My Shit Life So Far

One of the technical teachers had a bizarre burbling voice. He was a bit like an incomprehensible version of Bernie Winters. Once he gave me a long talking to and I had genuinely no idea if it was praise or censure. Probably the latter, as I was pish at techie. There was an assignment to build a little bookcase once. I didn’t have a clue so I stole the display model that the teacher had done. Just so it wasn’t too obvious I re-glued the runners on the bottom and ended up with a C.

The technical classes back then were idiotic. Teenage kids are like the A-Team. Give them a few rudimentary objects and they’ll construct a death machine of some kind. By the end of term the class was more tooled up than an Orc army. It’s like a conspiracy. Why don’t they teach kids in poor areas how to be hedge-fund managers and bond traders? Instead they get shown how to make mug trees and spice racks.

Years later I was writing on 8 out of 10 Cats, working on their Big Brother special. I’d watched Big Brother all that week to get up to speed and was pretty horrified.

‘They must really sift through the applicants to find such fucking idiots!’ I groaned. ‘I mean, people aren’t all just fucking idiots are they?’

Jimmy Carr just looked at me patiently and said, ‘Don’t you remember school?’ I suppose that’s true, the place was full of utter goobers. Once we were doing a science experiment in pairs. It was about velocity, so you measured how fast a little car went down a slope with five weights on it, then four and so on, to see if mass affected velocity. I was paired with a big, dotie Of Mice and Men character. I set the car with five weights and went to put it at the start line. He took it from me and ripped three of the weights off. ‘No point using five!’ he scoffed. ‘There’s only fucking two of us.’

Some of my favourite kids at school were the pathological liars. It seems that a tiny but indefatigable percentage of any school population will claim their bones have been replaced with metal and that they hang out with U2. The best one I knew was a boy called Ed Raven. He transferred into our school in second year but looked about eighteen and was sort of a hunchback. He claimed to have been living in Germany, where he was the national BMX champion. He also said he was independently wealthy, owning a meat factory near Berlin. I mean, if you could lie about anything, who would lay claim to a meat factory? Ed Raven would. That was his genius. My friend bumped into him many years later outside Glasgow Uni. Raven was walking with a cane and brushed past him having no time to answer questions. His ship was moored in the Clyde and he had to get back before the crew grew restive.

There was another guy like that in one of my classes. He came in late one day and started into some crazy excuse. We all perked up because we knew that somewhere in the explanation he was going to be mauled by a leopard or something. The teacher cut into what he was saying and made him tell the actual story of why he was late and it was … his mum making him wait in for the gasman. You could see a real look on his face that said, ‘What’s the point of telling you this? This is boring.’ I think that was the thing with those kids, they thought that our reality was so boring it literally wasn’t worth living in. They were sort of right, too.

Apparently parents tell an average of 3,000 white lies to children while they are growing up. My parents told me that every time you told a lie a giant fire-breathing spider with the head of a bear and the arms of an octopus would spin a big web out of all your lies and then when it had spun a web big enough it would carry you off in it. Of course it wasn’t until years later I found out they had been lying to me all along and they weren’t my real parents. Personally, I’m looking forward to telling my kids they were adopted. They weren’t, I’m just looking forward to telling them that.

I had friends but kept myself apart from most people, largely because I felt that they were all heading for grim jobs and Barratt houses in an unquestioning way that I found alarming. Still, there was always a part of me that wondered if I should try to be part of the gang more and forget about my doubts. I just couldn’t imagine being part of that world though, having a job, a mortgage, marrying your girlfriend from school and sending your own kids back there. Thing is, I’ve met a lot of people from school since and they’ve done all that, done the stuff I only used to say they’d do as a sort of despairing joke.

In my late twenties I was out with my best friend Paul Marsh (Paul is a transcendent human being and full-scale nutcase who I will colour in lovingly later on). I’ve known Paul since school and he’s flowered into a real independent thinker. On this occasion he was wearing a green leather jacket and some kind of tartan bondage trousers. I’d been writing all day on ecstasy. A guy came up to us who’d been at school with us both; he had a little pot belly and greying temples and was wearing the same wind-cheater my dad has. Now I’m not saying he’s a bad guy; he’s actually a lovely guy, but he looked at Paul dressed as some kind of Space Clown and me looking like I was trying to stare through the fabric of the universe and he said, ‘So lads! Are you getting much golf in?’

