Tag Archives: travel

Get yer rhododendrons oot for the lads

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My kids and I caught the ferry from Gourock to Dunoon at the weekend. I say ‘caught’. It was thankfully pretty stationary when we drove aboard. I figured taking the car was a no-brainer. We didn’t have a lot of time and without the car we wouldn’t have been able to explore much more than the dock on the other side, which would’ve been about as pointless as flying from Edinburgh to Milan, wandering around the airport then immediately flying back again, all the while raving about how culturally enriching ‘the Italian experience’ was.

Gourock. That’s a strange name, isn’t it? [note to any non-Scots reading this – it’s pronounced ‘goo-rock’, not ‘gow-rock’, you fucking idiot. Honestly, imagine not knowing how to pronounce the name of a place you’ve never heard of before in a country whose pronunciation rules aren’t immediately clear. What a loser] It’s next to Greenock. What is it with ‘ocks’ on the west coast of Scotland? I’ve no idea what an ‘ock’ is, much less why two ‘ocks’ would be next to each other. I’ve even less idea why one of them would be ‘green’ and the other made of ‘goo’. A simple Google search would doubtless put paid to my speculation, but I can’t resist an enduring mystery, plus I’m ignorant and lazy. I’d prefer to imagine ‘ocks’ as whatever I bloody well want them to be, thank you very much. I mean, are ‘ocks’ decapitated crocodiles? Dismembered octopi? Is it how Jonathan Ross would refer to the green guys in Mordor if he moved to Middle Earth? There’s no doubt in my mind that the real answer is incredibly boring. It’s the same with Coatbridge: was the whole town named after a bridge of stitched-together Medieval jackets? As far as I’m concerned: yes. Yes, it bloody was. And don’t get me started on Bathgate.

None of us had ever been to Dunoon so we knew little about what to expect once we arrived, beyond what I’d gleaned from a cursory Google search (I still refuse to Google ‘ocks’). We met a kindly old man on the deck of the ferry as we clambered out of the car. After a brief exchange he was quick to suggest places we might go and things we might do. Well, truth be told, he only really had one thing in mind…

I’ve clearly phrased that in an unnecessarily sinister way, haven’t I? And I’ve left you thinking that this poor, innocent old man wanted to ‘Jack and Rose’ us in the back of his motor. Or paint us like one of his Gourock girls. He didn’t. His real intentions were, mercifully, a lot more boring than that. What he wanted us to do was visit the botanic gardens.

‘You’ll love it’, he said. ‘The rhododendrons are out.’

I looked back at my kids: two be-limbed bundles of kinetic chaos; a couple of Nagasakis in skin-suits. Voracious, vital, joyful, and mental. The whole world – its sounds, colours and energies – piped perpetually into their skulls with the force and power of the zap-bite that cooked the shark in Jaws 2. ADHD in human form. Tom and Jerry meets Israel and Palestine. ‘Mister,’ I thought, ‘These kids REALLY don’t give a fuck about rhododendrons. Come to think of it, neither do I.’

My kids might’ve been interested in rhododendrons, but only because it sounds like a shape invented by a drunk pigeon, or some sort of giant robot who spends his days fighting Godzilla. As long as they laboured under the impression that a rhododendron was one of those things they’d be excited, but the minute they found out it was a fucking flower their eyes would glaze over like Cheech’s and Chong’s would on a microscopic journey through Bob Marley’s left lung.

Don’t get me wrong. We adore nature. Its canvas. Its scope and humps and hues. Its vistas and vacuums. We rarely get hung up on the specifics, though. We’re quite happy to gaze at flowers – Geilston Gardens, for instance, is a stunning wee place – just don’t ask us which ones are rhododendrons. We don’t know what they are, much less when they’re going to be out. And we don’t want to know.

But this man wanted to know. And he wanted us to know, too. And I’m pretty sure that he wanted us to know that he wanted us to know that he wanted us to know, too. But did he always know? Did he tug, teary-eyed, at his mother’s apron strings and wail: ‘Oh, mumma, will the rhododendrons be out again this year? Oh, will they, mumma? Please say that they will!’ Was rhododendron his first word? When did this rhododendron obsession take root? And would it happen to me?

After all, there was a time when I wouldn’t have believed you if you’d told me that a time would come when I’d be willingly listening to Radio 4 in the car. Or feeling a sense of accomplishment for getting that third wash out on the line. Would I turn sixty and get inducted into some secret, and incredibly boring, society? Would I receive a card from the King that read: ‘You give a fuck about rhododendrons now. Deal with it.’?

We didn’t go to the botanic garden. We ate ice cream. We climbed rocks. We skimmed stones. We saw a seal. We wandered the fringes of a loch that used to house US submarines. That’s a bit better than fucking flowers.

Mind you… [Googles rhododendrons] they are LUSH. Oaft. That’s a beautiful flower. Maybe… you know, the next time we’re near a botanic garden… just once I could, you know [Keeps Googling] So THAT’S what an ‘ock’ is.

Northern Ireland Part 1: A Titanic undertaking

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Our last trip to Northern Ireland, almost exactly a year ago, was undertaken with the express intention of visiting the Titanic Museum; a very simple aim that was thwarted by the people of northern Europe’s oldest and mightiest foe: the weather. A few days before we were scheduled to fly to Belfast, Storm Kathleen dislodged a portion of the museum’s roof (very important to preface the name ‘Kathleen’ with ‘Storm’ else you’ll be imagining some giant, maniacal woman scaling the building like King Kong, demanding to see the manager), and it was closed for repairs. This necessitated a swift reworking of our itinerary, and though the day trip wasn’t without its upsets and logistical challenges we managed to have a fun and fulfilling time. It’s hard to feel too aggrieved when you’re driving along beautiful, rugged coastlines under cold blue skies, and hopscotching over the Giant’s Causeway (where I witnessed my first-born, Jack, clambering onto a huddle of monstrously large boulders and proclaiming: ‘Hey, these look like huge testicles’).

