LIFE NOTES (2)

 

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 climbed up the steps heading towards Spindlehowe Road, behind what was then a church, you could still see it.

 

Riding on the dodgems at the local fair – if it were local; I cannot precisely recall – with my mother, wearing a rather fetching raincoat.

 

Mrs Marley and her version of expatriate Italian culture. The huge Bush radiogram with its teak-redolent, dark blue-labelled Decca singles deep within.


The visits from several newspapers because word had got out about my being something of a child prodigy. Reading and writing at two. A lengthy, detailed and finally apologetic letter from the National Association of Gifted Children was sent to our house. The photograph of me, reading that letter, made the front pages of the Scottish Daily Mail and Scottish Daily Express. The glum conclusion was that nothing special could be done for me in terms of formal education, which I almost certainly should not have come anywhere near. Not enough money, you see. We were living in a first-floor flat on Main Street in Uddingston, above what was then the Bay Horse Inn pub. Saturday nights were noisy. In my childhood that situation was deemed unique.


Music drifted unevenly through that year. The first record I remember hearing and remembering was I Feel Free by Cream right at year's beginning. My father liked Cream; they were really a jazz group masquerading as a pop one ("rock" didn't yet exist). I saw the promo film for Strawberry Fields Forever on Top of the Pops, and indeed that broadcast was recorded, in audio, by sellotaping a microphone to the television speaker. All other elements were random; San Francisco, Grocer Jack (the harpsichord tag to the latter immediately conjured up the abovementioned conical dome for me; it twirled as balletically as the dome seemed to do), light entertainment in general.

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