Dangerous Sports For Boys!

Friday 6:06 p.m.
I went to the Carphone Warehouse in Princes Street, the folk who sold the mobile phone to my partner. The boy said I needed a USB port cable. He said they didn't sell them separately. Since there wasn't one in the box .... so they sell you a mobile phone that'll take photies the size of a postage stamp, but you can't buy the cable to get them onto your computery thing. I can't even give it away since it was a gift. I'd like to drop it down the toilet. I believe they don't like that.

Near the bottom of our garden in Thorndean Avenue there was a burn (a rivulet) which ran through some rough ground and then joined another two burns. Where these burns converged they had to build two aquaducts for big pipes because of the way the ground dipped. Anyway, one was quite near the ground, but the other one was maybe eighteen feet off the ground from the the top of it. On the top of it, this girder box for a big pipe, were straight lines of steel about six inches across, interspersed with cross and diagonal girders to help form the latticework.

One summer we used to play tig and one man hunts on top of this lattice works. You could bend over and run along the pipes, but if you were confident and being chased it was much better to run along the top. So there's an eighteen feet drop to the burn here and two fences at either side with metal spikes. We used to run full pelt along the top of this.

I was coming back from the pub once in my twenties and remembered doing this. I climbed up on top of the girders boxing in the big pipe and walked across. Even sober it was dangerous. In fact, crazy.

Down the wee lane at the top of Orbiston Drive and make a left and you were on the rough ground, later a swing and football park, which led up to the bing. This was a big bing. Firstly, there was the red shale bing and on top of that the black tipper. There was a huge almost vertical drop down from one side of the big dipper, but on the other side there was a grass covered flat bit then the slope down the shale bing. That side was climbable though very, very steep. I remember racing down this shale side with three other kids when I was about seven. It was important to win, but the faster you went the more liable it was that you would go head over heels. Jake Carlin, who never won anything else, was brilliant at that. There's like a bow wave of shale in front of him and in his wake as his wee legs were kind of swinging weirdly from his knees. It was a long way down.

Jake lived right across the road from me and Peter Robertson and a kid in a single child family stayed next door. It was like being middle class being that kid. He was always clean with shiney shoes. He was never allowed away from his gate. He was not allowed to go up the bing and wasn't really allowed to play with us either. So we had to go up the bing and down the woods without him. Soon it was as if he never existed at all.

So we're up the bing this day and this other group of kids from a few streets away have got this big tyre. It was much bigger than a car tyre. Like a tyre from a tractor maybe. Anyway, they've got this tyre up the bing somehow and they've got this younger kid who has agreed to go inside this tyre which is going to be rolled down the bing. Even we did not think this was too smart, but this younger kid is going to get plenty of points of bravado if he can pull this one off. I'll never forget it. The kid is wrapped like a circle inside the tyre and off it goes. As it's getting faster and faster, it hits the rough ground at the bottom of the bing and starts to bounce high in the air, and everyone is standing with their mouths open as it bounces and bounces like something out the Dambusters and jumps the fence and whacks with a shudder into the back of this prefab. The kid, looking tiny by this time, gets out from inside the tyre and you can see he's trying to escape the garden, but he's falling down and getting up away down there like something from Charlie Chaplin.

We were free when we were kids. We did not have mobile phones. We could go where we liked. Several times we walked to Blantyre to David Livingstone's Memorial. This was miles and miles away. We found a place to climb the wall since we didn't have any money, but none of the attendants ever said anything to us as we went around the museum in the big house there.

Of course, between the ages of ten and fourteen we played an awful lot of football.

I can't think of a better way to be brought up than as a kid in Bellshill. There were lots of easily accessible wild places like the Glen, the Hammies, the Black Woods and Thankerton. The schools were good, like rocket ships for the dispossessed. We had the NHS for running repairs. Nobody had much money, but we could go to the pictures and the baths, and nobody went hungry. None of the tims were bad to their kids that I ever heard of, but even at that, best of all, as soon as you were out to play, and that could mean anything, there were no adults. When we were out and about, we kept away from grown-ups. Sometimes we ran away from them. Girls, of course, stayed closer to home. Middle class boys were brought up like girls. What a shame! They wouldn't even know what they were missing.

The bliss at the auld maw's went wheeeeee today, but there's no point in telling the too dumb to meditate about the bliss.

10:49 p.m.
The pizzaman said he's been getting phone calls from folk he hasn't heard from in years. What's the matter with this country? You can't even get arrested with dope these days, but I don't know how to buy it. By Wednesday I will have saved a hundred pounds due to not being able to score for a month. I could buy a lamp, a sodium halide lamp for that. Except I don't know where to get that either. I think I'll have to find some young people to speak to. They don't smoke soapbar. The proper bourgeois. Thank god! They've got money. They snort Charlie. They smoke weed. God, I'll have to be sociable.


I don't think that's the attitude your supposed to be adopting, Hotboy. Bugger it, Jack. Eating soapbar kept me in. The progeny of the progeny of the evil bourgeois have all grown up. I'm sure they'd love to speak to moi. I'm smart enough for that, so I am!