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 who keep the Sabbath and anything else they can get their hands on; Hielanders who want what the good burghers of the capital have and are always prepared to fight for it; and Glaswegians who never know what they want but are prepared to fight anyone for it anytime, anyway.’ Looking around the room, they’re all here. It’s good that my druncles consider themselves self-made men as it relieves God of an awful lot of blame.

Yet as I look around I realise how yesteryear that world already is. Milling around me clan MacAlba has grown into this melting pot of Scots, English, Irish, Canadians, Australians, Kiwis and Americans; Free Church, Anglican, Evangelist, Roman Catholic, Kirk of Scotland,  Buddhist, atheist, agnostic, humanist and too stupid to know or care; Islanders, highlanders and innocent bystanders; preachers and teachers, wasters and wankers, gangsters, pranksters, academics and arseholes. Society dissected before my eyes, a little bit of everything, even Edinburgh – although we usually keep that quiet. And I think of the Scottish diaspora that enfeebled this nation and left us the worst to play their insipid politics with our lives. Looking around and noting the missing faces of the long departed, I realise again that I have more relatives in Australia and America, Canada, China, New Zealand, Singapore, Europe and England than I do remaining in our celtic homeland.

  I see my father behind Aunt Shelagh, stacking a plate of cold meats and cheeses while he juggles a bottle of Labatt’s. He nods across the room. Uncles Iain and Niall seem to be arguing with their youngest brother again. Jim is the black sheep of the family. Depending on how you view things, either an alpha wolf, predator of the highest order, or a complete prick. I go with prick. However, he suffers badly from Glaswegian Alzheimer’s – he forgets everything except the grudges. From the glares in my direction it could even be that I am again the source of the dispute. Perhaps understandable. 

  Shard memories cut deeply. I wince at the thought of cousin Shane lying dying, feeling the wicked heat of the flames that torched the ice-cream van depot where we were where we shouldn’t be when we shouldn’t be. Wasn’t the first time but it would be the last time for Shane. I remember in pictures, not words. Wonderful for good times. My molotov memory strips bare the years, sees me run round a Softee van to witness the most horrific thing I’d ever seen. I hear the crackling flesh again. I smell the frying skin. I see my cousin burn. I hear him die.
A shiver rips down my spine.

  In the doorway, cousins Jas junior and Tam notice the heated discussion and circle round to join in. They appear to calm things down then drift over my way, pointedly assuring me they’re happy to see me here. We catch up over a glass.
All these years and I still can’t let my guard down around Uncle Jim.

  The last time I saw Aunt Viv was on the steps of my parents’ house. I was back for a long weekend and catching up with friends and family. The folks knew she was over from Santa Ponsa where she was spending most of her time, but she wasn’t the type to forewarn of her arrival. She preferred always to just turn up unannounced on your doorstep, willing hostage to capricious fate. If you were busy, if you were out, if you had other guests, so be it. She could join the party, blow you a kiss or visit some other time. There was always tomorrow. Today had to be seized and beaten into shape. I had a flight to catch back to Brussels and was haring out the door late. I had been unable to promptly escape my mother’s long digressions as she brought me up to date on the recent history of the global family, the welcome new additions to the family bible genealogy and the ends of sundered lines. Sometimes I wondered if all these people really existed or if they were all just figments of my mother’s over-ripe imagination. Perhaps she was God creating the world as we went along.

  Maybe I’m God creating it right now. Maybe we’re all God. Perhaps that’s just my eighth day madness manifesting or the forgotten flashback of a long-neglected acid trip. Are we the process of God’s omniscience? How would we know?

  We were saying goodbye again when I noticed Mum smiling beyond me into the distance. I glanced over my shoulder just as I felt an arm circle my waist. It was Aunt Viv, sunkissed in a transparent beachdress perfumed by the Mediterranean. All that was missing was warmth from the sun, summer in Scotland as usual lacking that key element. She was over sixty then but still looked twenty years younger, even with the strident sunlight highlighting every wrinkle. Wild nights and whisky had always suited her. Her latest acquisition, the yacht-owning toyboy from Hell or Pinner or wherever, was introduced, and as I dashed to catch my flight she walked up the steps out the pages of my Book of Life.   

  I see my mother is holding things together as usual, thriving on the chaos, introducing distant relatives no-one knows but her or her island counterpart Mhairaidh. The keepers of the secret and sacred knowledge, undoubtedly related by unseen bonds of ancient sisterhood.

  Mum is in her element. This is all second nature to her, planning, arranging, making and baking. It’s her way of coping with these events. Wakes and funerals? Well, she has seen enough to understand what’s needed. War, disease, enmity and emigration have ruptured the greater family so we seek solace and shelter occasionally in clustered isolation.  

