Two things you never see these days; Afghan hounds and Afghan coats. Is it the war on terror? Is it fashion? Maybe it is just one of those tricks the memory plays, letting you think powerful events from your past were ubiquitous or represented the norm. So either my memories of these two Afghan items are artifacts of my mind or indeed they were very common in 1970s Fife.
The lad down the road from me on Main Street had two Afghan hounds. The three of them seemed to be everywhere. I guess because I lived opposite the park I saw them a lot, coming and going. He would take his dogs up the fields at the back of the park and onto the hill towards Blythe's tower.
He must have been in his mid teens and seemed the kind of kid everyone described as 'a guid lad'. That meant he wasn't a punk or a homosexual and didn't sniff glue. People would see him walking his dogs up the road to the park and say, "Aye there goes Jimmy and his dugs. He's a guid lad". I never actually spoke to him and didn't actually know him but he is a figure of legend in my memory.
One hot summer day I remember a kind of kerfuffle, an atmosphere. Something was amiss. Voices were calling out and people were gasping. I looked up over my front gate and there was Jimmy wearing what looked like a strawberry blond Afghan coat. Strange for the time of year. His flooding tears were also a bit of a signpost towards the drama that was unfolding in front of our eyes. His coat was in fact his dead dogs, lying limp and lifeless, slung across his shoulders. Stained with blood their long golden coats had become a matted bloody mess. Jimmy walked across the road in front of my house crying his heart out as he carried his dead dogs home. It seems the hounds had got too close to some sheep up on the hill and the farmer had shot them both dead.
From that point on, if you were to fast-forward through the rest of the DVD of my life, Jimmy had gone. No further appearances, no honourable mentions, no late cameo at a football match ten years latter. No, he was gone, not even to be found as sone long forgotten 'deleted scene' in the extras menu of my memory.
Most families have traditions. Some always have fish on a Friday, some stay up to ‘see the bells in’ on Hogmanay, others let off hundreds of rounds of live ammunition into the air from a Kalashnikov during weddings. Us, well be all drove to my Auntie’s on Boxing day and slept over.
This was a real treat for me as my Auntie and Uncle lived in a massive house with a huge garden. I think this substantial piece of property was courtesy of a sizable redundancy package my Uncle benefited from when the Francis colliery shut down. The thing I remember most about that house was the hall. In my memory it is 50 yards long, 15 yards wide and with about 20 rooms coming off from it on both sides. In one room, near the end on the right, so not often visited due to the extreme distance, there was a pool table. Just like the ones you got in pubs and amusement arcades!
Two other rooms off that hall also sit firmly in my memory. These were the bedroom and sitting room belonging to my Dad's dad, or Dai (pronounced die) as we called him. Wee Jock had moved in with my Auntie after his wife had died from Lung cancer at a relatively young age. He had basically transplanted his old sitting room at home into this new room at his daughter's. The reason I remember these rooms so well is because it was in that sitting room that I first saw my Dad properly cry. He had always been a bit of a softy when it came to things like Lassie and Little House on the Prairie so I had seen him shed a tear before, but this was something different. Surrounded by all his Mum's things, which had been brought from the old house to furnish this new sitting room, I guess it was just too painful. He wept.
I remember the bedroom because on these boxing day sleep-overs I shared a bed with my Dai. Now this is strange given the massive house and the large number of rooms with beds in them. But it seems at some point in the past I had asked if I could share a bed with Dai, mentioning that I liked his smell! Can't think why. A heavy smoker and drinker who used to slick his hair back with milk to hold it in place, I cannot imagine the smell would be generally regarded as pleasant. In reality I had talked my little self into a corner. Having said I wanted to, I didn't then want to hurt any feelings by backing out. I actually found the whole experience quite unpleasant for a number of reasons. Firstly, plain and simple he snored. Secondly his body, when clad only in Y-fronts and vest (tucked in) was a collection of tattoos and miners scars, like Robert DeNiro in Cape Fear but with a lot of the air let out!The final reason, and the real clincher, was the cup of phlegm on the bedside table. Yes that is correct, I said a cup of phlegm on the bedside table! Poor wee Jock had worked down the pit all his life since he was about 13. This combined with 30 B&H ever day for 40 years had left his lungs in a fairly parlous state. Through the night he would be coughing his lungs up and spitting the resultant product into a china tea cup which he kept on table by his bed. In the morning, when I got up early to watch kids TV, I would hazard a peek at the contents. My stomach still turns to this day as I remember the cup of greeny brown phlegm, marbled with dark red blood and flecked with jet black coal dust.
