Lockdown Day 47: Friday 8th May 2020 Don was shot on a visit to Trinidad after decades in London, unintended victim of a local beef, just sitting around enjoying life, chilling with a sweet rum punch. Wrong place, wrong time. Kriis trashed his fucking ridiculous Maclaren F1 V12 a couple ...
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Lockdown Day 46: Thursday 7th May, 2020 The ceasefire continued as Don and Frank exchanged limited conversation, if not phone numbers. The night drifted on its preordained march in a mellow haze of soon to be forgotten memories as the troops manned a futile bunker against the advancing dawn. Manic ...
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Lockdown Day 45: Wednesday 6th May, 2020 As the legal nightclubs closed around three am, the influx of shell-shocked tourists began, johnny foreigner slumming it with the temporarily-cash-in-hand lumpen detritus of society. The joint was bursting in no time, a time-honoured safety valve of early-doors London. The crush intensified, bodies ...
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Lockdown Day 44: Tuesday 5th May, 2020 We decided to hit 69, down Charing Cross road. Near enough, but out of sight of the frantic Federales. A cantankerous place, always on someone's hitlist but, playing the odds, unlikely to go down that night. "Who's running this place these days?" "Still ...
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Lockdown Day 43: Monday 4th May 2020 Denmark St was deserted as I turned the corner. There was no queue yet outside the club that didn’t exist, illegal yet ever-present, a dive, a shebeen full of the promise of the illicit night. It was not yet midnight, so way too ...
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Lockdown Day 42: Sunday 3rd May, 2020 The taxi dropped me on Haymarket before speeding my mate Jase along past Hyde Park into the western wastes. I strolled through Piccadilly Circus under the halon glow, still busy as tourists gathered aimlessly below an absent Eros in the attractionless night. 'Caveat ...
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Lockdown Day 41: Saturday 2nd May, 2020 Terry manicured the blankets with his typical attention to detail, smoothing them out from the centre towards the corners of the bed as far as he could reach,  showing great attention to camouflaging his wires, tubes and catheter in valleys of cotton. Always ...
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Lockdown Day 35: Sunday 26th April, 2020 Despite the blood loss and bone-mangling injuries, Jay survived the crash. The club held a number of blood runs and most of the chapter contributed. He lost his left leg below the knee and his right leg above. With the help of the ...
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Lockdown Day 34: Saturday 25th April, 2020 As Stonk slipped on his skullcap and Jay followed him, helmetless as ever, we jumped into Doc's old chevy and took off down the freeway. It didn't take long to reach the park. When we hit the parking lot, Doc said he was ...
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Lockdown Day 33: Friday 24th april, 2020 I pit-stopped on the return leg. The beers were working nicely. I loved having a forceful, free-flowing piss when I was on my way up. It just felt so good, so natural, as if I could piss on the ceiling. What's wrong with ...
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Lockdown Day 32: Thursday 23rd April, 2020 The parking lot was rammed, it was jamming. Petrolheads lounged around cradling coldies and checking out the industrial strength machinery slotted around the lot, flared pick-ups - Dodges and Fords mainly; rusty beaters - impossible to tell what they once were; V8 excess ...
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Lockdown Day 31: Wednesday 22nd April, 2020 I relaxed into my growing beer buzz and zoned into the mellow acid rock reverberating through the dusky room. There are times I just love chilling in a world of my own with a frosty bottle and fiery chaser listening to raunchy, driving ...
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Locdown Day 30: Tuesday 21st April, 2020 I rammed open the heavy oak door to peer into gloom. Jay was already in residence, camped on his stool at the bar in the far corner near the dartboard he believed to be his personal domain. Thirtyish, stout and heavy-muscled, curly dark ...
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Lockdown Day 29: Monday 20th April, 2020 Mack's Pheasant Plucker - best biker bar in northwest Chicagoland, if not the state. An oasis of beer and bikes and grinding rock'n'roll in a concrete wilderness of cross streets and commercial cack, sitting pretty off the Interstate at some bland, nameless twelve-lane ...
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Lockdown Day 28: Sunday 19th April, 2020 Jesus, Trick. You kept that quiet. All these years and you never cracked a light. Is that it then? The reason for all the wildness, madness, restlessness, the endless road? You feel guilty? Guilty? You can't carry guilt around with you for twenty-five ...
