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. […]
Category: Book of the Dead
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 […]
a bit Bride of Chuckie
Lockdown Day 18, Thursday 9th April, 2020 A new nurse wandered in as we chatted into the night, scowling twice at us, tut-tutting the roadkill mess. We ignored her and carried on without acknowledging her downer presence. She took this personally, so when she tut-tuttingly tut-tutted louder, I stood smiling and grandiosely swept up my […]
ghosting a Piobaireachd
Lockdown Day 17: Wednesday 8th April, 2020 I feel old recalling these times, caressing these long-frond memories with their tentacle temptations, traps and trials. I wonder what fuels these musings? Guilt? I thought it long-gone, passed with the death of Uncle Jack. Love? We may have loved yet never been in love, but we will […]
finger ghosts stroke my spine and chill my soul
Lockdown Day 16: Tuesday 7th April, 2020 I hold the door open for Charlene as she wrestles herself and the baby out, then let myself into the surgery. There has been nothing done to this room since it was pensioned off and it has not aged well. The wrinkled blind is drawn, cataract illumination slipping […]
wild nights and whisky
Lockdown Day 15: Monday 6th April, 2020 So I survey the faces in the winter’s light, those I recognise and those I don’t, five generations of blood-clan and marriage. In-laws and outlaws, introverts and extroverts, past, present and future. Clan MacAlba. A tired old joke used to say ‘there are three types of Scots: Edinbuggers […]
new hair-dos and old hair don’ts
Lockdown Day 14: Sunday 5th April, 2020 First time we kissed, and I do mean kissed, not sloppy cheek peck kissing as Aunties do with barely-tolerated nieces and nephews, was at another family get-together. Everyone was crowded into grandma’s house. I was a 17 years young, mid-seventies hippy, lost and waiting to be found, sad […]
slipping on different rungs of Jacob’s ladder
Lockdown Day 13: Saturday 4th April, 2020 A palpable tension stalks the room as it fills with saints and sinners slipping on different rungs of Jacob’s ladder. Auntie Vivien had not lived a conventional life, at least as far as some of her more traditional relatives were concerned. The Western Isles of Scotland, remnant havens […]