скачать книгу бесплатно
I was also born with what used to be called ‘bat ears’ – protruding ears with no folds in them. At secondary school these would have been the equivalent of having ‘Insert Cock Here’ tattooed on my chin but the primary-school kids weren’t too bad about it. I think there was a huge waiting list to get an operation but somehow my mum managed to persuade a surgeon to do it quickly. He was genuinely doing it off the books or something, like a mechanic might have a look at his mate’s motor after hours. Afterwards, I had to wear pads over my ear for weeks, secured with a big hairnet. Well, that’s what it looked like to me. To everyone at school it seemed to say, ‘Please slap or punch me in the ears.’ I was supposed to go back a couple of years later and get my lobes pinned back as well. Unfortunately, the guy had selfishly died in the interval so I’ve still got these weird protruding lobes. Who knows how many jobs this bloke was knocking off in his lunch hour, out of the goodness of his heart? I often look at people with big earlobes in Scotland and wonder if we’re all part of some perverse brotherhood.
The bit of Pollokshaws we lived in wasn’t a bad place for wee boys and girls. The sort of things that horrify estate agents are pretty good for kids. There was a big bit of waste ground nearby and people didn’t seem to mind you digging big holes in the grass or building dens in the trees. A den meant dragging sheets of wood, plastic or whatever you could find up against the body of the tree and then boldly proclaiming it a den, rather than building anything. Once we found a load of discarded doors and used them to completely surround a tree, creating a plywood armadillo. You had to jump into it, nobody having thought to use one of the doors as a door.
I had an older brother, John, and a younger sister, Karen. I shared a room with John, and Karen had a room of her own. John was a slightly nervous little boy, always worrying about what our parents would say or what they’d think he should do in any situation. We used to say our prayers every night before bed and then we’d talk a bit as we fell asleep. I always remember him turning to me one night and saying:
‘There’s always one thing that you’re worrying about. You stop worrying about one thing and you worry about something else. It never stops.’
I lay awake. It was the first thing I’d heard that had genuinely worried me.
For years my brother’s school day started before mine and in theory I should have been able to sleep for an extra hour. He hated getting up though and my mum would have to stand over him, shouting his name in a weird trembling soprano while I buried my head under the covers. He was like a comic-book caricature of a sleepy boy. Crust would form on his eyes and he’d struggle to open them while he pulled apart his breakfast of jam sandwiches. Then he’d climb back into bed with all his clothes in his arms and twitch endlessly under the covers like Harry Houdini before emerging fully clothed.
My brother and sister and I all made friends with the twins in the next back, Thomas and Rosemary Duffy, and there were other kids you’d see as their families moved through the area, or as they came to visit relatives. Wee people had a much more autonomous life then, going out on their own and knowing they had to be back for lunch and dinner.
At any time there’d be seven or eight of us knocking around out in the backs. Rosemary was a sweet lassie who loved to feed and name all the rogue cats. Thomas had a gruesome streak, so we got on tremendously. We’d drop snails from the top of the tenements, seeing whose could survive the longest, like an evil game of conkers. We dug a massive hole in my back and when nobody came to stop us we just kept going. It was right up the far end so the adults couldn’t really see us from their windows. After about three or four days somebody must have noticed we were exhausted, coming home filthy and coughing like miners. I remember a shocked figure looming over us, buried up to our chests and probably heading for the water mains.
Wee Thomas had an inspired idea for the hole. A lesser boy would have pulled a sheet of tarpaulin over it and called it a den. But Thomas staged what he called ‘Insect Disaster Movies’. This meant that you got down into the hole with a set of binoculars while Thomas laid worms or ants or snails before you. You were to look at them through the binoculars (backwards) while he rolled stones onto them, doing the voices of the fleeing beasties as they screamed their horror and worried aloud which way to run to flee the earthquake.
The Duffys had an enormous Alsatian. Once I went round for them and Rosemary opened the door only to suddenly disappear, this monstrous thing dragging her up the hall by her ankle. Their dad, ‘Old Tom’, was my dad’s drinking partner, although who knows what they talked about. My dad was quiet but Old Tom was almost silent. The few things he did say were delivered in such a low, worried Glasgow burr that it sounded like somebody asking for help through faulty air conditioning. My dad told me that they went to a country and western bar once, one of these unbelievable places in Glasgow where people dress as cowboys. Some guy came up and started showing them his quick-draw skills and gun twirling. ‘I’ve been timed as having a faster draw than John Wayne!’, he told them, just as he dropped the gun. In one of his few recorded utterances, Old Tom looked at him and deadpanned.
‘If John Wayne was here now, you’d be deid.’
One day all of the kids were sitting on the stairs in the Duffys close and the idea got thrown up that we should form a gang. The girls wanted us to call it ‘The Mickey Mouse Club’. The boys had come up with ‘The Bloodsucking Slugs’. Actually, that was my idea. We made my sister cry at the horror of being a Bloodsucking Slug. That day finished with Rosemary Duffy tying me to a washing pole and saying she was going to kiss me. I struggled with the washing line tied round me but I really wanted her to kiss me. Somehow I got free anyway and ran off, hopping disappointedly over the railings into my own back.
Thomas Duffy and I both joined the Cubs, which we loved. I think we’d exaggerated the subs to our folks so we could buy Slush Puppies on the way home. Our parents never caught on, even though we’d always come back with bright blue or purple mouths and crippling headaches. The Cubs was run by a lovely lady who lived round the corner from us. I don’t think she knew a single thing about the Cubs or the Scouting movement; she just started it up in the church hall to give us something to do. There were none of the awkward formal greetings and knot tying of the proper Cubs. If you wanted a badge you just told her and she’d set you a totally arbitrary task. I got my sports badge for running round the hall. There was a great fancy-dress competition every Halloween. Once I went as the Hulk – painted from head to foot in watercolours that dried on me in such a way that I seemed to be walking around in a huge scab. Thomas, quite brilliantly, painted an enormous cardboard box and went as an Oxo cube. He made his dad walk us to the hall as he had a real paranoia that a passing lunatic might set fire to him.
