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 and happy and intriguingly melancholy. Long brown hair, faded blue torn jeans, blue and blue striped Allan Glen’s rugby top. Probably had blue socks on too, my green period came later. It was a beautiful day with the family scattered through the house, in the back garden and out the front, lads playing football in the street with the local kids or clambering over the Anderson shelters and abandoned mine shafts in the field opposite, lasses giggling in small groups, rating the unwitting boys, talking clothes, Jackie foursomes, whoever happened to be the pinup of the week, Abba.

Bloody Abba. They plagued me for years. Infesting the charts when I was a teenager, belting out the desperately cooling windows of gay Oxford Street pubs in Sydney as we headed out to Borobodur or for some, full-blown revival mode when I made it back home in the 90s. Literally decades of bloody Abba.

The men were milling around with giant whiskies and bolstered egos, while the women sipped more delicate gins, except granny and Auntie Viv who swallowed their whisky with the best of them. The whole place was alive with that infectious genial nonsense of all great family gatherings, betrayed secrets, grateful memories, happy faces, sacred places, jealousies old and new, druncles and old carbuncles, summer dresses, relationship messes, new hair-dos and old hair-don’ts, friendships rekindling, elders dwindling,  youngsters revving up.

  I was loitering around the living room, waiting for a quiet moment to help myself to an illicit wee nip and liberate a few cans of Belhaven Eighty Shilling ale for the younger cousins waiting expectantly in the garage. Grandma’s living room was tantalisingly close to empty, a solitary druncle remaining by the television, larceny beckoned.

  Everything in the room around me was small. Since Grandad’s ghost had been excised with the removal of his weathered armchair it had made me feel big. The rug was wee, the armchairs were wee and hard, the wee television was black and white, the stool was unpadded and wee – and we children would squat on the rugged floor. Wee was all that was needed to do the job. For Grandma’s side of the family too, ostentation and excess were wicked and frowned upon. Highland hardship breeds character and integrity and the city made you soft. This was drummed into us all. And in truth I have never met a hardier crew in my travels far and wide, hard men and fair in the main, but not to be crossed. So the room was sparse, although Grandma regarded it as pleasantly comfortable. Understandable given the harshness of her impoverished early Glasgow – an alcoholic father who left a single mother struggling in the slums of Bridgeton to put food in the mouths of eleven desperate children, having already lost two under the age of six months. Even Grandma was wee, shaving just five foot tall. The pictures of her and Granddad in full Sutherland uniform always amused me as she barely reached his chest.

  So when Uncle Jim turned off the TV in disgust at the donkey he’d backed in the 4:30 from Kempton, I seized my chance. I poured myself a golden dram of Ballantynes, toasted the ancient Celtic gods of good fortune as I knocked back the scotch, then pondered a second.

  Suddenly I realised that someone behind me was watching, uninvited witness to my grand larceny. Beer and cider were fine but there would be a serious stramash if my parents caught me at the Scotch. I glanced at the mirror to see the reflection of Aunt Viv framed in the doorway to the kitchen. Seeing me watching her watching me, she tut-tutted and raised her almost empty glass in a toast, before draining the liquid sunshine, ruby Uisge Beatha. Obviously very happily tipsy, she danced quickly over to me, slipped one arm around my waist, cradled my head with the other hand and French-kissed me deeply without a word.

  To this day I can still remember the taste, the smell and the bite of the whisky, but I’ll never know if that was me or her. I was shocked. She stopped before the end of eternity, stepped back, re-arranged her dress then kissed me warmly on the cheek. As she poured a drop of water into her recharged glass my mother walked in and they wandered out to the hallway together, discussing what to get cousin Sandy for going to sea.

I grabbed the beer and legged it to the garage, teenage certainties very uncertain.