… a wee recap Post… for, well, no particular reason at all… enjoy…

…I was reading on her blog some of the back-posts from Author pal, Alison Jack, and behold and lo, there was a wee piece I Guest-Posted to her terrific page in December 2103… being the narcissistic Caledonian God-let that I am, it caused me to smile (well, if I don’t laff at my own stuff, who will, Mabel?)… it may engender a smirk or three from yerselves… if yeez‘ve seen it before, then just go about yer business, NUTHIN to look at, folks…please enjoy…

…be careful kids… it’s a jungle out there… beware of becoming a horse’s lunch…

…this ol’ Jurassic has less time left to his end-date than the time lapsed since he first came whistling into the WURLD as a naked Scots bairn in the late ‘forties… incorrectly termed ‘the bad old days’ in Dockland Govan in Glasgow, growing up there was, for the large part, a colourful, eventful passage in my life… now and again, lovely wee flashbacks flit in and out of what remains of my little grey cells and I smile to myself… and wonder, how the hell did we kids ever survive?… don’t get me wrong… there was never shootie-guns or meat-cleaver attacks… drugs were a disease as yet to be visited onto a future Glasgow… but danger and peril lurked at every turn… especially if yeez were only five years old… let me illustrate with a trio of traumatic chapters impacting my psyche before I had even reached the grand old age of six (it might have been six-and-a half, but who’s counting?)…

ABANDONMENT : first day at primary school, new SupaDuke shoes laced up, knitted brown jersey, and a handkerchief sewn onto the end of the sleeve… delivered at exactly nine in the morning into a crowd of thirty or forty similar waifs at the infant class… me Mammy pushed me into the throng, and then left… yes… left!… gone!… vanished!… vamoosed!… along with thirty or forty other Mammys… nob’dy told us they would be coming back at eleven to retrieve us… like an invisible switch, over three dozen children began to bawl in unison… no amount of sewn-on handkerchiefs were any match for the tsunami of tears… until even now, that was prob’ly the longest two hours of my existence…

ANIMAL ATTACKS : there was lots of time for playing in the streets… very few motor vehicles made it in to darkest Govan… coal deliveries came in horse-drawn carts… but significantly, horses also came in horse-drawn carts…

…I don’t know how big a horse may seem to me nowadays, but back then, they stood miles higher than my wee-Jimmy frame… we kids held no fear of these tame beasties, and often were allowed to feed them carrots and other delicacies while they stood waiting for the delivery men to move onto the next stop in the tenement… unhappily for me, on one occasion I wandered too close beneath the front end of Black Beauty’s brother, and my skull became the menu delicacy of the day… a neat nibble removed a half inch of skin and attendant hair, causing a whoosh of blood… I went off screaming to me Mammy, who didn’t seem to share the sense of calamity that I had… when she’d stopped laughing, a dose of ointment stemmed what to me were gallons of my life-blood… to this day, in a certain light, a little bald patch gleams at the back of the skull…

HUMAN ATTACKS : as small children in an impoverished neighbourhood, school lunches were supplied at minimal cost (1/6d in old money for five lunches, which being in Scotland, were called ‘school dinners’)… each midday, the classes were formed up into hand-in-hand double lines and marched to the nearest parish hall for assembly for ‘dinner’… in one memorable interlude I’d noticed the potatoes coming from the metal containers were green… and I refused to eat them… I was frog-marched to the headmaster, an unforgettable ogre, Mister Donaldson, sitting at the front table with the rest of the teachers…

…‘what’s wrong with yer potatoes, boy?’… and in that naïve honesty possessed only of small children, I replied, ‘please, Sir, they’re sh*te’… the ensuing smack across my face came so rapidly it knocked me to the floor… I got up, dodged the grappling hands trying to propel me forward for a second dose, and scrambled out of the hall… I ran all the way home to me Mammy, two streets away, and blurted between sobs, ‘a big man hit me’… back we went together to the hall… the b*stard Donaldson repeated to me Mammy what I’d said… the next thing I knew was another belt across the face… from her!… the upshot was, I went off potatoes for at least a couple of years after that… and kids of today don’t think they’ve got it easy?… hmmmph… all the same, be careful kids… it’s a jungle out there… see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!…

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