You Are Awful (But I Like You) Page 17
My wife’s youngest brother and his wife work as doctors in Scotland, and have both served time at a Fife-based coronary-care unit. This is handily located right opposite a chip shop, and it’s apparently easier to count the outpatients who don’t cross the road and walk straight into it upon leaving the clinic. Two-thirds of Scotsmen are overweight. Scottish women are the fattest in Europe. A fancy-that fact-box in a world atlas of human geography says of the nation: ‘Scotland has the worst diet of any developed country in the western world, and the highest incidence of heart disease.’
With none of this in mind I prised open my Styrofoam casket on a bench up the road, and forced myself to register dismay that the pizza thus revealed was in no way battered or deep-fried. It just wasn’t very nice, a ketchup-topped sponge soggy with the vinegar substitute that had been showered upon my supper as a non-optional extra. I tore off and ingested a ragged chunk before accepting that even with a lapful of hot food, it was much too cold to stay still. So off I stamped around the back streets of Lochgelly, wreathed in coal smoke and fumbling at super-heated chips with deep-frozen fingers. The roads were lined with cramped little semis and 1960s bungalows: Britain’s cheapest houses, in their flimsy, pebble-dashed glory. All had the kind of scuffed and anonymous front door you could imagine a TV interviewer knocking upon at the end of a quest to track down some forgotten star of yesteryear: an aged footballing legend living alone in straitened circumstances, maybe, or a Bay City Roller back home with his mum. The curtained downstairs windows glowed with light and warmth: everyone was sensibly inside, perhaps watching Sky by two-bar electric fires, though definitely not drinking Kestrel – which, speaking as a major player in the crap-arse 3 per cent lager scene, I can confirm has not been brewed since around 2003.
After a premature mouthful of yellow embers I let my supper cool for a while. Once it had done so, and my blistered tastebuds were pulsing less furiously, I was able to establish that these were chips from the loftiest zenith of British high-street catering, made as only we can make them, and loved as only we would dare to love them: fat, soft and slippery with oil and non-brewed condiment. Just what the doctor ordered (everyone in Scotland to stop eating).
Replete and greasy, I headed back to Main Street, and its lonely pools of sodium light. I had three hours to kill before the last bus to Cowdenbeath, and put them slowly to death in Lochgelly’s very strange pubs. The first was called the Silver Tassie, an entirely purple establishment I shared with an unhappy young barmaid, a sprightly old lady and an enormous industrial fan heater. Brilliantly effective in the production of throbbing decibels, this machine performed less ably in its primary role. When I successfully ordered a half-pint of Tarrrrrtan and raised it to my lips, breath steamed out across its brown surface, followed by the sound of teeth chattering against glass.
‘Grey Oscar phone!’ came a cheery bellow above the rotary roar. I looked up from my bar stool and saw the old lady, sat two tables away right in front of the heater, addressing somebody. Hopes that it might not have been me ebbed away when I noted the barmaid had sloped off. The old lady cupped her hands and tried again. ‘Gayer star fun!’ There was nothing for it: I stood up and walked across with benevolence and foreboding battling it out on my features. The latter rallied strongly when I spotted the chaser hiding behind her half pint. ‘It’s perishing in here!’ she shouted, white hair being whipped across her spectacles by the tepid and deafening gale. ‘I was just saying to get your scarf on!’
I nodded and smiled, and so did she. In the circumstances it seemed unthinkably rude to walk away, so I sat down. We smiled, we nodded, we took small sips from our small glasses. Occasionally the companionable silence was punctured with a strident cry, and its yet more strident echo. ‘Wee bit o’ heat coming off that now!’ she’d yell, hoicking a thumb at the wind machine. Then: ‘I was just saying there’s a WEE BIT O’ HEAT COMING OFF THAT NOW!’
There wasn’t – I’d just had to put my gloves back on – but of course I smiled and nodded anyway. Presently I cocked a hand to my mouth, bent towards her ear and yelled, ‘So you’re a regular here, then?’ A very unhappy moment now passed, during which I pondered that of the two gambits implied by this approach, the least awful involved me accusing an eighty-year-old woman of being an alcoholic. But strangely, and wonderfully, she just looked out into the purple gloom, smiling, nodding, deaf as a post. I drained my half with a much larger sip, raised a gloved hand, then stepped outside and jogged up the road.
