Surprisingly Down to Earth, and Very Funny

But if you want to know what my earliest memory is, it’s of me in nursery school, about four, getting to lick the cake mixture off a spoon. All happy.

The Bollywig

When I think back to primary school, I have this memory of me always feeling different. I’ve always felt a bit different. I’ve always had this feeling that everybody else knows what they’re doing. Back in primary, I had this feeling like I’d missed a day. Not just a normal day where they taught you how to read or write, but where they taught you something else, something more important. Something you should know before any of that.

It’s something that I can’t put into words. It’s just fucking … something. I didn’t really think I’d missed a day, it was just a feeling. But there were times where there really were things that I didn’t know and everybody else knew, as if I really had missed a day, when I hadn’t. Like, there was a song we used to sing, and everybody seemed to know the words except me.

There was this classroom with a piano in it, and every week or so we were to go along to it, where there would be this teacher that would teach us music. We’d learn a few instruments, and we’d sing a few songs from some songbooks she put out. I didn’t like singing; I felt too self-conscious. But I especially didn’t like singing the song we always did at the end.

At the end of every class, the teacher would bring out something she called ‘The Bollywig’. It was a tennis ball, with cotton wool for hair, and a face on it. I didn’t realise at the time, but I think it was a play on the word ‘gollywog’. (This was the late 70s.) But other than the name, there was nothing potentially racist about it. She brought out this Bollywig like it was a puppet, and she had a song to go along with it. She sang the song, and everybody was to join in. But I didn’t know the words. I don’t remember any day where she said, right, here are the words. Yet everybody else seemed to know them. I could make out the words for the first bit, but not the rest. So I’d be singing it like this:

The Bollywig is round and small

It hasn’t any hair at all

It lives on hmmm hmmm hmmm hmmm hmmm

And sometimes hmmm hmmm hmmm hmmm hmmmmmmm.

At the bit where I’d hum, other people would be singing words. I’d be looking about, and there would be everybody singing. I’d try to work out what they were singing, but I couldn’t. One of the bits sounded like ‘salted plooms’. Salted plooms? What does that mean? I didn’t want to ask, in case I got laughed at or got into trouble for not listening.

It was fucking worrying, because it wasn’t just the words to some song, it wasn’t just that. The song was the backstory of this Bollywig. The song told you who it was and why we should love it, and the teacher would bring it out at the end like it was the big fucking finale, and everybody was excited to see it. And there was me, not getting it, wondering what the fuck salted plooms were.

It was just one of many instances where I felt like everybody knew something I didn’t.

And I never did find out the words. I tried googling it, but there’s fuck all. I think the teacher just made it up herself, the words and the tune. It was a catchy wee tune, the sort of thing you’d expect to be a famous nursery rhyme tune, where the words are different depending on where you live. But I didn’t hear that tune played again.

But then, about ten years later, when I was 17 or 18, I was in college. And one of the folk in my course starts whistling a tune to himself.

I fucking span towards him.

It was the tune to the fucking Bollywig.

This was a guy I barely knew, I didn’t know him from school or anything like that. I just span towards him and went like that, ‘Here! What’s that you’re whistling?’

He said, ‘What? Oh, it’s just a daft wee song.’

I said, ‘Aye, but what?’

He said, ‘Just a wee song from school.’

A song from school!

I said, ‘Here, it’s not the fucking Bollywig, is it?’ expecting him to say, ‘The bolly what?’

But he said aye, it was! He was all surprised that I knew, and I was surprised that he knew.

I asked him if he went to Carnwadric Primary, but he didn’t. He went to some school I’d never heard of, from miles away. The pair of us were laughing. What the fuck was going on here?

I asked him to sing a bit, to double-check that we were talking about the same thing. He started singing, ‘The Bollywig is round and small …’

I was like, ‘No fucking way!’

I asked him who taught him the song, and he said it was some music teacher. I asked him what her name was and what she looked like, and it was the same one as mine. The same fucking one. Turns out she went from school to school around Scotland.

We talked about the Bollywig and had a laugh about it. I felt like giving the cunt a cuddle.

Then I said to him, ‘Here. What the fuck were the words?’ I told him that I always felt pure out of place because I must have been the only person in my school that didn’t know the words.

It turns out he didn’t know either.