The Cub leader’s brother would come to the meetings a lot to help out; he was maybe in his twenties. The last 20 minutes of most meetings involved him tying an enormous running shoe to a big bit of rope and making us jump as he swung it round faster and faster. Who knows what was going on in this guy’s life that he’d turn up every week to blast wee boys into the side of a public building with an enormous shoe, but we were really glad that he did. I even won one week! I was encouraged to stage a high-jump competition at some railings near our house, hurting my balls quite badly.
Our outfit or unit or whatever (not having been in the proper Cubs, who knows what the term is) went to a real Scout camp once and it was absolute chaos. There’s always been something suspect about Scoutmasters to me. Middle-aged men taking young boys into the woods to practise tying knots is clearly not good. If you’re going to get felt up in a tent by the Scoutmaster then the very least you should get is a badge that you can use to cover the hole in the back of your shorts.
There was also some weird sectarian thing going on with the guy who was leading the trip. I was too young to decode what was going on but when the kids started singing ‘Flower of Scotland’ on the bus he went absolutely tonto, making the driver pull into a lay-by and giving a truly crazy, bulging-eyed speech about the Queen. That’s a real thing with sectarians – they always assume that people are interested in the shite they talk. He was literally foaming at the mouth about the Act of Union, in front of a bunch of 9-year-olds who were thinking about when they might get a hotdog. Of course one must avoid generalisations but that man was definitely a paedophile.
At camp, we were no more prepared to set up tents and light fires than a tribe of monkeys. In fact, one of our guys (a real wingnut who seemed much too tall and old to be a Cub) immediately climbed a tree and started screaming like a monkey, breaking off branches and throwing them into the camp. Another got off the bus and just ran straight down towards the river bank, crashing straight into the river. The real Scouts looked shell-shocked as the monkey guy leapt down from the tree and tried to engage them in swordfights with an enormous stick. Clearly, all pretence of being a real outfit, unit or possibly troop had been blown.
The Scouts sent an observer to one of our meetings. I missed it but apparently he stood around slack-jawed watching boys get pelted into stacks of chairs with a big training shoe. We were all made to attend a real Cubs meet in a better part of town. The Cubs had to line up and do a little salute at the start! The leader was called Akela! The gymnastics badge didn’t simply require jumping two-footed over a chair! Their leader called out a boy to give a mad little speech about the history of Scouting. He had an enormous gum boil, easily half the size of his face, and spoke in a wet mumble like the Elephant Man Jr. The meetings must have been bad because our Cubs got shut down and there was fuck all to do again.
In a way crime makes perfect sense in those nothing-to-do places. A teenager came up to us once on a moped he’d stolen and said he’d give us rides on the back of it. I was too scared but some of the kids got on for a backie. I still have this vivid picture of him shooting off across the waste ground at the end. He might have been the last truly free individual I ever met and is no doubt dead.
I had a rich fantasy life as a kid, honed on the dullness of my surroundings. I read The Hobbit when I was little and after that every magic-type kids’ book that I could find. I loved Alan Garner and Diana Wynne-Jones, and just read that stuff all the time.
My own fantasies were a whole lot weirder than anything in the books. I had this baroque story that I thought about for years. I’d go off and play on my own, thinking about it and acting out the scenes. I was a magician who travelled from town to town in some Middle Earth-type world with his travelling companion who – get this – was an enormous guy that he had created from mud. My companion, whose name escapes me, was always falling to pieces and I’d have to redo the spells. He had rubies for eyes – not any old rubies, but magic rubies that I stored powerful fire spells in. The stories largely involved the two of us rocking up to town and not getting any respect from the local king or whoever. He’d generally try to put us in jail or set his men on us. That’s when my good buddy would unleash all the pent-up rage in his fiery eye, often burning not just the king and his men but the whole town that had disrespected us.
But here’s the best bit. I had a sword that would cut whoever it touched and give them a wound that would never heal. I think I must have read about that somewhere. In some versions of the story, I had cut myself with the sword, all down one arm, so my arm was hidden and bandaged in my cloak and I was often weak. The story regularly revolved around me trying to rest up while we were in prison or being chased. My fiery friend would stand guard over me while I summoned up enough energy to destroy our enemies. Later on in life, this made my national stand-up tour feel pretty familiar.
My brother and sister and I were allowed to get one comic each a week. We’d get The Victor and The Dandy and sometimes others. I was never one for savouring the artwork; I just loved the stories. My favourite in The Victor was a thing called ‘Deathwish’. It was about a racing driver and sometime stunt-man who had been horribly disfigured in a crash. He wore a mask to cover his injuries and basically longed for death. Each week he’d try to do something in the race or stunt he was working on to kill himself. It always backfired and helped him win his race or do an amazing stunt, much to his disappointment. There was a brilliant panel once of him coming to in his hospital bed to the sound of popping champagne corks, just lying there looking disgusted.
I’d plough through our comics quickly and read my sister’s Bunty when nobody was looking. It had a lot of weird stuff. ‘Susan the Sham’ was great: a girl who’d been in a traffic accident and had an evil uncle who was making her pretend to be deaf for compensation reasons. Every week she’d overhear something she really ought to tell somebody about but couldn’t. One of the main stories – did I dream this? – was about a lassie who lived a pretty much normal life except for one thing. She was trapped inside an enormous energy ball. She’d go to school in it and have to deal with a certain amount of hassle but when it got too much she could always just shoot off into the sky in this fiery orb. I once tried to make a sketch about this for a pilot I was doing. The producer read the script and then said one of my favourite-ever sentences:
‘Do you know how much of our budget it would take to create an energy ball?’
That’s the great thing about television. Sometimes, you just feel that anything could happen. The guy didn’t say it was impossible. He was just thinking of the repercussions of sticking an actress in a big, glowing energy ball!