My second pub of the night offered a further bracing reminder that the rigid design diktats of chain ownership have no power in Lochgelly. With their chalkboard specials, artfully distressed wooden flooring and gas-fired fake coals, British pubs are starting to look more and more like each other. But Shardy’s, a tough little cream-coloured cube with bars on the windows, looked more like a cowboy prison. Inside was a single room whose decor defied categorisation: a chestnut-roaster nailed obliquely to an orange wall, an overpowered spotlight slung from a yellow ceiling, dun-coloured carpet tiles, chrome chairs with brown Dralon cushions. The place had the ramshackle, thrown-together look of off-campus student accommodation. So too, in a mature, university-of-life kind of way, did the four-strong clientele.
‘Heavy’ looked promisingly weird when I spotted it on the front of a pump, and certainly sounded odd as I ordered a half of it. When the landlady flipped the tap I expected to watch alcoholic treacle coil forth into my glass, topped off with a sprinkle of crushed downers. In fact, in colour, consistency, taste and potency, it proved stupendously normal: mild bitter beer. I nursed it in an orange corner, accepted and benignly ignored by my fellow drinkers just as I had been in Gateshead.
It was warm and quiet; to keep the horror of public somnolence at bay I eavesdropped on my neighbours, two men in their fifties discussing the local unemployment situation. Their conversation could be described as faltering. Both were enthusiastic smokers, but for whatever reason – perhaps they thought I might flob in their chasers – instead of going outside together for cigarette breaks, they took it in turns. ‘You’ve got to have a car to get a job these days,’ one would say, and then he’d get up and walk out the door, leaving his friend to sip beer and whisky and scratch his chin. Four minutes later the door would heave open, letting in a frozen waft of fags, and the pair were reunited just long enough for someone to say something like ‘Aye, that’s half the battle’ – once it was just ‘Aye’ – before the chin-scratcher picked up his Regals and clomped out in turn. And so let us move on from the munchy box and the tanning booth to the final two fronts in Scotland’s determined one-nation assault on global trends in human life expectancy.
It’s taken a concerted effort by Scotland’s drinkers and smokers – one imagines a generous overlap in the relevant Venn diagram – to keep their nation atop the European cancer and cirrhosis charts. A third of Fife’s adult population smokes, and Scottish women lead their class as Europe’s doughtiest puffers. The habit actually enjoyed a resurgence in the early part of this century, when the number of Scottish smokers rose for three consecutive years. The booze statistics are no less eye-reddening – some 40 per cent of Scotsmen are classified as binge drinkers – but I think you’ll find these contributions to Fife Alcohol Support Service’s online noticeboard rather more evocative.
‘I don’t drink during the day, but usually stop off on my way home after work and have about six pints. Can you give me some advice?’
‘I drink in moderation but have recently begun to binge at the weekend. Now I’ve started to feel dizzy on Monday mornings, and wonder if the medication I’m taking for high blood pressure could be responsible.’
This entire nation is busily gorging, sizzling, smoking, idling and drinking itself to an early grave: the 2003 Scottish Health Survey declared that 97.5 per cent of Scots were ‘living dangerously’. But here’s the thing. In Lochgelly at least – where all those bad buttons are pushed hard and often – you’d be pressed to tell. Everyone I’d seen drink
ing had been doing so in profound earnest – the smoking tag-team dispatched three pints and three doubles in ninety minutes – yet there was none of the Hogarthian raucousness and dishevelment their intake merited. Just like the dapper old soaks in Cowdenbeath, they were indulging to dangerous, wanton excess with quiet decorum. It might not be what any prematurely bereaved relatives would choose as a tombstone epitaph, but these people can really take their drink.
‘Goan watch fucken TV now or what?’
The Christmas tree hoodies tramped disconsolately by as I waited at the bus stop. It was only as I watched them slink away up Main Street that I wondered if the town’s restrained behaviour might be related to its most famous export: the tawse, a three-tailed, two-foot leather strap first issued to Scottish teachers in 1886, and still being wielded by them over a hundred years later. Offered in four weights – from naughty-toddler Light to Begbie-grade Extra Heavy – the tawse was manufactured exclusively by Lochgelly-based saddler John Dick. So synonymous did the town become with flesh-striping retribution that the tawse was often referred to as a lochgelly.