We shook ourselves awake at 5am and got a lift from my bleary-eyed sister to the airport. No delays this year. Everything went like clockwork. A couple of hours later we had picked up our hire car at Belfast International and were on our way to Belfast. Having never driven in Belfast before, I was glad that SatNav existed.

SatNav has become so ubiquitous it’s almost as indivisible from us as a microchip in the brain. The memory of my mum and step-dad as they pored over a crumpled map unfolded so it almost blotted out the entire windscreen of the car, edging ever closer to divorce or murder as they tried to determine just where the fuck we were, may as well be in sepia tones with old-timey music playing over it, and if we ever had to return to those ancient days I dare say I’d just stop going anywhere. And I mean anywhere. I’d just sit in my house strapped to my armchair like Hannibal Lecter, pissing and shitting myself all day rather than face a trip to the bathroom without the help of a benignly monotonous – but still somehow sexy – computerised voice saying things like: “At the next cistern, sit down, and unbutton trousers. Stay on toilet for 10 minutes. Make a U-Bend.”

Certainly, navigating my way through Belfast city centre using a physical map would’ve been a torture comparable to taking a heavily-armed hamster dressed as a medieval knight up the bum, given that even with SatNav I managed to take a wrong turn three times. And on two of those times it was the same wrong turn.

“Slight left? IT’S EITHER A FUCKING LEFT OR IT ISN’T!” is a phrase I’m certain escaped my lips. That and: “I hope you like this stretch of motorway, boys, because apparently we’re going to be spending the next three days driving up and down the fucker.”

In my defence, my difficulties weren’t born entirely of incompetence. When I’m driving in an unfamiliar place and there are cars whooshing on all sides, weaving to and fro like maniacal dodgem cars, and I’m trying anticipate what each of those drivers are doing or are going to do, all the while reciting a mantra in my head – usually “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck” – I don’t have any brain processing power leftover for navigation, much less reasonableness or sanity. I’m reduced to a sweating human fist behind the steering wheel, one who sometimes unfurls into a middle finger [scribbles down movie idea – Imagine ‘The Island of Doctor Moreau’ meets ‘Transformers’ meets ‘The Fast and the Furious’. You’ve just imagined ‘The Fist and the Fuck-you-rious’, starring Vin Diesel as a giant human fist called Greg, but pronounced ‘Creg’ because apparently Americans don’t know how to speak].

Eventually – half an hour later and the depletion of half a tonne more adrenaline than anticipated – we reached Belfast’s Titanic Quarter (and after the motorway debacle I could’ve comfortably smoked a quarter in relief, chased down with ten litres of pirate grog). We were all starving, having eschewed breakfast due to the ungodly hour at which we’d had to clamber out of our beds. My inner calm, reclaimed from the road, didn’t last long. One look at the prices in the Titanic Museum’s café had my cortisol levels shooting back up and ringing the bell at the top of my Angst-O-Meter.  There are only tourist destinations in that quarter of the city, no regular shops, and so the cafes and restaurants have a monopoly on food and snacks. And don’t they ever. The next exclamation to escape my lips was: “Six pounds for a fucking egg sandwich!?” I thought about the thousands who’d lost their lives on the Titanic; the men, women and children who’d bubbled down into the icy tomb of the sea, gargling with choke-mouthed terror as they went, and it quickly occurred to me that at least they’d never been charged £22 for two sandwiches, a croissant, a bottle of water and a small latte. They don’t know they’re dead, they really don’t.

The entry fee for all three of us to enter the museum proper was about £60. Just to put that into perspective: that’s ten egg sandwiches. The opening section of the museum, accessible up a short escalator, was engaging but unremarkable. Lots of giant pictures and diagrams, lots of old clothes and kitchenware behind glass, the odd diorama, much like the layout of any other museum you’ve ever visited, where you wander around nodding intently at things – ‘Oooh, look, it’s a vase from four hundred years ago, isn’t that amazing’ –  as you try to pretend that you aren’t so bored you’re about to start pulling bits of your own brain down through your nose just for something interesting to do. There were, admittedly, some cool things to see and do, but we were trapped inside a shambling, ever-growing herd of fellow looksters, so the only thing we could really do without any problems was get pressed into a wall as we muttered obscenities. The farther we shimmied through the labyrinth, squeezed into and between remorseless throngs of people, the more I worried that the museum wasn’t going to get any more entertaining. Had I dragged the kids across an ocean just for them to have as shit a time as we could have been having in Fife for a fraction of the price? At least in Fife we would’ve been able to wolf down at least twenty-five egg sandwiches for the money.

This visit to the museum really was important, especially after our thwarted attempt the year before. Both my kids are fascinated by the Titanic, but my youngest, Christopher, is a proper fan-boy. Because of his passion for and knowledge of the subject his primary four teacher even introduced the Titanic as a class project. I didn’t want to be responsible for wrecking his vibe, sinking his love for the world’s most famous doomed ship to the murky depths of his subconscious.

Luckily, one elevator ride changed everything. Before we knew it we were in the queue for the closest thing this museum had to a rollercoaster. You climb into what looks like a mutant cross between a multi-level dodgem cart and an alpine cable-car, and you’re taken along, around, and down a massive physical structure that’s augmented with ‘sets’ and multi-media displays – of sound, of light, of heat – the whole ride meant to simulate and convey the experience of being on the Titanic’s construction crew. And it’s incredibly impressive. In fact, I give it a five egg-sandwich rating.

