My Father In Memory

For a brief time during the period when my parents had moved to Kilmarnock by mistake my father fancied himself a blues harp player, a sort of Ayrshire Sonny Boy Williamson. My father could be capricious in his ways. He’d once admonished me with some vehemence for taping over his Art Blakey Jazz Messenger’s cassette with blues music but now he was steeped Mississippi Delta-deep in the stuff.

My mother has had to put up with much in her life, an emotionally abusive father and a husband who was as unpredictable as the Scottish weather. One minute he was working the next he was blacklisted for leading wildcat strikes. One minute he was sitting watching Emmerdale Farm the next he was in a boxroom at the end of the hall trying desperately to bend a note on his Hohner. The sound was like a cat being squeezed through a rusty mangle.

The marriage vows do not state ‘Love, honour and put up with blues-harp practising seemingly until death doth you part’ but what is a wife to do?

It was the same, only quieter, when he took up cigar smoking. For a long time, he was leader-aff of the homeless families division at Waltham Forest Council and hingin’ aboot wi’ the trendies. Wee, exiguous feminist wimmin wi’ round specs who listened constantly to Janis Ian albums and blokes made entirely of corduroy. My da was in his element and to facilitate further his Viva Zapata look (I still have his ID card on which he is depicted with full bushy moustache, dark glasses and long hair. He looked like a cross between a Weather Report bass player and the outside left of the Brazilian World Cup winning team) he took to smoking slim panatellas.

There he’d be scrunched up in his usual tense way, legs wrapped like coils sooking away at this broon stub that was obviously making him sick. Done more for comic effect than economy (though his thrifty parents would have approved of the latter) he’d insert a pin at the sooky end to allow him to puff right down to the very nub. Not the super-cool look he may have been aiming for.

He gave this up as a bad job after a while and took to wearing cowboy boots.

Me and Meester X at the Scottish Poetry Library

 As a volunteer one is invited into a unique workplace. If you think about it, every workplace is totally unique. They may have similar characteristics; computers, fork-lifts or whatever, but their human make-up is unique. I should know, I’ve had over forty jobs in my adult life, everything from a bookie’s board-marker to a university lecturer.

A volunteer is different from a paid worker in that everyone is duty-bound to be nice to you. You’re not just another drone working for a wage, you are somehow this pious individual offering services for free, and, even though they may despise you for this in their hearts and minds, they must act towards you as if you are a visiting holy man with their ‘thank you ever so much for doing that’ and ‘can I get you a tea?’.

So it is with me at the Scottish Poetry Library. Apart, that is, from the gaslighting.

Ok, I’m joking about the gaslighting but there is something oddly disconcerting going on in that I am continually misunderstood, misinterpreted, misconstrued by the heid-honcho there, an amiably intense individual that we shall refer to as Meester X. Take yesterday as an example of this.

I’m spraffing with the librarian, a jolly, faux-curmudgeon named Jenny. I’m saying to her what will I do if I venture down to London by train to visit my 82-year old mother and I have a positive LFT before getting to her place of residence..

“Ah mean I cannae just get back on a train back to Scotland like that SNP wummin..”

Meester X only catches the last bit as he emerges from his room.

“I heard that about ‘that SNP woman’. She’s the leader of our nation,” he half-quips

“I didn’t mean that one..,” but by this time he has sped to another part of the building.

So now I’m anti-Nicola, anti-SNP, anti-independence. anti-Scottish when in fact I’m not necessarily any of those things and I was referring to the MP who’d travelled back from Westminster even though she’d tested positive for Covid.

These occurrences have been going on for some time. I was volunteering at an event (the announcing of the new Makar?). There was all sort of media there and invited guests and I was handing out drinks when Meester X comes bounding up..

“Are you Kathleen’s man?”

I’d been volunteer at the library for three years and I have no idea who Kathleen is far less was I married to her.

“No, Meester X. I am a volunteer here”

He eyes me suspiciously as if really I am ‘Kathleen’s man’ and what are my motives for denying this fact.

Also, he thinks I’m soft in the head.

One morning and bang on my starting time at ten I cannot gain entrance as the glass door is still locked. I peer in looking for a staff member to let me in. Meester X spies me and starts making demonstrative motions with his hands. While I am trying to interpret these he loses patience and comes to open the door.

“Why don’t you just press the buzzer?”

There’s nothing I can do but appear oafish to Meester X. If I was ever surreptitiously scratching my groin you can be sure it will be witnessed by a head-shaking Meester X.

I try to ingratiate myself by engaging him on his hometown of Dundee. I tell him how impressed I was by the view from Dundee Law and how I was previously unaware of the existence of this lofty peak.

