LITMIR.BIZ

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a lot of weird stuff. ‘Susan the Sham’ was great: a girl who’d been in a traffic accident and had an evil uncle who was making her pretend to be deaf for compensation reasons. Every week she’d overhear something she really ought to tell somebody about but couldn’t. One of the main stories – did I dream this? – was about a lassie who lived a pretty much normal life except for one thing. She was trapped inside an enormous energy ball. She’d go to school in it and have to deal with a certain amount of hassle but when it got too much she could always just shoot off into the sky in this fiery orb. I once tried to make a sketch about this for a pilot I was doing. The producer read the script and then said one of my favourite-ever sentences:

      ‘Do you know how much of our budget it would take to create an energy ball?’

      That’s the great thing about television. Sometimes, you just feel that anything could happen. The guy didn’t say it was impossible. He was just thinking of the repercussions of sticking an actress in a big, glowing energy ball!

      A new comic came out that was an absolute mindblower. The Buddy it was called. Cheery title but a clue to its disturbing nature was in the human-skull jacket pin given away with the first issue and the lead story of ‘They Saved Hitler’s Brain!’ They had Limpalong Leslie, an international footballer with one leg shorter than the other. His footballing brain always had to be working overtime as he was essentially crippled. He’d leap over tackles saying, ‘Ho ho! He telegraphed that one!’ It was still less weird than Tuffy, the story of a homeless goalkeeper. He could never find a house, even during the couple of seasons he played for Spurs.

      I felt outside of the stuff the other kids were into, like the whole football thing. I support Celtic but as I got older I struggled to see those clubs as anything other than big businesses making money out of some of the poorest people in society. You go to those grounds and they’re these giant chrome fortresses rising out of blighted, deprived communities. Celtic won the European Cup in 1967 with a team all born within five miles of the ground. If they tried that now they couldn’t find eleven guys who still had two legs. I find it difficult to believe that people can care about whether some millionaire pervert has got a thigh strain or not. That’s another thing about football – it’s a bit gay. Guys fretting over some lad’s calf or hamstring – they might as well all fuck each other in the centre circle.

      Both of the Old Firm clubs have profited massively from sectarianism. Personally, I think everyone involved over the years has shown that they don’t have Northern Ireland’s best interests at heart and it should now be given to a third party, like Spain. Imagine how little the average Belfast citizen would care for the problems of religion if he could just get a nice bit of tapas on the Falls Road. And it wasn’t fucking raining all the time. And he still had knees.

      The standard of football has been pretty terrible for a long time. There have been some great sides but they’re pretty rare. Most of the time the Scottish League is like watching a really gruelling donkey race. Sure, like most people I support one team over another, but it’s getting more and more difficult to care what colour of hat the winning donkey is wearing.

      TWO

      Primary school was great. On the first day I was looking around thinking, ‘There’s no catch … this is genuinely a big, warm room full of toys.’ Now, Little Frankie would have hated it if he knew that one day I was going to gloss over his nursery education, which he absolutely loved. On the other hand, books can only be so long and I’ve got a lot of stories about drug abuse to get to. Let’s just say that Little Frankie pulled the paddling pool off its stand about once a month, soaking himself and having to go home in a pair of huge borrowed shorts.

      The great thing about primary education is the positivity and praise the kids get. Probably not the best way to prepare them for the reality of adult life in Scotland, but I like it. I think if we actually focussed on an education system that prepared people for life in Scotland it would be a lot like the Fritzl household. I mean, what gets me about this whole sordid story is Fritzl’s wife saying she didn’t know. Did she not suspect something when her husband came in every week with sixteen bags of shopping, including kids’ clothes and nappies? Who did she think they were for – the dog? ‘I know we treat him like one of the family, but sandals and shorts?’ People have accused Fritzl of neglect, but he was fucking them every day – they probably would have loved a bit of neglect. Even Adolf Hitler must be going, ‘… und I thought Ich war ein Cunt!’ The whole thing is so common in Austria they now sell ‘Hallmark’ cards with ‘Congratulations on escaping from your underground sex hell’. Of course, I shouldn’t joke; Fritzl’s daughter has been through a horrific ordeal. But just wait until she gets all the back payments for child benefit. That’ll cheer her up.

      I loved primary and it was so supportive that up until I was about 9 or 10 I still thought I could draw. Teachers had always said, ‘Well done’ when I drew or painted something, so I didn’t realise that I couldn’t draw at all – almost to the level of a handicap. This dawned on me when I challenged my friend Charlie to a drawing contest. We were going to draw a space shuttle as it was the first one and the kids were really excited about it. I used a ruler and drew a big rectangle in the middle and two bigger rectangles on either side, for the booster jets. Then I drew triangles on top of the rectangles – turning them into rockets! Sure, the space shuttle that I drew freehand inside the main rectangle (the fuel tank!) was a little shaky and looked a bit like a face, but the overall effect was pretty impressive.

      Charlie blinked impassively at my drawing and then produced what seemed to be a black and white photograph of the space shuttle. There were little scientists doing final checks on the scaffolding at the launch base, partially covered by the shadow of the main fuel tank. Did you ever read Peanuts when Charlie Brown would be building his shitty little snow fort and Linus would have built an actual castle with battlements and a flagpole? It was like that. I insisted mine was best and went off to find a judge.

      As a kid I was fascinated by space shuttles and by astronauts in general. This was before all the blowing up took the shine off things. Good old NASA. With all their money, could they maybe have a mission where everyone doesn’t nearly die? They should have some honesty and call their next mission ‘Operation Spacegrave’. Remember all the unmanned missions they used to send up in the 1950s and 60s? You know what they did with the monkeys and dogs that piloted them? They poisoned them! All their bodies are still up there. So an alien civilisation’s first contact with earth will be a ring of abandoned spacecraft filled with dead chimps and Alsatians. Approaching earth for some sublimated alien race must be like when the police close in on the house of a serial killer and find an outer perimeter of faeces wrapped in newspaper.

      One day on our way to school my friend Gary McRedie and I found a huge porn mag. It was thicker than a dictionary and full of big Seventies bushes – women who looked like they were giving birth to Kevin Keegan. I didn’t really understand what it was (I don’t think), but had to admit it was strangely compelling. Gary suggested that we hide it under a shrub so we could come and look at it whenever we liked. The next day it was gone – someone had found it! I was disappointed but also oddly relieved. It was only years later, as I was telling someone this story, that I realised Gary McCredie had gone back and got it for himself.

      There was quite a lot of religious stuff at primary. Every week we’d go down to the church and practise hymns, led by Miss Moat, a spirited big woman who looked like she played centre-back for somebody half decent. At least I was lucky enough not to go to a Jesuit school. The Jesuit saying is ‘Give me a boy until he is seven and I will give you the man.’ Usually a sexually confused manic-depressive.

      We made our first confession when we were seven years old and had to really rack our brains for sins. I said that I’d stolen something, which I hadn’t, and that I’d lied, which I had – about stealing something. An old man listening to a child’s sins while they’re both locked in a wooden box? If I was a sexual pervert I would definitely join the priesthood. Although clearly the sexual-pervert community is way ahead of me on that one. Earlier this year the Pope met victims of sexual abuse at the hands of Catholic priests. If I’d been fingered by a priest the last person I’d like to meet is the ultra priest 9,000. It’s like fighting the

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