A new comic came out that was an absolute mindblower. The Buddy it was called. Cheery title but a clue to its disturbing nature was in the human-skull jacket pin given away with the first issue and the lead story of ‘They Saved Hitler’s Brain!’ They had Limpalong Leslie, an international footballer with one leg shorter than the other. His footballing brain always had to be working overtime as he was essentially crippled. He’d leap over tackles saying, ‘Ho ho! He telegraphed that one!’ It was still less weird than Tuffy, the story of a homeless goalkeeper. He could never find a house, even during the couple of seasons he played for Spurs.
I felt outside of the stuff the other kids were into, like the whole football thing. I support Celtic but as I got older I struggled to see those clubs as anything other than big businesses making money out of some of the poorest people in society. You go to those grounds and they’re these giant chrome fortresses rising out of blighted, deprived communities. Celtic won the European Cup in 1967 with a team all born within five miles of the ground. If they tried that now they couldn’t find eleven guys who still had two legs. I find it difficult to believe that people can care about whether some millionaire pervert has got a thigh strain or not. That’s another thing about football – it’s a bit gay. Guys fretting over some lad’s calf or hamstring – they might as well all fuck each other in the centre circle.
Both of the Old Firm clubs have profited massively from sectarianism. Personally, I think everyone involved over the years has shown that they don’t have Northern Ireland’s best interests at heart and it should now be given to a third party, like Spain. Imagine how little the average Belfast citizen would care for the problems of religion if he could just get a nice bit of tapas on the Falls Road. And it wasn’t fucking raining all the time. And he still had knees.
The standard of football has been pretty terrible for a long time. There have been some great sides but they’re pretty rare. Most of the time the Scottish League is like watching a really gruelling donkey race. Sure, like most people I support one team over another, but it’s getting more and more difficult to care what colour of hat the winning donkey is wearing.
TWO
Primary school was great. On the first day I was looking around thinking, ‘There’s no catch … this is genuinely a big, warm room full of toys.’ Now, Little Frankie would have hated it if he knew that one day I was going to gloss over his nursery education, which he absolutely loved. On the other hand, books can only be so long and I’ve got a lot of stories about drug abuse to get to. Let’s just say that Little Frankie pulled the paddling pool off its stand about once a month, soaking himself and having to go home in a pair of huge borrowed shorts.
The great thing about primary education is the positivity and praise the kids get. Probably not the best way to prepare them for the reality of adult life in Scotland, but I like it. I think if we actually focussed on an education system that prepared people for life in Scotland it would be a lot like the Fritzl household. I mean, what gets me about this whole sordid story is Fritzl’s wife saying she didn’t know. Did she not suspect something when her husband came in every week with sixteen bags of shopping, including kids’ clothes and nappies? Who did she think they were for – the dog? ‘I know we treat him like one of the family, but sandals and shorts?’ People have accused Fritzl of neglect, but he was fucking them every day – they probably would have loved a bit of neglect. Even Adolf Hitler must be going, ‘… und I thought Ich war ein Cunt!’ The whole thing is so common in Austria they now sell ‘Hallmark’ cards with ‘Congratulations on escaping from your underground sex hell’. Of course, I shouldn’t joke; Fritzl’s daughter has been through a horrific ordeal. But just wait until she gets all the back payments for child benefit. That’ll cheer her up.
I loved primary and it was so supportive that up until I was about 9 or 10 I still thought I could draw. Teachers had always said, ‘Well done’ when I drew or painted something, so I didn’t realise that I couldn’t draw at all – almost to the level of a handicap. This dawned on me when I challenged my friend Charlie to a drawing contest. We were going to draw a space shuttle as it was the first one and the kids were really excited about it. I used a ruler and drew a big rectangle in the middle and two bigger rectangles on either side, for the booster jets. Then I drew triangles on top of the rectangles – turning them into rockets! Sure, the space shuttle that I drew freehand inside the main rectangle (the fuel tank!) was a little shaky and looked a bit like a face, but the overall effect was pretty impressive.
Charlie blinked impassively at my drawing and then produced what seemed to be a black and white photograph of the space shuttle. There were little scientists doing final checks on the scaffolding at the launch base, partially covered by the shadow of the main fuel tank. Did you ever read Peanuts when Charlie Brown would be building his shitty little snow fort and Linus would have built an actual castle with battlements and a flagpole? It was like that. I insisted mine was best and went off to find a judge.
As a kid I was fascinated by space shuttles and by astronauts in general. This was before all the blowing up took the shine off things. Good old NASA. With all their money, could they maybe have a mission where everyone doesn’t nearly die? They should have some honesty and call their next mission ‘Operation Spacegrave’. Remember all the unmanned missions they used to send up in the 1950s and 60s? You know what they did with the monkeys and dogs that piloted them? They poisoned them! All their bodies are still up there. So an alien civilisation’s first contact with earth will be a ring of abandoned spacecraft filled with dead chimps and Alsatians. Approaching earth for some sublimated alien race must be like when the police close in on the house of a serial killer and find an outer perimeter of faeces wrapped in newspaper.
One day on our way to school my friend Gary McRedie and I found a huge porn mag. It was thicker than a dictionary and full of big Seventies bushes – women who looked like they were giving birth to Kevin Keegan. I didn’t really understand what it was (I don’t think), but had to admit it was strangely compelling. Gary suggested that we hide it under a shrub so we could come and look at it whenever we liked. The next day it was gone – someone had found it! I was disappointed but also oddly relieved. It was only years later, as I was telling someone this story, that I realised Gary McCredie had gone back and got it for himself.
There was quite a lot of religious stuff at primary. Every week we’d go down to the church and practise hymns, led by Miss Moat, a spirited big woman who looked like she played centre-back for somebody half decent. At least I was lucky enough not to go to a Jesuit school. The Jesuit saying is ‘Give me a boy until he is seven and I will give you the man.’ Usually a sexually confused manic-depressive.
