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My Shit Life So Far
Frankie Boyle
I don't think anyone can have written an autobiography without at some point thinking "Why would anyone want to know this shit?" I've always read them thinking "I don't want to know where Steve Tyler grew up, just tell me how many groupies he f**ked!"'So begins Frankie's outrageous, laugh-out loud, cynical rant on life as he knows it. From growing up in Pollokshaws, Glasgow (‘it was an aching cement void, a slap in the face to Childhood, and for the family it was a step up'), to his rampant teenage sex drive (‘in those days if you glimpsed a nipple on T.V. it was like porn Christmas'), and first job working in a mental hospital ('where most evenings were spent persuading an old man in his pants not to eat a family sized block of cheese'), nothing is out of bounds.Outspoken, outrageous and brilliantly inappropriate, Frankie Boyle says the unsayable as only he can. From the TV programmes he would like to see made ('Celebrities On Acid On Ice: just like Celebrity Dancing On Ice, but with an opening sequence where Graham Norton hoses the celebrities down with liquid LSD'), to his native Scotland and the Mayor of London ('voting for Boris Johnson wasn't that different to voting for a Labrador wearing a Wonder Woman costume'), nothing and no one is safe from Frankie's fearless, sharp-tongued assault.Sharply observed and full of taboo-busting, we-really-shouldn't-be-laughing-at-this humour, My Shit Life So Far shows why Frankie Boyle really is the blackest man in show business.In 2010, MY SHIT LIFE SO FAR won the title of Scotland's favourite summer read, coming top of a list of 20 other books from the likes of Ian Rankin, Iain Banks and Carol Ann Duffy.
My Shit Life So Far
Frankie Boyle
Dedication
To all my enemies,
I will destroy you.
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
One
I grew up in a Glasgow. It’s a disturbing but…
Two
Primary school was great. On the first day I was…
Three
I know one shouldn’t dwell on the past, so I’ve…
Four
The school had a nice policy of trying to do…
Five
Lust is a big part of most men’s personality. They…
Six
The summer I left school I got a job as…
Seven
Shortly after being sacked from the civil service, I found…
Eight
Going to Sussex University was great. Yes, a lot of…
Nine
After I graduated, age 22, I got a job working…
Ten
I’d been going out with a girl since working in…
Eleven
Having been going full time on the comedy circuit for…
Twelve
For a wee while I was quite happy travelling around…
Thirteen
At the same time as appearing on the Live Floor…
Fourteen
Live Floor Show was given a network series, but the…
Fifteen
Shortly after landing the job writing for Jimmy Carr, a…
Sixteen
Mock the Week had become inexplicably popular, so I went…
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
Back Ads
About the Publisher
INTRODUCTION
I don’t think anyone can have written an autobiography without at some point thinking, ‘Why would anyone want to know this shit?’ I’ve always read them thinking, ‘I don’t want to know where Steve Tyler grew up! Just tell me how many groupies he fucked!’ I suppose I’ve just had to assume that anybody who buys this book has an interest in my life story, but I’ve covered myself by including long passages about all the groupies Steve Tyler has fucked.
I’ve been careful not to get too nostalgic. It’s the most retrograde, reality-denying emotion. How long before you’ll be standing at a bus stop hearing someone moan, ‘Say what you like about Saddam, but that country’s gone to hell without him’? Saddam did at least make the trains run on time. It’s just that they were DeathTrains to DeathCamps. To be honest, they were often late but people were too scared to say anything.
There’s a fair bit of swearing in this book. I wasn’t going to put in any at all but then I thought, ‘Fuck it, these readers are cunts.’ I know there’s an argument that swearing should only be used by a writer to underline a point that really demands it, or when strong emotions are in play. I think of this as a particularly English view, resting on the sad viewpoint that not much ever merits strong emotion or opinion. The whole debate is a bit pointless. I was in a hotel room recently and a show came on where Frank Skinner was talking about swearing on TV. I switched over and had a half-hearted wank. I’m one of about three people in the country directly affected, and I switched over. I would have happily watched Frank Skinner talk about anything else and I had a half-hearted wank over a presenter I know is a lesbian. For which I awarded myself double points.
There’s a genuine BBC directive that says you can’t use ‘fucking’ as a verb but you can use it as an adjective. So now you have to say, ‘Do you know what’s fucking great? Nookie!’ Ian Wright has criticised the BBC for dumbing down. I agree with him, but there’d be more weight to his argument if he’d stayed with the BBC. I’m glad he escaped from the relentless intellectual slide to present Gladiators.