After a few years of this I plucked up the courage to ask if I could sleep in another room. Duly ensconced in my own suite of rooms I slept like a king. I didn't know it but that was to be the last year of the Boxing day sleep overs. All the kids grew up, moved out and relationships changed. The house was sold and my Auntie, Uncle and Dai moved to a smaller place up the road. Not long after that my Dai became quite ill and moved into a home. I visited him once before he died and was strangely comforted to see the china cup on his bedside table.
The three figures walked across the field, two men and a boy. The boy looked with fascination at the silky black barrel of the shotgun. He had never seen one up close before and now, as he climbed the slope, his eye was constantly drawn to its matt metallic sensuality, to its rising and falling in the crook of his uncle’s arm. “It’s a braw gun eh son?” his uncle said. The boy looked away, embarrassed. The strange feelings of excitement the gun was giving him left a guilty echo inside, in a part of him he was only just starting to feel, like looking at a girl’s legs in class and getting caught. “Do you want ti hold it?”
“Naw yer alright there Alec.” The other man interrupted. “You had better jist hold onto it. He’s too wee ti be carrying a gun. He’s no even twelve yit.”
“Whatever ye say John, you’re the boss. Your right…as ever.” Alec replied, the last word drifting off into a contemptuous mumble. “Aye, am expecting gid things fi you John, what wi yer army training an that,” Alec continued, now with a note of contempt, “A wid imagine yer a crack shot eh?”
“A did alright.” Replied John as he lifted the boy over a fence at the edge of the field. As he lowered his son down on the other side the sleeve of his leather jacket snagged on the barbed wire. “Shite! This jacket cost me a fortune.” He cursed.
“A bet. Looks like yer still doing alright. Fancy clase, an that. Yon motor you got yersel? That must o cost a bob or two!” said Alec “ye always did land on yer feet.”
“Dinny start Alec” John replied, still angry from the ripped sleeve, “you screwed up, the rest o us jist got on.”
Alec stopped and turned, a twisted upper lip showing his yellowed teeth, punctuated with gaps. “Jist got on!” he spat “Dinny give me that crap. You only got on coz oor fether though the sun shined oot yer erse. He set you up in that job. Daddy’s bloody golden boy. ‘He’s jist oot the Guards ye ken, Falklands an that.’ If a heard him say that once he must have said it a million times.”
“Look Alec, kin ye jist drop it. Am here wi the boy and we’re ment ti be puttin aw that behind us, noo that yer aff...ye ken...the drink an that.”
“Yer right John. Yer right again.” Alec’s voice trailed off into silence.
Up ahead lay the tower. It stood on top of the hill, a look out post by all accounts, built by some unknown merchant from years ago who watched the sea for the approaching cargo ships. Now it stood in ruin, just the four bare walls. The boy knew this place well. This tower was the limit of his independent world, the point beyond which he never dared to venture. Standing as it did on the crest of the hill, to go beyond it was to loose sight of home back down in the valley. Going beyond the tower meant leaving the invisible zone of protection which radiated out from his mum, up over the park, through the fence and over the field to the top of the hill and the tower. Today it was different. He was with his Dad, he carried that feeling of protection with him.
“This is a grand spot. Let’s stop here. The rabbits come oot the whins ower there. We jist need to sit still lang enough.” Said Alec.
“Wid it no be a bit better if we…” John replied but exchanging a look with Alec, his words trailed off then returned suddenly. “No, yer right. Here’s as guid a place and any.”