We made our first confession when we were seven years old and had to really rack our brains for sins. I said that I’d stolen something, which I hadn’t, and that I’d lied, which I had – about stealing something. An old man listening to a child’s sins while they’re both locked in a wooden box? If I was a sexual pervert I would definitely join the priesthood. Although clearly the sexual-pervert community is way ahead of me on that one. Earlier this year the Pope met victims of sexual abuse at the hands of Catholic priests. If I’d been fingered by a priest the last person I’d like to meet is the ultra priest 9,000. It’s like fighting the end-of-level boss in a video game. First confession at the age of seven must be incredibly boring for the priest. Imagine having to listen for hours on end about stealing conkers and farting during school assembly. This is why so many priests like to help out by giving the poor kid something to really confess about next time around.
First holy communion was the big one – all the girls dressing up in terrifying tiny bridal outfits to trot up the aisle and ‘marry God’. It was a whole community doing this. If one guy had made a kid do that in his basement he’d have been locked up for life. I lost both my front teeth during the week of my first communion ‘There definitely is a God.’ Yeah, tell that to the poor sod who drives the bus and gets spat on ten times a day for the minimum wage. It might be more accurate if the message was printed on the inside of the bus and read, ‘There definitely is a God. And he hates you.’
I have a theory about the Pope. You know how he fought for the Nazis? Well if Nazi scientists did manage to save Hitler’s brain then maybe they kept it alive in a jar for years waiting to implant it into someone with power on the world stage. That someone would need to wear a very big hat to hide all the stitching left by a brain transplant. They probably thought about putting his brain into an NFL quarterback but held out for the Pope. The Pope has said that condoms don’t help prevent the spread of AIDS. Someone ought to tell His Holiness that he must be putting them on wrong. You’d have though the Pope would have been well up for using condoms. It would have scuppered the court cases of many of his priests if there was no DNA evidence. In Africa AIDS has killed 25 million people in three decades. That’s a lot of funerals. I can see why the Pope doesn’t want to lose the work.
There was a thing at primary called ‘The Black Babies’. It was a hugely misguided charitable effort they used to drop on us in Catholic schools. You sponsored an African baby and, I think, sometimes got to name them. At least, that’s what I’m told by my African friends Wolf Tone and Murdo McCloud. Anyway, there was always some daft kid who misunderstood and thought that they’d actually get the baby for a bit. They were too young to realise that there are a thousand good reasons why a little African baby shouldn’t be shipped off to another country and that human beings should never be exchanged for money. I think that Madonna basically has the emotional development of one of those kids. She can pay for a little black baby, so why shouldn’t she get to keep it? She’s probably been drawn in by the advertising – if you get an African kid it costs £2 a month to feed and if it gets cataracts they’re only a pound to fix. Actually, I feel really sorry for little David Banda. The only black role models he’ll have growing up will be homosexual backing dancers. Madonna is said to have had his nursery painted like a jungle, to make him feel at home. Hopefully the kitchen’s done out like the inside of a UN helicopter.
Every summer we went to stay at my gran’s place in Ireland. She lived in a really remote part of Donegal, which is beautiful and bleak. I’d say maybe a little of the bleakness seeps into the people. The bit we lived in wasn’t so much quiet as empty. If someone wanted to film a movie there that was set after a nuclear apocalypse they would have had to bus people in.
My gran lived with my granddad, my great-uncle and my uncle James in a little whitewashed farmhouse. My brother and I would sleep in a small room with both uncles, my great-uncle often getting himself off to sleep with a long, tongue-in-cheek monologue about how we were going to Hell, and listing all the torments that would be waiting for us. I always enjoyed it as a sort of grim joke, but it worried John and afterwards you could hear him muttering his prayers hard even over all the snoring.
They were all very religious. My uncle got a new car and nobody would get into it until a priest had been out to bless the thing. A priest came out and got paid to tell the story of the Good Samaritan and throw holy water over the bonnet. My granny prayed a lot, for everybody. I sometimes wonder if I’m not still just working through the goodwill she built up with for me with God. One day soon I’m going to run out of her Hail Marys and both my legs will drop off.
Everybody was obsessed with death in that household. They’d talk about it a lot. Once we were all getting on the bus as we left at the end of summer and I said ‘See you next year!’ to my granddad. ‘I’ll be dead next year,’ he replied, without sadness. That’s Catholicism; it’s a great big death cult. Look around a church at all the golden crucifixes, the big marble statues of Jesus dying. The nativity, the only part of the story that’s about life, is just a temporary thing they throw up for a few weeks. It’s generally focussed round a £5.99 Tiny Tears doll – one year our church had a rocking horse for the donkey. It had ‘I’m a cowboy’ written on it.
My granddad was a difficult guy. Joyless, to the point where he found other people’s laughter upsetting. He’d often scold us for laughing, as would my mum. They thought that laughter was infantile. I thought the idea of somebody hating children’s laughter was really funny, like an ogre in a fairytale. My granddad had a very hard life. He grew up in poverty I can’t imagine at a time when children were hired out to farms as rural labour. He had to work in Scotland to support his brothers and sisters, and ended up burying most of them when they were still young. Now his health was gone and he was in constant pain. I knew all this, but I was a child so I hated him for being a grumpy old cunt.
Boredom was a huge part of our lives there. It’s the rainiest county in Ireland. Which is a bit like saying you’re the Dirtiest Woman in Dundee – a lot of competition and little prestige. Often we’d be stuck indoors listening to fiddle music on a crackling radio. Everybody spoke Irish so you’d have to entertain yourself. I read loads of books there on my top bunk, the days ticking by slowly. I’d always run out of actual kids’ books and have to dive into my granddad’s stack of masculine adventure novels. There was a real lurch trying to get into a story of a mercenary on the run from the East German police when you’d just finished a book about a boy who had magic shoes.