This book isn’t entirely accurate. I have changed all the names and occasionally tweaked the order of events. I’ve also lied quite a lot. My favourite autobiography is Clive James’s brilliant Unreliable Memoirs. In the introduction he says that all the stuff that sounds true is made up and all the unbelievable bits are true. I’m saying that too, stealing it from him. I also stole his Chapter Four, for anyone who wonders why I went to sixth-form college in Australia. There are a few other instances of plagiarism; they’re mostly just the bits where I’m solving mysteries in Victorian London. Also, there are a couple of blatant untruths. The 1988 Scottish Cup Final was won by Celtic, rather than Dundee United, and I did not rape Tina Turner.
Sadly, there are parts of my life that haven’t made it into the book. In the Seventies I was involved in a top-secret project. I’m not really allowed to talk about it, but it was big. That’s all I can tell you about Operation C. I. AIDS. I went to some CIA seminars to begin with but I can’t remember much about them. All I know is that anytime I hear any of John Lennon’s solo stuff I go out and buy a harpoon. I still have the flask of Michael Jackson’s DNA I stole for Operation Timberlake. His DNA wasn’t hard to get. I dressed up as a schoolboy and hid the flask in my ass. I was also part of the plot to kill Castro, but it was impossible to get near him. I did manage to become his masseur, but even that he makes you do through a catflap with a snooker rest.
Being a special operative was a great job. How many people can say they got to meet all three Paul McCartneys? A lot of people wanted to strangle him after the Frog Chorus, but I was the one who actually got to do it. The CIA recruited me in an operation where they got prostitutes to spike people with acid and find out their secrets. They really had me over a barrel once they knew how much I liked to fuck prostitutes on acid.
There are quite a few drug-abuse stories coming up but I do urge you all to use drugs with caution. For example, never take cocaine before a group-therapy session. It’s really hard to interrupt a discussion on incest with a great idea for a song. Also, never take opium suppositories. I’ve never been in a situation where I thought ‘You know what would make this better? Hallucinating out of my arsehole.’
Another part of my life I’ve not been able to talk about is when I was spiritual adviser to the England football team. I had to leave because I just couldn’t handle their attitude to women. You’ve got to worry when the movie on the team bus is The Accused. But you had to admire the simplicity of Sven’s team talks. He’d simply stand in the dressing room and say, ‘There are women out there.’ The team wouldn’t even leave by the door. They’d eat their way out onto the pitch through the dressing-room walls. Then for a while I ran an art project getting sex criminals and serial killers to send their ideas to television companies. It was always something they’d already thought of.
It’s interesting for me to see the things people choose to get offended about and the things they let slide. Earlier this year I had to quit my Daily Record column over a moral disagreement. We disagreed over whether it was OK to make jokes about a dead child molester. It’s not that I wasn’t a fan of Michael Jackson – I was a big fan when I was 8. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was his ‘type’. For his London concerts Michael Jackson advertised for children in wheelchairs or with missing legs. What parent would agree to that? Look what happened to kids who could run away! Those tickets sold out in minutes. An interesting attitude we have to paedophilia in this country: ‘We don’t want paedophiles round here … unless they’ve really worked on their choreography.’
We can all learn something from Michael’s life. For example, it looks like oxygen tents are a big waste of money. Apparently when the news of his death broke, Jackson’s father rushed straight to the hospital just to check if the medics needed a hand with beating Michael’s chest. The man may be gone but he has left a musical legacy that will be around for hundreds of years. As will his face.
There’s a really grim pro-censorship lobby that seems to be thriving at the moment. The Daily Mail and these religious maniacs must be stopped. They won’t rest until all telly has been cleansed. Until there’s no swearing and Walking with Dinosaurs is exposed as the heretical lie it is. They’ll be Walking with Creationists – ‘Our story begins 7,000 years ago when God created the earth – exactly like it is today. Here’s a Tyrannosaurus rex, being buried by God to test our faith.’ These are the same nutcases who complained that having Fiona Bruce present Antiques Roadshow was disgraceful and encouraged lustful thoughts. Presumably while all wanking like an incarcerated rapist on ecstasy.
It’s been interesting to write a book and work without the hands-on censorship of TV and radio. Amusingly, amidst all the horror of the world, I was censured this year for daring to make a joke about Israel. I think it was, ‘I’ve been studying Israeli Army Martial Arts. I now know sixteen ways to kick a Palestinian woman in the back.’ I was pulled up about this as civilians were killed by Israeli troops in Gaza. This was on a show called Political Animal on Radio 4. That’s where producers like to focus the edginess in their shows into the title.
