You Are Awful (But I Like You) Page 16

  The final approach made it plain that Forth was not an obvious magnet for human settlement. WARNING: BOG ROAD, read a sign at the last junction. As the lonely roofs of the town took shape on the misty brow ahead, so too did the energetically rotating blades of what was once the UK’s largest inland windfarm. The winters here were evidently hard even by regional standards, and so were the inhabitants: such a proximate eyesore was an almost thrilling retort to the nimby trend. My back yard? Fuck my back yard.

  Pebble-dash, or roughcast, is as old as the Romans. From their time until the Great War, architects and builders employed it as a widely admired decorative finish. Today, of course, pebble-dash is simply a devastatingly effective means of wiping 10 per cent off the value of your home. The rot set in when developers put roughcast to work as exterior Artex: with half the nation’s bricklayers cut down on the fields of Flanders and Picardy, there were suddenly plenty of poorly finished new houses – and crumbling old ones – in need of a quick and cheap layer of slap. This trend reached epidemic proportions in areas where the material’s low-maintenance durability promised additional benefits: ‘In remote and weather-beaten places,’ writes one architectural historian, ‘pebble-dash seemed both sensible and stylish.’ Slathered from head to toe in the stuff, Forth was a one-town rebuke to this verdict. Almost every home I drove past sat mired in that death-coloured porridge of sand, cement and gravel. Style may come and go, but there didn’t seem anything sensible in the dark patches of damp blotting almost every roughcast surface, nor the hefty chunks of it that had fallen off. You could imagine the letters dropping through local letterboxes: ‘Congratulations: as the resident of a poorly built house in a remote and weather-beaten place, you have qualified for South Lanarkshire’s compulsory pebble-dashing programme. Close your windows and stay indoors.’

  It was a town laid out without love, and built without care. Only one of Forth’s undulating heathery panoramas was topped with a windfarm, yet almost every house turned its back on the view, instead staring out at its mouldering, roughcast clones across a cheerless square of patchy grass and a NO BALL GAMES sign. Barbed wire was strung right around the roofs of lock-up garages, perhaps the legacy of unusually determined burglars, perhaps of George Gracie on the rampage. Here atop a lonely hill they’d somehow managed to recreate the ambience of a truly horrid urban housing estate. Welcome to Forth, read the banner my mind slung across this vista. We live here so you don’t have to.

  The ironworks that was Forth’s principal raison d’être shut down in 1940, followed in due course by the local coal mines, the railway station, the cinema, the brass band, the police station, and George Gracie’s overworked heart. Yet Forth wouldn’t die. In fact, its population is still growing. Nothing about the place made sense. The high street was a long, grey straggle of grimness, all grubby second-hand car dealerships and takeaways. Only the tanning salon seemed to be thriving: a group of homebound schoolkids were shuffling about outside while their mothers filed in for a Tango top-up.

  There are now eight hundred tanning salons in Scotland, more than the national stock of chip shops, which is saying something. If there’s a health-hazard bandwagon to jump aboard, the Scots will push everyone else off and drive it whooping over a cliff. These people just can’t do bad things by halves. The appeal of ultra-violet tanning seems to echo an inter-war builder’s attachment to pebble-dash: a cost-effective way to conceal shoddy exterior work, especially in weather-beaten places. The comparison works in the longer term, too, as neither technique has proved durably stylish or at all sensible. More Scots die from skin cancer than Australians, with at least 150 annual deaths attributed directly to tanning salons. In fact, Scottish women now endure the highest incidence of malignant melanoma of any demographic group in the world, up three-fold in a generation, entirely as a result of their addiction to coin-in-the-slot sunbeds. One deeply creosoted sufferer told doctors she’d notched up three thousand sessions in twelve years.

  I bumped on to the petrol station’s forecourt past a local-paper newsboard reading, VICTORY FOR VANDALS, and filled Craig up in the cold wind. This establishment had been severally identified as a hot spot of Forthian oddness: one motorist recalled how the attendant had insisted on trying to guess his name from the initials on his bank card, only to turn nasty when he failed.

  ‘Is it Donald?’

  ‘Er, no.’