They farmed sheep there and occasionally we’d have to help out, acting as auxiliary sheepdogs when the sheep were being herded, or taking lunch out to the shearers when they clipped them in a nearby pit. There were actual dogs as well and we’d be so bored we’d dote on them to a degree they found exasperating. These creatures had to have a complex skillset – able to run after sheep on a hill but also to put up with little children who wanted to make them wear a blouse.
The highlight of every week was the arrival of the baker’s van. This guy drove around the middle of nowhere selling cakes and sweets and stuff, and we would clean him out. We’d be sitting on rocks with nothing but fields for miles eating these bright purple or luminous yellow cakes. Every Sunday a wee bus came to take everybody to Mass in the local town of Dungloe. Mass was crushingly dull and sometimes in Irish, but afterwards you were in town till the bus left. A proper town with sweets and penknives and toy guns and footballs.
Dungloe was famous in Ireland for its annual summer beauty contest called ‘Mary from Dungloe’. Irish communities from all over the globe would contribute fresh and conventional-looking examples of their gene pool. You’d have a Chicago Mary and a Glasgow Mary; who knows what their real names were? The whole thing was exactly like Father Ted’s ‘Lovely Girl’s Contest’ and everyone for miles around seemed obsessed with the thing. One year a local girl won – Moia McCole, the Donegal Mary. She lived at the bottom of our hill and everybody was really excited. They drove about at night honking on their car horns and there were big bonfires and parties. The Sunday World printed a photo of her where she was leaning forward a little too far and you could see her nipple. I cut it out and had a wank behind a big rock.
There was a peculiarity in that part of the world whereby people sometimes had a second name related to their job. I guess it started because so many people had the same first names and surnames. The guy who delivered the post was Dimrick the Post. There was a baker in Dungloe who my mum’s family knew as Anthony the Cake, but my dad’s lot called Anthony the Bun. It was great meeting people who were called the Van or the Loaf. It was like a whimsical branch of American wrestling.
Often we’d get driven to the pub by my uncle where we’d drink something called ‘Football Special’ in life-threatening quantities. We particularly loved it because it had a head on it like a pint of beer. Looking back it was actually a thick chemical scum. It also meant that we were basically drunk on sugar.
The main pub we went to was called Tessie’s. It was a run-down place with a stone floor and barrels in the corner. On cold nights you all sat in Tessie’s kitchen by the fire. Everybody played a card game called ‘25’ for tiny stakes – fifty pences was about the limit. In reality it was just an excuse for people to curse each other and the games were always accompanied by explosions of laughter. They’d curse each other for playing their hand badly or too well, for winning too much or being a sore loser or a cheap bastard or just a bastard. One time some American tourists wandered in and asked if they sold low-alcohol lager – they asked half a dozen drunks playing cards on a barrel as a dog ate crisps off the floor. After a disbelieving pause everybody screamed with laughter. This wasn’t just rudeness; nobody there had heard of such a thing as low-alcohol lager and it sounded like a ridiculous contradiction.
We kids loved going to the pub and would get really upset on the nights the men would go without us. It’s possible that we were cripplingly addicted to the sugar high. Some nights we’d go to bed then hear the car leaving the drive, so we’d run out after them. We knew we couldn’t stop them going without us. I think we just wanted to leave them with the image of us in their rear mirror, standing in the doorway in our pyjamas forming a tableau of disappointment and recrimination.
There was a relaxed attitude to drink-driving, in that you were basically allowed to drink-drive. I saw a guy one night struggle to get his key into the car door for a few minutes then hop in and drive off. My uncle would have about ten pints some nights and then drive us all home. I guess the feeling was that we weren’t going to crash into anyone, because barely any fucker lived there.
One year I went over to Ireland with my mum in winter. It was really beautiful in the snow. My cousin Mark was there too and every morning we’d pull our wellies on and walk for miles in a different direction, always finding somewhere interesting. I think it’s my memory of this period that makes me fantasise about living in the country. In reality I know there would be no shops and I would kill myself.
I was generally pretty bored and under-stimulated when I was a little kid. Other than going out to play in the backs, we didn’t really do much of anything. My brother and I got a Spectrum computer one Christmas and it totally took over our lives for a couple of years. There were loads of addictive games which to a modern child would seem like playing with a jobbie on a stick. It’s amazing what people were doing with less memory than is currently in the average vibrator. Those games were like little coding haikus. There was one called Schooldaze, which was a chillingly realistic depiction of school. You had wee tasks to do for your own benefit but everything got derailed because you had to spend all of your time in classes or you’d get punished. I intensified the reality loop by sometimes failing to do my homework because I was playing the game. There were some surprising freedoms in it too. You could, for example, just fuck yourself out of the top-floor window and fall to your death. The Headmaster would stand over your corpse and say, ‘You are not a bird, Eric’, quite callously I thought. Also you could go into the empty rooms and write swearwords on the blackboards, which we thought was unbelievably hilarious. The teacher would give you lines if they actually caught you but seemed remarkably calm about teaching a class who were looking at the word ‘Cuntbucket’.
There was also a game called Emlyn Hughes’s Supersoccer. Like everybody, we hated Emlyn Hughes but the game was strangely compelling. There was a bug where if you put a heavy tackle in on someone they would just sort of die – lie down on the pitch and just never get up. Their inert form would be repositioned by the computer for free-kicks. You could also score from a kick-off by taking a really big run-up and just blooter it into your opponent’s goal. My brother and I had a tensely negotiated agreement not to do this and we both did it absolutely every time.
I was about eleven when I started going to the cinema by myself; my parents just had no interest in that kind of thing. I really wanted to see Star Wars because everybody at school had the action figures and was talking about Return of the Jedi. Eventually my dad said he’d take me. What he actually took me to was the first Star Trek movie, the really shit one with the baldy woman in it. I’ve never had the heart to tell him.