The three figures knelt down in the grass and rested in silence. Slowly rabbits started to appear here and there. Alec loaded the shotgun with two blood red cartridges and lifted the barrel into place with a smooth click. The boy still transfixed by the weapon, couldn’t take his eyes off it. But now something was different, the atmosphere around the gun had changed. No longer did it ooze a sensual magnetism, an almost erotic attraction, now it was cold. Where the black steel of the double barrels had once seemed slick and smooth, they now appeared hard and brutal. Still he stared at the gun. He could not look away. It was if the moment he took his eyes of this thing it would turn into a snake and strike out at him. He had to hold its gaze. It seemed to the boy that his uncle felt the same fear for his hands were trembling, his knuckles white with the strain of holding this serpent in check. It looked as if he was privately wrestling with a powerful animal, intent on slipping free from its handler and unleashing its raw, destructive potential.
Then just as suddenly as the change had come it stopped. The hands relaxed, the trembling faded and the boy’s uncle seemed to breathe a sign of…was it relief? Alec turned the gun towards his brother. John only had time to turn and blurt “Alec don’t be a..” when the gun went off, sending an iron fist through the blood and bone of the man’s chest. Alex started to laugh, a loud shouting laugh, a laugh that seemed to laugh at the world.
By the time the boy ran into the fence at the bottom of the hill the laughing had stopped. He breathlessly crossed the fence at the back of the park which abutted the farmland through which he had just run blindly. The boy felt like the protective bubble his mum projected had never been so far away. She was in the front garden, talking to the neighbour, when the boy ran across the road, without hesitating to look, and crashed into her, holding on tight. In the distance, beyond the park, with its witch’s hat and swings. Beyond the fence and over the fields to the tower, the gun fired for a second time. The boy looked up at his mum and started to cry.
Growing up in East Fife tends to leave its mark on a boy. Besides the chip on my shoulder, I also developed a soft spot for golfers. Leven, standing as it does at the front door of the 'world' famous East Neuk, is often bypassed by the traveller. This is their loss for it boasts one of Scotland's best kept sporting secrets. I am referring to the Leven links golf course. Jointly owned by two clubs, the Leven Thistle and the Leven Golfing Society, it is used as a qualifying course for the Open when it comes to St. Andrews. A tough, unforgiving course, liberally sprinkled with dollops of whin and thick tangled rough, it had broken many a man and on one occasion actually broke my 7 iron!
So, as a young boy growing up around this course, golf kinda got into my blood. My Dad was very active in the Leven Thistle, progressing from mere member to Secretary, to the giddy heights of Captain. I am sad to report that his standing on the course and those off the course did not follow the same trajectory. He stubbornly remained an 18 handicapper. I often played a few holes with my Dad and I think it was there, on that golf course, that I learned something about what it is to be a man. Besides learning how to swear I also saw a normal man struggling with a game that was obviously impossible to master. Time and time again my Dad would start his round by hitting the ball straight off the tee into the burn not 20 meters in front of us. This was humiliation indeed as the first tee sat alongside a busy promenade, bustling with Glaswegian tourists with hair like Irn Bru and for whom golf was a foreign country, a bit like England. These people would stand by the fence and watch in silence, seemingly out of respect for the player and the meditative state into which he seemed to be entering, but in reality, like on so many of the occasions when we stop and observe our fellow beings in their endeavours, we are hoping to see them make a royal arse of themselves.
Despite repeated failure and humiliation in front of strangers and club members, my Dad never gave up. Sure he would make me run and try and get the ball out of the river while he teed up the next ball, but he always got that next ball out of the bag, put it back on the tee and had another go.
It was the summer of 1979 and a man called Severiano Ballesteros Sota or 'Seve' to his millions of friends, had just won the Open at St.Andrews. With his good looks and muscular approach to golf, there was no reason to dislike him. In my family we loved him so much we even named our cat after him. I once managed to actually come into physical contact with Seve, the man that is! We were at a pro-celebrity golf match, in the days before celebrity had been become a dirty word. It was all quite low key and friendly. You could actually get quite close to the players. So there I was walking alongside Seve, just a few feet from his bronzed, muscular forearm. My Dad is elbowing me and saying, "Go on touch him, go on." And I'm thinking, "That's a bit weird, no thanks" when my Dad grabs my arm and hits Seve with my soft white Scottish hand. Fortunately Seve was great but not Christ and he didn't stop the crowd and demand to know who had touched him. I guess in all the jostling any number of people could have done it. He just strode on, smiling and waving. Very unChrist-like, but still seriously cool.
