I never fitted in during my 4our year stay in Ayrshire. I found the line between horseplay and outright bullying to be too hard to distinguish at times, and I was always a little bit too optimistic that, say, a bus would be on time to truly adapt to the Ayrshire mentality, a sort of anti Buddhist Zen based around mantras that ended in curse words. What I did like was the extra space to go wandering around and exploring, the early 90tys being replete in Ayrshire with buildings jam packed with boxes and places to investigate, failed Thatcher era enterprises left to rot and gather dust with motivational posters left on the wall and folders full of training tips piled on the ground. Monolithic new town office blocks on the edge of town were the perfect place to sit and while away a few pre invention of the Internet hours before sunset, typing stories no one would ever read on computers or reading soccer magazines in which a plooky faced Scottish wean with a rockstar haircut was always proclaimed as the saviour of our national game. I tried to explain the solitude thing to Debbie but she was too interested in whether any of the corporations had secretly invented a robot yet and the conversation would dissipate in a flurry of aggressive kisses and chocolate eating. By the time I had abandoned the weekend explorations and developed a kinship with the community - it took my 3hree years to get angry about the way buses were never on time, or that the local ASDA was out of cheese on a frequent basis - I was back to Penguin to live, where my negativity was out of place but found a home in, oddly enough, the cellars of abandonded Penguin businesses, only they were filled with people smoking and talking and cursing getting old and how much Nirvana were selling out. My Ayrshire affectations of disdain for life held up well against this backdrop, but my anger was false, and since there were no buses in Penguin really, I ran out of ammunition somewhere by November...
When I broke up with Debbie, I threw myself vigorously into killing time by reworking my friendships with the local populace. After all, I had the time and money to spend again, they put a security guard on my favourite building who was demanding bribes, and they cancelled the Sunday bus run into town - bloody Thatcher. I hadn't noticed in my time living in Ayrshire that 1ne street was so utterly different to another, like a seperate country with different rusted up cars in the driveways as flagposts and gateways. My retreat had lead to a lack of door chapping from the local children, so like a politician on the verge of being booted out I had to wander around the doors of my street seeing if kids wanted to come out and play, a board game sometimes a sweetener in the deal. I wasn't popular at first - I didn't support the right soccer team, I was a little too wordy and flowery in my conversations, and I had been out of sight for a long time, a blur in a Joe Bloggs top sighted on a minibus here and there, but essentially non communicative and out of touch since I had petitioned to get John McCarthy out. I had to carefully negotiate my way back in polite society, 1ne stubborn Scottish face at a time. Doing this had been good for me, not because I really wanted friends especially, but it was good to have a project, and in time I was fitting in a bit more comfortably. My new found maturity had lead Debbie to consider a long distance relationship, and I was also included in the local bonfire hunt and gather for Fireworks night. Sadly the role of "The Guy", the local wean strapped into a shopping trolley and pushed around as part of a door to door hunt for superflous funds was taken by a smaller child called Nicky - in fairness, he added a wonderful Cassevetes improvisational style to the role, plus he fitted in the trolley - but at least I got to carry the fund raising tin, and sometimes I got given a blackjack out of the mixed lolly jar. In truth, it was as much as I could have hoped for...
There was a local rumour that our local gang - the BYT, oft graffitied, never sighted outside of the odd bookie raid in Dreghorn and the rarely sighted letter to the editor about how they were cruel to walls - had co-opted the spacious inside of our big giant mile wide uncleared thorn bush to stash drugs, porn and, if Nicky was to be believed, a fearsome squadron of dobermans guarding all the made up items. As a result, we had to move the location of our bonfire lest the BYT make an MESS, which incidentally was a gang in Kilwinning not quite as fearsome. Our bonfire took on mythical proportions early on in it's embyronic development - well, it made the local paper - due to it's size and scale and threat that the 200 aerosol cans in the middle would make the whole thing explode and send local businesses scurrying for cover. The photographer was other worldly attractive but so bored it was painful. Our photo was suitably moody and dystopian - anarchic wide eyed children in the middle of a page which also featured an article about old women being mugged on trains - a black and white shot of a pile of twigs and papers where no one smiled and we look like a Joy Division test shot. Well setting fire to the whole district was the plan anyway, after initial enthusiasm it just ended up being a large garbage tip style pile of junk on which local hobos ended up throwing magazines and broken couches onto instead of lugging their rubbish to nearby towns that smelled bad. Our local burst of publicity meant that we had to lie to ourselves that we would created something Arthur Brown would be fearful off. Then, the day of the bonfire, it started raining, softly at first, then drizzling, then bucketing down at a million miles an hour, leaving a largeish crowd standing in the rain wondering how they would get home, and our pile of garbage and twigs lay unlit and smelly until a man from the council came and took it away, stealing a couch for himself. It was also the last time for about 2wo years I saw Debbie, standing in the rain with hand on tracksuited hip, telling a local reporter she knew the bonfire had no chance of catching light, and that in the future bonfires would all be built by robot...
Since I never really fitted in in my time in Ayrshire - or if I did, I was too busy creating clumsy poetic metaphors about relationships and bonfires to care - so the only real evidence I have that I was ever part of any kind of communal group is a yellow local paper article where I look like Ian Curtis, standing next to a pile of twigs. Sadly the fate of Mrs McGlashan and her horrific train memoir is not known, nor is the fate of Nicky, and whether or not anyone from a gang picked up their stash of rained upon Playboys. It does count as at least some evidence I was there though, that I was living in those times and dressing in that way. I think 1ne of the office blocks is still standing, brown and decaying and now filled up with matching shirted workers who file in and out in a never changing formation while the building cracks and fades like the ambition of a middle manager determined to make work fun. I found on 1ne of my trips back to Ayrshire, in the spot where the bonfire was built, the arm of a rocking chair and thought maybe it had sat on the ground all that time, but some kids were playing soccer around my legs and I had to get out of the way, since the only other option was to gather them around and begin a grandfatherly story about how this was 1nce all fields, and in this day and age an old man gathering children around is frowned upon. As it happened, there was a think piece in the local paper that suggested people were getting mugged for their bonfire money. Our money at least went on sweets, a different kind of theft. See things change...they always do, at times you are up and times you are down...sure as the sun will set tonight. I always remember that. It was scribbled on the office walls of an abandoned Ayrshire office block. It wasn't quite as good as you don't have to be crazy to work here but it helps, but the font was suspiciously close to the security guards handwriting on his forms, suggesting a hidden melancholy and depth of thought a long way from his staccato sentences asking for 5ive pounds or threatening an eviction...
The locked away nostalgia of a fading past is a comfort when you run out things to do in the present day don't you find...
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