The first thing I went to see on my own was Footloose. I was really into old rock and roll records and thought it sounded brilliant. I borrowed my brother’s fake leather jacket and sat in the cinema with the collar turned up. It’s still pretty weird that those guys were Kevin Bacon and Chris Penn, and that it was basically gay.
I started taking my sister along to the local cinema in Muirend, a real time capsule with staff who looked like they were being hunted by Ghostbusters. There was a doorman called Frank. Strictly speaking, what he was actually called was ‘Frank the Wank’, something people shouted at him everywhere he went. I was on a bus years later and two teenagers saw him coming out of a newsagent in his civvies and actually got off the bus to shout it at him. I’d drag my sister along to my choice of movies – which meant every rubbish fantasy film that came out, things like Krull and Beastmaster. I think my parents would give me the ticket money for both of us if I took her along, so I’d bribe her with Maltesers and she’d sit there dispassionately watching Rutger Hauer have an unconvincing swordfight with a man dressed as a cyclops.
I was really excited when the old cartoon version of The Lord of the Rings got a showing at the GFT. As a kid I’d have been delighted to know that everybody would eventually get into Tolkien. This is back in the days when fantasy was just for total nerds. There were about a dozen to fifteen heavily bespectacled kids – one was a diabetic whose mum had brought him a big box of raisins for a snack. It was great to set eyes on Glasgow’s other dweebs. There was a bit when Aragorn laid into some orcs and we just all went mental. I think life is a lot different for alternative kids nowadays. Texting and the internet mean that being a Goth or something means you’re part of a big social scene, it’s an inclusive thing. Back then, we all just went our different ways in the afterglow, wishing each other all the best with the next ten years of bullying.
THREE
I know one shouldn’t dwell on the past, so I’ve really tried to put the misery of my secondary education behind me. On the other hand, if I ever meet Steven Tilsbury again, I’m going to bundle him into the back of a campervan, which I’ve had specially adapted by the Chinese military, and he’s going to spend a very difficult nine months strapped to a surgical table, fed intravenously, while I create a masterpiece of suffering with a nail file and a cigarette lighter. STEAL MY FOOTBALL SOCKS WILL YOU STEVEN?
School days are only happy if you have a particular yen to be taught five hours of geography a week by a convicted paedophile. Actually, to be serious, the sex at school was embarrassing. You’d think after 20 years the janitor would know what he’s doing. I still can’t come unless I’m in a small dark room filled with sports equipment.
There’s that amazing cliché that schooldays are the best days of your life. Things have gone very wrong in your life if your best days involved being shouted at by an alcoholic for spelling ‘broccoli’ with two i’s. Anyone who had the best time of their life at school has never licked LSD off what they think used to be a hooker. To be fair I didn’t hate everything about school. I only hated the teachers, the pupils, the lessons, the building, the food, the smell, every second I spent there – but I have to say the driveway was sort of OK.
The journey to secondary school involved taking a bus and then walking for a couple of miles. The walk always had the sun hanging directly in front of me – the Mayans couldn’t have aligned this thing any more directly with the fucking sun. When it had been raining there would be puddles reflecting the light up into your eyes and it felt like walking into the belly of a spacecraft.
Our school was a zoo for children. On my first day I sat shell-shocked at the side of the playground, a complex ballet of dead-arms, gambling, taunts and violence. At one end were railings surrounding a deep staircase into the basement. This was the ‘grog pit’. If someone’s bag could be got off them it would be hurled down these steps. If they went down to fetch it, an animal howl of ‘GROG PIT!’ would go up and the whole school would crowd up onto the railings and spit on them. I saw a tiny first year emerge to jeers, wet and slippery like a newborn calf. I instantly knew that my task for the next five years was to get through this.
Later I found that a big part of surviving was to get yourself a lockable room in which you could sit out lunchtime. Teachers would sometimes give the keys to their classroom to responsible kids, ostensibly to do work. It was actually so these weaker specimens could have a locked door between them and those who wanted to take their money, humiliate them or simply punch them repeatedly in the arms and legs. I was in the Latin Club and half a dozen of us would have lunch there for a couple of years. I’d never studied Latin, and could probably have survived in General Population. Michelle Caldwell was in the Latin Club though, and she tended to cross her legs in a way that let you see up her skirt. I loved Latin Club.
I should probably mention here that the Latin teacher who let us have the room was a nice chap who was the school’s expert on sex education. A spindly, balding man with a ginger homeless beard, he’d occasionally pop up into religious classes and give a lecture on contraception. Apparently the only thing that was allowed was something called the rhythm method, but withdrawal was preferable to, eh, using a condom. I imagined that he practised withdrawal a wee bit himself as he had a noticeable facial twitch. Almost a spasm, it made him look as if he was about to yell out some obscene prophecy. He had nine children.
Even having a room didn’t guarantee safety as often crowds would gather round them like zombies, trying to break in or holding the door closed after the bell so everybody inside would be late for their next class. A guy tried to break into the Latin room one time through one of those little strips at the top of a window, the kind you have to undo with a hook on a stick. He was an enormous, powerful guy – unbelievably tall. I knew his family and they had contacted The Guinness Book of Records because they were convinced that he had the biggest feet of any boy his age in the world. I also knew he was adopted. Who knows how his adoptive parents must have felt as this enormous, villainous cuckoo grew to dwarf them in their home? It was a tense lunchtime, two of us trying to stop the door from being kicked in, the others trying to push these record-breaking feet back out through the window.
There was a lot of behaviour from the kids that just verged on madness. On our first day in technical class we got this long lecture about safety in the classroom. We were all just looking at each other in disbelief thinking, ‘No way! They’re giving us chisels?’ Within seconds of the talk finishing someone blew metal filings into somebody else’s eyes and that was that – a year of technical drawing instead.
One of the technical teachers had a bizarre burbling voice. He was a bit like an incomprehensible version of Bernie Winters. Once he gave me a long talking to and I had genuinely no idea if it was praise or censure. Probably the latter, as I was pish at techie. There was an assignment to build a little bookcase once. I didn’t have a clue so I stole the display model that the teacher had done. Just so it wasn’t too obvious I re-glued the runners on the bottom and ended up with a C.
