably in the forlorn hope that I would emulate old Tommy Walsh there.

I’ve put in an ad in this new online dating site Lonesomebutgantin.com. See what you think?

“Fatherless female with horny mother wanted. I’m sick of DIY, if you know what I mean? No-one from Paisley area need apply”

I thought at one time of marrying P. But, only if she would tell me the other letters in her name!