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Lockdown Day 27: Saturday 18th April, 2020 Angela died of a heroin overdose at the age of twenty, my beautiful, broken sweet angel. I was barely sixteen. I hate, yet pity, junkies to this day. No-one in my family and none of my friends except Kit ever knew. Some suspected ...
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Lockdown Day 26: Friday 17th April, 2020 We skipped up the stairs to her room, the house cool and empty, smelling faintly of wild roses and almonds and stiff summer breezes. Despite the warm welcome, she was distant, distracted, puffy-eyed as if she had been crying. She squeezed me close, ...
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Lockdown Day 25: Thursday 16th April. 2020 August sun glinted deceptively off Bingham's pond as I leapt on the back of the 11 bus as it trundled off, grasping the grab rail and hauling myself aboard as it picked up speed. As I climbed the stairs, flapping swans in the ...
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Lockdown Day 24: Wednesday 15th April, 2020 I took her arm and we walked the other way towards Charing Cross. Slowly. Not once looking behind. Not wanting to draw any attention. Gradually picking up speed. Anticipating the dreaded arm on the shoulder, the 'Come here son, you're lifted.' Trying to ...
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Lockdown Day 23: Tuesday 14th April, 2020 Some raucous rounds later, Thommo flew down the back stairs, halted by a HoneyMonster shaped buffer. "Time tae hit the road guys, raid coming up. Ah just got chinned in the lane at the back by three bacon delivery wagons. Ah'm in mid-pee ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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Lockdown Day 12: Friday 3rd April, 2020 Grandma is sitting in a large chair in the centre of the bay window, silhouetted by the matriarchal sun. The armchair dwarfs her. She was only ever five feet tall. And that was before she shrank with the passing of the years. Always ...
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Lockdown Day 11: Thursday 2nd April, 2020 In the lounge, the grand piano stands rooted in its spot to the left of the bay window. As it has since the day it was wrestled up the stairs into the house. Gleaming. An awesome display of profligacy when bought in the ...
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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 ...
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Lockdown Day 9: Tuesday 31st March, 2020 We pull up outside the russet sandstone tenement. This is still an exclusive area despite the city's decline, a peaceful, easy feeling of tree-lined avenues, parklands and immaculate tenements. The curtains are drawn in many windows as a mark of respect. For forty ...
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Lockdown Day 8: Monday 30th march 2020 As the sullen sun struggles to pierce gathering clouds once more, we muster behind the hearse to walk the half-mile or so to the cemetery. The cortege is heavily rugged up for the wan Scottish winter, dark heavy coats, long woollen scarves, shined ...
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Lockdown Day 7: Sunday 29th March, 2020 I sit in the rear of the church, a fraying wicker seat at the end of my road to the aisles. The kirk is sparse, unadorned, a bare granite temple, typical Presbyterian gateway to the eternal dawn with a fire and brimstone gatekeeper ...
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Lockdown Day 6; Saturday 28th March, 2020 Lakeshore Drive hustled Lincoln Park twenty floors below, late-evening traffic clogging the highway from the Old Fashioned grandeur of the Drake hotel to the malt liquor melee of the Addison turnoff. Lake Michigan sparkled in slow evening light, the twinkling rays of the ...
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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 ...
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Lockdown Day 4: Thursday March 26th, 2020 Next? Grandpa - emphysema.
I was seven by then. He was bedridden as long as I could remember, wreathed in a constant Capstan full-strength fog, assuring the doctor on his frequent visits that he'd really, really given up smoking this time despite the ...
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Lockdown Day 3: March 25th, 2020. I paused to marshal delinquent thoughts.
"This is a pretty unusual way to pass the time, Terry. You sure this is what you want? It's not very... uplifting." He nodded, rigid shoulders framing syncopated breathing, "Humour me." "Humour you? That's easy. What do you call ...
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Lockdown Day 2: Tuesday 24th March, 2020 Grandad died." I stopped. And waited. Then waited some more. Terry chuckled, "Trick, your ignorance is encyclopaedic. Even on my death bed you won’t cut me some slack. Come on. Give up the good stuff. All the juicy bits. The secrets go to ...
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Lockdown Day 1: Monday 23rd March, 2020. God means to kill us all "I'm collecting dead people, Trick." Terry grinned eerily across the stark neon room as he said it.
"Strange occupation for a scouser like, you might say, but it don't mean that I'm robbing graves and selling the ...
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