The technical classes back then were idiotic. Teenage kids are like the A-Team. Give them a few rudimentary objects and they’ll construct a death machine of some kind. By the end of term the class was more tooled up than an Orc army. It’s like a conspiracy. Why don’t they teach kids in poor areas how to be hedge-fund managers and bond traders? Instead they get shown how to make mug trees and spice racks.
Years later I was writing on 8 out of 10 Cats, working on their Big Brother special. I’d watched Big Brother all that week to get up to speed and was pretty horrified.
‘They must really sift through the applicants to find such fucking idiots!’ I groaned. ‘I mean, people aren’t all just fucking idiots are they?’
Jimmy Carr just looked at me patiently and said, ‘Don’t you remember school?’ I suppose that’s true, the place was full of utter goobers. Once we were doing a science experiment in pairs. It was about velocity, so you measured how fast a little car went down a slope with five weights on it, then four and so on, to see if mass affected velocity. I was paired with a big, dotie Of Mice and Men character. I set the car with five weights and went to put it at the start line. He took it from me and ripped three of the weights off. ‘No point using five!’ he scoffed. ‘There’s only fucking two of us.’
Some of my favourite kids at school were the pathological liars. It seems that a tiny but indefatigable percentage of any school population will claim their bones have been replaced with metal and that they hang out with U2. The best one I knew was a boy called Ed Raven. He transferred into our school in second year but looked about eighteen and was sort of a hunchback. He claimed to have been living in Germany, where he was the national BMX champion. He also said he was independently wealthy, owning a meat factory near Berlin. I mean, if you could lie about anything, who would lay claim to a meat factory? Ed Raven would. That was his genius. My friend bumped into him many years later outside Glasgow Uni. Raven was walking with a cane and brushed past him having no time to answer questions. His ship was moored in the Clyde and he had to get back before the crew grew restive.
There was another guy like that in one of my classes. He came in late one day and started into some crazy excuse. We all perked up because we knew that somewhere in the explanation he was going to be mauled by a leopard or something. The teacher cut into what he was saying and made him tell the actual story of why he was late and it was … his mum making him wait in for the gasman. You could see a real look on his face that said, ‘What’s the point of telling you this? This is boring.’ I think that was the thing with those kids, they thought that our reality was so boring it literally wasn’t worth living in. They were sort of right, too.
Apparently parents tell an average of 3,000 white lies to children while they are growing up. My parents told me that every time you told a lie a giant fire-breathing spider with the head of a bear and the arms of an octopus would spin a big web out of all your lies and then when it had spun a web big enough it would carry you off in it. Of course it wasn’t until years later I found out they had been lying to me all along and they weren’t my real parents. Personally, I’m looking forward to telling my kids they were adopted. They weren’t, I’m just looking forward to telling them that.
I had friends but kept myself apart from most people, largely because I felt that they were all heading for grim jobs and Barratt houses in an unquestioning way that I found alarming. Still, there was always a part of me that wondered if I should try to be part of the gang more and forget about my doubts. I just couldn’t imagine being part of that world though, having a job, a mortgage, marrying your girlfriend from school and sending your own kids back there. Thing is, I’ve met a lot of people from school since and they’ve done all that, done the stuff I only used to say they’d do as a sort of despairing joke.
In my late twenties I was out with my best friend Paul Marsh (Paul is a transcendent human being and full-scale nutcase who I will colour in lovingly later on). I’ve known Paul since school and he’s flowered into a real independent thinker. On this occasion he was wearing a green leather jacket and some kind of tartan bondage trousers. I’d been writing all day on ecstasy. A guy came up to us who’d been at school with us both; he had a little pot belly and greying temples and was wearing the same wind-cheater my dad has. Now I’m not saying he’s a bad guy; he’s actually a lovely guy, but he looked at Paul dressed as some kind of Space Clown and me looking like I was trying to stare through the fabric of the universe and he said, ‘So lads! Are you getting much golf in?’
There was quite a telling thing that happened right at the start of my second year. There was an open patio area that linked different parts of the school. A bunch of us were dawdling through there and suddenly a big group just attacked this guy called John Jo. I think he’d literally looked at somebody in the wrong way – suddenly a group was round him punching and kicking him with one big lad slamming his head off a wall. John Jo just never came back; his mum took him out of the school. I remember our form teacher giving us a sarcastic speech about how his mum had come up to the school and said he wouldn’t be back. The form teacher was utterly incredulous that someone would transfer out because he’d been subjected to a serious, unprovoked assault. His point was pretty explicit – if she didn’t like her son’s head getting rattled off a wall, she’d struggle to find anywhere she’d like in the Glasgow school system.
It wasn’t the roughest school in Glasgow, nowhere close to it, but it would probably have shocked a lot of people. Quite a few people I knew there are dead now. A wee guy called Billy Kerr got killed by his dad, who chopped his head off in a drunken rage. His old man was a butcher, so at least he’d have made a good job of it. The guy who told me he’d been killed added brutally, ‘… not so wide anymore’. ‘Probably not quite as tall as he used to be either …,’ I sighed.
There was a nearby school that was some kind of special institution. I don’t know quite what it was, a List D school, borstal or some kind of learning difficulties place. Anyway, anyone you met from there was either a hardcore villain or mentally handicapped. One lunchtime a whole crew of them turned up at our school, smashing windows and battering people. It was like a fucking Zulu movie. A big group gathered outside one of the entrances – I think they had a beef with somebody in particular and were calling him out. One of our teachers (a hard case) walked out calmly and headbutted the biggest one right to the ground. It was like Clint Eastwood. Or like a grown man headbutting an emotionally troubled boy. It was tremendous.