“How could you miss a thing like that right in the centre of the city?” he replies, barely concealing his derision.

I’m used to be thought of as a reasonably intelligent individual with a ready and wry wit but to Meester X I am a somewhat doltish figure who pretends not to be married to Kathleen, whoever she is. I am ‘a volunteer’ but maybe one who has been assigned to the place, perhaps by a mental health agency.

Volunteer in the community?

Political Haircuts

 Is this a Turkish barbers? Not really, unless one wants to delve into the history of colonialism and recent geo-politics and it turns out we do, me and this hairdresser chappy with the scant grasp of English let alone the Scots version of it.

“Off vark today?”

“No, no,”

“Vat you vark?”

“Hairdresser’s and allied trades inspectorate!”

This stuns the poor chap into silence until the international code of good manners forces him into resuming the conversation.

“You vatch news? Russia and Ukraine?”

“Yes, a terrible geo-political chess match with alarming implications.”

“Putin is madman and he can cut off gas for all Europe!”

“Yes, but he doesn’t like the potential of a NATO country on his very border.”

He appears appreciative of my grasp of world politics and considerately tonsures my sideburns like they are topiary.

I ask him what he thinks of Boris Johnson.

“He is idiot like Trump and his haircut is no good! You like him?”

“No, I despise the man. I’m Labour, really,”

“Ah! Tony Blair..?”

“Well, no. I mean..”

“I am Kurd from Iraq. He bomb my country for nothing and they steal oil,”

I am entering dangerous waters and at the same time being allied with Tony bastard’n Blair.

“I don’t like Blair, just his party and even then…!”

“He is liar and criminal your Tony Blair..!”

Fucking hell!! I’ll maybe go back to the Polish barber next time although we didn’t lift a finger for them in ’39. Maybe they won’t remember.

Toilet Humour

  

I thought there was maybe the chance of a wee romance or even just some sex. She’d been coming down here on her wee visits a few times now and when we’d parted there seemed always to be something left unsaid or undone somehow. The thing was that I didn’t feel I could make a move incase I was mistaken. We came from different cultures – religions, even – and I feared the most monstrous repercussions if I slipped up (she’d showed me a most alarming photograph of her close and extended family posing with seriously serious armaments of a gunly nature; her own mother with what looked like a Magnum of some description.)

I was seriously attracted to her and had been since we’d met although really only in a physical way. Personality-wise she was curt and clipped and could easily spend a good hour boring the arse off me with an arid anecdote about an erroneous stationary order at work or one of her many complaints about working practices or individuals she worked with. My notorious humour and charm rolled off her like rain off a rock (she had a way of looking at me as if I was a retarded 5-year-old even though I was a good few years older than her.)

Then one day after a particularly exciting paddle in the sea, a breakthrough, or so I hoped.

“Dave?”

“Yes,” I replied a little breathlessly. Was this her declaration of devotion? My invitation to lustful bliss?

“I hope you don’t mind me asking,”

Surely, she was about to ask if I shared her feelings of amour; if I felt as she felt? This was surely houghmagandie time.

“Well..,”

“Go on,”

“Would you be very upset if I asked you to let me clean your toilet bowl? It’s the limescale. I know a way to get rid of it.”

To say this stopped me in my tracks would be an understatement. How off-the-mark could I have been in my expectations or was this some sort of cultural code I wasn’t privy to?

In her culture was an offer to clean a man’s toilet tantamount to a come-on? I didn’t think so.

I could only laugh and ask her the toilet-cleaning secret.

Coca-cola, apparently. They don’t tell you that on the ads.

Toilet Tales

“Ahm needin’ the toilet, da!”

“Yer ma’s huvin’ a bath, son, you’ll jist huv tae wait.”

But I was in desperate need as my strange, contorted posture indicated. I’d be mibbe twelve at this time and we were living 18-up in the high flats right in the very south-west corner of Glasgow, nearly in Renfrewshire. When the winds blew hard the building swayed with it to the extent that the ‘big light’ on the ceiling danced like a 1920s flapper. I wasn’t having a good time at my new school and was rather a worry to my parents.

My da gave in.

“Look, son. Ye better jist do yer business in the kitchen sink, but don’t tell yer ma.”

And so, I did.

My auld man looked more astonished than dismayed or angry. Was his son suffering some sort of mental malfunction? Was he a bigger eejit than anyone had even thought? Was he in fact in need of some sort of medical or psychological help?

The evidence lay in solid form on the surface of the new, modern stainless-steel sink.