There was quite a telling thing that happened right at the start of my second year. There was an open patio area that linked different parts of the school. A bunch of us were dawdling through there and suddenly a big group just attacked this guy called John Jo. I think he’d literally looked at somebody in the wrong way – suddenly a group was round him punching and kicking him with one big lad slamming his head off a wall. John Jo just never came back; his mum took him out of the school. I remember our form teacher giving us a sarcastic speech about how his mum had come up to the school and said he wouldn’t be back. The form teacher was utterly incredulous that someone would transfer out because he’d been subjected to a serious, unprovoked assault. His point was pretty explicit – if she didn’t like her son’s head getting rattled off a wall, she’d struggle to find anywhere she’d like in the Glasgow school system.

It wasn’t the roughest school in Glasgow, nowhere close to it, but it would probably have shocked a lot of people. Quite a few people I knew there are dead now. A wee guy called Billy Kerr got killed by his dad, who chopped his head off in a drunken rage. His old man was a butcher, so at least he’d have made a good job of it. The guy who told me he’d been killed added brutally, ‘… not so wide anymore’. ‘Probably not quite as tall as he used to be either …,’ I sighed.

There was a nearby school that was some kind of special institution. I don’t know quite what it was, a List D school, borstal or some kind of learning difficulties place. Anyway, anyone you met from there was either a hardcore villain or mentally handicapped. One lunchtime a whole crew of them turned up at our school, smashing windows and battering people. It was like a fucking Zulu movie. A big group gathered outside one of the entrances – I think they had a beef with somebody in particular and were calling him out. One of our teachers (a hard case) walked out calmly and headbutted the biggest one right to the ground. It was like Clint Eastwood. Or like a grown man headbutting an emotionally troubled boy. It was tremendous.

Of course, life then was probably less violent than it is for the average teenager nowadays. I certainly think that teenagers should be taught more about knife crime. Going for the kidneys can give you a much cleaner kill. Equally, news footage of the teenage victims of gun crime should teach us all something. Look closely at those notes left by friends as the cameras pan by – there is a lesson to be learned here. These kids just can’t spell. ‘Respek’? What’s that? They certainly won’t be getting any of my respect until they learn some basic spelling and punctuation. Modern youth also seem to be horrible gift buyers. Do you really think this guy would have appreciated a teddy bear? He was a crack dealer!

Our diets at school were laughably terrible. Loads of us would go for chips at lunch – chips and a potato fritter was the top seller. That’s a bag of chips and an enormous chip please. My mum would make me a packed lunch, so I’d spend a fair bit of time trying to barter gammon rolls and Blue Ribband biscuits into something more interesting. There was an ice-cream van outside the front gates that sold single fags and a tuck shop that only seemed to sell choc-ices. I loved it and I’d have appreciated it all even more if I could see myself now – forcing myself to eat a bowl of leaves with my meals in a desperate attempt to stay alive.

I do think kids need better education about nutrition – I didn’t really have a clue about any of that stuff till I read up on it a few years ago. Scientists have found that people who choose to eat crisps, chips and chocolate have a gene linked to obesity. They are now able to identify the group of people with this gene, by looking at a map of Scotland. Apparently, the SNP is to give every schoolchild in Scotland an obesity check. If they can’t fit into one of Alex Salmond’s trouser legs they go on a diet.

One of the fattest boys at my school was called Jerry MacBrayne. There was a rumour that he’d been caught masturbating during chemistry class. Nobody knew if it was true, but we all abused him about it endlessly because there wasn’t much else to do. He had these really fat parents, a fat sister and a wee fat dog. They’d all go jogging together in a nearby park in terry towelling tracksuits. My friend, a mischievous wee lassie called Lesley, lived across from them. She phoned a curry house one night and sent them half the menu as a prank. She said his dad answered the door and looked absolutely delighted.