But what I find incredible is that the Israelis say they can build housing in the West Bank because the Palestinians weren’t productive enough with it. So if a bunch of settlers start building flats on your back patio you’ve only got yourself to blame. For fuck’s sake plant some marrows before it’s too late. People say nothing can solve the Middle East problem. Not mediation, not arms, not financial aid. I say there is Something. Atheism. Suddenly everyone would be looking at each other thinking, ‘What the fuck were we doing? That was insane! Why are we all wearing these ridiculous hats? Were we drunk?’ Also, you could eliminate the problem of suicide bombing overnight by making everybody wear spandex. Good old Israel. They’re the South Africa that it’s not OK to call cunts. Mind you, I don’t understand the Palestinians either. If they hate Israel so much why don’t they go form their own fucking country?
It’s not like I don’t get offended myself. I was horrified last year when some people said the floods were God’s judgements on homosexuals. That’s an outrageously offensive thing to say, especially when everyone knows that God’s actual judgement was AIDS. But it’s often the most innocuous jokes that make TV bosses go nuts; there really isn’t any logic to it. Once I made a joke about Prince Harry, saying that now he’d joined the army he could look forward to having an arsehole like a collapsed mine-shaft. A woman from the channel literally ran onto the studio floor screaming ‘Nooooo!’ in a strange, slow-motion way and waving her hands in the air like somebody about to get eaten by a giant bug on Dr Who. But don’t feel sorry for Harry. The initiations and rituals in the army must be a light relief compared with those in the royal family. In the army it’s just drinking and getting hit on the backside with a cricket bat. No altar. No lizards from the lower fourth dimension. No having to watch your grandmother dislocate her jaw to consume a terrified homeless teenager. Harry actually has a lot in common with the average squaddy. In that he has absolutely no idea who his real father is.
That said, I don’t really understand the point of the royal princes joining the army. Why send a couple of pampered party boys like Harry or William in to fight? In a war you need a ruthless, merciless killing machine, someone like Andy McNab, or Prince Philip. Prince Philip is the perfect soldier: he likes shooting things and he’s a racist. He’d kill his own daughter-in-law if he thought he could get away with it.
It’s amazing how difficult it is to get jokes onto TV shows when adverts for abortions are to be shown on television. I wonder if they will use more famous adverts as inspiration. Have a break, have a killed kid. Or the McDonald’s classic, ‘I’m not lovin’ it.’ I suppose the best advert for abortion is just a silent thirty-second shot of Chris Moyles. The first TV advert for the morning-after pill has already been shown. It’s just a clip of the Teletubbies and a voice saying, ‘If you don’t want to watch this shit – take the pill!’
Having looked back over my career while writing this, I’ve concluded that show business is a great thing to work in, particularly if you enjoyed the stories of H. P. Lovecraft. Paul Gascoigne is appearing in a TV show called Total Wipeout. This is cruel. I don’t know if you’ve seen Gazza recently but he looks like he emits a high-pitched shriek at 1 am every morning that kills all the insects within ten miles. Judging by the title I assume it’s just Gazza staring at the screen attached to a saline drip, silently whispering the words to ‘Fog on the Tyne’ as someone performs brain surgery on him with an ice-cream scoop. Actually, it sounds like a winner.
Pretty much every celebrity nowadays seems to be a satirical morality tale. When Peter Andre left Jordan she was said to be devastated. Now she’s left with only two massive tits. Peter escaped to Cyprus; it says something when you escape the arguments and fighting by going to an island with UN peace-keepers. But he will of course be entitled to half of Jordan’s assets, so at least he gets a spacehopper out of it. And Kerry Katona announced on Facebook that she is selling off one of her breast implants on eBay in a bid to raise money for charity. One of them? What is she doing with the other one? Letting it look after the kids? I’m surprised Kerry is on Facebook, although I suppose it’s one way she can keep in touch with her children.
It’s easy to lose your sense of perspective in show business. I totally understand why people end up doing things they really shouldn’t. Apart from anything else, people keep offering them money. Nadya Suleman, the mother who gave birth to octuplets earlier this year, was offered £700,000 to appear in a porn film. Fair enough – she’s had more people inside her than most porn stars. Whoever the male star is, I hope he has GPS or he might not find his way out again. You can’t really describe it as throwing a sausage up an alley; it’ll be more like flicking a grain of rice into outer space. After having eight babies, is a penis really going to do it for her? I think she’ll need a football team in scuba gear armed with ostrich feathers and power tools.