From that point on – post cable-car – the kids were engaged and enthused. They pored over the 3-D schematics of the docks like Harland & Wolff CEOs, comparing the model with the very real view outside the window, where the actual Titanic once sat chained before plunging off towards the ocean and onwards to its destiny. They marvelled at the light display that projected the rolling wreckage of the ship beneath their feet. They stood in reverence as the names of the fallen appeared on a giant wall, and recoiled in distaste as flashing statistics revealed the very real class-related disparities in survival outcome. There was a recreation of the first-class deck at the Titanic’s bow, complete with artificial seascape. There was a simulation of a lift that carried you from the bowels of the ship up through the different social strata to the towering funnels above deck, all while you stood still, immersive video screens to your right, left and centre providing the incredible yet slightly disorienting illusion. And, of course, there was a small replica of the bit of the ship that Rose and Jack did their ‘I’m the king of the world’ bit in the 1997 movie, which the boys were keen to utilise, given that they do that ‘I’m the king of the world’ scene most places we go. Wherever there are boats or water (and sometimes neither).

Just when we thought we’d got our sandwiches’ worth from the visit we realised that our ticket entitled us to board the SS Nomadic, berthed in the Hamilton Dry Dock a short-walk from the main museum. The Nomadic was used by the White Star Line to ferry passengers, provisions and mail from dock to ship. In 1912 it would’ve carried passengers from the dock at Cherbourg to the Titanic, which had been moored offshore due to its, well, titanic size (I see what they did there). Being able to walk in the footsteps of people who’d boarded the Titanic added a physical dimension and thus a human one to our understanding of the disaster. An empirical connection isn’t a pre-requisite for empathy, but it helps. To see and feel an experience through someone else’s eyes. And… other body parts. “Dad?” my youngest, Christopher, asked, “Do you think some of the passengers would’ve done a shit in the same toilet I’ve just done one?”

A very worthwhile morning. A sensory feast, a treasure trove of facts and details, a deeply humanising experience. But in a universe where the Titanic’s crew had dodged the iceberg and survived would we have journeyed all this way to visit the more sedate ‘Belfast Nautical Museum’ that I’ve just invented? I doubt it. It says a lot about the rubber-necking nature of us as a species that we sometimes need a wee sprinkling of death to generate or maintain our interest.

Are you enjoying the movie? Bit boring so far actually. Well, keep watching, because someone gets their head blown off in about ten minutes. Great!

Hey, you want to check out these ships? Yawn. Did I mention that thousands drowned? Hot DAMN, why didn’t you say so sooner?!

Our next port of call, far from any actual port this time, perfectly embodied that equation (learning + brutality = 😊). Crumlin Road Gaol is a Victorian-era prison that was operational between 1846 and 1996, during which time it housed everyone from low-level thieves (quite possibly including people who’d stolen expensive egg sandwiches from museum cafes) to combatants and terrorists on both sides of the Troubles.

The Troubles. Not quite a war, civil or otherwise, and they had to call it something, I guess, but ‘the Troubles’ sounds less like a long-standing political and sectarian conflict between two sets of ideas and nation states in which thousands in every strata of society lost their lives or were otherwise maimed or forever changed, and more like how your prudish aunty would describe her period. Whatever its name, it was a conflict that was – much like your aunty’s monthlies – brutal, bloody, and not something you’d want your children mixed up in.

The grisly history of the gaol, as presented on plaques and video screens, and through props and mannequins, was fascinating, but we enjoyed most of all the simple sensation of existing in a place that would normally be blocked to us. Blocked for reasons of historical obsolescence but, hopefully, also because none of the three of us is going to end up in actual jail. It’s my fond hope, though, that if either or both of my children do end up in prison that they enter as the crème de la crème of criminals, like that bit in Goodfellas where they’re all allowed to cook gourmet Italian meals in their cells because they’re the shit.

We learned that the prison itself was an active battleground for the Troubles. In 1991 an IRA bomb went off inside the canteen. A year later, loyalist paramilitaries fired an RPG-7 rocket at the prison. These were sensationalist details, that had the kids raising their eyebrows in both alarm and excitement, the latter probably to do with me having watched far too many action movies with them over the years. In one of the cells we watched a short animated film that summarised the history of the island of Ireland and the Troubles, from the 12th century right up to the Good Friday agreement and beyond. Even though I’ve a smattering of knowledge on the subject, I found it just as instructive as the kids did.

The tour – which was largely free-range until the end – came to a close in the room where they hanged the condemned prisoners, complete with noose dangling from the ceiling and a giant lever bolted to the floor. We left the gaol and wandered down the street to the Shankhill Road to see the murals of and from the Troubles – many of them astonishingly artistic – that were still displayed on the gable-ends of shops and houses. Just as it was hard to connect the real and brutal history of Crumlin Road Gaol with the benign building we visited – with its photo opportunities and on-site restaurant/steakhouse; hell, people even get married there these days – it was difficult to imagine this pleasant and painted street being patrolled by British soldiers. From there we walked to the Peace Wall, and tried to comprehend what it must’ve been like to live in a city so polarised and divided – literally and physically divided. The whole length of the wall, top to bottom, was covered in messages, slogans and graffiti, stretching as far as the eye could see. Some of it was poetic, some philosophical. Somewhere, I’m sure, though I never saw it, was the insinuation that Tracey takes it up the arse. It was sobering, though. The difference between then and now. I guess, given enough time, everything becomes a tourist attraction: castles where blood ran like water and heads used to be lined up on pikes (“Cheer up, mate, they’ll be selling keyrings of your decapitated face here in a few hundred years”); jails where people huddled and died in misery, and sometimes got their bollocks blow-torched off; Fife

To be continued.

Next time: caves, castles and crap weather.

(I’m still not over the price of that sandwich)

Scots on a Plane: The Family Honeymoon

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Airports are dreadful places that seem to exist only to give parents new reasons to shout at their children. Queues, shops, cafes, restaurants, crammed avenues and concourses: the modern airport is everywhere you’ve ever had to lose your shit at your children, all rolled into one. If the Mind-Flayer from Stranger Things was a building, it would definitely be an airport.

