My Shit Life So Far Read Free Page A

that went on for the 6 O’Clock News . My mum would sit on the floor with her legs running across it lengthways and the kids would all sit at right angles with their legs over hers. I had a constant cold, despite there being enough blankets on my bed that I could have comfortably survived a gunshot. Sometimes the fire would go on in the morning before nursery and I’d heat my clothes up in front of it and roast my legs until there were red swirling patterns all the way up to my shorts.
    When I was growing up I think most people struggled with what we’d now call ‘fuel poverty’. The price of fuel rose twice as fast in Scotland as in the rest of Europe. Hello! Those big pointythings in the water are called fucking oil rigs. Scotland is basically a huge lump of coal with roads and Tesco Metros on top. I hate to say it but we’re a nation of suckers. We tell our old people to wear an extra jumper in winter. They should be watching the Queen’s Speech in a thong, warming their mince pies by the glow of a sixteen-bar fire.
    My childhood came near the end of that clichÉd time when you knew everybody in your close. An old couple called the Robinsons across from us on the ground floor had a grandson who could draw. When he visited them I would love to sit and watch him conjure cars and dogs and boxers with a piece of charcoal. Upstairs from us were the Patons, a family cruelly held back by a society that didn’t sufficiently reward bad tempers, heavy footedness and shouting. Across from them was Mrs Heinz, a kind old lady with a face like a tiny withered apple. The top landing had a pompous fool of a newsagent who had his initials stencilled across the driver door of his Toyota Corolla and opposite him a wee man called Norrie who was, in no particular order, a communist, golfer and homosexual.
    Pollokshaws in general was a lot like Bladerunner without the special effects. Turning one way from our house, high rises towered over freezing little Sixties prefabs. The other way, the road must have been one of the bleakest in Europe: on it were a yard filled with building materials that was eternally locked up, a tiny office building the size of a large van and a milk factory. All facing a giant used-car lot. I spent a lot of my childhood terrified of nuclear war. Every time I heard a plane go overhead Iwas convinced we were all about to disappear in a ball of incendiary light. Handily, the car lot had a terrifying alarm system that went off every other night and sounded quite a lot like a 6-year-old’s idea of the four-minute warning.
    In the centre of Pollokshaws was an underground shopping centre where shops struggled to stay open. Not the bookies or the boozer that were in there; they did fine. Food was just less of an essential. The W of ‘Pollokshaws Shopping Centre’ had been stolen long ago and replaced with a shaky, spray-painted ‘G’ under which old ladies would stand around nattering, taking a sweepstake on which of their friends would last the winter. In the dead centre of it all was a memorial to the Scottish socialist John McLean, who would have wept.
    You had to be careful going through here with your mum. If she saw someone she knew, you’d have to stand disconsolately by her side while they exchanged information about prices and graphic descriptions of the illnesses of mutual acquaintances. It might as well have been in another language. My mum spoke Irish, so it often was.
    There were maybe half a dozen high flats in the area. Most tower blocks in the Seventies were so depressing they should have put a diving board on the roof. I think Scottish architects in the Sixties must have been given massive bribes by the makers of lithium. The way they’d been positioned meant that the main street, Shawbridge Street, was essentially a wind tunnel. My brother used to walk me to school when I was very little (he’d make me walk about five steps behind, so people didn’t know Iwas with him). One day we got caught