Drugs!

Friday 9:05 p.m.
I realised as I wakened this morning, and sat in the train, and meditated whilst listening to the lama with the auld maw, that things had progressed as usual, and there was a difference in the bliss ... and how much warmth and succulence had been added ... despite whatever I was doing. And I would like to die before I get old unless I'm as much help as the auld maw, so I went out a bought more wine. Because I don't live in a decent country like Holland and can't get hold of any decent drugs. I really will have to start going out and bothering the progeny of the progeny, or find myself a sodium halide lamp!

I bought TWO bottles of Camden Park and have nearly finished the first one. The label says ....

Camden Park is the business. Big, satisfying, takes no prisoners. In this Pino Grigio you will find zesty citrus flavours with a hint of vanilla on a lingering finish. No messing around. Not to mention, it's got the well hung bull on the label. We like that.

The boy who wrote that is a poet and a pissheid. You can't taste it at all really, but it was reduced by forty percent.

I got packed in by the nice girl during the Christmas of my first year at uni. The denims she didn't like me showing up in lasted a lot longer than she did. By the time I stopped wearing them, I think they had about twenty four or twenty nine patches in them and had huge insets to make them flare out from the knee. I'd managed to score dope before she packed me in.

The best stuff I've written hasn't been about me at all. I think the best book I wrote was xxxxTheRealMcCoyxxx which my secret agent is just now failing to sell. Anyway, I loved writing it which is a good sign. The first novel I tried to write was called xxxAlmaMaterxxx and I don't think it's very good at all, but was a good learning experience. Anyway ... it started off much bigger than it ended. I think I wrote about cutting it in xxxAreYOuBoysCyclistsxxx and I took out the first two years of university.

A kid at my work last week asked me about writing. Second year. I told her she might find xxxCityWhitelightxxx in the Edinburgh Public Library still. So I checked their catalogue. It's not there. (I've got fifty copies in this room!) But there is still a copy of the cycling book. Fung! That's a hostage to fortune. Also, would corrupt youth to read such a thing.

So to make the university book a manageable size, I just chopped the first two years out. This included my introduction to drugs.

Don't believe anything you see on the telly! 1968 looked like a revolution was happening. I'm watching this in my sixth year at school and I've applied to Edinburgh Universtity and even that was on the telly. I wanted to go there to get involved in these revolutionary happenings.

The suitcase my uncle Dan took to Australia, a cardboard kind of thing, now under my bed, was what I took up to Bellshill station. My pal Tony was with me. He wasn't going. I'd only been in Edinburgh once before, when I was thirteen on the way to and from a caravan site in Port Seton. The suitcase was very heavy and had in it almost everything I could call mine. In Pollock Halls, I could only carry it about thirty yards and then put it down, it was so heavy.

Later on, I'm watching out of my student house room window at the progeny of the evil bourgeois arriving and they've all come with their proud parents and they're all wearing sports jackets and flannels, and you could have thrown up right then except it was still very exciting though disappointing in a way to be there.

I had a carcoat. It was kind of luminous plasticy, bri-nylony thing with a fake fur collar. I was wearing this when I went to Paddy's Bar in Rose Street with my two, new protestant friends from uni.

Protestants had a completely different attitude to girls. They really did just want to fung them. Or that seemed to be the primary concern. One of my new protestant friends told me that the reason I liked girls was because I been to a single sex school and didn't see the little bitches, etc, etc, etc. Just send everyone to single sex schools then. Anyway ...No wonder the divorce rates are the way they are. Winking is for sexual satisfaction surely. Other people are for making deals with.

Call them non-catholics. They weren't really protestants, more like heathens. So the guy next door to me in Pollock Halls told me that if I wanted to score the place to go to was Paddy's Bar in Rose street.

We're sitting at the side having a pint and checking out the clientele. Two guys are sitting at the bar and one of them has on a tie-dye teeshirt. Longish hair. The other guy has a long , scuffy coat. The three of us discuss this among ourselves.

The bar is quite quiet. I delegated myself to go up and speak to these guys. One is called Louie. I ask him if I can buy any drugs in this bar. Eventually Brian comes in. I get to speak to Brian. At the time, Brian was doing his O'Levels and wasn't even legal enough to buy a drink in this bar. Portobello High School. Don't send your children there.

Brian collects the money from folk in the bar and goes away. Pound deal. A sixteenth of an ounce.

I liked Brian. I grew fond of him later. He came to see me box once in Dalkeith. I met his grown up son at a wedding I was at last year. He's one of the folk on my remembrance list. He got killed on Piper Alpha. Death by capitalism.

The guy who Brian was going to see to get the dope off later was found to be grassing some other folk, and these people tortured him and recorded it. Two of the disturbed, funged up and bizarre folk who were later my deep, dear friends got to listen to the tapes of this whilst scoring once. Reg and Gerry. Albert knew these folk. Or one of them. Of course, being dead nice, very little of these shennanigans came near moi!