I’ve got to hand it to airport authorities: they’re ingenious, dastardly bastards. They know just how to work you, leading you through and along their labyrinths like coked-up rats in a maze. As soon as you’re through the security gates you’re funnelled into a giant shop (the first of many), where cries of ‘me want, me want, me want’ fill the air – and that’s just from my wife. She loves perfume. Not necessarily buying it. Just being around it. I had to spend a solid five minutes pivoting and dashing around snatching glass vials from the hands of my fleet-footed children while she sniffed seemingly every scent ever to have existed. Can there be any new smells left? Or any celebrities who haven’t endorsed a scent? We can’t be too far away from the arrival of ‘Diffidence’, by the late Bruce Forsyth.

I don’t know if I’ve overcome my fear of flying, or if my kids’ disobedience in the airport had left me no longer caring if I lived or died. Never-the-less, I was the best I’ve ever been on a flight without the aid of alcohol, pharmaceuticals or muttered promises to a God I don’t believe in.

I had to mask my true feelings about flying for the sake of the kids, to show them there was nothing to worry about, even though there clearly fucking is when you’re careening through the sky in a highly combustible tin dildo. If worst came to worst I’d like to think I would encourage us all to link hands and exchange looks of silent, sad acceptance, like the toys sliding down towards the furnace in Toy Story 3, but in reality I’d probably be screaming a bumper dictionary’s worth of swear words and hurling my own shit in the air like a chimp.

I’m not usually a fan of take-offs, but watching my eldest son lost in hysterical delight at the sensation in his stomach as we ascended (this was his first ever flight) distracted me from my unease. It was beautiful.

We flew with Ryanair, an airline whose passenger manifest seems to consist exclusively of hen-dos, stag-dos, old lads who still dress like sexual conquistadors in their mid-20s, and leathered-and-lacquered old ladies.

One of these such ladies – a boozy, crag-faced grandma – sat in the seats in-front of us. She fancied herself as something of a banter-merchant, a belief that only strengthened the more ferociously drunk she became. With each passing minute her cackles increased exponentially, in direct proportion to my rocketing despair. The more emboldened the drink made her, the steadier the barrage of banter that came my way. Had her banter been a flower, she would have picked it up, plucked its petals off and crushed its ovary to dust, before blowing the remnants in my face. I wasn’t exactly praying for an air disaster, but I would’ve been happy if a window had blown open just long enough to suck her out into oblivion.

My sister picked us up at Alicante, and we drove the half-an-hour or so to her villa. The first thing that struck me about my surroundings, gazing out the car window at the passing landscape, was that the concept of town-and-city planning didn’t seem to exist here. All there was for miles around was flat, scorched landscape, broken by the occasional incongruous crop of scraggy, withered green. Farms, houses, strip malls and holiday complexes were peppered around the panorama in a hopscotch way, with no discernible attempt to blend or group. I guess that’s what happens when corruption is the rule rather than the exception in the planning departments of local government.

“Senor, can I build a strip-club next to your funeral home?”

“Senor, you could put your strip-club IN the funeral home if the envelope’s big enough.”

As we got closer to my sister’s villa I saw more and more developments for ex-pats and tourists; little cubes that looked like they were designed by the Flintstones, but built by the Jetsons.

My sister had a lot of beds in her house, but small ones, and spread across two floors and three rooms. My wife and I had to sleep apart every night, keeping a kid each with us, Christopher, our youngest, taking the bed on the bottom floor, and Jack taking the bed on the first floor. We switched rooms and kids throughout the holiday, depending upon varying factors such as who Jack wanted to read him a story that night, and which of us could be arsed dealing with the more screamy one.

On the night I’m about to detail – which will henceforth be known as the night of blood-curdling terror – I was lying next to a sleeping Jack when a large, red moth descended from the shadows outside the lamp-light, and almost hit me straight in the face. It struck my shoulder and thudded down onto my rucksack that was lying on the floor at the bedside. I laughed, and watched its next moves with a smile. The moth sat there for a moment or two. Then it flapped and jumped towards the bed, before finally slithering behind it. It… what?

Wait a minute, I thought.

Moths…

…Moths don’t slither.

I wasn’t smiling any more.

A cold dread seized my skull, squeezing me alert. I dropped the book and hopped to my feet, staring from the empty space where the moth-thing had landed to the tiny gap it had squeezed through. If I’d been in a horror movie, I would’ve been the person shining a torch down a dark basement corridor saying, ‘Helloooo?’ in a croaky voice.

I carried Jack downstairs to the bed where his mother and brother lay sprawled, legs akimbo, limbs askew, and slotted him in next to them like a human Tetris piece. There was plenty of room for me – provided, that is, I contorted myself like a 12-year-old Russian gymnast. I didn’t care about comfort: better crumpled and cockroach-free than lying in a spacious bed with the haunted and twitchy demeanour of a combat soldier. My wife opened one eye; an eye that said the same as her mouth:

‘You’re not coming in here.’

‘There’s a cockroach up there,’ I said.

‘I heard,’ said the eye as it closed. ‘Pathetic.’

Pathetic? I was Indiana Jones, and that little guy was my pit of snakes; I was Superman, and he was my Kryptonite. That cockroach was the one chink in the armour of an otherwise impeccably brave man… except for when it comes to, em, wasps, heights, death, rejection, my mother, em… apart from that, though, the one chink in my armour.

Anyway, it was time to be brave. I needed my glasses, my book and my drink, which were all still encased within the roach room. I crept upstairs and stood in the door-frame, willing myself to walk inside. It took me about five minutes to work up the courage, and even then I ran in and out of that room with the speed of a little boy who’s just walked in on his parents shagging. In the morning the cockroach was gone, and so was my self-respect.

On our first full day we stopped off at Merca China for beach and pool supplies. Merca China is a chain of giant warehouses filled with baubles, bangles, beads and bad customer service; the very worst you’re ever likely to experience. The staff make you feel about as welcome as a rogue turd in a swimming pool that’s already bobbed half-way down an old woman’s throat.