I know show business seems fucking pointless now, like something Hieronymus Bosch coughed into a hankie. Look in your heart, though, you know that it’s going to get worse. We’ll look back on Tom Cruise as a charming eccentric. The actor who replaces him as the No. 1 film promotion entity will probably worship a giant serpent, marry Hermione from Harry Potter and lay an egg in her chest.
It’s been fun becoming a micro-celebrity just as the whole idea of fame gets debased by reality-show contestants. Once, getting recognised in the street put you on a par with Grace Kelly. Now it puts you in the same bracket as somebody who attempted to beat the world ferret-stamping record on Britain’s Got Talent. Susan Boyle is now so famous that a Croatian TV crew were filming her in Scotland. They wondered which ethnic war could have caused so much desolation. Then a café owner said he saw her face in a slice of toast. So what? Every day I see her face in my toilet bowl. Everyone keeps asking me if Susan Boyle is a relative. Of course not – none of them will ever manage to chisel their way out of that cellar. I suppose we do have things in common; I look ridiculous dressed as a woman too. Come on, Susan Boyle does look uncannily like Mrs Doubtfire as played by Gordon Brown. She had a lot of people laughing at her because of her looks, but what people don’t realise is that she’s probably one of the best-looking people in West Lothian.
I can’t make too many jokes about Susan Boyle as the British public have taken her to their heart. What can I say? Britain loves a dog. Sorry, underdog. Let’s be honest and say that God broke the mould, just before he made her. Susan claims she has never been kissed. On that evidence alone, Scotland’s alcohol problems are not nearly as bad as previously imagined. OK, so she hasn’t been kissed, but this is Scotland. I’ll bet she’s been fingered on a school trip to Largs. There are probably thousands of Susan Boyles out there who were worried about coming forward in case they got laughed at – and let’s just hope her success doesn’t change that. Still, congratulations to the third most talented Boyle in Scotland. I’m number two and first place goes to my uncle Jim, who can play the flute from four different orifices.
You can gauge the success of any Scottish celebrity by how much they are hated in Scotland. By these standards I am still pretty much plankton. A side effect of micro-celebrity is that you do get hit on by a lot of hoaxers. I had a wee boy phone me up the other day and pretend to be my long-lost son. All I can say to that little lad is that he’ll have to get up a lot earlier in the morning if he wants to get his hands on my bone marrow.
In any case, the whole of television and celebrity is simply a distraction aimed at keeping you sedated while your pockets are picked by vested interests that may or may not be lizards. You’re going to end up with celebrity reality shows piped directly into your eyes the same way that classical music is played to fatten cattle. What kind of person buys the autobiography of a panel-show contestant? Wake up you CUNT.
ONE
I grew up in a Glasgow. It’s a disturbing but strangely loveable place, lurching like any alcoholic from exuberance to unbelievable negativity. I always loved the hilariously downbeat motto, ‘Here’s the Bird that Never Flew. Here’s the Tree that Never Grew. Here’s the Bell that Never Rang. Here’s the Fish that Never Swam.’ It’s like the city slogan that got knocked back by Hiroshima. They might as well have a coat of arms where St Mungo hangs himself from a disused crane.
We lived in a place called Pollokshaws. It was an aching cement void, a slap in the face to Childhood, and for the family it was a step up.
Until I was about three we had lived in the Gorbals, a pretty run-down bit that got knocked down as soon as we left. I’ve still got a few memories of it. Standing out in the back, while a wee boy with a grubby face lit matches. He let them burn down to his fingertips while I stood there thinking, ‘This is one of those bad boys Mum keeps telling me about.’ I remember Mum giving me money in a sweetshop to pay the man behind the counter and just throwing the coins at his surprised face. And I have a vivid memory of being with my brother and finding an old tin sign that advertised ice-creams and lollies, the kind that creaks in the wind. We loved it so much that we kept it outside our front door. When we got back from holiday with Mum that summer, my dad said it had been stolen and we were in tears. We’d been talking all the way home about how much we were looking forward to getting back and seeing our sign. In retrospect, Dad obviously fucked it onto a rubbish tip.