  ‘David?’

  ‘Look, it’s Douglas. My middle name’s Alexander.’

  ‘I don’t need to know your middle name.’

  But the cheerful girl at the counter processed my card without a glance at its details, a source of some relief given that the least embarrassing of my two middle names is Sebastian. She was still smiling when, a while later, I handed back a wooden heart the size of a medieval shield, and the lavatory key to which it was attached. ‘Och, so how did that go, then?’ In my haste to leave I left Craig’s filler cap on top of the petrol pump.

  Almost at once the clouds scurried away to the distant horizon. The sun burst forth and the golden moorland around was suddenly framed in more rainbows than I’ve ever seen sharing the same sky. ‘Pump up the Bitter’ gave way to ‘Leap Up and Down (Wave Your Knickers in the Air)’, Ozzy yelled out the big swears and all was right with the world as I’d come to know it.

  I arrived in Cowdenbeath after darkness, which this far north in December kicked in well before Countdown. My familiarity with the town was limited to hearing its football team name-checked at the tail end of Radio 5’s Saturday-afternoon results. Somehow I always pictured the footballers of Cowdenbeath, in fact every footballer in Scottish League Division Two, plying their trade on a sloping rectangle of coarsely mown heather in some windswept Highland outpost. In fact, Cowdenbeath FC and almost all its rivals are squeezed into the M8 corridor, the short, fat belt of almost unbroken development between the opposing firths of Clyde and Forth that almost everyone in Scotland calls home. I have before me a map of Scottish football clubs: imagine a shooting target fired at a great many times by an expert sniper, and then – ah, go on, sweetheart, just a couple of quick rounds – by his four-year-old niece. (Bang! Inverness Caledonian Thistle. Bang! Elgin City.) Suffice to say that stags on the pitch are not the problem I’d imagined them to be at the very urban likes of Falkirk, Stenhousemuir or Airdrieonians.

  Cowdenbeath FC were once known as ‘The Miners’, but unsurprisingly now aren’t. The town that dubbed itself ‘The Chicago of Fife’ when a modest late-Victorian colliery-linked boom raised the population to twenty thousand is clearly well schooled in the ironic arts, and have accordingly re-nicknamed their team – average home attendance 421 – ‘The Blue Brazil’. I didn’t find the ground, even though there wasn’t much to Cowdenbeath – certainly a lot less than there might have been in 1949, when 25,586 turned out to watch The Miners take on the might of Rangers in a League Cup quarter-final, more than double the entire current population. My quest for accommodation took me up and down the narrow high street, railway bridge across one end, flaky-fronted old cinema-turned-bingo hall at the other. The dominant retail outlet between was festooned with a banner that read, Fife’s Largest Furniture Charity. After a lot of driving about I found a pub that looked likely to contain people who might understand me, or at least not get too annoyed if they didn’t, and went inside to ask for help.

  It was a whisker after five but the trio of old chaps at the dim and silent bar had clearly been in situ for some time. Each had a pint and a whisky chaser on the go, yet all seemed genteel and respectable; three smart overcoats hung from pegs by the door, and they nodded at me courteously when I walked in. Then a barmaid of middle years breezed into her station through the hindward saloon doors, elaborately made up and exuding a dangerous waft of thwarted, resentful boredom.

  ‘Och, it’s your lucky dee,’ she said, brightening in response to a new face. ‘We’ve a few wee rums upstarers.’ That was splendid news, and I told her so, adding that I’d just need to go and move my car, which was
outside on a double yellow. ‘Nae bother, we’ve a car park oot the back,’ she said, smiling now and fiddling with a spray-crisped lock of Dark Intense Auburn. ‘So what have you done wrong to desererve a night in Cowdenbeath, you knotty man?’

  ‘I’m in marketing. Face-to-face roaming retail.’

  The nearest of the old Shankleys at the bar half-turned and spoke in a gravelly growl. ‘That like travlin sales?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ I conceded with an airy and indulgent half-laugh, trying to sound like James Bond being asked if he was a policeman. ‘Yes, I suppose in a way it is.’ Doubt and disappointment snagged the barmaid’s powdered features. ‘Exclusive luxury merchandise,’ I went on, quickly. ‘Not, you know, carpet-tile adhesive or shoe-pencils or whatever.’