  Mum is one of the reasons I don’t sleep much. I got my late night habit from her with my early rising from Dad. It kind of squeezes the night but that’s OK – cliché alert – I’ll sleep when I’m dead. I can remember as a kid watching grainy late-night movies till the early hours with Mum when the rest of the family had bedded down for the night. It didn’t really go with rising in all weathers from the age of fourteen for my six a.m. paper run, but I survived and not needing much sleep can come in handy at times. I remember being bundled out of bed onto the cold floor as Dad unleashed our battering ram dog, who could somehow run full-tilt at my closed bedroom door, leap to slam it open with both front paws, then pounce onto my bed in one impossible movement. He would then place his back against me, four sandy legs against the wall and shove until he had monopolised the warm spot I had been pleasantly asleep in. As it was a narrow, single bed this often deposited me on the cluttered hard floor. In all the years since, I have never found an alarm clock that worked so well, although few of them had such bad breath.  

  Mum is pushing one of the old Barra boys over to Aunt Jane, one of granny’s sisters. Like my mother, Jane is also in her element, except that element is gin. She believes the problem with the world is that it’s always a few drinks behind. No relation by blood, she may well be closest in spirit to Aunt Vivien, save she has always seemed to lack her ecstatic communion with life. Altar wine sacrificed for the devil’s drop, perhaps. Though English, she shares the family’s insidious over-indulgence. I remember a blazing row once when Aunt Jane was visiting Glasgow, staying at Gran’s. Granny was annoyed because she thought Jane was drinking far too much. Pot meet kettle said, well, everybody. In her defence, Aunt Jane insisted she never poured a drink before noon and that, as she retired for the night long before her wayward card-sharping elder sister, it was undoubtedly granny who was drinking far too much. Granny was forced to concede that she had indeed, never seen her youngest sister pour a drink in the morning, but there was no reconciling them. Jane stormed out, all the way down to our house, so I slept on a fraying canvas camp bed for that week. Years later I was staying with her down on the south coast for a few days before hitching up to London for a Neil Young gig at Wembley Arena. The second morning I bought some Theakstons Old Peculier for me and a bottle of Gordon’s with some Slimline to placate the Shinto spirits of the house. When I opened the fridge to cool the mixer, there stood a production-line of pre-fab gin and tonics. When I mentioned this strange gathering in passing later, Aunt Jane threw me a most disdainful look and repeated she never poured a gin before noon. However, when confronted with the hard evidence behind the round of Stilton, she finally admitted that she may actually drink the odd one or two before lunch that she had prepared the night before.

  I mingle, say my hellos and mouth expected platitudes. I nod occasionally to craggy faces, commiserate with acne teenagers in orthodontic braces and press the flesh with aging relatives with too much latitude in saggy places. From angry zits to replacement hips, life can be harsh, but despite my growing sense of sorrow, I make all the right noises. Shaking hands and hugging old biddies I’ve not hugged since the last coven gathering, I notice they avoid my eyes, the older, the sicker, the more evasive. Each day brings us closer to our own brief end and some are closer than others. My wasted youth and unearned health pit me implacably against their age and unbeckoned decay in some minds. Are they conscious of this? Do any of them actively understand it? I have no idea. But I have noted that these days I appreciate that in a way I never did till recently. I accept their reluctance, it no longer concerns or distresses me. The immortality of youth betrayed me long ago but now I understand more keenly how this drives our days. I’m lucky to still be here and will make the most of it. They are all a part of me now and will be till my own time has come. As I will be with them.

  I still have nothing meaningful to say to the boys. I see them busying themselves, trying not to think about the whole affair. Loss. Abandonment. Loneliness. Middle-aged orphans. Perhaps this day is the sole day a child loves a parent as much as the parent has always loved the child. Their own children offer little comfort today but will be there tomorrow and the days after. Succour and succession?

  Outwith this familial cradle, dumped behind the door, there is a tiny crying in a carry-tot. A very, very tiny baby swaddled alone with its tears. I look for some recognition in a face in the crowd and catch it in cousin Charlene’s. She is arguing animatedly with her dad, Uncle Jim gesticulating fiercely while glancing over towards the child. I don’t believe it can be hers. She is really just a kid, an uncertain waif barely able to look after herself, never mind a baby. But sure enough she picks up the hungry bundle and looks around for a quiet place.

  I catch her eye and gesture to the empty surgery. The door is not locked so she slips inside, thanking me. I watch her tortured shadow disappear in the light of the day. Send in the clowns? Don’t bother, they’re here. This three-ringed circus will play and play. An ever-changing troupe, neither good nor bad, we parade our colours and pass the flag to future generations. The guard will change but the procession goes on.

Evolution? Adaptation, not necessarily progress.