My dad was a labourer. There had been a building strike starting the day I was born and he’d been planning on joining it. I imagine my mum probably had something to say about him walking out of his job as she gave birth. He did the honourable thing: feigning sciatica and getting a three-week sick line. After my sister came along he was able to put our name down for a new council house, move us to somewhere a bit more child-friendly. He went for a place a little further down the Gorbals because it was near his work. This is the last recorded instance of him using his own judgement. Mum went screaming across town like an artillery shell, landing in the housing department and refusing to leave until they gave us a flat in the Shaws.
One of the first things I did after we moved in was, aged 3, to eat a whole bottle of painkillers that my mum had hidden in a cupboard. I had thought they were her secret supply of sweeties. I was rushed to hospital and had my stomach pumped. There they discovered that I had also scoffed a packet of rusks and these had prevented the painkillers from hitting my stomach and killing me. Saved by my own greed!
I already showed a general talent for the offensive non sequitur at this age. My parents introduced me to a friend of theirs who was over from Ireland. I’d never met her before but listened to her pronouncements on what a big boy I was, before sailing in with,
‘I saw you washing your bum in the bath last night.’
She was quite a shy, demure lady so there was a sort of choked silence and then we went our different ways.
Our house was part of a tenement: six flats linked by a communal stairway (called a close) with four big back gardens divided by fences but linked by the traffic of stray cats and children. This is where adults dried their washing and dumped their rubbish in a concrete midden. Where we built dens and dug holes and captured wee beasties and killed them.
One major feature of my childhood was how cold the house was. The only heating was a three-bar gas fire in the living room that went on for the 6 O’Clock News. My mum would sit on the floor with her legs running across it lengthways and the kids would all sit at right angles with their legs over hers. I had a constant cold, despite there being enough blankets on my bed that I could have comfortably survived a gunshot. Sometimes the fire would go on in the morning before nursery and I’d heat my clothes up in front of it and roast my legs until there were red swirling patterns all the way up to my shorts.
When I was growing up I think most people struggled with what we’d now call ‘fuel poverty’. The price of fuel rose twice as fast in Scotland as in the rest of Europe. Hello! Those big pointy things in the water are called fucking oil rigs. Scotland is basically a huge lump of coal with roads and Tesco Metros on top. I hate to say it but we’re a nation of suckers. We tell our old people to wear an extra jumper in winter. They should be watching the Queen’s Speech in a thong, warming their mince pies by the glow of a sixteen-bar fire.
My childhood came near the end of that clichéd time when you knew everybody in your close. An old couple called the Robinsons across from us on the ground floor had a grandson who could draw. When he visited them I would love to sit and watch him conjure cars and dogs and boxers with a piece of charcoal. Upstairs from us were the Patons, a family cruelly held back by a society that didn’t sufficiently reward bad tempers, heavy footedness and shouting. Across from them was Mrs Heinz, a kind old lady with a face like a tiny withered apple. The top landing had a pompous fool of a newsagent who had his initials stencilled across the driver door of his Toyota Corolla and opposite him a wee man called Norrie who was, in no particular order, a communist, golfer and homosexual.
Pollokshaws in general was a lot like Bladerunner without the special effects. Turning one way from our house, high rises towered over freezing little Sixties prefabs. The other way, the road must have been one of the bleakest in Europe: on it were a yard filled with building materials that was eternally locked up, a tiny office building the size of a large van and a milk factory. All facing a giant used-car lot. I spent a lot of my childhood terrified of nuclear war. Every time I heard a plane go overhead I was convinced we were all about to disappear in a ball of incendiary light. Handily, the car lot had a terrifying alarm system that went off every other night and sounded quite a lot like a 6-year-old’s idea of the four-minute warning.
In the centre of Pollokshaws was an underground shopping centre where shops struggled to stay open. Not the bookies or the boozer that were in there; they did fine. Food was just less of an essential. The W of ‘Pollokshaws Shopping Centre’ had been stolen long ago and replaced with a shaky, spray-painted ‘G’ under which old ladies would stand around nattering, taking a sweepstake on which of their friends would last the winter. In the dead centre of it all was a memorial to the Scottish socialist John McLean, who would have wept.
You had to be careful going through here with your mum. If she saw someone she knew, you’d have to stand disconsolately by her side while they exchanged information about prices and graphic descriptions of the illnesses of mutual acquaintances. It might as well have been in another language. My mum spoke Irish, so it often was.