  ‘You mean like collectables?’

  ‘That is exactly what I mean. High-class collectables.’

  That was more than enough to be getting on with, but I felt powerless to hold back the flood of idiotic cobblers that had built up in my head during those long, long hours with only bleak moorland and novelty hits for company. ‘Animals,’ I announced confidently. ‘Animal figurines. I’m talking top-end kit here. We do a crystal rabbit for £7,000. It’s massive, like this high.’ I held a hand out by my shoulder. ‘Just sold three to Barry Whitfield, who produced “Agadoo”, and also appears in the video as a pear.’

  ‘Oh aye,’ said the barmaid gamely, as if giving me the benefit of a Grampian-sized doubt. ‘Well, just wait here a wee minute and I’ll make some space oot back. Should be able to squeeze yerself in by my Fiesta.’ She raised a pencilled brow and chuckled suggestively – all the Shankleys looked up at that – then sashayed out into the cold. She was back in before the door had time to close.

  ‘That you with the hazards on?’ Gone was the sashay, and the smile. I nodded, and she nodded back, fixing me with a brief but horribly withering stare. How dare you, how dare you, come flouncing in here with your promise of adventure and excitement and not being seventy-four years old, driving … driving …? oh, you pathetic little man. And with a great clicking of tall and tiny heels, out she went through the doors behind the bar.

  The landlady caught me just as I was about to go outside and move Craig, perhaps as far as Carlisle. She was a slightly harassed woman with a number of young children in tow, many of whom accompanied us on a tour up to and around my room. Being the size of a snooker table this certainly made for a memorable experience. Not much else did, once I had the place to myself. It was over-lit and under-decorated. Mildew seeped into my nostrils. The net curtains billowed as a Baltic gust barged its way in around the tall, narrow window frame. Someone next door was trying to cough up a fur ball. Suddenly very aware that I wasn’t even supposed to be in Cowdenbeath, I put on two pairs of gloves and went out.

  You might imagine the inhabitants of Lochgelly having strong words for the London-based national newspaper which decided that as the home of the UK’s cheapest houses, their town deserved to be condemned in print as ‘the last place in Britain people want to live’. But as I’d already discovered, there’s nothing a Scot enjoys more than kicking his town when it’s down. The Observer found plenty of locals happy to agree that an average property price of £55,000 made their former mining town precisely seven times worse than Henley-on-Thames, where the houses – Britain’s dearest – were seven times more expensive. ‘I’ll tell you why Lochgelly is cheapest,’ a retired steel fitter told the reporter, ‘because it’s like Beirut.’ The online comments that ensued were more damning still. ‘I grew up there and, by God, they’re right: the place corrodes your very soul …’ ‘It’s a pity Osama bin Laden wouldn’t pay Lochgelly a visit and put us all out of our misery …’ ‘Everyone just sits at home in front of their two-bar electric fires, drinking Kestrel and watching Sky telly …’, ‘Since the bypass opened, no one at all has any reason to come here, except the drugs squad and the occasional sociologist …’

  And me. Cowdenbeath was merely my staging post, the nearest place to the Beirut of Fife that promised a bed for the night. The towns lay no more than three miles apart: a five-minute drive or a twenty-five-minute wait for a bus, if you’ve undertaken to spend a long evening in Lochgelly and have contemplated its entertainment options in advance. With the aftershocks of Red Aftershock still rumbling through me I could muster little enthusiasm for alcohol. But the alternative didn’t even bear thinking about: going alone into a Scottish pub and ordering four hours’ worth of soft drinks in a London accent.

  The bus ride was all condensation, diesel and swearing. Scotland appears to have carried through a major devaluation of profanity’s dominant currency, the Fuck. In the ten minutes before the doors hissed me back out into the cold I heard the word casually piped, murmured and drawled three dozen or more times, by smooth-cheeked young bairns and well-kempt old men. And never with the slightest malice or aggression: the Scottish Fuck is sprinkled liberally into everyday humdrum conversation as no more than a mild intensifier. As a linguistic condiment it’s salt and pepper, not Three-Alarm Wasabi Tabasco.