It is strange but when I think of Seve the man, I always end up thinking of my Dad. It might just be the golf connection but I sense that deep down there is another link, something more fundamental, more basic. I think in the end it boils down to what it means to be a man. My Dad, a fairly normal man playing off 18 and Severiano Ballesteros, a golfing colossus, both deeply influenced me as a young boy. They both came to represent heroic forms of masculinity. One the one hand my Dad, struggling on against the odds, getting knocked down but always 'getting another ball out the bag' and playing the game. One the other is Seve, handsome and strong, taking the challenges in his stride with seemingly effortless skill.
When you grow up, most of your heroes start to loose their cartoon status and become real human people with flaws and cracks just like you know you yourself possess. This brings some comfort against the howling wind that life starts to blow at you but it is a bitter loss none the less. At the end of boyhood, when we are just beginning to try on the images and roles we have seen other men display, we also see that these pictures which have played across the screen of our childhood are just an illusion, a movie, a play, a game.
Seve Ballesteros Sota grew old, stopped winning and finally, at the age of 54, died from a brain tumour. My Dad looked after me and my sister after my parents split. He worked all kinds of jobs, made all kinds of sacrifices. He suffered, was broken but came back. I couldn't see it at the time because I was still really just a selfish little boy. I grew up and can now appreciate what he did. When all the rubbish I've talked about masculinity and role models is stripped away, there he stands, his failings eclipsed by his love for me. When I understood that, at the age of 40, that was the end of boyhood.
It just so happened that I found myself at the group for young mums that is run by my Church, St.Mary's. Don't ask why I was there but there I was sitting on a bean bag tapping some wooden sticks together in time to the praise music as one of my little ones danced around shouting 'Praise God' and 'We love you Jesus'. Fully Charismatic (don't tell Granny).
I have 'popped'1 into this group a couple of times recently to meet the current Mrs. Gibbons and have always been aware of the warmth and genuineness of the group. It is not like other mother n tots I've been to. These have been similar to going to a cock fight in a warehouse just of the A11 (don't ask!) Everyone sat in a circle and looked in on the corralled children as they took part in some kind of Darwinian selection process: biggest, fastest, strongest.
I digress. You see, the last time I went I picked up a piece of paper about praying with your kids. Interesting I thought. This could be useful, knowing, as I do, that our prayer time with the kids usually consists of a quick ritualistic one liner before meals with me shouting at some one to put their fork down/stop singing/take their elbows of the table/pass the port! Our pre-meal thanks have become a bit like 'on your marks, get set, go!' Something that just has to been done before we start, a bit like putting your teeth in before you kiss.
Still digressing. Look I'm coming into land now, this 'interesting' piece of paper contained an idea called 'Finger Prayers'. It immediately appealed to me as a man who enjoys routine, systems and order. I present it now for your perusal and hopefully more.
1 Popped. When ever you find yourself with adults around children I find that we all start to use 'pop' instead of things like 'put' or 'stick' or even 'slip' !?.e.g. 'pop that in there' or 'lets just pop this dummy in'. I picked up this viral habit when we were in hospital for two weeks with the premature kid Andrew. Also got a bad dose of Norovirus but that's another story (or claim). All the staff said 'pop' like it was going out of fashion. Even the doctors. Are they trained to say this? Does research show that patients/fretful parents feel comforted and and reassured by things being 'popped'. 'I'm just going to pop this camera up your arse Mr Gibbons.'
I was reading a thing on Yahoo the other week about the number of cities you have visited in your life. Seems that most people, even the fairly well travelled, have rarely visited more than 20. When I tried this little activity with the current Mrs Gibbons, the fragrant Clare Rosamund, it descended into a good tempered argument about what constitutes a city. Is it about cathedrals? Are Manchester and Salford separate cities? Guess it depends which side of the Irwell you are standing on. All became a bit silly so we gave up at around 16 (SAE for a full list).