I Blame Carnwadric

I sometimes wonder if I’m a psychopath. Or if I’m warped in some way.

Something bad happens, and I don’t really care, or I might even find it entertaining. I don’t mean that I sit watching tragedies on the news, laughing my head off, having a wank. It’s just that every now and then, somebody will talk about how something is bad or dangerous or tragic, and I’ll be wondering why I don’t feel the same way.

I blame Carnwadric.

Like, I don’t know if this is anything to do with it, but see when I was wee, boys would make crossbows. They’d get a couple of pieces of wood, a hammer, nails and elastic bands, and they’d make themselves a crossbow. They’d put a wooden clothes peg on it, pull it as far back as it would go, and try to hit each other, right in the fucking face. A piece of solid wood, flying at your head at more than 100 mph. None of that eye-friendly foam-bullet Nerf gun shite. Or they’d make ninja stars by sharpening bits of metal, and they’d chuck them at cunts. Or they’d get pre-made weapons, like an air pistol or a Black Widow catapult, and fire them off at people or windows or something else, to see what happened.

And I’d be watching it all, as a wee boy. I wouldn’t be horrified, because nobody said I should be horrified. I’d be watching, hoping that something bad happened.

Boys would put stones on train tracks, to see what happened. To see if the train would come flying off, with everybody in it. When it was sunny, they’d find a piece of broken mirror, head to a busy road, and shine the sun into drivers’ eyes. I did it myself once or twice. You’re kind of hoping that you’ll blind the driver, causing him to crash and die. Well, you’re maybe not completely trying to kill somebody, but what else are you doing it for? You don’t really think about it. I was only about eight at the time.

Boys would do all sorts of things to hurt people, for a laugh.

In primary school there was a game called Pile On. A boy would get grabbed, and everybody piled on them, like it was rugby or something. You’d be trying to crush them, to see if they’d suffocate, to hear him not being able to breathe – and then you’d stop. Another time, it would be you getting piled on. It was a laugh.

There would be things that weren’t a laugh. There was something called the Pole Crusher, that older boys did to younger boys. A boy would be grabbed and lifted up, held horizontally, with his legs spread apart, and rammed into this pole in the playground, so that it crushed his cock and balls. They tried to do it with me once, but I started screaming and crying and they let me go. They got somebody else instead, and I stood and watched, happy it wasn’t me.

And then there were things that they’d do to themselves.

They’d do things like make these big rope swings that hung from bridges, and everybody wanted a shot because it went so high that, if you fell off, you were a goner.

Or they’d go to the top of the Kennishead Flats, these high-rise tower blocks, 20-odd storeys up, and they’d sit on the lights that jutted out from the building, because there was a chance you could fall to your death.

Or they’d go up to the tyre factory and steal a tractor tyre, then they’d take it to the top of a hill, one that rolled down into a busy road, then two of them would climb inside and get their mates to push them so they started rolling down towards the road. Just to see what happened.

There was just all this stuff where you were either trying to kill somebody or risk getting killed yourself. And some boys did get killed. You’d hear about somebody falling from the top of the flats, or falling down the lift shaft. It would be shocking news that everybody would talk about for a few days, then they’d go back to carrying on as usual. It was like Russian roulette or something.

It was mental, really. But it didn’t feel mental at the time. That’s what I’m trying to say. Nobody came along and said, ‘Now, now, that’s enough of all that.’

Well, there was this Sunday School thing. Some Christian thing, over at the school, that I went to a few times. We played games for a while, then they got out a projector and lectured us about Jesus, to try and make us all good. One day, some boys outside opened the windows to the hall, and threw in a firework. A mini rocket. There was a panic as the rocket lay there with the fuse thing sparkling away. Nobody knew what to do. Then it screeched all over the place, in every direction. Everybody fucking shat it. You didn’t know where to go.

It was magic.

I don’t know if that’s warped me in some way, all of that. It’s not that I still go out with a broken piece of a mirror in the summertime, I’ve grown out of that kind of stuff. But there is still a part of me that’s into it. I’m a 44-year-old man with a family, but there’s still a part of me that wants to reflect the sun into a driver’s eyes, causing him to close them, which causes him to swerve into oncoming traffic and kill about six people, including himself. There’s a part of me that finds that funny.