knew that somewhere in the explanation he was going to be mauled by a leopard or something. The teacher cut into what he was saying and made him tell the actual story of why he was late and it was … his mum making him wait in for the gasman. You could see a real look on his face that said, ‘What’s the point of telling you this? This is boring.’ I think that was the thing with those kids, they thought that our reality was so boring it literally wasn’t worth living in. They were sort of right, too.
Apparently parents tell an average of 3,000 white lies to children while they are growing up. My parents told me that every time you told a lie a giant fire-breathing spider with the head of a bear and the arms of an octopus would spin a big web out of all your lies and then when it had spun a web big enough it would carry you off in it. Of course it wasn’t until years later I found out they had been lying to me all along and they weren’t my real parents. Personally, I’m looking forward to telling my kids they were adopted. They weren’t, I’m just looking forward to telling them that.
I had friends but kept myself apart from most people, largely because I felt that they were all heading for grim jobs and Barratt houses in an unquestioning way that I found alarming. Still, there was always a part of me that wondered if I should try to be part of the gang more and forget about my doubts. I just couldn’t imagine being part of that world though, having a job, a mortgage, marrying your girlfriend from school and sending your own kids back there. Thing is, I’ve met a lot of people from school since and they’ve done all that, done the stuff I only used to say they’d do as a sort of despairing joke.
In my late twenties I was out with my best friend Paul Marsh (Paul is a transcendent human being and full-scale nutcase who I will colour in lovingly later on). I’ve known Paul since school and he’s flowered into a real independent thinker. On this occasion he was wearing a green leather jacket and some kind of tartan bondage trousers. I’d been writing all day on ecstasy. A guy came up to us who’d been at school with us both; he had a little pot belly and greying temples and was wearing the same wind-cheater my dad has. Now I’m not saying he’s a bad guy; he’s actually a lovely guy, but he looked at Paul dressed as some kind of Space Clown and me looking like I was trying to stare through the fabric of the universe and he said, ‘So lads! Are you getting much golf in?’
There was quite a telling thing that happened right at the start of my second year. There was an open patio area that linked different parts of the school. A bunch of us were dawdling through there and suddenly a big group just attacked this guy called John Jo. I think he’d literally looked at somebody in the wrong way – suddenly a group was round him punching and kicking him with one big lad slamming his head off a wall. John Jo just never came back; his mum took him out of the school. I remember our form teacher giving us a sarcastic speech about how his mum had come up to the school and said he wouldn’t be back. The form teacher was utterly incredulous that someone would transfer out because he’d been subjected to a serious, unprovoked assault. His point was pretty explicit – if she didn’t like her son’s head getting rattled off a wall, she’d struggle to find anywhere she’d like in the Glasgow school system.
It wasn’t the roughest school in Glasgow, nowhere close to it, but it would probably have shocked a lot of people. Quite a few people I knew there are dead now. A wee guy called Billy Kerr got killed by his dad, who chopped his head off in a drunken rage. His old man was a butcher, so at least he’d have made a good job of it. The guy who told me he’d been killed added brutally, ‘… not so wide anymore’. ‘Probably not quite as tall as he used to be either …,’ I sighed.
There was a nearby school that was some kind of special institution. I don’t know quite what it was, a List D school, borstal or some kind of learning difficulties place. Anyway, anyone you met from there was either a hardcore villain or mentally handicapped. One lunchtime a whole crew of them turned up at our school, smashing windows and battering people. It was like a fucking Zulu movie. A big group gathered outside one of the entrances – I think they had a beef with somebody in particular and were calling him out. One of our teachers (a hard case) walked out calmly and headbutted the biggest one right to the ground. It was like Clint Eastwood. Or like a grown man headbutting an emotionally troubled boy. It was tremendous.
Of course, life then was probably less violent than it is for the average teenager nowadays. I certainly think that teenagers should be taught more about knife crime. Going for the kidneys can give you a much cleaner kill. Equally, news footage of the teenage victims of gun crime should teach us all something. Look closely at those notes left by friends as the cameras pan by – there is a lesson to be learned here. These kids just can’t spell. ‘Respek’? What’s that? They certainly won’t be getting any of my respect until they learn some basic spelling and punctuation. Modern youth also seem to be horrible gift buyers. Do you really think this guy would have appreciated a teddy bear? He was a crack dealer!
Our diets at school were laughably terrible. Loads of us would go for chips at lunch – chips and a potato fritter was the top seller. That’s a bag of chips and an enormous chip please. My mum would make me a packed lunch, so I’d spend a fair bit of time trying to barter gammon rolls and Blue Ribband biscuits into something more interesting. There was an ice-cream van outside the front gates that sold single fags and a tuck shop that only seemed to sell choc-ices. I loved it and I’d have appreciated it all even more if I could see myself now – forcing myself to eat a bowl of leaves with my meals in a desperate attempt to stay alive.
I do think kids need better education about nutrition – I didn’t really have a clue about any of that stuff till I read up on it a few years ago. Scientists have found that people who choose to eat crisps, chips and chocolate have a gene linked to obesity. They are now able to identify the group of people with this gene, by looking at a map of Scotland. Apparently, the SNP is to give every schoolchild in Scotland an obesity check. If they can’t fit into one of Alex Salmond’s trouser legs they go on a diet.
One of the fattest boys at my school was called Jerry MacBrayne. There was a rumour that he’d been caught masturbating during chemistry class. Nobody knew if it was true, but we all abused him about it endlessly because there wasn’t much else to do. He had these really fat parents, a fat sister and a wee fat dog. They’d all go jogging together in a nearby park in terry towelling tracksuits. My friend, a mischievous wee lassie called Lesley, lived across from them. She phoned a curry house one night and sent them half the menu as a prank. She said his dad answered the door and looked absolutely delighted.
The idea has been floated that parents of obese children should be fined. Don’t people realise that the parents of fat children are simply misguided? What they’re trying to do is make their kids less attractive to paedophiles. What they’re forgetting is that they’re making it more difficult for them to run away. In Vegas I once saw an incredibly fat man on one of those little mobility scooter things, except he’d driven it onto a moving walk-way, so he didn’t even have to drive. Now that’s lazy.
Live Aid was a huge thing at school. I think it’s fair enough for kids to get excited about something like that. But the adults who bought it should have really been embarrassed. ‘The Christmas bells that ring there are … the clanging chimes of doom?’ Did that really happen? Even at 12, I’d had a host of sexual nightmares that were less weird than the video to that song. If there’s one thing we’ve learned about fighting famine over the years it is this – big music events don’t work. We can tick that off the list. To be honest, you’d have thought that would have been a bit further down the list. It’s amazing to think that at some point there was a meeting where someone said, ‘People are starving in their millions’, and somebody replied, ‘We’d better get a hold of Ultravox and Annie Lennox.’
Seeing the film Gandhi was also a massive thing for me as a kid. I saw a clip of it on TV first, where Gandhi as a young man is thrown off a train because of his race. I just felt this incredible indignation that stuff like that happened in the world. I talked to my dad about it and was absolutely raging. I suppose that
