Trivial Tales of Everyday Madness: A future legend in my own mind.

Robert K Hogg

I miss my granddad. He on my mother’s side. You’d have liked him.

Most people did. I miss my gran too. She on my dad’s side. I could say
grandmother or grandma, but as we never called her that, I’m not about to
now. She was less easy to like, certainly so unequivocally, but that’s the
nature of people. I called my mother mum, and my father dad. They split
up when I was six or seven. Probably seven, as I recall the move to the
larger council flat on the top floor, and where I stood at what was to be our
bedroom window and watched with no little curiosity a girl sitting against
the wall below.
We were never to become romantically involved in any way, both
being too tentative, the close proximity to each other ruling it out from the
outset in all probability. She lived at the bottom with her younger brother
whom I came to like. They stayed with a commonplace-minded bore of a
woman, rarely cheerful, whom they called Nana. Their mother was a rare
sight. I don’t think she stayed there, or if dad was ever on the scene.
Some things get lost in the mists of time and obscurity and relative
indifference. Andy slipped once while climbing the shortish metal
washing poles. A freakish accident, he gashed his leg. I was glad I wasn’t
there to see it. Strange, the things one remembers. Perhaps it was because
of the uninhibited relish of whoever told me of it at the time. And because
it seemed so unlikely. A “greenie” pole. Just outside his “house.”

The irony was I was forever taking off and risking life and limb,
literally, as if to feel the life more in me, or tempt the fates, who seemed
determined to give me a hard time anyway, mainly in the guise of my
mother. Perhaps it was my way of thinking I might bring the fight to them,
it not being possible to bring it to her; an unthinkable thought. If I
believed on an unconscious level God had it in for me, perhaps this was
my way of testing the boundaries. Bring it on, big guy. But I didn’t really
believe that. I think it was a phase most adventurous spirits go through.
That quite simply, I was excited by it and enjoyed the intensity of
concentration it demanded to walk slowly along the outside of the bridge
for walking perched high above the road in Balgay Park, or outside the
railings and above the sheer drop adjacent to the stairs that led down from
the entrance to Dudhope Park from the Constitution Street side and also a
busy road, but no car stopped and no-one told me to stop and get back on
the right side of the railings. Maybe they didn’t want to be the one who
distracted me. Clearly I had a head for heights as they say, but to me it
was all about self-reliance and not falling. It was my choice so I was in
control. There was no question or incidence of dizziness or nausea. That
would have been the end of me. I wasn’t lacking in common sense,
though my mother begged to differ. She positively insisted on it, though
she knew nothing of my often hair-raising excursions. Neither was I
stupid, though she was as vehement in her insistence on that too. I could
be impulsive, but equally I could give a potential climbing project, such as
the electricity pylon on the Law Hill, a few minutes thought, as I did, and
decide against it. I well recall that. I didn’t know if and where the
electricity flow began, or if it affected a section of the metal rails at a
certain height, or what. My ignorance on the subject was enough to decide
me, however exciting the prospect of climbing higher than what I took to
be the highest point in Dundee.
There was always the Steeple, but from the inside like everyone else,
as I did one school lunchtime with my buddy. Everest the hard way – from
the inside. Now I look on mountain-climbers and the like, getting stranded
and freezing to death on the side of a mountain or dying in a crevasse in
the proverbial middle of nowhere, and I think, thanks but no thanks. It
seems nuts to me. Know your limitations. I just don’t have the same faith
the technology will get me through it. As a kid I could check my shoelaces
and that my hands weren’t sweaty by wiping them on my front or trousers,
but neither would I climb if it were even remotely damp. I think. No flies
on me, though a well-placed bug might have ended it all – but not really,
unless it was a wasp. Nothing would distract me short of being struck by
lightning, though I suppose there was always the possibility of some
insane kids throwing stones at me. A possibility I never considered.
Something to come back to. Variations on a theme. But I digress. I was
thinking of my close relatives.
It seems silly they didn’t get on with each other when I was so central
to both their lives in many ways. I could say the same of my mum and dad
of course, but that was as problematic for other reasons. Otherwise my
granddad and gran had little contact with each other. They had got
together so to say, to discuss the question of which of them might adopt
me. My gran was willing to take me alone but granddad was reluctant to
separate my younger brother and me. Maybe he felt and possibly rightly
so, that if the buffer of sorts I was were to be removed, there would be
little to stop her inflicting her wild projections on him alone. I knew
nothing about this of course, at primary school age still, and difficult
though it was, I’d have missed my brother intensely. It was obvious to
anyone aside from my mother and Bo that we took great pleasure in each
other’s company; we had a lot of laughs together, and he was no less
important to me for that reason. It was a balance of opposites. During the
intense insecurity of adolescence, and the constant and sometimes extreme
attacks on my image of myself, he was, for all his faults as well as my
own, a symbol of normality for me, and of sense and sanity, though whom
I could experience myself more in keeping as I believed myself to be;
intelligent and amusing. School and home seemed to conspire in
inculcating in me the perception I was as valueless as I was potentially
dangerous, if in an inconsequential, silly way.
They liked to have it all ways. In retrospect it was my intelligence and
the joyfulness they saw in me that threatened them. Like many people
they secretly hated life and themselves, the former quite overt at times in
my mother as when she would rage at how she had “had it up to here, to
here,” she would scream, almost slapping her straightened hand against
her chin for emphasis, the treat of violence, tangible as always. I knew she
hated me. There was no accounting for her irrational enmity. It was
something to be accepted and avoided wherever possible. I preferred to
stay in our room and read.
When I wasn’t reading there was playing football outside in the back
green with mates and other acquaintances. Few things as engaging as
football as a kid. Through it one learned of the character of ones fellows
and oneself. Kicking the ball around was almost incidental, or it might
have been if we didn’t take it all so personally. Another aspect of our
character, not least mine. I took the game seriously enough to practice on
my own for a time, by trying to control the ball as I attempted to dribble it
around the conveniently placed aforementioned poles for the washing. A
short-lived enthusiasm. I gave up in frustration, though I was no slouch at
the old bodyswerve and an accurate striker or could be. I toyed for a while
with the notion of being a professional football player for a living. What I
didn’t know was that my dad’s dad, my other granddad who lived in
Australia with his wife had been just that. For some reason my favourite
team came to be Celtic. I even bought their record at the time, precocious
as my musical tastes could be for a kid. I could and did go to the local
grocers and heard Argent’s Hold Your Head Up playing in the background
and it was about all that mattered.
An intriguing melody stayed with me for the rest of my life. I have
the clear image of myself at my gran’s, in her top flat in Union Street,
where I couldn’t seem to get the refrain from It’s The Same Old Song out
of my head, and intentionally so. It haunted me, almost as if I was trying
to remember something long forgotten, partly mixed with the thought of
school and a girl I liked intensely. It felt almost as if I could escape into
the music if I kept repeating it, and the more I repeated it, the more vistas
of meaning seemed to hint at opening up to me, yet wouldn’t, producing a
mix of emotions too complex and painful to comprehend. I loved stories,
but I had the feeling that music spoke to me more directly than anything
else in the world. That somehow, we were one of a kind. The emotion
was as impossible to put into words as music itself. There was no way I
could communicate it to anyone. It was a secret of sorts between some
other more abstract but no less important reality and myself.