Having attended a school that stoutly bucked trends in humanitarian decency by actually reintroducing corporal punishment in the late 1970s, I probably have a sharper axe to grind – ouch, sir! – than most. But at my school, as at most English schools, beatings were rare, carried out behind closed doors with the grim and exceptional ceremony of a prison hanging. In Scotland, being lashed with a big leather strap was simply an integral part of everyday school life. A 1980 study by Edinburgh University’s Centre for Educational Sociology, conducted among forty thousand school leavers, found that only one in twenty Scottish boys went through secondary school without getting the tawse. Its functionality went way beyond the enforcement of discipline. Teachers across Scotland, and particularly in primary schools, raised weals on youthful skin as an incentive to learning: one Glaswegian girl remembers being tawsed nine times in a single lesson for stumbling over the words to a prayer the class had been told to learn by heart. This was in the 1960s: the girl was six years old at the time.
For the craftsmen at John Dick, tawse-making was consequently much more than a cottage-industry sideline. Demand for tawses actually boomed during the early Sixties, when the firm was selling over four thousand a year. By then, Scottish teachers had shifted their aim from bottom to palm. Most of them, at least: some schools held regular bareback public floggings until well into the 1970s. One pupil recalls the routine: ‘If a boy had done something considered serious, such as stealing a pair of plimsolls, he’d be beaten in front of the whole school. Held across a school desk by two teachers and beaten on the bare backside by the headmaster. Female teachers would be excused, so they wouldn’t have to see any buttocks.’ John Dick suffered an unfortunate dip in business when primary schools started to phase out the whole infant-lashing thing in the early Seventies; the firm’s Light model was discontinued in 1975. There was another downturn after 1982, when the European Court ruled that a Cowdenbeath schoolboy suspended after refusing a dose of the tawse had been denied the right to education. But Lochgelly straps were still shifting – at £5.90 a time with a new metric-standard strap length of 580mm – right up until the autumn of 1987, when corporal punishment was abolished in Scottish local-authority schools. John Dick closed down soon after, though the last proprietor’s granddaughter still sells Lochgelly straps for what I’ll just call a specialist market.
A year before the ban was announced, the schoolchildren of Lochgelly and Cowdenbeath were invited to celebrate the centenary of the local tawse-manufacturing industry. The consequence was a spontaneous rampage: baying pupils raided punishment cabinets and herded terrified teachers into the miners’ institute gymnasium, where they were forced to perform humiliating naked jigs at tawse-point. At least that’s how it should have been. In fact – and I still can’t quite believe this – the children dutifully collected money and with it commissioned a 5-foot replica of a three-tail Heavy-grade Lochgelly tawse, which was then put on proud display in a local museum. That’s just so toweringly wrong. These are damaged people. The kind of people, I couldn’t help conclude, who overdose on unhealthy solace in later life. Too many lashes of Heavy means too many pints of it.
Having done my own drinking early and in moderation, I was rather looking forward to a night above a pub. As background lullabies go, there are none more soothing than the sounds of muffled debauchery: how fondly I recall nodding off as my parents and their cheeseclothed chums partied the night away with Lambrusco and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, except for the time I nipped out of bed for a pee, and a woman I’d never seen before barged in and threw up in the bidet.
Anticipation waned when I came to terms with my room’s fearsome lullaby-resistant properties. The bed was a little too small for Wee Jimmy Krankie, and much too creaky for Vincent Price. Applying Hans Christian Andersen’s mattress-comfort index, we’re talking ‘The Princess and the Angle Grinder’. The companionable clinks and laughs from below were rudely overpowered every fifteen minutes or so when a fellow overnight resident entered the toilet, which was separated from my right ear by 10 inches and two layers of plasterboard. Some of these visits were inevitably more trying than others, but all ended with a tremendous crashing cascade that suggested sluices being voided at the Three Gorges Dam. I woke in the kind of position favoured during Pompeii’s final moments, wearing an expression made famous by Edvard Munch.