  ‘All right there?’ intoned an elderly voice behind me. ‘How the fuck are you doin’?’

  ‘No bad. Aw, but this bag is fucken killin’ my shoulder.’

  A while later, from two rows in front: ‘Aye, I saw that last night. What a fucken belter. Fuck me.’ It was the pleasantly lilted, home-spun discourse of Dr Finlay’s Fuck Book, or Fucker of the Glen.

  The declining impact of fuck’s north-of-the-border potency was legally recognised in 2001, during Kenneth Kinnaird’s appeal against a breach of the peace conviction. Kinnaird, a forty-three-year-old Glaswegian, had been arrested and charged in Edinburgh after telling a traffic policeman to fuck off. His defence counsel enlisted a professor of English, who told the court, ‘Fuck seems to me hardly countable as an expletive. Rather it is used as a reinforcing adverb: it’s fucking cold, hot, terrible, whatever.’ Kinnaird, of course, wasn’t using the word in anything like this context; he was instead telling a policeman to fuck off. Nevertheless, the presiding judge sustained the appeal, excusing Kinnaird for doing no more than ‘using the language of his generation’. As a member of that generation, I was already picturing myself knocking on the window of a stationary patrol car and clearing my throat.

  I set off up Lochgelly’s dark and deserted Main Street gasping breath in through clenched teeth and shuddering like a Maestro at tick-over – why, it’s almost as if it was December, and I was in Scotland. Cars droned by. I pushed at the unyielding door of a pub before noting the boarded-up windows and a hopeful appeal for new ownership. Many other enterprises had been cleared away, leaving the straggly commercial survivors bordered with unsettling swathes of open land. A trio of hoodies mooched silently about the Christmas tree by the miners’ memorial. Lochgelly seemed determined not to defy its local critics, though in fairness I uncovered little definite evidence of Syrian-backed guerrilla activity.

  I can reserve particular praise for the native commentator who encapsulated his hometown as ‘an S-bend with chip shops’. Lochgelly is home to six thousand souls, enough to sustain one each of the usual high-street enterprises: an undertaker, a Spar, a baker, a bookie’s and so on. Above that it’s a select group. I passed two tanning salons. I passed three pubs. And I passed four chip shops – make that five, because the China Chef prominently advertised its battered sideline. Even if you’re having aromatic crispy duck, eating out in Lochgelly means stuffing in those deep-fried yellow sticks that up here they call Glasgow salad.

  I went into the last, the Golden Fry, a swish and busy enterprise with half a dozen uniformed staff behind the counter and a parade of saturated fats advertised above it. Though not quite the full parade. I’d read that a quarter of Scottish chip shops offered the notorious catering cataclysm that is the battered, deep-fried Mars Bar, but it didn’t feature on the Golden Fry. In fact, I never found the food world’s unholy grail on offer anywhere in the land. Nor was I ever able to treat myself to the national d
runkard’s delight that is the ‘munchy box’: a foot-square pizza carton crammed with onion rings, doner meat shavings, hunks of nan bread and nuggets of assorted bhaji, all served on a bed of Glasgow salad. After some deliberation, having learnt somewhere that Scottish establishments generally gave it the dip-and-sizzle treatment, I plumped for a ‘pizza supper’. The last word added a veneer of nutritional respectability to my order, suggesting a balanced meal with representation from across the food groups. But in Scotland it simply means ‘and chips’.

  There’d been a spot of linguistic awkwardness on the bus, when securing a ticket from the driver meant three attempts at the single word ‘Lochgelly’, the first two eliciting looks of embarrassed amusement, as if I’d just impersonated an animal. With this in mind, and perhaps eighteen local ears cocked in close attendance, when I reached the head of the Golden Fry queue I heard myself round off the word ‘supper’ in a ridiculous thrumming roll. The woman at the counter nodded blandly and started piling the right things into a big Styrofoam box. Relief was swiftly subsumed by the realisation that this was how I’d have to talk until the end of my days, or until I left Scotland. On these rations it was going to be a close call.