This is for the Spango Out of Bellshill Yogini!

Thursday 10:15 p.m.
Some beers in.

The authoritarian Labour Party basturns ... and they made me !... say that they want to raise the school leaving age to eighteen. Where are our civil liberities now, eh? You have jail, the army, then school. These are places where you don't really get a choice. The school leaving age should be lowered to fifteen. I knew when I was going to become fifteen that some things had to change. When you became fifteen, you should go to the dancing.

How do you do that? I went to a single sex Catholic school, so I wanted to go to the dancing and had to find someone who knew how to do that. Among the fantastically talented football players I hung around with was Tony, who couldn't play football, but could run very fast. He was a pal of the Viewpark crowd I hung around with, but they didn't know how to go to the dancing. He had been to two dances in the Motherwell Town Hall, so he knew how to go to the dancing and I started going with him.

Me and Tony became a team. So we started going dancing together and he was my deepest dearest friend till from the time I went to the first dance with him till I was about twenty one. All the folk I knew when I was at that age were much nicer than the funged up, disturbed and bizarre progeny of the evil bourgeois I met at uni. The catholics of my youth were really nice folk.

Tony stayed with his parents and two other kids in Banyan Crescent off the Laburnum Road down Viewpark. His grandparents stayed in the house. They were wonderful, two old Lithuanian folk. His grandad had been in the salt mines during the First World War and his granny was a wonderful wee woman. We'd be going out to the dancing and she'd pull up his jumper to see if he was wearing a vest. I really thought she was great. She'd tell him to find a nice jewish girl. God knows what that meant. There weren't any jewish girls in Bellshill. I asked her once what Lithuania was like and she said it was flat and full of potato fields.

The Bellshill YMCA was built in the space when the picture house there got knocked down. It was across from the George picture house where I went on my first proper date. The YMCA is a kind of protestant freewheeling place. There are no priests or anything like that there. But is it not a den of iniquity like the Stute, the Miners Institute where they had a bar and you could drink there, I think. The YM was really for the under eighteens.

This is like the flesh. The vast majority of gurls who went there were from the mixed prod schoools, with some wonderful exceptions. There was a toughness about most of them which you didn't find in the lassies who went to the catholic senior secondary in Bothwell.

There was a part in all these dances where they sailed passed you in very short skirts, or psychedelic smocks with big legs, and this was about 1966/7 when hemlines were a bit neater than previously.

With Tony, I found how to negotiate going to a dance. I met Claudia Cardinali, the most beautiful fifteen year old girl at the bus stop as I took Tony there to catch his bus to Viewpark. But maybe that's for later.

A lot of my school chums didn't make the step into going dancing when they were fifteen because some of the places had a bit of a reputation for violence. Would you be safe?

The only folk going to the Bellshill YM on Saturday nights from our school were me and Tony. There were fights every week. Everyone was sober as well. The bouncers frisked you before you went in, checking for blades. Sometimes gurls took blades in in their handbags. They might have been called steel combs, sharpened ones. Anyway, you got searched every time you went into the Bellshill YM and I loved that. Getting searched makes you feel like someone. You have arrived. You are going to the dangerous dancing.

Getting 'lumbered' and getting 'claimed' were two expressions to know about. Getting a lumber meant you had picked up a girl, probably to walk home. Getting 'claimed' meant someone had come up to you and said: 'You're claimed, pal.' That probably meant you had to fight someone when you got outside the dance hall.

No one ever did this to me and my pal Tony. We were just lucky, I suppose. And he was from Viewpark and I was a joe from Bellshill who played football so I knew a lot of the joes from Viewpark. But maybe we just didn't fit in and nobody cared about us or who we were.

The dance hall is a gym really. They've got a stage. There is a single row of seats around the gym hall kind of space. When the fights kicked off, and they did every week, you moved back and jumped up on the seats so you could get a better look at the fights.

At the time in Glasgow, before the drugs, before the smack, there was a lot of gang trouble, but it didn't really happen in Bellshill so much. But once or twice things did erupt.

Once with all the claiming that went on, the traffic got stopped outside the YM . There's traffic banked up either way with folk bleeding and nutting each other. Wonderful to see and walk passed and to be uninvolved.

Bands you'd heard of played there. Tamla Motown. One Saturday night the Marmalade played there. The girls couldn't keep from attacking the stage. Ob La Dee Ob La Da. All the bouncers had to man the stage and thrown the orgasmic hysterical teenage girls back into the crowd, what a tough job for a dirty old man! This meant there were no bouncers out in the hall. This so-called Bellshill team, who miraculously ignored me and Tony, went round the hall and beat up all the interlopers, all the joes who were not from Bellshill. Bits of hair and splodges of blood and scalp skin adorned the floor.

But did you get a chance to fall in love there a find true romance in the place, Hotboy?

There was a cross at Bellshill then. To get Tony to his bus to Viewpark maybe you had to walk that way and wait for the bus. As I was walking towards the bus, I saw this wonderful, wonderful looking girl. We were fifteen, so she would have been fourteen and a bit not filled out. But she was gorgeous. I was walking towards this bus stop and looking at this wonderful vision and thinking who can you be, you wonderful, wonderful creation. As we got to the bus stop, Tony starts to speak to her. She was called Della Ward. She was the wee sister of a guy who was in the same year as us, a product of an Italian mother and a Lithuanian dad. I just loved her, love at first sight. Of course, I couldn't speak to her. I was unable to show her my final Hotboy self. I was just completely lost in how beautiful she looked. And she really did look beautiful.

In another culture, the marriage could have been arranged. They might have said to her parents that the boy is shy, but he has brains and he will get off the floor at some point and be able to love and look after your daughter like there's no potato fields or poverty or anything anymore.

I saw her sometimes from then on until I was about twenty one odds. Eventually, I would hardly say hullo to her. Maybe sometime in another lifetime I give you all my money and all my clothes and all my thoughts, and my body, speech and mind, but I wasn't ready for such a gorgeous, waste your mind, bite the pillow emanation this time. Anyway, her maw was gorgeous as well and a happy josephine. Her daughter will have been happy as well.

Why didn't you get someone like that, Hotboy? You give them your arm and leg, Jack, but they'll still make your cry.