on the scaffolding at the launch base, partially covered by the shadow of the main fuel tank. Did you ever read Peanuts when Charlie Brown would be building his shitty little snow fort and Linus would have built an actual castle with battlements and a flagpole? It was like that. I insisted mine was best and went off to find a judge.
As a kid I was fascinated by space shuttles and by astronauts in general. This was before all the blowing up took the shine off things. Good old NASA. With all their money, could they maybe have a mission where everyone doesn’t nearly die? They should have some honesty and call their next mission ‘Operation Spacegrave’. Remember all the unmanned missions they used to send up in the 1950s and 60s? You know what they did with the monkeys and dogs that piloted them? They poisoned them! All their bodies are still up there. So an alien civilisation’s first contact with earth will be a ring of abandoned spacecraft filled with dead chimps and Alsatians. Approaching earth for some sublimated alien race must be like when the police close in on the house of a serial killer and find an outer perimeter of faeces wrapped in newspaper.
One day on our way to school my friend Gary McRedie and I found a huge porn mag. It was thicker than a dictionary and full of big Seventies bushes – women who looked like they were giving birth to Kevin Keegan. I didn’t really understand what it was (I don’t think), but had to admit it was strangely compelling. Gary suggested that we hide it under a shrub so we could come and look at it whenever we liked. The next day it was gone – someone had found it! I was disappointed but also oddly relieved. It was only years later, as I was telling someone this story, that I realised Gary McCredie had gone back and got it for himself.
There was quite a lot of religious stuff at primary. Every week we’d go down to the church and practise hymns, led by Miss Moat, a spirited big woman who looked like she played centre-back for somebody half decent. At least I was lucky enough not to go to a Jesuit school. The Jesuit saying is ‘Give me a boy until he is seven and I will give you the man.’ Usually a sexually confused manic-depressive.
We made our first confession when we were seven years old and had to really rack our brains for sins. I said that I’d stolen something, which I hadn’t, and that I’d lied, which I had – about stealing something. An old man listening to a child’s sins while they’re both locked in a wooden box? If I was a sexual pervert I would definitely join the priesthood. Although clearly the sexual-pervert community is way ahead of me on that one. Earlier this year the Pope met victims of sexual abuse at the hands of Catholic priests. If I’d been fingered by a priest the last person I’d like to meet is the ultra priest 9,000. It’s like fighting the end-of-level boss in a video game. First confession at the age of seven must be incredibly boring for the priest. Imagine having to listen for hours on end about stealing conkers and farting during school assembly. This is why so many priests like to help out by giving the poor kid something to really confess about next time around.
First holy communion was the big one – all the girls dressing up in terrifying tiny bridal outfits to trot up the aisle and ‘marry God’. It was a whole community doing this. If one guy had made a kid do that in his basement he’d have been locked up for life. I lost both my front teeth during the week of my first communion ‘There definitely is a God.’ Yeah, tell that to the poor sod who drives the bus and gets spat on ten times a day for the minimum wage. It might be more accurate if the message was printed on the inside of the bus and read, ‘There definitely is a God. And he hates you.’
I have a theory about the Pope. You know how he fought for the Nazis? Well if Nazi scientists did manage to save Hitler’s brain then maybe they kept it alive in a jar for years waiting to implant it into someone with power on the world stage. That someone would need to wear a very big hat to hide all the stitching left by a brain transplant. They probably thought about putting his brain into an NFL quarterback but held out for the Pope. The Pope has said that condoms don’t help prevent the spread of AIDS. Someone ought to tell His Holiness that he must be putting them on wrong. You’d have though the Pope would have been well up for using condoms. It would have scuppered the court cases of many of his priests if there was no DNA evidence. In Africa AIDS has killed 25 million people in three decades. That’s a lot of funerals. I can see why the Pope doesn’t want to lose the work.
There was a thing at primary called ‘The Black Babies’. It was a hugely misguided charitable effort they used to drop on us in Catholic schools. You sponsored an African baby and, I think, sometimes got to name them. At least, that’s what I’m told by my African friends Wolf Tone and Murdo McCloud. Anyway, there was always some daft kid who misunderstood and thought that they’d actually get the baby for a bit. They were too young to realise that there are a thousand good reasons why a little African baby shouldn’t be shipped off to another country and that human beings should never be exchanged for money. I think that Madonna basically has the emotional development of one of those kids. She can pay for a little black baby, so why shouldn’t she get to keep it? She’s probably been drawn in by the advertising – if you get an African kid it costs £2 a month to feed and if it gets cataracts they’re only a pound to fix. Actually, I feel really sorry for little David Banda. The only black role models he’ll have growing up will be homosexual backing dancers. Madonna is said to have had his nursery painted like a jungle, to make him feel at home. Hopefully the kitchen’s done out like the inside of a UN helicopter.
Every summer we went to stay at my gran’s place in Ireland. She lived in a really remote part of Donegal, which is beautiful and bleak. I’d say maybe a little of the bleakness seeps into the people. The bit we lived in wasn’t so much quiet as empty. If someone wanted to film a movie there that was set after a nuclear apocalypse they would have had to bus people in.
My gran lived with my granddad, my great-uncle and my uncle James in a little whitewashed farmhouse. My brother and I would sleep in a small room with both uncles, my great-uncle often getting himself off to sleep with a long, tongue-in-cheek monologue about how we were going to Hell, and listing all the torments that would be waiting for us. I always enjoyed it as a sort of grim joke, but it worried John and afterwards you could hear him muttering his prayers hard even over all the snoring.
They were all very religious. My uncle got a new car and nobody would get into it until a priest had been out to bless the thing. A priest came out and got paid to tell the story of the Good Samaritan and throw holy water over the bonnet. My granny prayed a lot, for everybody. I sometimes wonder if I’m not still just working through the goodwill she built up with for me with God. One day soon I’m going to run out of her Hail Marys and both my legs will drop off.
Everybody was obsessed with death in that household. They’d talk about it a lot. Once we were all getting on the bus as we left at the end of summer and I said ‘See you next year!’ to my granddad. ‘I’ll be dead next year,’ he replied, without sadness. That’s Catholicism; it’s a great big death cult. Look around a church at all the golden crucifixes, the big marble statues of Jesus dying. The nativity, the only part of the story that’s about life, is just a temporary thing they throw up for a few weeks. It’s generally focussed round a £5.99 Tiny Tears doll – one year our church had a rocking horse for the donkey. It had ‘I’m a cowboy’ written on it.
My granddad was a difficult guy. Joyless, to the point where he found other people’s laughter upsetting. He’d often scold us for laughing, as would my mum. They thought that laughter was infantile. I thought the idea of somebody hating children’s laughter was really funny, like an ogre in a fairytale. My granddad had a very hard life. He grew up in poverty I can’t imagine at a time when children were hired out to farms as rural labour. He had to work in Scotland to support his brothers and sisters, and ended up burying most of them when they were still young. Now his health was gone and he was in constant pain. I knew all this, but I was a child so I hated him for being a grumpy old cunt.
Boredom was a huge part of our lives there. It’s the rainiest county in Ireland. Which is a bit like saying you’re the Dirtiest Woman in Dundee – a lot of competition and little prestige. Often