The lady who served me didn’t look up at me once; just stood there staring angrily at the counter-top that rested between us, chewing gum like a speed-freak. She snatched the money from my hands and chucked the change at me with the rage-filled intensity of an aggrieved wife hurling her cheating husband’s clothes from a top-floor bedroom window. What crime had I committed beyond interrupting her afternoon mastication? I was aware of the unhelpful stereotype of Asian shop-keepers shouting ‘Hurry up and Buy’ at you, but this was the first time I’d experienced ‘Hurry up and die.’ The Merca China chain is closest in spirit and target market to our own B&M, except here both the B and the M stand for ‘Fuck You’.

We also experienced an authentic Spanish market, which was like a shanty town, but with second-hand sofas and cheap churros. I know markets like this usually attract an older demographic, but I’ve never visited one where you could sign up to start paying direct debits towards the cost of your funeral. No joke.

‘When you’re down the market, could you please bring back a dressing gown, a garden gnome, twenty packets of cigarette papers, some old models of vintage cars, a pound of oranges, and the peace of mind that can only come from a secure and flexible after-life plan?’

Whenever we went to a little cafe or tourist restaurant I always popped in to the ex-pat’s shops nearby. The range of second-hand paperbacks that were on sale helped to paint a picture of the ex-pat’s sociological make-up: Catherine Cooksons and Andy McNabs, sweeping romances and tales of war, spies, and intrigue. Clearly these were older people – retirees and escapees from Blighty – with an old-fashioned, romantic and defiantly binary view of the world; the sort of folks who would’ve voted Brexit, and probably still did, despite living in fucking Europe.

As the holiday was in part a honeymoon – by virtue of its proximity to our wedding – my sister recommended an eatery that would be just the ticket: a ‘traditional’ Spanish restaurant tucked away in an obscure suburban square, thoroughly off the beaten track, complete with mandatory tapas courses, and deliciously inexpensive carafes of wine (inexpensive is my favourite flavour). She said she’d drop us off, take the kids back to the house, feed and entertain them, then come back for us in a few hours’ time. At this point my gratitude started tussling with my paranoia, imagining Highway Robbers with little tick-lists of foreign blonde children.

We very rarely take time apart from our kids. We’re a family, for better or worse, and we do everything together, particularly mass mental breakdowns, at which we excel. This, however, was our honeymoon, so we felt entitled to a few hours’ respite from being maw and paw. Each of us separately has spent time apart from the kids, but it’s a strange feeling to be together, just the two of us, without them: a heady mix of guilt and joy, a cocktail we found was best washed down with copious amounts of wine. Or cocktails. I loved every minute of our freedom, but occasionally got a passing feeling like I’d just burned down an orphanage.

It helped that the restaurant our sister had recommended for us was like something out of a European art-house movie from a different era. The little trattoria has been owned by the same family for eons, and it shows in the personalised clutter and paraphernalia hanging from the walls and around the bar. People have been coming here for years, from all around the world, again and again, and they stay in touch. Up on the wall behind the bar were postcards from as far flung places as Britain, Australia, Scandinavia, and Texas.

I came armed with enough basic Spanish to ask for the menu, the bill, and to ask where the toilet was. I used my phone to Google any other phrases I needed. I always think it shows respect and value to use the native lingo, instead of just wandering in and shouting everything slowly in English like you’re talking to a dog (“I SAID DO. YOU. HAVE. THE. CHIPS. WITH. CHEESE, PEDRO? God, why don’t these people speak the Queen’s English?). Plus, it’s always good to learn new things. The bistro had its own resident cat. Good old Google told me how to ask the waitress its name. I was expecting it to be Ramone or something.

But it was called Fluffy.

That’s the memory of the holiday that will always stick with me: tipsy in that little trattoria, stuck in time, the minutes feeling like long, happy hours, the sun beating down outside; and in the town square just beyond the door, the spiral art installation, held in place by braces attached to trees, that we walked up – giggly and giddily – to survey the unbroken, dusty landscape beyond the town.

We stood there together in silence for a few moments, side-by-side, looking out at a different dusty landscape: that of our future.

All holidays and honeymoons have to end. As do all things, good and bad.

I’ll drink a cheap carafe of wine to that.

Adios, amigos.

Read a separate article from the same holiday about our trip to the mountains, featuring excitement, despair and a stolen car HERE

It was the best of times, it was… Coatbridge?

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It was our first time.

‘Maybe Coatbridge isn’t as bad as people say?’ I chirped to my partner, as I drove our family through the urban murk of the town. Her eyes remained fixed on the view outside the passenger-side window. I’d seen that same blend of guilt, horror and wonder on her face when we’d driven past serious road accidents.

‘I mean, we’re from Grangemouth,’ I said, continuing to plead Coatbridge’s case. ‘And even it’s got nice parts, right?’

Even Frankenstein’s monster’s got nice parts, I suppose. I’ve learned that it’s best not to be too harsh on other people’s towns when your own town could be twinned with post-apocalyptic Springfield; or is practically ‘The Wire’ with an all-white cast. As the old saying goes: people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. As my variation on that phrase goes: people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones and then use one of the fallen shards of glass to open a vein and spray ‘I’m something of a hypocrite’ in blood all over the floor.

I tried to give Coatbridge a fair crack of the whip, I really did, but pesky reality kept knocking the rose-tinted specs off my face, and after a while I stopped trying to put them back on, so I just slipped on a pair of black-as-death-tinted specs instead.

The deeper and deeper we drove into the town, the progressively less beatific the surroundings, until eventually we became convinced that we were trapped inside a Ken Loach film set in the late 1970s. As surely as the grass makes up the African plains, the landscape of central Coatbridge is a patterned hotch-potch of impregnable steel shutters; towering, dust-drecked high rises and walls swirled with hastily scrawled tribal markings. Every street we turned down was littered with little people with limps listlessly smoking their way back whence they came, or onwards, whence they were going.