The idea has been floated that parents of obese children should be fined. Don’t people realise that the parents of fat children are simply misguided? What they’re trying to do is make their kids less attractive to paedophiles. What they’re forgetting is that they’re making it more difficult for them to run away. In Vegas I once saw an incredibly fat man on one of those little mobility scooter things, except he’d driven it onto a moving walk-way, so he didn’t even have to drive. Now that’s lazy.

Live Aid was a huge thing at school. I think it’s fair enough for kids to get excited about something like that. But the adults who bought it should have really been embarrassed. ‘The Christmas bells that ring there are … the clanging chimes of doom?’ Did that really happen? Even at 12, I’d had a host of sexual nightmares that were less weird than the video to that song. If there’s one thing we’ve learned about fighting famine over the years it is this – big music events don’t work. We can tick that off the list. To be honest, you’d have thought that would have been a bit further down the list. It’s amazing to think that at some point there was a meeting where someone said, ‘People are starving in their millions’, and somebody replied, ‘We’d better get a hold of Ultravox and Annie Lennox.’

Seeing the film Gandhi was also a massive thing for me as a kid. I saw a clip of it on TV first, where Gandhi as a young man is thrown off a train because of his race. I just felt this incredible indignation that stuff like that happened in the world. I talked to my dad about it and was absolutely raging. I suppose that was the birth of some kind of political consciousness. Apparently the London Underground is using quotes from Gandhi on the Tube. But I don’t remember his saying, ‘There’s a body on the line at Marble Arch’ in the film. They are using other famous quotes too, but the one from the Koran emptied the train.

I was quite into socialism and read stuff like The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and George Orwell. I was quite an idealistic wee boy and I’d read quite a lot of political stuff by the time I was about 14. By 16 I joined the Labour Party. That didn’t seem like such a great place for an idealist. Or anyone with a low boredom threshold. It’s a rarely mentioned fact that politicians rise through the ranks by being able to sit through endless grim meetings. This inevitably means that we are governed by monsters. A few months of screaming inwardly during speeches about council business and I drifted off. It’s not like our political system even gets stuff done. Motorists now have to dodge a pothole for every 120 yards of road in Britain. It’s estimated it will take 13 years and cost £1 billion before council workers will finish standing around staring at all of them.

Politicians are just innately ridiculous and their lives can’t really bear the weight of much scrutiny. As a teenager I campaigned for Labour in a Glasgow by-election. The candidate was Mike Watson, who seemed like a reasonably genuine, socialist-minded character. He was elected, forgot about the socialism and later became Lord Watson. When I heard that he’d tried to burn down a hotel at the Scottish Politician of the Year Awards I assumed that he’d had a change of heart. Mike must have had an epiphany, I reasoned, surrounded by these braying crooks at their annual backslapper. Realising what he had done with his life he must have tried to bring the whole place down about their heads like a modern-day Samson! I did a gig at that hotel recently and the staff told me that he’d started the fire because they’d stopped serving him at the bar. My dad always had a generally socialist outlook. His philosophy was a strange mixture of apathy and class war. He didn’t want to smash the state but he wished that someone would. The good thing was that he would talk to us about stuff like that and we had an idea that the world might be a bit different from what we saw on the news. Once, my headmistress held a discussion about nuclear war, a subject I had questioned people endlessly about due to fear.

‘Did you know that there are underground bunkers where key people will go when there’s a nuclear alert?’ she asked the generally baffled class.

‘Yes Miss! My dad says that all the top politicians will go there.’

‘That’s right Frankie, a lot of key people will be taken there, so that the country will be able to keep running.’

‘Dad said that if he knew where one was, he’d get a shotgun when the four-minute warning went off and shoot everybody as they went in!’

My music teacher stood in a Glasgow by-election. He was a foaming Nationalist and once demonstrated the battle tactics at Culloden to us using a clipboard (shield) and pen (sword). He got a party political broadcast, which he sung. We all rushed home to see it.

‘Oh, these are my mountains!’ he cried, gesturing at some tower blocks. ‘And this is my glen!’ He was pointing into a local canal, full of rubbish. It was fantastic.

