Lockdown Day 5: Friday March 27th March, 2020

Uncle Lachlan Ruadh?  Whisky – liquid sunshine bound by the sky’s tears. The water of life finished him off young before I was eight. He was always fun, the Big Bad Wolf of eager infant imagination. He never opened his mouth without a joke to crack or tall tale to tell. Don’t know if I ever saw him sober. His favoured cure for a really bad hangover was to take two raw eggs and the juice of one bottle of whisky. Always dressed in a sharp suit and immaculate shoes, a different girl on his arm every time you saw him. Clean nails and a guilty conscience.
Stabbed in the throat in a drink-sodden brawl one Tuesday night down the town.

  The standard litany of life and death for a Glasgow childhood in the 60s I guess. The Swinging Sixties woke the world up to a wondrous anticipation of psychedelic possibilities, but Glasgow then was still the mean city of frontier streets it had been for 800 raucous years. A wildness of numb, slums and scum, disease and disgrace, leprous tenements leeching the souls from those trapped in the web of poverty, drink and violence. Survival of the hardest, the vicious preyed on the weak and those fighting to build a better life. Gangs and blades, knives, swords, open razors, hard men and harsher fates, casual violence on a city-wide scale, an alcohol-fuelled vendetta with life venting constantly, always ready to erupt.

‘Whit’s yuir name?’ ‘Where ye fae?’ ‘Whit school did ye go tae?’ ‘Whit’s yuir problem?’ ‘Come ahead ya cunt!’
Walk down the wrong street and feel lucky to escape with blood spurting warmly from just one slashed cheek. Wear the green or the blue in the wrong pub and wake up in a stark hospital bed. Incessant bigotry and throwaway violence. Get caught up in the riots of an Old Firm game and run the gauntlet of Janefield street for your life.

We graduates of that Glasgow school carry the scars less visible for all our days. Some let it define their short lives. Others let it live with them through the years. But show me the dark side and I’m already there. I was 8 the first time some kid tried to stab me with a butter knife sharpened on a rock to a point. Twelve when I first took acid. Fifteen when I got locked up in my first foreign jail. Glasgow was a hard city, it’s vigorous past just a memory then, its industrial heritage rusting and rotting, the cogs of empire grinding slowly to a halt, with nothing yet feeding the void. And though I was the future, I was umbilically linked to that history, the power and the hardship, the glory and the guts, the riches and rancour, through evanescing relatives born when Queen Victoria still ruled an empire on which the sun never set.

I’m an old hippy at heart man. But I learnt as a kid, even when you leave the house each day not wanting to fight with anybody, you have to be willing to fight with everybody just to get back home.

  So I’ve known death since I was five, though it was a while before first I stared him straight in the eye.
You know me, laugh in the face of danger… then hide until it’s passed by.

But there was nothing exceptional about my childhood experience, older relatives slipped away in their wearied time, some younger unfortunates swept up prematurely through drink or disease or accident or violence. Not drugs in those days though, thankfully. Close family and distant sons from Troon to Toronto and Sutherland to Sydney, in America, England, Africa, Asia, and lost on unknown oceans. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, they returned to the land that bore them if only in spirit, their journey over.

  Things changed as I grew older though, as I slipped my chains and invented my world. It all got kind of mixed up after that, a bit crazy, as you know, a bit messy. My own personal journey along the chaos road.”