That is all a bit of a preamble that is getting me to where I want to be. Having been at my Mum's house recently and looking through old photos of myself and family, I have been thinking a lot about my life story, my autobio as I am calling it.1 As I started to reflect back over my life, one of the first things I tried to do was to put together a list of towns and cities where I have lived. It was harder than I thought. So here we go, my hometown CV
Home town CV
1971-1976Kinglassie
1976-1981Kirkwall
1981-1985Leven
1985-1989Methil
1989-1993Aberdeen
1993-1994Bangor
1994-1996Manchester
1996-1997London
1997-1998Manchester II
1998-2001Cambridge
2001- Ely
Ready for my close up. To my left, before One Direction, the young Harry Styles. The boy in front is wearing tartan trousers, akin to those favoured by 1970s golfers.
1 Other working titles include; Dancing on the sideboard, My life as a beach, The death of Seve Ballesteros or Perseverando.
So a minister of the Free Church of Scotland was preaching with liberty from the front of a church in the Western Isles (might have been Harris, might have been Lewis, the truth has been lost in the retelling). Unusually for a wee free church in the islands it was large and even more unusually it was full. It must have been a funeral. Indeed it was so large it boasted a balcony and whats more there were people occupying it. As I said the minister was preaching and as he came to the end of his exposition, he drew the congregation together in prayer. Now in the Free Church of Scotland it is customary to stand to pray (and sit to sing) so the body of the kirk stood and as one bowed their heads. Just as the minister was about to start he spotted a man in the front row of the balcony. He was wearing a rather poor wig and as he started to bow his head it slipped off and fell from the balcony and down amongst the pews below. Barely able to stifle a gasp and struck with embarrassed horror the minister stood transfixed. His horror was compounded as he saw a lady in the pews below bend down and retrieve the fallen toupee. She rose, holding the hairpiece with a bemused appearance on her face. The minister, realising he has been standing in silence as this set-piece unfolded in front of him, falteringly started to pray aloud, but kept an eye on the unfolding drama. The lady with the wig looked around, spotted that the man in the pew in front was as bald as an egg.... The final piece of the puzzle fell into place for her and she gently placed the wig onto the head of the bald man standing to her front.
Spending alot of time thinking about Ezekiel and his valley of dry bones. I think I am feeling acutely the lack of God's vital spark that transforms us from mere dry bones into 'beautiful things'. Over the last year I have come across three pieces of music which I feel have encapsulated this feeling of emptiness, yet an emptiness still tinged with hope, with a realisation that although we do not always feel Him, God is always there. These three tracks have also, I think shown me the way back to God and that is through worshipping Him no matter how low I feel, no matter how dry and empty. In that way as my dry bones cry out to him he is making me into something new.
So first up we have Gungor. An American group with a clean, pure sound which rings like a bell in my soul. Gungor-Dry bones.
Next up another from Gungor. Beautiful things. When I feel I am nothing I remember in this song that I am but through God I can be made into something.
Third and final track is from the Rend Collective Experiment's latest album, the album which inspired the title of this blog, Handmade worship for handmade people. RCE are excellent and provide for me a form of muscular worship, warts and all that does not slide into the banality of some contemporary worship songs which might be classified as 'Jesus is my boyfriend' music. If you aren't part of the collective it is time you were!
Rend Collective experiment-Desert soul
Sorry to bore with own taste in Christian music but I hope you get something out of it, I do.
I guess the Psalms are full of laments and examples of man calling out to God. My feelings are often well captured in their lines. Often in the Psalms we find reference to enemies or oppressors, presumably hostile foreign tribes, factions within David's court and other flesh and bone threats. However, when I read Psalms like this one, Psalm 42, I also hear another cry, a voice calling to be rescued from oppression of the soul, a melancholy pleading to be lifted up, to be strengthened against the everyday 'foes' which assault us all.
With that in mind I wrote out part of the Psalm, the part that seemed to make this call the loudest. I then tried to rewrite it in away which, I hope, conveyed the more general, everyday cry of a believer to their Lord, the cry of a child of God calling for their Saviour to set them free.