There were pupils who struggled to get through life at school but it was the same for some of the teachers. There was a maths teacher called Mr Hughes: an unfortunately camp heterosexual who for some reason chose to wear shoes with little golden buckles. Everywhere he went kids sang ‘Mr Hughes, the Elephant Man’ to the tune of ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’. He was a lightning rod for spitballs, paper aeroplanes and any kind of improvised missile.

There was a game where kids would inch their tables forward when the teacher turned to write something on the blackboard. Mr Hughes just didn’t have the personal confidence to address it, so we’d all end up crowded round his legs. Sometimes his face would be pressed up against the board. One time he made a joke.

‘What would you measure a waistline in, centimetres or metres or kilometres?’ he asked.

‘Metres’, said Harriet Adams, a reputedly slack lassie, being deliberately unhelpful.

‘I suppose it might be measured in metres if you were Cyril Smith,’ quipped Mr Hughes, chortling at his own joke.

We all laughed too, and kept laughing. There was an instant telepathic understanding that we were never going to stop. People outdid each other trying to laugh the loudest, the most gratingly, screaming like animals until it started to become genuinely hilarious. Tears were running down faces and people were gasping for air, shrieking. A boy clawed at his throat like he was going to suffocate. Mr Hughes stood entirely passive throughout, staring not at but through the back wall.

Mr Hughes decided that teaching was not for him and left to become a bus driver. Fate is cruel and his route took him directly by the school. People would run out in their lunchtime to the bus-stop and sing the ‘Elephant Man’ song at him when he opened the doors, waving their arms up against their faces like trunks.

Our science teacher was called Mr Clarkson. He was always drunk and would drop things on the floor so he could try to look up the girls’ skirts. Every week he gave a mumbling, incoherent lecture called ‘The Life of a Battery’. It didn’t appear anywhere on the syllabus and even with repetition nobody was ever able to piece together exactly what it was he was saying.

Remember that old joke about the Pope needing a heart transplant? He drops a feather from his balcony and whoever it lands on has to give the Pope his heart. When he looks down he sees thousands of people all blowing desperately. Well, Clarkson had a version of that. If the class grew restless while he rubbed out and redrew his battery diagram he would decide that somebody was getting a ‘punishment exercise’. He’d push a piece of paper down one of those big, long science tables and whoever it stopped at would take the punishment. Of course we all blew like fuck. I remember seeing a mum up at the school complaining about the number of undeserved punishments her son kept getting, not realising it was because he was an asthmatic.

PE was generally dreaded. The teachers seemed to occupy something of an educational hinterland. Nominally a teacher but actually just a guy who likes running and throwing stuff. They were obsessed with getting us to climb ropes and wall-bars, like they were preparing us for a career in the eighteenth-century merchant navy. Our main teacher was a fitness nut called Mr McKean. At our first lesson he gave us a long speech about how flexibility peaked at twelve and explained that we were all stiffening towards death. Then we played dodgeball.

We had an annual football event where everybody played a class that was a year older. It was notorious for its brutality and warming up there was the testosterone level of a botched prison break. I waited for the opening whistle and ran straight at the smallest guy on the other team and hoofed him right in the balls. I had to do laps for an hour but the scene I was running round looked like a kung fu tribute to Saving Private Ryan.

In second year there was a big formal run that everybody dreaded. Five miles round a big cinder-ash marsh. I came 123rd out of 132 boys. The fattest boy in the school was a guy called Chris Katos, whose dad ran a kebab shop. On the second lap I spotted him hiding under a bush at the side of the track, eating an enormous bag of pakora. It was like something from The Dandy.

Our drama class was taken by Miss Skillen – a little middle-aged woman with huge tits forming an obscene shelf at right angles to her body. Occasionally producers would come into the school and host auditions for parts in TV dramas. They can’t all have been like this, but the ones I went to always had English producers looking for people to play stereotypical heavy Glaswegians. I remember they were casting somebody to play a drug dealer and there was an audition piece where boys had to shake down a smaller boy for money. Everybody loved this guy called Gazza Greer, who delivered a performance of some gusto. The role wasn’t a huge stretch for him because he was an actual drug dealer. He came into that room after bullying money out of someone, pretended to bully money out of someone, then went outside to put the hurt on the real world again. He got something like five grand for the film and disappeared from school into a two-year-long party.

