Mark Us Doon Fur a Five, Son

I breathed in this morning world in which the dew hung heavy and succulently on the grass. My father would get me up early on these summer no-school mornings and we’d head up the two miles to the Corpy golf course.

“They don’t use tees on this course, son, they use Tennant’s lager cans!”

Through glades and lanes and industrial sites from Kennishead High Flats to Deaconsbank golf course within the confines of Rouken Glen, a large and pretty park area on the far southern outskirts of Glasgow, probably it was even in East Renfrewshire where my father’s aspirant parents used to live in Clarkston before retirement to the leafy lanes of Ayr. When I think of Rouken Glen I think of large rhododendron bushes and tiny waterfalls. As a kid it was enchantment to me. Even in my near perpetual juvenile anguish it was Eden.

I should have enjoyed it more while I had the chance.

The golf game my father and I played was a farce. My father with his basic factory wage and his thriftful upbringing had purchased a half-bag of clubs not worthy of the name. Golf clubs need bend and whip; these clubs wouldn’t bend for Jehovah himself. If, as was the case all too often, one mis-hit and connected with turf instead of ball, the meaning of the word ‘judder’ became painfully apparent.

My father would intersperse his golf game with an aggressive range of swearwords picked up, no doubt, in his long years on the factory floor. These oaths would ring through the hazy morning air and travel miles to unsuspecting ears that could only guess at their origin.

There was one hole – the sixth – that seemed never-ending. It was a par 5 which meant that for my father and I, finishing it in single figures was an unlikely miracle. A drive would thud and skitter hopelessly fifty yards into the rough from where maybe two shots would be required to extricate the smug little white orb. Then a slice, then a hook, then a sklaff and by the time we got to the little burn before the green (or, often, in it) composure would be rent asunder and the pristine game of golf would now be resembling an anarchic slog looking only to be put out of its misery.

We could never play the last for fear of paying greenkeepers fees. The last was maybe the toughest hole on the course being all bunkers and undulations, it was the course’s final flourish leading one to the cheering crowds in the imaginary grandstand.

“Mark us doon fur a five, son,”

Those words to me have remained  a defiant salute to optimism trumping an awful reality for a lifetime. ‘Mark us doon fur a five, son’ could have been the battle cry of soldiers going over the to top at Passchendaele or the words of a Scotland men’s football team manager before his wards steps out once again to glorious failure. It should maybe even be the title of a new national anthem.

‘Mark us doon fur a five, son

A glass half full for us

Yer longer deid than alive, son

In unfounded claims we trust

It's Not Easy Being God!

It’s not easy being God, says God, as a bad-tempered angel attempts to cut his toenails. There are a billion and one things to do on an almost daily basis and do you know how hard it is to delegate God’s work? Of course, you don’t, how could you? God has a brain the size of…of…of, well everything that exists. All the trillions of universes you suspect you know about and the trillions more that you don’t. All these universes are in God’s brain and were all created meticulously to his plan.

Take Black Holes! Vast voids of anti-matter that suck the stuff of worlds into them every second. Only a God could invent something so awesome and so profoundly humorous. (Yes! God has a sense of humour and don’t think he doesn’t.)

And on your own tiny planet, the beauty of a coral reef. What of that? And yet you squander it like everything else.

The angel, a little cuddly, beatific creature, gives up on his task and goes back huffily to his cloud.

You need a sense of humour, and a pretty dark one too, to be God. By Christ you do!

God gazes at a screen in his mind and sees little Christopher Hitchens, that profound and earthly atheist, at his given task; to be forced to argue against his own words in his own earthly books and speeches. The sight of this made sometimes made God almost cry with laughter. Now that is a sense of humour.

Folk like Hitchens and others, inhabitants of a small, insignificant planet, arguing that ‘there is no God’ and ‘God is dead’. They say that if there is a God then why does he let all the awful things happen: all the genocide and war and suffering and disease? They say that if there is a God then he is a bad God, a disinterested God, a God that doesn’t care. But what about me?

Didn’t I sacrifice prophets to tell you how to live, to live with peace and gentleness in your hearts? And what do you do?

O you have had successes, you human beings created in my own image. I was particularly proud of the Inca people. Their civilisation was based on justice and fairness where even their rulers would till the land to show solidarity with their poorer brethren but what did you do? You obliterated them from the face of the earth for the gold within it. And what you call the Native Americans, what was their crime? They venerated my Kingdom, worshipped it and you lied to them, betrayed their kindness and generosity and ultimately obliterated them too. And in MY name.

O no humans. I have not forsaken you. It is you who have forsaken me. You could have built on what was already a paradise and you have systematically destroyed it. You could have lived in peace like the brothers and sisters you are, but you have divided and killed and gassed and slain and put poison into men’s hearts as you have into my seas and rivers, but you forget one thing. Through my son I told you that it will be the meek that will inherit and that is exactly as it shall be.

No, it is not easy being God, but be sure of one thing you pompous and you preened and ambitious. You so much less than you could have been.

It is not you that shall have the last word..!