Introduction

As with all people, I am a collection of many facets that I hope provide an agreeable interface for each situation or experience. Hence, I enter different roles at different times with different people. When I’m a Dad I’m loving, caring and understanding and hopefully the same as a Husband. The role of a Son is forcing me to come to terms with the fact my parents are ageing and I look more and more like my Dad with each passing day. These roles and behaviours are built on past experiences both good and bad. So I have decided to provide a background of my life as an explanation of the beliefs and morals that have created the person I’ve become.

I am the son of Scottish parents, who moved to England to avoid the resulting bigotry and persecution for marrying into the wrong faith and from the wrong town. Little did they know that the town they chose to escape to (Darwen, East Lancashire), was under siege from an influx of Scottish and Italian immigrants. They had swapped one form of intolerance for another. This led to a childhood that was punctuated by physical violence and verbal attacks, resulting in the worst decisions of my life! I would learn how to talk like a “Darrener” and fit in as much as possible, I’d be ashamed of this decision but I was only 5 and couldn’t understand my school teacher and she could understand me. “Dae ya git mi?”

I’m agnostic and political by default. My family is from the ship building area of Strathclyde, where I used to spend most of my six week holidays, watching the ocean liners and oil rigs being built and giving each type of gigantic crane a dinosaur name. These were the happiest of times, the only period during my childhood that I felt completely safe and at home. Even as an adult these feelings still return when I visit. I have often believed it was the ghost of my granddad reminding me of where I belonged, as he often did when he was alive. One day when our children are grown up and have their own families, my wife and myself will return to Scotland and remain there.

Both sides of my family were historically from proud crofting backgrounds, with the exception of my Great Granddad who came from Ballycastle in Ulster. Hence, the surname but that is another story. The maternal side of family were known for risking the death penalty by turning to sheep stealing to feed their kin during the lean periods of the post-clearances. I feel a tremendous pride in my ancestors for the risks they took, which ensured that my present day family would exist. So I’m proud to say “I come from a long line of sheep stealers”.

Being born in the sixties meant that I witnessed the rise of ‘Thatcherism’ and was old enough to see how her government used Scotland as a guinea-pig for their reforms. Shipyard after shipyard closed, people lost there jobs not in 10’s or 20’s at a time, not even hundreds but by 2000-3000 people at a time, followed by the destruction of small businesses that fed the shipyards. My ‘Granddad’, towards the end of his life, used to watch the young men pushing prams and found it hard to understand how any man could take over the role traditionally held by the wife. It was carefully explained to him that they were the new ‘new men’, who were not afraid to show vulnerability or help around the house, to which he replied “so that’s what ‘new man’ means, it means unemployed”.

The jobs evaporated and a brighter future was considered an oxymoron. People gave up and moved away in a mass exodus of nearly 30,000 people. Those who stayed watched their home towns turn into desolate waste grounds. The combination of poverty and no hope led to a slow creeping death for the towns that once depended on the shipyards. As unemployment escalated, so did the misery caused from the drug trade and then came the petty gangsters, who introduced a gun culture into these already desperate times.