9 I say to God my rock, 9 My God has always been there for me, solid as a rock.
"Why have you forgotten me? But just now I feel like he has gone,
Why must I go about mourning, that he has forgotten me-it gets me wondering.
oppressed by the enemy?" Am I going to have to put up with being dragged down
10 My bones suffer mortal agony by life? Am I going to feel empty and sore inside forever?
as my foes taunt me, 10 Sometimes its like everything I know is laughing at me.
saying to me all day long, It makes me sick to the bone,
"Where is your God?" as the world sings it's mocking song,
"Where is your God?"
11 Why are you downcast, O my soul? 11 Why am I so empty, so depressed?
Why so disturbed within me? All these chaotic, confusing, misleading thoughts, why?
Put your hope in God My only hope, my ticket out of this mess is God.
for I will yet praise Him I know that one day soon I will look to Him again and say,
I have never been what you might call a hard-core Scotsman. My self image has never fitted well into the mold of 'Scot'. I think I have a love/hate relationship with the land of my birth. For a while I think I wanted to forget about Scotland and my Scottishness as part of my attempts to become an intellectual man of the world. I used to hate travelling on the London Underground because I new I was going to end up being cornered by a drunk Glaswegian. When this inevitably happened he would usually detect my reluctance to engage in conversation and start to get a bit shirty, as drunk people so often do when you refuse to throw their ball back over the conversational fence. As bad as I feel about this I have never faked an English accent to shake of am inebriated jock. I will never stoop that low!
Having returned to Scotland for a period of RnR 1 I attended a service of the Free Church of Scotland (Continuing)2 and eat wild salmon at the Minister's Manse. Later I found myself cruising the sleazy3 tourist shops of Portree on the Isle of Skye. In a period of about 45 minutes; I considered my favourite tartan tie in the Edinburgh Woollen Mill4, actually tried on a Harris tweed sports jacket, bought Boswell and Johnson's A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and tapped my foot to some accordion and fiddle music!
Having never eaten salmon in my puff and actually quite enjoyed it, I started to compile a list of 'Things typically Scottish', things which might have strong positive associations with Scotland and/or the Scottish. I present this list for you now, along with position on each.
Things typically Scottish
Whiskey-hate the stuff, smell makes me gag. If it comes to some kind of ceremonial whiskey drinking e.g. Burns' night/Saturday night then I tend to just wet my lips and pass it on.
Porridge-no positive feeling towards this stuff other than the childhood memories of my gran pouring it into a drawer in the sideboard lined with greaseproof paper. When cooled and hardened this could be cut and given to children as a kind of working class muesli bar.
Fish, esp salmon-always disliked fish. The smell of hot salmon could bring on nausea.
Being tight with money-well gotta fess up here, I am a bit mean but also have a masochistic aversion to dealing with money matters or financial affairs. I let the current Mrs Gibbons deal with it. I feel totally out of my depth in those fiscal waters.
Haggis-never really ate haggis till I left home around 1983. Since then I have delighted in the 'Chieftan' several times and his misunderstood relative the vegetarian haggis. Another great thing about haggis is convincing foreign people and the English that a Haggis is a living animal which needs to be hunted and caught in a net before slaughter. I once made a small boy cry with that story. I kid you not.
Football-I consider myself the personification of Scottish football, i.e. I'm rubbish. Played rugby instead and am pretty mediocre at that. There is a pattern forming here. The 1978 world cup in Argentina crystallised my feelings about the national team. They possess the amazing ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and tend to play brilliantly when the odds are heaped against them, but usually to no avail, as shown in the final group game vs Holland. Archie Gemmill, we salute you! Watch it and weep at the poetic beauty as the wee man fi Paisley make Cruyff and his boys look like eejits!
Being drunk in public-never again, not since that time in 1998 when the police were nearly called to a Tesco's just outside of Northampton when it looked like I was a sexually assaulting my wife, the fragrant Clare Rosamund. look, I'd had a beer or two and we were quite recently married at the time, what more can I say?
Bagpipes-shit.