There were maybe half a dozen high flats in the area. Most tower blocks in the Seventies were so depressing they should have put a diving board on the roof. I think Scottish architects in the Sixties must have been given massive bribes by the makers of lithium. The way they’d been positioned meant that the main street, Shawbridge Street, was essentially a wind tunnel. My brother used to walk me to school when I was very little (he’d make me walk about five steps behind, so people didn’t know I was with him). One day we got caught up in a wind so fierce that I lifted right up into the air. I hovered briefly, about four feet up, like a tiny superhero who had foolishly attempted to strike fear into criminals with a duffel-coat costume. The wind stopped suddenly and I landed right on my face. I was really proud of my torn trousers and gashed leg – a proper injury!
There was a bit behind one of the high flats that got so windy that nobody could hear you if you shouted into the wind. Well, you couldn’t hear yourself; I don’t know if anybody else could hear. Maybe everybody round there dreaded blustery days because random children would turn up and scream obscenities outside their windows. To be honest, we did that on sunny days too.
I got a telescope when I was a bit older. Actually my brother got a telescope that he never used. I’d train it on the windows of the upper storeys and look at folk – there were a couple of buildings that you could see right into. I think I was partly hoping to see women’s tits, inspired by a scene in Gregory’s Girl, but it was largely just curiosity. There was a couple who’d always dance together, drunk. It was sweet and a little bit sordid.
One of my favourites was this woman (although I thought of her as an old woman, she was probably mid-30s) who’d do really high-powered Eighties aerobics and then put on a coat and go outside onto the balcony and smoke fags for ages, just looking down into the street. Once a guy had jumped out of that high flat and hit one of the concrete posts at the bottom where we used to play leapfrog. It never really got cleaned up properly and he became an impressively large stain that lasted for years. As a kid, I wondered if this woman was thinking about jumping. I wondered why this guy had jumped and distrusted my dad’s explanation (‘He was drunk’). As a teenager I grew really disgusted with the area. I’d look up at the flimsy little net curtains in the windows as I walked home from the library every night, wondering why we didn’t all jump.
My favourite window was right at the top of a block on Shawbridge Street. A guy did martial arts in his living room wearing a sort of ninja outfit. It’s hard to be precise, but it looked like an all-black bodysuit and maybe a balaclava. He had nunchakus and a wooden sword and he’d be there every night – occasionally you could even see him leaping about with the lights off. I was visiting my parents years later when I was at uni and thought that I must just have dreamt this guy. I got out the same old telescope and pointed it up at his window. Ten years later and he was still there. Looked like he’d gotten really good at it too.
The high rise nearest us had a bunch of shops set into the basement. The main one was an Asian newsagent that constantly changed hands as shopkeepers weighed up the cost of cleaning graffiti against the profit margin on a chocolate tool. When I was little there was a Sixties-style soda bar which had somehow survived into a completely different era. It was run by two old ladies with big beehive hairdos and they sold ice-cream floats and milkshakes, very, very slowly. It closed when one of them died. I remember one of the local mums telling me about it when we were coming home from school one day. I asked what had happened to her and the woman grunted, ‘Her liver went.’
We always got our hair cut at this barber called ‘Old Hughie’s’. Old Hughie was from the Islands somewhere, was always completely pished and had a wooden leg. My mum would sit balefully behind us as we sat in the chair, encouraging him to take more hair off. She always left bitterly disappointed that we still had a little hair. Pretty much the only cut that would have satisfied her would have exposed a sizeable section of our brains.
The place had a history of housing immigrants from way back. There was an old song about the time it had consisted of a whole load of Flemish people in the nineteenth century called ‘The Queer Folk o’ the Shaws’. The place had stayed pretty queer. There was a library and a swimming pool and that was it. On the hill at the far end of town was our church, the church hall and school. All built on a hill screened by trees. John Stirling Maxwell, who owned the area, had allowed Catholics to build those only if they were somewhere he couldn’t see them.
At the time religious division in Glasgow seemed absolute. It was brutal too. When I was just a little kid a Celtic player electrocuted himself by accident in his loft. ‘It’s My Party and I’ll Cry if I Want To’ was number one and on the radio, and at that week’s football you could hear the Rangers fans singing ‘It’s My Attic and I’ll Fry if I Want To’. A Rangers player called Tom McKean gassed himself in his car and the graffiti was ‘Gas 1, McKean 0’.
I remember getting my tonsils out when I was a wee lad and I made friends with a Protestant boy on my ward. Neither of us could sleep the night before our operations and we sat up watching trains going by out of the window. The city underneath us seemed dark and wonderful. We were up till morning, watching tiny silhouettes go to their work. When my dad asked me what I’d done in hospital I said, ‘I spoke to a Protestant.’ It just seemed much stranger than anything else that had happened.