Even among the kids who did the auditions, there was an amused awareness of being stereotyped. If Sir Ian McKellen had been born in Glasgow right now he’d be playing a glue-sniffing bouncer with bi-polar disorder. We’re our own worst enemy. Even programmes made in Scotland portray most Scots as loveable chancers on heroin and incapacity benefit. Imagine if every TV show from America was about a cowboy eating hot dogs on the electric chair. Just once I’d love to see a sitcom based on Dundonian transgender ballet dancers living on a barge.

I couldn’t act at all but I got a couple of parts as an extra with a line or two. I was a cheeky young gardener in a Play for Today. There was a bit where a bunch of us were supposed to shout abuse at Russell Hunter, who was the star, as we walked by in the distance. I couldn’t think of anything else to say so I just shouted ‘Clitoris!’ over and over again. You could hear it quite clearly when it went out on telly. I think the producers just couldn’t understand my accent but it baffled a lot of viewers in Scotland.

Later, I was a cheeky milkboy in an episode of Dramarama, starring Mark McManus. Taggart! He slept in his dressing room quite a bit and would occasionally stumble into mine in a dressing gown and ask if I had any fags. There was none of the tedium an adult would associate with being an extra. I was getting paid to be off school. It was like finding the cheat codes for the universe.

Kids had to have chaperones on set, so I got to meet some interesting characters. One woman I had was an adorable 50-something Glasgow mum. She would go on about her passion for Richard Chamberlain (‘a waste of a good man’) and generally gossiped at me like I was cutting her hair. My favourite was this moustachioed socialist guy who would discourse on what he’d do to various politicians and celebrities if he got them alone in a room. If you’re stuck in a Portakabin for long enough with anyone – even a young kid – you’ll eventually just start being yourself. His marriage, he confided, had been in trouble because of his libido, but had been greatly strengthened by the arrival of AIDS, which stopped him wanting other women.

‘Used to be a pretty girl would smile at me and I wouldn’t be home for three days. You caught anything, the doctor gave you a jab and told you not to drink for a while. Not any more. The party’s over.’

I loved people talking to me like an equal. I was always sad when the job was finished and I had to leave the stories and the card games and the bacon rolls. Looking back, that was the start of my interest in show business. I didn’t particularly enjoy the performing but I did love the camaraderie and the sheer variety of folk, endlessly talking shit.

The school had an annual talent show, which my best friend Aiden and I did one year with a filthy act of pretty basic sex material. We were two detectives, talking about our cases as being a bit of a side issue to all the women we’d fucked. It wasn’t even really double entendre; there was clearly only one way you could take it and everybody was horrified. After that they’d make us audition every year for the talent show on our own, and then ban us. I used to look forward to the wee audition, just standing on our own in an empty lecture theatre doing blue jokes to our very elderly deputy head’s flinty, unchanging scowl.

The shows were always compered by two good-looking drama monkeys called Victor and Andy. Their schtick was that one would come on and say, ‘Where’s Andy?’ then go off to look for him while the other came on and went, ‘Where’s Victor.’ I hated those guys and, denied any other role in the show, we’d go and heckle them. I’d like to say it was witty heckling; it wasn’t.

‘Where’s Andy?’

‘You’re a CUNT, Victor!’

We did notice that people in the drama society seemed to be fucking each other. I guess that’s the way of the acting profession everywhere and I salute it. We even thought about getting involved, purely for sexual reasons. I went to a school production of Guys and Dolls as a reconnaissance exercise and decided it wasn’t worth it. There was a girl who was the school’s Sharpay, who was a hirsute lassie routinely referred to as Teenwolf. She had these really hairy arms and kind of lady sideburns. All the guys affected to dislike her but we were all secretly turned on by the fact that she was a known shagger and must have had a muff like Henry Cooper’s armpit.