Scottish nationalism-I flirted briefly with the SNP in my student days at Aberdeen, think I even voted for them. Now I tend to think Scotland is better off in the tent pissing out. For one thing who gets to keep the nukes!?
Calvin-loving the salvation by grace alone/struggling with election and predetermination5
Robert Burns-I used to think Burns was pretty naff, with Tam O'Shanter being the acme of naffness. Then I read it and was totally gripped by its sexy magical voyeurism and adrenaline fuelled chase scene 6. I thought it was all about a silly hat. Needless to say I soon discovered the works of Burns to be intelligent, sensitive, passionate and riven with a desire for social justice.
Rain/wind-apparently very common in Scotland. No strong feeling on it myself but they do say when in the highlands if you don't like the weather wait 15 minutes.
Being dour-Gordon Brown MP. Need I saw more?
Deep fried Mars bars-if I had been given a deep fried Mars bar for every time a kid had asked me if I'd ever had a deep friend Mars bar I'd probably look like a deep fried Mars bar. Or dead. Same thing really.
Balamory- Does Balamory reflect the ethnic mix in the Inner Hebrides? Look at miss Hoolie's pre-school class and I think you might ask a few questions.
Kilts-love them and want one. Few men in my family have the physique to carry off the kilt. After wearing kilts to my wedding most were arrested for 'having no visible means of support'. My dad said he looked like a lamp shade when wearing a kilt.
Gingerness-nothing against ginger people, in fact I'm a bit gingery myself in the beard department. The current Mrs Gibbons, the fragrant Clare Rosamund, actually wants our wee boy to have ginger hair and constantly remarks on his 'coppery tones'. Not so sure myself.
Billy Connolly-this man is the world's best anecdotal joke teller. I refer you to his appearance on Parkinson in the 1970's where he delivered the now classic 'murdered the wife' joke.
1 Reading n (w)Riting
2 A schism of a schism. Members of the FCC (Free Church Continuing) refer to the members of the Free Church as the 'residual body', or the 'rump' in less charitable moments. Members of the Free Church have apparently nick-named the FCC as the 'Taliban'. Nuff said.
3 Sleazy in the way that afterwards you feel dirty and empty and promise yourself that you will never do it again. Of course, even as you are promising yourself this you know that soon, in fact the next chance you get, you probably will!
4 then wondered if I would ever wear a tie again.
5 think I'm Arminian ,not Armenian like Dave 'the Duke' Dickinson, great episode of Who do you think you are
As the Duke of Wellington once said, "Top o the mornin' to ya!"1 Shortly after that he said "When a man turns over he should turn out." I have adapted this phrase for the modern ear to "Roll over, roll out"2 . What does all this actually mean? Well if I can be so bold as to attempt to translate the words of the Iron Duke 3, I think what he was trying to say was that when you wake up for the first time and turn over in bed, that is the time you should get up out of bed. This is a phrase which has followed me around since I first read it, haunting me like the ghost of procrastination. It has been knocking around my head a great deal in the past few weeks since my sleeping patterns have been knocked off kilter by a combination of depression and medication. I have been finding myself waking a lot through the night then 'properly' rousing at around 0530HRS 4. Now I do not think the Duke was meaning that if you get up for a pee at 0235HRS then you should get dressed and start making tea n toast! But what about the half past five awakening? Too early? In my dreams I rise effortlessly from my white cotton sheets, slip downstairs and put on the coffee. With the rich aroma stimulating my clean, hairless nostrils I pop the pain aux chocolate into the oven and sit back with the latest edition of Military Matters, noting with excitement the cover teaser about an article on page 17 about the Duke of Wellington's daily routine, Six steps to a healthier, more energized life. A day with the iron duke. Next week bowel health the Bonaparte way! Reality bites and I turn over, not out.
1 Seems he was as Irish as Brad Pitt in Blown Away. 2 Any publishers reading this I've got a great idea for a self help book based on the routines and disciplines of great generals through history. 3 Only a few men were ever great enough to carry the name 'The Duke'. Wellington, although he needed the prefix of 'Iron' to let you know he was hard. Overcompensating I think. The other men worthy of the handle are John 'the duke' Wayne and my personal favourite David 'the duke' Dickinson. Cheap as chips! 4 Since I am talking about a military man I felt the armed forces style time thing was a nice touch. It's what the Duke would have expected. Mind you though, whe what the 24 hour notation invented?
