Lockdown Day 10: Wednesday 1st April 2020

At home as kids we were never allowed out to play on a Sunday.

A sop perhaps to the Calvinist legacy that engineered an empire, built a world and remained strong in the Scottish psyche. But we never complained. It was just the way that things were, even though we knew it wasn’t the same for everyone. Scattered families – Catholic settlers, Episcopalians, Jewish émigrés – let their children run free after chapel, church or discrete Lord’s day. Others were yet fiercer in their Sabbath reverence, no hot water, no cooking, no television or radio, a strident community constricting further the weekend, wee but far from free.

  But when we were visiting Aunt Vivien and Uncle Jack there were few restrictions. Then we’d be out in the park or the streets or the back closes, running wild through immaculate middens too good for the word with Duncan and Donald and Lachie. The sun always shone on those days, even in winter. At least in my memory. I conveniently ignore the icy blasts of Scottish winters brutalising my raw legs with icicle rain flaying the bare skin from my bones. We were Scottish. You didn’t wear long trousers till you went up to the secondary school. No matter the weather.

  We’d arrive on a Saturday, already done up in our Sunday best, topped and tailed, rubbed and scrubbed until we were immaculate, if still smelling of carbolic soap. We never stayed clean long though. As soon as we had said our hellos, hugged whatever visiting relatives were there, we’d wipe smeared lipstick from our cheeks, change, rush out the apartment door and leap down the stairs, sprinting through the unimpeachable close into unfamiliar territory. We’d play and eat and play, then spend the night in the room of one dispossessed cousin or another, peering out the hauntingly open door at the partying adults long after we had been sent packing to bed. And when the newborn day streamed through the curtains, we’d be up with the dawn, pestering my father for breakfast, as he was always the earliest riser, up at five a.m. no matter what. We’d wolf down our bacon and eggs, not his signature, but rather his only dish, and head out the door for a carefree Sunday morning just as the druncles appeared. That was just the way it was. The way it should be.

  I glance around. A true gathering of the clans from far and near, all sides of my family mustered in strength. I say my hellos and make my way down the hall to the lounge. The house is awash with flowers, festooned with lilies – her favourite – drowning in oceans of roses and orchids, a dead rainbow garden that I can tell appalls my deadbeat, feng shui consultant cousin Faun – not her given name. Faun has withered on the vine since moving to Edinburgh. I recall her as a juicy peach of a teenager, funny, frantic and fabulously female; yet now I see a politically-correct prune decked in gaudy Andean headwear, Sandinista right-on bleached cotton and fair trade fascism.  With her fanatical espousal of all things eastern as holistically healthy – yoga and Tai Chi and murderous Maoist dogma – she would undoubtedly have weathered the cultural revolution only to choke on a dim sum because the room faced the wrong way.

But Aunt Vivien would not have approved either. Flowers were for gardens and parks and the romancing countryside, alive and blossoming in a riot of colour, dancing in the breeze, swaying to the rhythm of the day. Not dead and decaying in some in memoriam lifeless exhibition.

  Now a party. That she would have approved of. A celebration to wake the dead and shake the living. That was more he thing. Although perhaps not with all of these particular guests. There are some right chancers and fancy-dancers in this assembly of the great and the good of clan MacAlba. All my relatives, all part of what I am, for good or bad. How much am I a part of them I wonder? Would I really want to know? Do l care? 

  I remember her vividly. Always my favourite Aunt. Maybe it was the Black Striped Balls. Perhaps because she was always fun and full of an unquenchable enthusiasm for life. Maybe because of how things were between us. Perhaps because she was seen as a bit of a maverick, a black sheep and I knew that was how some of the hillside-grazers in the family regarded me. Maybe because as I was growing up she was the most sophisticated, interesting and handsomely attractive woman in my life. Handsome, somehow not beautiful. Though her appearance eternally belied her age, there was something about her non-conventional, alluring appeal that precluded beauty. I didn’t know why and I didn’t care. Auntie Viv would always be my favourite.

  It seems such a short time since I was modelling my first pair of proper long trousers before her in this catwalk hall Not just tracksuit pants, these had a crease. No longer shorts, I was a grown-up, I was twelve and heading for new battles in a big boy’s school. And the parties and the fun, study, toil, war and peace, loves and losses, tears and fears and forgiveness and happiness that followed?
That has all passed in the blink of an eye.

Perspective lies, but the truth seems still distant nonetheless.