Chapter Eight
IT WAS A crisp and rosy dawn, one that cast a flattering blush upon Fife. Lochgelly’s porridge-plastered, bargain-bin housing stock looked a lot better with a hint of pink on it, and so did the rank of chimneys lined up atop a neighbouring bluff: the massive petrochemical plant of Mossmorran, staffed by Lochgelly’s former miners and tawse-testers. I yawned my way north-east on an empty road, the rising sun strobing painfully through the roadside oak trees. Past the brief shimmer that was Loch Gelly, past Kirkcaldy, Gordon Brown’s constituency and at this stage of political history perhaps the only place in Britain where his name was more than a punchline. Music, Maestro: Babylon Zoo’s ‘Spaceman’, the Gordon Brown of one-hit wonders, a track that promised much but delivered only failure and embarrassment.
Recorded in 1995, ‘Spaceman’ had been hanging around unnoticed for a year when an ad agency knob-twiddler chanced upon it, or rather one very, very small part of it. And so in 1996 Levi’s released a TV commercial that incorporated a massively speeded-up sample of its stunted chorus, which severally employed the title in a manner I am not permitted to replicate. A swiftly released remix incorporating multiple repetitions of this sample sold 418,000 copies in Britain in its first week, and very quickly went on to top the singles charts in twenty-three countries. To the astonishment of those unlucky few familiar with the rambling, dirge-like original, Babylon Zoo were eagerly tipped for enduring global stardom – most energetically by Jas Mann, the band’s Wolverhampton-born frontman and sole songwriter. As the persistently tuneless, repetitive and garbled album I now endured made plain, this could never and did not happen. Almost every track exceeded six minutes. One went on for precisely eleven months. Babylon Zoo’s free-fall from grace swiftly achieved terminal velocity. Like many, I last saw Jas Mann making a ten-ton twat of himself on satire juggernaut Brass Eye, sombrely agreeing with the suggestion that he ‘might have a few more genes than normal people’.
The approach to most of my bad places meant an air of ratcheting dread: the grotty ring road, the squat housing blocks, the brownfield wasteland. Not so Methil. One minute it was all heathery brae and crofters’ cottages and villages called Milton of Balgonie. The next … well, here’s how Wikipedia’s overview of the town begins: ‘Immediately adjacent to the mouth of the river is Methil power station, which is now unused and awaiting deconstruction.’ A few months before I’d found some 1960s home movies on YouTube, showing Methil’s heaving prime in jerky, luridly coloured silence. A logjam of railway trucks massed by a dockside full of smoke and funnels, a se
a of sensibly trimmed heads packed into a football stand, bunting strung across a crowded, sunny street. I thought of them now as Craig bumped through the puddles in the car park outside East Fife FC, and came to a halt between two upside-down sofas.
Never before had the chasm between vibrant past and bleak present yawned more hugely. To one side stood the abandoned power station, its soaring concrete chimney an attempt to disperse the noxious aftermath of the slurried waste-coal burnt there. To the other a sprawl of rubbled nothing, the docklands that had once been home to the busiest coal port in Scotland and an oil-rig yard where the men of Methil had hammered together some of the world’s largest steel structures. And in front of me a mouldering breezeblock football-stadium wall topped with a billboard reminding spectators of the twenty-four-hour emotional support available from the Samaritans (national rates apply).
Methil and its resident football team have never been short of critics. The club fondly recalled as one half of the most feted scoreline in football history (Scottish Second Division, 22 April 1964: Forfar 5 East Fife 4) achieved a grimmer notoriety when featured in Sky 3’s Football’s Hardest Away Days. The same online sources that had directed me to Hawick and Forth proposed twinning Methil with Kosovo, Beirut and Uranus. But by some distance the town’s most prominent detractor – and it was only a matter of time before he made an appearance – was HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Having spent much of his wartime naval service escorting convoys in and out of Methil docks, the Duke felt qualified to call it ‘a dump’, thus launching his more durable career in offensive indiscretion. ‘He is highly unpopular here, to say the least,’ said one local historian, asked to comment on the town’s fifty-year grudge against the gaffemeister. Exceptionally, this inspired the Duke to issue a belated apology, or at least a denial. Writing to the Lower Methil Heritage Centre in 1995, he claimed never to have gone ashore there during the war, and concluded, ‘I remember passing through Methil some years ago with the Queen, but am quite sure I never described it as “a dump”.’ One pictures him passing the envelope across a footman’s proffered tongue, then turning to address his wife: ‘“A steaming cack-heap”, wasn’t it, dear?’