The last few weeks have been hard ones for me (and my family). I have been off work for over 8 weeks with depression. In that time I have been on three different types of anti-depressant, none of which have made any kind of dent into the gloom. Coming off my last drug and starting my new one has been a nightmare. I had proper Trainspotting style cold turkey; sweats, shivering, headache, violent mood swings and even some minor visual hallucinations1. It felt like you could have popped my head with a pin.
That is all behind me now as the new drug, Mirtazapine2 begins to take over in my brain. This drug affects the levels of Serotonin like Prozac3 but also Noradrenaline, a neurotransmitter similar to adrenaline ans involved in control of blood pressure and heart rate along with other things. The thing is nobody really understands how altering the levels of these neuro-transmitters can improve depression. The thing is clinical trials show they do 4.
Besides these chemical interventions, lifestyle changes are said to help, no-brainer if you have reactive depression5. The time off work is definitely helping, reduced stress and has given me crucial breathing space. Before being signed off I was starting to have fantasies about/plan minor to moderately serious accidents for myself to get me off work. I would spend quite a bit off time thinking about how I could get run over by a car and guaranteeing just a broken leg and nothing worse. Fortunately I have never been low enough to plan my suicide, I thought about it, but never anything more.
1 Not quite Renton's baby on the ceiling horror of Trainspotting but disconcerting none the less!
2 I have Christened this one Marzipan. Bit of a game in my family what with me being on so many different types of anti-depressants. Started out as a way of not letting the kids know. Citalopram some how became 'psych-nut-trolley'. We do a similar thing with biscuits, perhaps I'll post on this at a later date.
3 Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel worth a read if you like mis-lit. While I am recommending books I really enjoyed Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad,
4 Haven't checked but then that's why we pay Doctors. Free at the point of use but we all still pay
5 reactive depression is succinctly summed up in the witty bumper stickers or posters you see in offices i.e. "Shit happens..."I'm not sure what I've got. Bit of a history in the family. My great gran on mum's side though the man on the TV could see up her skirt!
"It is all very well for those who are in robust health and full of spirits to blame those whose lives are sicklied or covered with the pale cast of melancholy, but the malady is as real as a gaping wound, and all the more hard to bear because it lies so much in the region of the soul that to the inexperienced it appears to be a mere matter of fancy and diseased imagination. Reader, never ridicule the nervous or the hypochondriacal, their pain is real; though much of the malady lies in the imagination it is not imaginary."
When I was about 5 I went for a walk with a friend. We went beyond the fence at the back of the park and up the hill to the tower. The tower was an old folly I think, goodness knows who built it because it overlooked Glenrothes, Leslie and Kinglassie, none of which are exactly what you might call pretty. We were walking up the hill from Kinglassie where I lived on Main street.
The tower was a let down, no ghosts or dead bodies as we were told we would find, only an empty husk of a building with no obvious reason for ever being. Bored, we walked along the ridge of the hill towards Glenrothes and there, like a couple of special forces observers, seal crawled to a position which allowed us to look down onto an airport. Rather than walk back the way we had come, we wandered down the hill to the main road and started walking home. It was here we were offered a lift.
Before I knew it I was back home and having to deal with the angry relief of my mum. it was clear she was upset and fretful so being a good boy who likes to make his mum happy I needed to come up with a way of easing her stress. The idea came into my head, as I ate my tomato soup, to suggest to my mum that we knew the guy in the car, he was a friend of my friend's dad. Simple. "What's his name?" asked my mum, "A dinna ken" I replyed between slurps. "Where diz he live?" she said. "A dinna ken". "Well wit diz he look like?" she pleaded. "A bit like him" I mumbled, thrusting my spoon at the TV. My mum stood horrified as she looked towards the TV and saw an picture of the Yorkshire ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, staring at us from the box in the corner of the living room.