Sorry if my whencing was a bit off there. Was my whencing on point? One so rarely gets the chance to whence these days, and when one does one can never be sure if one’s whencing has behoofed anyone except oneself, or made one appear – and I make no apologies for the strong language I’m about to use here – a crinkum-crankum. Or, heaven forfend, a fandangle! Hey, if you’re going to whence anywhere – or indeed do anything that seems like it might be better suited to the nineteenth century or earlier – then it might as well be in Coatbridge, a town that’s famous both for having a Time Capsule (its Ice Age-themed swimming and leisure centre), and actually being one.

Coatbridge isn’t a Blue Peter-style time capsule, filled with fluffy, fun and life-affirming things that children of the future will be fascinated to re-discover: Coatbridge is a time capsule containing only shit things. Upsetting things. Deeply traumatising things. Things that have been left there as a warning to future generations never to let this shit happen again.

The invisible, town-sized time capsule covering Coatbridge has a cracked outer case, one that exposes the town’s surface to the rust of modernity, but keeps its sedentary core protected and intact. This produces a strange effect. At any given point in the town’s geography it’s somehow simultaneously 1876, 1915 and 1982, like you’re inside a malfunctioning, open-top TARDIS. It’s the kind of town where you might stumble across a junkie wearing a shell-suit and a miner’s helmet angrily challenging you to a duel on horseback.

At the risk of labouring the point, Coatbridge puts the Ark into archaic; the punk into steampunk; and the ‘fuck’ into ‘fuck, I think we might’ve found a place that’s worse than Alloa’.

‘I think we might’ve found a place that’s worse than Alloa,’ I said to my partner, my eyes wide with fear and fascination. ‘If ever there was a place too broke to make a bridge out of anything other than coats, this is that place.’

My partner felt my forehead. ‘Worse than Alloa?’ she said, with a worried look on her face.

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘Nowhere’s worse than Alloa.’

It was a weekday morning, so the swimming pool at the Time Capsule was closed until the mid-afternoon. We didn’t realise this until after we’d pulled into the car-park with our two restless children. ‘What are we going to do in Coatbridge for four hours?’ my partner asked, but imagine she’d asked it all in block capitals. I thought about it. Our options pretty much boiled down to one: sit there in the car park and stay really, really still, like they did when the T-Rex attacked in Jurassic Park.

I spied a Chinese takeaway at the top end of the street, on the side wall of which somebody had spray-painted ‘PIRA’ (the ‘P’ standing for ‘Provisional’, the IRA standing for, well, IRA). Say what you like about Coatbridge: you can’t say it isn’t multicultural.

After a few moments of panicking, we asked our pal Google for help. She suggested Summerlee, the Museum of Scottish Industrial Life (Google is definitely a woman, given that she’s always watching you, and she knows everything), which was only a short drive along the road from us. So off we went, travelling back through time on purpose for a change.

Now, on paper I’m a huge fan of museums. They hold obvious historical and educational value. They help to record, preserve, maintain and advance culture through a shared process of remembering, sifting, shifting, expanding and evolving. Museums hold a mirror up to us; one that doesn’t always reflect a pretty picture. Sometimes the story a museum tells is one of tyranny, theft, enslavement, genocide and cultural appropriation. After all, he who controls the past controls the cultural narrative, and thus holds the key to the future. That also explains why groups like ISIS are so hell-bent on the systematic destruction of museums and historical sites – not everyone who wants to challenge or re-write the narrative does so from a place of virtue.

But even if we don’t always like what we see, museums force us to look, and look hard out at the world, into our shared pasts, and deep into our selves. As the old maxim goes: he who does not understand history is doomed to repeat it. I get all that. I do. Museums are important. They’re worthy. They’re vital.

But Christ they’re fucking boring.

I try. I do, I really try. I want to love them. I walk around museums with an intense expression on my face, nodding solemnly at the plaques as I try to give even the smallest of fucks about a special kind of steel hinge that was first manufactured in Paisley in 1928. Or get excited that some dead rich guy managed to score himself a collection of old pots from Peru.

Actually, though, Summerlee is different. While I’m generally never one for the minutiae (of life, not just of museums), there’s some really great stuff there, not just inside the main exhibition hall but all across the 22-acre site, from recreations of old shop facades and miners’ cottages to hulking great chunks of antiquated mining equipment to a working tram to boats to steam engines to interactive displays for the kids – including a recreation of a gigantic iron works’ furnace complete with audio and visual effects. The folks in charge aren’t daft, though. They know that if daddy’s prone to boredom, you can triple that for the kids, so there are toy trains and Duplo blocks everywhere. Actually, I think the kids liked the trains and Duplo blocks the best, the little philistines.

Maybe I’m not anti-minutiae. I think I’m possibly just more interested in people than I am in things (though I concede that’s a pretty daft statement, given that the story of one is usually incomplete without the other). I spent a lot of time that day staring at ashen-faced, cap-wearing men in old black-and-white photos from the days when Coatbridge was still an active mining town.

Camera technology was in its infancy then and photography had scant few practitioners. Developing a photograph was a time-intensive and expensive process, so nobody was fucking around in front of the camera doing duck pouts or taking selfies. They stood like statues, staring straight ahead, like they were locking eyes with their firing squad, or caught in the paralysing gaze of a demon who was about to extract their souls and sell them to the highest bidder.

This photo was taken in Cumnock, not Coatbridge, but you get the idea.

We look at old photographs as if we’re looking at cardboard cut-outs or lab specimens: men from a forgotten world; men from an alien world. I like to imagine the moments after the light from the flash-bulb has faded from their vision; imagine them shuffling awkwardly, telling bawdy jokes, spitting, shouting, joshing each other. I imagine how fun and unencumbered their lives must have been, but also how brutish and brutal. I bring these men to life, make them real, but then it makes me said, because I have to let them die again. Old photos are tombs we’ll all climb inside eventually.

