For Moral Absolutists Only? Maybe

  I started primary school on Tuesday 6 February 1968. From then my memory becomes rather more formed, since my days are now structured, and I can remember things and people more readily. Specifically I remember my nice, middle-aged headmistress who took me in hand and started giving me piano lessons, using the Ministeps to Music series of book tutorials. She lived well into her nineties and to the end always remembered me with fondness.   Dissociated images of popular culture; Thunderbirds on television, Tintin’s Destination Moon . Apollo 8 just after Christmas. I remember the deaths of Martin Luther King (but not that of Robert F Kennedy) and Yuri Gagarin being reported on ITN as they happened but the celebrity death which probably saddened me the most was the Scots motor racing driver Jim Clark, killed in an accident on the track in what was then known as West Germany that spring, aged just thirty-two. One of the other kids in my class was called Jim Clark – and I don’t know

  Like David Stubbs , I read English Language and Literature at Oxford in the eighties. I went to a different college from David’s but he had to put up with B*r*s J*hns*n two years below him, whereas I made every effort to avoid having to put up with M*ch**l G*ve in mine. I suspect David was as frustrated as me by the Eng Lit syllabus stolidly refusing to progress beyond Tennyson. Strange how we were all “up” there at more or less the same time, albeit with some temporal overlaps; Mark Sinker, Nigella Lawson, Simon Reynolds, Paul Oldfield, Roger Lewis and me. Even Lucy Ellmann was around to some extent, at her father’s big house down Jericho way.   I did knuckle down and do my degree, and since I had Another Person to support at the time (none of your business) I had to get a Proper Career as a fallback, since I figured particularly early (and rightly) that, as much as I loved the music papers and magazines of the period, any attempt on my part to maintain a career as a music cri

  My next set of memories stems from 1967 and they are scattered and not conjoined. Visiting the High Speed Gas showroom with my mother one weekday morning to pay the gas bill. The showroom was situated in front of a giant (and now long-demolished) gasometer, on the border between Uddingston and Bothwell, which one could see from Glasgow and, we used to joke, sometimes from southern Italy. There was a queue of anxious housewives.   A visit with my parents to the greenhouse at Tollcross Park, me dressed in a navy blue sailor’s suit. Photographs were taken which I didn’t really enjoy.   A new kitchen dresser being installed in the hallway of our narrow flat in Uddingston Main Street and filled with items of food and cutlery. I kept having to move out of its way.   The small conical dome presiding over the grocery – for a spell in the 1970s it was a branch of the Centra chain – at the junction of Uddingston Main Street and the extremely steep Gardenside Street. If you climbe