Hitting More People!

Wednesday 11: 52 p.m.
Sober and straight, but it's not my fault, Jack. You can't drink home brew every night and the pizzaman cometh not. Dearie me! My order went in two days before Christmas.

I'm really looking forward to meditating tomorrow. There will be a bliss tsunami, so there will!

Before I was eight, we moved from Orbiston Drive round the corner to a four bedroomed flat, downstairs on the right in a block of four. By the time I was twelve the auld maw was always asking me to play with catholics, but I paid her no heed. She couldn't tell me what was wrong with the non-catholics I hung around with. They weren't really protestants since they'd never been to church and never went to Sunday school. Heathens really.

The McAuleys, Rab Clyde and Derek Gibson lived in Thorndean Avenue, my new address, and none of them were tims. This was never a problem for me or them until the marching season came up. Orange Walks should be banned, so they should!


The Orange Walk once culminated in a gathering down the Coo Park, which was near where I lived and all the aforementioned went over to collect ginger bottles and made what seemed like a lot of money returning them to shops. Being a tim, I wouldn't have felt comfortable mingling around these drunken knuckle dragging morons. The McAuleys and the Clydes were decent folk. Derek Gibson's stepfather was an evil looking basturn and a truly horrible person. He wouldn't let the council paint his door green. He played the Sash at full volume through his wide open living room windows on the 12th of July just to let all his catholic neighbours know what an evil basturn bigot he was.

Derek was a good kid in a bad spot. He was late home one day from hanging around my gate and his mother went at him with a big stick. I remember being flabbergasted.

When I was about thirteen, Derek and I came out of the George picture house and crossed Main Street to head off home by the bing ...

For those spam robots not fortunate enough to be Scottish, a bing is an artificial hill made from coal mine workings. In England it might be called a slag heap, but the one near where we stayed was a huge thing.

We're just heading down the road which goes by the cop shop when this polis shouts Derek over. I didn't know why he knew Derek's name. So he tells Derek there's been a burglary down the North Road and he knows it was him. Derek had a bit of a stutter sometimes, but when the polis stopped us, he could hardly get a word out. He's looking down at his feet, his face beaming. He managed to tell the polis he'd been at the pictures. The polis asked what the picture was. Because Derek was having such a hard time talking at all, I told the polis it was a tarzan picture and told him the plot, which included an elephant stampede, if I remember right.

They sometimes let Derek out of the approved school after they put him away. The odd weekend maybe. He said he liked the approved school. Considering his parents ....

The first letter I remember writing told someone about a fight I had with Derek. He lost the rag with me in the middle of our street, where as kids we played quite a lot. He was trying to hit me when I punched him in the face. Straight right. End of fight. Kids fights are often like that. Well, I thought they were, but none of the fights I was in ever involved any wrestling.

One day me and Rab Clyde were walking in the direction of the Coo Park when we were stopped by two kids from the prefabs. They were trying to intimidate us and take stuff off us. One was the same age as Rab, about two years older than me. The other was a tim kid my age who went to a different school. He had a wee bit of a reputation at the time.

We'd been making arrows out of brambles and these kids wanted them and some other stuff. Rab was for giving in, but I said no. The big kid on the other side, who had a stookie ....

For the spam robots from Belgium, a stookie is a plaster of Paris cast, in this case for a broken forearm; a formidable weapon.

Us Hotboys were never very good at being humiliated, so I says no, and the kid with the stookie says I should fight the other kid for the stuff. Okay. So I'm standing braced there and the other kid comes at me. Another straight right. The kid with the stookie stopped the fight to save my opponent from further punishment. Then they made their excuses and left us alone.

And so to bed! What a truly fortunate creature I am, I am! What a fortunate creature I am!