Looking at these pictures makes me feel angry too. Places like Coatbridge used to keep this country running by keeping the fires burning. Generations of men – not just in Coatbridge, but all across the country – toiled under the ground day after day in hazardous and hellish conditions so that the rest of society could enjoy heat and light and power, and all of the myriad things we as a species would come to take for granted. These men gave their health, their families, and in many cases their lives. Their families, their town, should’ve seen the fruits of their labours. To see the rundown state of many parts of Coatbridge today is an almost unforgivable insult; it’s like the government and the power companies sucked the town dry and then callously cast its carcass into the dirt. No wonder there are so many wee people limping and smoking their way through wrecked and ruined streets, or in the shadow of grim Soviet-style high rises.

The older you get, the less comforting nostalgia becomes; the more everything reminds you of death. Sometimes when I hear songs I’d remember my sister listening to in the other room when I was a kid, I start to cry. Because it’s gone, it’s all gone, and none of us ever thought it would go, that we’d lose it, even though older people did nothing but constantly warn us about it. As a species we can go to Machu Picchu, the South Pole, or the Moon, but the one place we can never go – and the only place we all sometimes yearn to go – is back. You can never go back.

Thanks, Coatbridge. You’ve made me clinically depressed.

At the top end of the Summerlee site are four refurbished miners’ cottages, each made to resemble a different era: the 80s, the 60s, the 40s and the late 1900s. The 1940s cottage even has an air-raid shelter in the back garden. Nice touch.

This area of Summerlee was my favourite – but also the most bittersweet – part of the experience. When I stepped into the living room and kitchen of the 1980s house it was like stepping back through time into my own childhood, into the homes of my parents and grandparents. The attention to detail was exquisite. I had to ask my partner and kids to be quiet so I could soak up the feelings. I felt like I was standing not inside a room, but at a graveside.

The silence was only broken when Denise Ferry burst into the living room singing ‘My Boy Lollipop’.

The 1980s cottage – Summerlee

After passing a wonderful few hours at Summerlee we went to the Time Capsule. It was as fun as I remember it being when I was a kid. Seeing the little ones laughing and smiling and having a great time always helps me make peace with my mortality. I remind myself that the world isn’t built with me in mind anymore, or at the very least the days of my relevance swiftly are coming to an end. I shouldn’t be sad for myself, but happy for them, happy for the happy things they’ve yet to experience that they’ll hopefully grow old enough to be able to look back on with great, great sadness. Now that‘s a Scottish sentence for you.

Driving out of Coatbridge we fringed Drumpellier Park, threaded in and out of well-kempt estates and peaceful side-streets. But our trip’s true ending – the real fade-to-black, cut-to-credits scene – was our post-swimming meal at Burger 7.

We ate here in 2017. Burger 7 didn’t ask me to write this. I just really loved the place.

Burger 7, despite being nestled in less than auspicious surroundings, is quite possibly the best café/restaurant I’ve ever eaten at. That’s not hyperbole. I mean it. Maybe I felt that way because the day’s heady mix of fun, philosophy and soul-searching had finally made me appreciate life’s minutiae. Maybe it was just because they did an awesome vegetarian hotdog. Whatever the reason, we all loved it. It was homely. Welcoming. We were made to feel like we were the only customers in the world at the last restaurant in the universe.

Inside, Burger 7 looks like the diner that Tony Soprano visits with his family in the final scene of The Sopranos, but it feels like Artie Buco’s restaurant, Vesuvio, that Tony visits with his family during the big storm in the closing minutes of The Sopranos’ first-season. Whenever I think of Burger 7 now, I always think about the speech that Tony gives his family, as they huddle contentedly in the cande-light at the very end of that episode:

“I’d like to propose a toast. To my family. Some day soon, you’re going to have families of your own, and if you’re lucky, you’ll remember the little moments, like this… that were good.”

Thanks, Coatbridge.

You’re alright.

Kids, and the poor timing of their poo-poos

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Our eldest son Jack, who’s three-and-a-bit, gets a small cup of fruit juice first thing in the morning with his breakfast, and pretty much drinks water the rest of the time, give or take the odd swig of diluting juice as a treat. In Scotland, where teeth and hearts have a significantly lower life-span than their host bodies, it makes sense to encourage as many healthy habits as possible, as early as possible. While our pro-H20 stance is certainly commendable it has had the unfortunate side-effect of making juice something of a taboo, and we all know how children swarm to taboos like wasps to open cans of Cola. If we’re ever lax enough to leave our own flagons of diluting juice within his reach – and we are that lax, painfully often – he’ll stand there with his fingers twitching at his side like a gunslinger’s, before grabbing for that juice as if his life depended upon it. He might manage to glug a small cup’s worth, he might manage to glug a litre. One thing’s for sure: we’re rarely quick enough to stop him.

One morning between Christmas and New Year I took him and his little brother Christopher (who’s not long turned 1) to the historic village of Culross – a favourite family haunt of ours. In the rush to get all of us ready to go I neglected to notice a big bottle of pre-mixed Ribena sitting unattended on a table-top. Jack managed to down an indeterminate volume of juice before I clocked on and managed to snatch the bottle away from him.

Even though I bade him piss before we left the house we still had to pull over on a dual carriageway minutes into the journey so he could relieve himself. We stopped again just over the bridge in the village of Kincardine, where he had to piss against one of our car’s front wheels. I caught a bit of friendly fire splash-back on my hand, so took baby-wipes out of little Chrissy’s travel-bag, spilling some of the bag’s contents on to the floor of the car in the process. We eventually reached Culross, and I hoped that Jack’s tank was now empty. It had to be, I told myself, else his bladder’s a bloody TARDIS. The three of us larked in the play-park as the winter wind threw handfuls of invisible ice at us. I ran between two swings at opposite ends of the small park – little safety-swing for Chris, big half-moon wrecking-ball swing for Jack – pushing the kids for a few seconds each time, to warm myself up as much as to amuse the boys. I soon realised that it was too cold to linger long at the unsheltered shore, so we started walking, Jack jumping along by my side, little Christopher warmly ensconced in his wind-proof buggy as I pushed and puffed him along the street.