Of course, life then was probably less violent than it is for the average teenager nowadays. I certainly think that teenagers should be taught more about knife crime. Going for the kidneys can give you a much cleaner kill. Equally, news footage of the teenage victims of gun crime should teach us all something. Look closely at those notes left by friends as the cameras pan by – there is a lesson to be learned here. These kids just can’t spell. ‘Respek’? What’s that? They certainly won’t be getting any of my respect until they learn some basic spelling and punctuation. Modern youth also seem to be horrible gift buyers. Do you really think this guy would have appreciated a teddy bear? He was a crack dealer!
Our diets at school were laughably terrible. Loads of us would go for chips at lunch – chips and a potato fritter was the top seller. That’s a bag of chips and an enormous chip please. My mum would make me a packed lunch, so I’d spend a fair bit of time trying to barter gammon rolls and Blue Ribband biscuits into something more interesting. There was an ice-cream van outside the front gates that sold single fags and a tuck shop that only seemed to sell choc-ices. I loved it and I’d have appreciated it all even more if I could see myself now – forcing myself to eat a bowl of leaves with my meals in a desperate attempt to stay alive.
I do think kids need better education about nutrition – I didn’t really have a clue about any of that stuff till I read up on it a few years ago. Scientists have found that people who choose to eat crisps, chips and chocolate have a gene linked to obesity. They are now able to identify the group of people with this gene, by looking at a map of Scotland. Apparently, the SNP is to give every schoolchild in Scotland an obesity check. If they can’t fit into one of Alex Salmond’s trouser legs they go on a diet.
One of the fattest boys at my school was called Jerry MacBrayne. There was a rumour that he’d been caught masturbating during chemistry class. Nobody knew if it was true, but we all abused him about it endlessly because there wasn’t much else to do. He had these really fat parents, a fat sister and a wee fat dog. They’d all go jogging together in a nearby park in terry towelling tracksuits. My friend, a mischievous wee lassie called Lesley, lived across from them. She phoned a curry house one night and sent them half the menu as a prank. She said his dad answered the door and looked absolutely delighted.
The idea has been floated that parents of obese children should be fined. Don’t people realise that the parents of fat children are simply misguided? What they’re trying to do is make their kids less attractive to paedophiles. What they’re forgetting is that they’re making it more difficult for them to run away. In Vegas I once saw an incredibly fat man on one of those little mobility scooter things, except he’d driven it onto a moving walk-way, so he didn’t even have to drive. Now that’s lazy.
Live Aid was a huge thing at school. I think it’s fair enough for kids to get excited about something like that. But the adults who bought it should have really been embarrassed. ‘The Christmas bells that ring there are … the clanging chimes of doom?’ Did that really happen? Even at 12, I’d had a host of sexual nightmares that were less weird than the video to that song. If there’s one thing we’ve learned about fighting famine over the years it is this – big music events don’t work. We can tick that off the list. To be honest, you’d have thought that would have been a bit further down the list. It’s amazing to think that at some point there was a meeting where someone said, ‘People are starving in their millions’, and somebody replied, ‘We’d better get a hold of Ultravox and Annie Lennox.’
Seeing the film Gandhi was also a massive thing for me as a kid. I saw a clip of it on TV first, where Gandhi as a young man is thrown off a train because of his race. I just felt this incredible indignation that stuff like that happened in the world. I talked to my dad about it and was absolutely raging. I suppose that was the birth of some kind of political consciousness. Apparently the London Underground is using quotes from Gandhi on the Tube. But I don’t remember his saying, ‘There’s a body on the line at Marble Arch’ in the film. They are using other famous quotes too, but the one from the Koran emptied the train.
I was quite into socialism and read stuff like The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and George Orwell. I was quite an idealistic wee boy and I’d read quite a lot of political stuff by the time I was about 14. By 16 I joined the Labour Party. That didn’t seem like such a great place for an idealist. Or anyone with a low boredom threshold. It’s a rarely mentioned fact that politicians rise through the ranks by being able to sit through endless grim meetings. This inevitably means that we are governed by monsters. A few months of screaming inwardly during speeches about council business and I drifted off. It’s not like our political system even gets stuff done. Motorists now have to dodge a pothole for every 120 yards of road in Britain. It’s estimated it will take 13 years and cost £1 billion before council workers will finish standing around staring at all of them.
Politicians are just innately ridiculous and their lives can’t really bear the weight of much scrutiny. As a teenager I campaigned for Labour in a Glasgow by-election. The candidate was Mike Watson, who seemed like a reasonably genuine, socialist-minded character. He was elected, forgot about the socialism and later became Lord Watson. When I heard that he’d tried to burn down a hotel at the Scottish Politician of the Year Awards I assumed that he’d had a change of heart. Mike must have had an epiphany, I reasoned, surrounded by these braying crooks at their annual backslapper. Realising what he had done with his life he must have tried to bring the whole place down about their heads like a modern-day Samson! I did a gig at that hotel recently and the staff told me that he’d started the fire because they’d stopped serving him at the bar. My dad always had a generally socialist outlook. His philosophy was a strange mixture of apathy and class war. He didn’t want to smash the state but he wished that someone would. The good thing was that he would talk to us about stuff like that and we had an idea that the world might be a bit different from what we saw on the news. Once, my headmistress held a discussion about nuclear war, a subject I had questioned people endlessly about due to fear.
‘Did you know that there are underground bunkers where key people will go when there’s a nuclear alert?’ she asked the generally baffled class.
‘Yes Miss! My dad says that all the top politicians will go there.’
‘That’s right Frankie, a lot of key people will be taken there, so that the country will be able to keep running.’
‘Dad said that if he knew where one was, he’d get a shotgun when the four-minute warning went off and shoot everybody as they went in!’
My music teacher stood in a Glasgow by-election. He was a foaming Nationalist and once demonstrated the battle tactics at Culloden to us using a clipboard (shield) and pen (sword). He got a party political broadcast, which he sung. We all rushed home to see it.
