Lockdown Day 27: Saturday 18th April, 2020 Angela died of a heroin overdose at the age of twenty, my beautiful, broken sweet angel. I was barely sixteen. I hate, yet pity, junkies to this day. No-one in my family and none of my friends except Kit ever knew. Some suspected and some, I […]
Category: Tiny Dancer
count the headlights on the highway
Lockdown Day 26: Friday 17th April, 2020 We skipped up the stairs to her room, the house cool and empty, smelling faintly of wild roses and almonds and stiff summer breezes. Despite the warm welcome, she was distant, distracted, puffy-eyed as if she had been crying. She squeezed me close, a fresh soul-searing clinch so […]
hives of hustle and humanity
Lockdown Day 25: Thursday 16th April. 2020 August sun glinted deceptively off Bingham’s pond as I leapt on the back of the 11 bus as it trundled off, grasping the grab rail and hauling myself aboard as it picked up speed. As I climbed the stairs, flapping swans in the murky water behind me hissed […]
you could get arrested for that
Lockdown Day 24: Wednesday 15th April, 2020 I took her arm and we walked the other way towards Charing Cross. Slowly. Not once looking behind. Not wanting to draw any attention. Gradually picking up speed. Anticipating the dreaded arm on the shoulder, the ‘Come here son, you’re lifted.’ Trying to look natural, feeling as […]
the polis wir jist daein a hold ‘n’ scold
Lockdown Day 23: Tuesday 14th April, 2020 Some raucous rounds later, Thommo flew down the back stairs, halted by a HoneyMonster shaped buffer. “Time tae hit the road guys, raid coming up. Ah just got chinned in the lane at the back by three bacon delivery wagons. Ah’m in mid-pee an’ they told me tae […]
the Honey Monster towered above me
Lockdown Day 22: Monday 13th April, 2020 Planet Earth tae Trick. Anyboady in therr?” The HoneyMonster towered above me, six feet six inches of tattoos, sinew, muscle, scar tissue and metal plates. A cross between Barry Sheene, Ossie Osborne and Charles Atlas, limbs mangled through high-speed tarmac-surfing bolted back together at multiple break points. […]
the Blenheim was the dog’s mangy bollocks
Lockdown Day 21: Sunday 12th April, 2020 The basement bar in the Blenheim was the dog’s mangy bollocks. Central to Glasgow, a mindgame warzone on the marches of Sauchiehall Street, it rocked my world. Friday and Saturday nights it was full of the hippest, coolest, baddest, maddest longhairs in the West of Scotland. Weeknights were […]
weird appeared
Lockdown Day 20: Saturday 11th April, 2020 Weird appeared the next Saturday afternoon when I bumped into her in Listen!, the record store central to the Hippydom of Glasgow. More accurately, when she bumped into me down in the basement as I sifted that dusty dungeon for any Blue Oyster Cult or Nektar rarities, offcuts, […]
tiny dancer
Lockdown Day 19: Friday 10th April, 2020 Blue jean baby, she was a ballerina in evening’s auditorium, a tiny dancer in the heaving street, enchanting the restless queue outside the Apollo, exotic and sensuous and strange, alien to the grey September Glasgow night. Fey chestnut hair blowing in the wind as she pirouetted down Renfield […]