Friendship is a funny thing. We count days, months, years and decades of shared time with our friends. After a wee dram or two we recall that time someone said something silly to someone; and we laugh the laugh of togetherness, equally funny to us both, equal as a shared experience.
Yet something happened a few weeks back that turned that notion of friendship on its head. I bumped into a lassie called Siobhan at a charity event. She hails from Glasgow, so naturally we got chatting. Glasgow's that sort of place. It's Scotland's f
irst city and markedly different from its east coast adversary: we gave them the castle and we got the rest. Glasgow is a city built on lay lines of connection; everyone seems to have a link with everyone else. This unseen, almost tribally familial aspect of the place is both reassuring and unsettling.
There's great comfort in meeting people that used to hang out with my friend Mark Van Daal, yet at the same time rather worrying that names from 20 years ago still carry so much sway. It is very rare that I find myself chatting with someone from Glasgow without establishing some sort of common connection. It's sort of uncanny.
For all its gallus, big city status, my hometown often feels no more than a wee village. So I launched into a fact-finding mission with the delightful Siobhan, fairly confident that we would discover that we had 1) a mutual friend in Dennistoun; 2) shared the same dentist in Muirend; or 3) went roller-discoing in a now derelict hall on Paisley Road west. The first answer elicited the fact that we had been at the same school. Small world.
It transpired that we were together at the same school for all of about eight weeks, she incoming and me on my way to the big bad world of university. However, I knew almost every member of her immediate and extended family. Smaller world. We arranged to meet again a week or so later. Over a cheeky wee glass of Pinot Grigio I worked out that I played rugby with her elder brothers and cousins; my wee brother's best friend went on a date with Siobhan once (and only once); I fancied her best friend's sister; and my best friend from school, Miss Sharkey, became a very good friend of Siobhan's shortly after I left school. Smallest world.
We had a massive and significant shared history, but it is a shared history by proxy, a shared history by default. We experienced so many of the same places, peoples and events but just never at the same time. I have now only met Siobhan three times in as many weeks , yet I feel as if I have known her since I was 17. That's Glasgow for you.
Trapped by childhood memories of Mum's polyglot tongue-lashings
Lifts are great places for enforced experiences. There is nowhere more intimate, more soul-baringly cramped than a lift. Even silence seems to communicate huge amounts about those travelling vertically for those mundane moments in life. I experienced one such occasion on Tuesday evening. It was late; I had finished work and managed to catch the lift before the doors closed to exclude me. I always feel slightly apologetic when I force a lift to re-open, as if against the contraption's better judgment, and those of the occupants.
My fellow travellers, for five floors at least, were a mother and her two pre-teenage sons. There was a definite air of anger in the lift as I entered, an anger I at first supposed was directed at me. It soon became apparent that the maternal ire was directed at her progeny. She drew breath and spat out chastisement; she scolded in an Eastern European language, Russian I was guessing. Even though I know about three words of Russian (one of those being Mockba, the only thing I remember from the 1984 Olympics) I knew that she was telling them off. There's something universal about the pattern of speech when it comes to getting a row. She abruptly stopped talking. She tutted, inhaled and then launched in again, this time in English.
It brought back such memories. There is nothing quite as humbling as a bilingual deriding from yer maw. I grew up being told off in two languages, Punjabi and English. It was as if for my mother there weren't sufficient English words for her to convey her anger; her switch to English would then be the thickest, blackest of lines under her Punjabi telling-off. Her dexterous linguistic shift from one idiom to another, one language to another ensured that I was left in no doubt about the many errors of my ways.
She would use brilliant Punjabi phrases which, translated literally, asked (rhetorically, of course) whether I "fancied eating a slap". She would then employ cracking phrases like "do you want to bet?", with gambling being the furthest thing from her mind.
I felt for the lads in the lift as they stared at their feet, their mother's anger, tempered only by her necessity to breathe. As the lift doors closed on the fifth floor, long after their bodies disappeared, her bilingual rage continued.
Hobson's choice kebabs my tastebuds
It was a late finish for me the other night. Such a hectic day had meant that I had eschewed dinner. It was almost midnight in city centre Liverpool and I was hungry; very hungry. To my surprise the city's restaurants and eateries had all shut up shop. The only potential provider of food was a kebab shop. I was a beggar rather than a chooser. A shish with extra chilli sauce and a wee poke of chips seemed like the perfect meal: a homage to protein and carbohydrate. I stole my food back to the hotel room and sat and devoured the barbecued meat and salad and chips without taking breath. Fancy foods can come and go but sometimes all a body wants is a big fat kebab.
Rendered speechless by the betwixt
and between
I was speaking at an event in the week, and while checking through the script with the organiser, I was told that I had to delete the final line of the evening's script, a line that wished the ladies and gentlemen a good night. I obediently crossed the line out, before asking why it had been edited. Apparently, present in the room was a person who described themselves as of non-specific gender. Non-specific gender. That means that they were neither a man nor indeed a woman. That is what non-specific gender means. I had to confess to being a little curious. Surely you are one gender or another; I completely understand and support an individual's right to change their gender in pursuit of the life they choose to lead. (As the fat one frae the 'Briggs who grew up with NHS specs and a bottle green turban I am the last person to deny anyone their wish to be in control of their own identity and self-image.)
Notwithstanding this support, I do think it's rather curious that everyone else has to change their lives to accommodate what is after all, a statistically tiny minority of individuals. Frankly if your life has been a nightmare because you have felt trapped in the wrong body then surely a man wishing the ladies and gents good night is the least of your concerns?
I understand the sensitivity we must display about language. There are words of a racial nature I would be unhappy to hear bandied about; similarly there are words that are complicit in the subjugation of women that can be equally offensive and ought to be outlawed. But it worries me that in a room full of hundreds of people, we are forced to change something as harmless as the phrase "ladies and gentlemen"
Political correctness comes from a good, well-meaning place. It was designed to stop the insensitive use of words and terminology. However, isn't political correctness being abused when a miniscule minority of highly unique albeit troubled individuals, change utterly innocuous phrases for a very tightly defined reason?