We normally head up the hill – up the narrow, cobbled streets with their tiny hobbit doors, to the old, cold church that overlooks the town – but today I decided, in no uncertain terms, ‘fuck that’. Let’s go sideways. Let’s buck the trend and spend the entirety of our trip today going ‘along’ instead of ‘up’. Fuck ‘up’. My bones creaked with gratitude; my heart even gave a little double-thump salute. Unbeknownst to us all, horror lay along that long, flat road. I’d been so focused on dealing with the pee-pee situation that I hadn’t even considered the possibility of emergent poo-poo. I was going to pay for my poo-bris. We were about to move to Defcon BUM.

I was glad we’d gone ‘along’, as before long we discovered a community garden we hadn’t known existed. There was a large, decorated Christmas Tree just inside the entrance gate, something that wouldn’t have lasted intact for a single evening had it been erected in my urban shithole of a town; there was a pagoda, various little potting sheds, and as the garden sloped up it sent steps up past clumps of wild flowers, herbs and mini-thickets of trees, and back down again, with benches dotted at strategic points around the loop. It’s beautiful: obviously well-used and well-maintained; a real labour of love by the locals.

And we shat in it.

I’d taken Christopher out of his buggy, and left it at the main gate (again, that buggy would’ve been on bricks and on E-Bay along with the Christmas tree if this had been Grangemouth!). Jack wanted to walk up and around, and back down the garden, again and again, again and again, and we accompanied him, Jack light and spry on his feet, me beginning to feel the strain of the inert boulder of my second-born against my biceps. We’d done about four or five loops, and I just wanted it to end, and for the journey into the unknown ‘along’ to continue. But be careful what you wish for, right?

‘Daddy, I need a poo-poo! I need a poo-poo!’ cried Jack, beginning to waddle like a cowboy penguin, a hand reaching down to cup his bum.

I scanned the area. There was nowhere for him to defecate that wouldn’t be plainly visible to the whole of creation. The public toilets were a ten-minute walk away. I had to help him, but I had Christopher in my arms, and we were far away from the buggy, too far away for me to have run back to it, strapped Christopher in and wheeled him back to Jack before the klaxxon sounded for Code Brown. Shit, shit, shit, I thought – rather appositely, I suppose.

‘Daddy!’ Jack wailed.

‘OK,’ I said, beginning to pull myself together, ‘OK, down over there, behind that shed, there are a couple of trees, can you make it?’

He added a little quick-step dance to his waddle.

‘JACK, CAN YOU MAKE IT?’

This was turning into an episode of 24. DAMN IT!

‘Yes, Daddy.’

‘You can do this, son, come on, hold it in, you’re almost there.’

I bent down to help him pull down his trousers, as Christopher dangled limply over the precipice of my shoulder. There was nothing for Jack to steady himself against, so he was forced to squat. In the haste and panic I’d spared no thought for the position of his pecker relative to his trousers; in any case, he’d surely pissed every centilitre of liquid from his body over the past forty-five minutes, so additional pee-pee was severely unlikely, right? Wrong. His bum may have been poised over a wet mound of leaves, but his wee willy was aimed straight at the back of his jogging bottoms, and there was definitely still juice in the tank.

‘SON OF A BITCH!’ I snarled in frustration, as the piss skooshed out.

‘Son of a bitch!’ came the parroted reply from the little shitting – and pissing – figure below me.

‘NOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooo!’ I yelled, my trademark grace-under-fire, calm-under-pressure portion of personality really kicking in. I opened Christopher’s travel-bag to take out some nappy sacks and baby wipes, but… oh no. They were all on the floor of the car. And there, at my feet, was my piss-covered, dirty bum-med child, squatting over a big, brown, highly visible poop. There were two paper hankies in my pocket, which I had to use to wipe the worst of the poo from Jack’s bum. With nowhere to put them, they fluttered to the ground like feathers. Horrible, shit-stained feathers. I tried to kick some leaves over them.

‘What have we done?’ I asked my boys, and perhaps even the Gods themselves. There was no answer.

We headed back to the car, taking the coastal path. I watched the dark circle on the back of Jack’s slacks as he happily bobbed along just in-front of us, a stark reminder of my woeful lack of parental preparedness. I put Jack in his car seat sans trousers and tucked a blanket over him.

In the long hours that followed I couldn’t stop thinking about how I’d caused my son to have to make a ten-minute journey covered in his own piss. The fact that he didn’t seem to give a shit (if you’ll excuse the word choice) did nothing to salve my guilt. Neither could I stop thinking about how we’d desecrated and defiled a beautiful garden. Inside my thoughts and conscience I’d cast myself as some horrible X-rated panto villain. ‘OH, YOU’VE DONE SUCH A LOVELY JOB, BUT DO YOU KNOW WHAT WOULD BE A NICE ADDITION TO YOUR PRECIOUS SANCTUARY, CHILDREN AND OLD PEOPLE OF CULROSS? A BIG HUMAN SHIT! HA HA HA HA HA! AND SOME SHITTY HANKIES MUHAHAHAHAHA!!’

The next day I was haunted. Should I drive back to the scene of the crime to dispose of the evidence? What if some sweet old lady slips in it, or bashes it with her hoe and gets some hunks of it in her mouth? What if a kid finds one of the brown-tinged hankies and tries to blow their nose with it? I couldn’t bear it. It was like The Tell-Tale Heart, but with a jobby. Edgar Allan Poo! I wanted to confess. I needed to confess. Email the community association and say: ‘I admit the deed! Look behind the shed! Here, here! It is the steaming of my son’s hideous shit!’

But I didn’t.

People of Culross, if you’re reading this, rest assured that karma got me in the end. Literally. I’ve just recovered from a sickness and diarrhoea bug.

Head hung in shame, it’ll be a long time before I return to your Garden of Peed-in (I know my son shat in it, but there’s no such thing as the Garden of Shat-in, so I hope you’ll allow me some creative license).