Tears for a Tinker

We emptied our wee low-roofed cottage house of its meagre amount of furniture, giving it to whoever wanted it. Then we piled into Daddy’s van (a bit larger than John’s) and set off to Glenrothes, to live with Shirley in her new house. It was to be a tight squeeze sharing with her, but as far as Davie was concerned it was a step nearer Crieff. Fife skirted Perthshire, and he’d not be happy until we were back in his beloved home town. However, this, may I say, was a pipe-dream carried around in my husband’s head. As far as I was concerned, Crieff was in the past, and would firmly bide there! Yet if you’ve read my previous book, then you will know that, in the end, he won.

From Woodside, the ancient part of Glenrothes, sprang Scotland’s second modern ‘shopping centre’ (Livingston, I’m informed, gave us the first). By shopping centre, I mean shops gathered together under one roof. The birth of ‘you will spend your money here’, and the death of family-run businesses began in these places. Years of shopping with the personal touch died beneath those Perspex roofs. The old shopkeepers were unable to compete with ‘buy one, get one free’ smiley faces behind miles of walled glass. Like zombies we give them hard-earned money for cheap, shabby goods, and turned our backs for ever on the ‘this is quality’ businesses that had been handed down from father to son, pushing them into little drawers of past times. Yes, new town shopping centres like those in Glenrothes and Livingston had us hook, line and pork-linkers. Nowadays, like locusts, those centres have arrived in every town, ruling our credit and controlling spending on a gigantic scale. Gone forever is the personal touch, lost to banks and building societies who determine what, where and when we spend.

Personally I blame these centres for destroying the art of conversation. We tend to eye up a nearby stranger as a hovering hawk ready to pounce and steal our credit cards from tightly held purses. I used to enjoy shopping—now I spend more time trying to avoid eye-contact with security guards than wondering if the garment I just purchased could be dry-cleaned or machine-washed.

With symbolic layers of plastic,

We procure some flexible friends.

This warrants idle fancies,

Able choices in the end.

With the touching face of plastic,

We inhale the telephone.

The moving arrow travels on,

Words unspoken, minutes gone.

With fine moulded, mounted plastic,

We acquire Baird’s progression—

Beware this T.V. madness,

It dictates without permission.

When steel encircles plastic,

Enter now the vehicle maze,

The happy wanderers’ wanderlust

Enslaved to wheel and brace.

With the ultimate in plastic

We replace our tired hearts,

A hip, a leg, whatever next,

In this Hi-Tech paradise...

Shirley was working in a chicken and egg factory named Eastwoods. Her then husband had a good job managing a department within the local paper mill. My Davie got a job working on a building site (Glenrothes was rapidly expanding) and guess who held the fort. That’s right, me. I made certain Christine and Hughie, Shirley’s wee ones, got off to school on time, sandwiches were prepared for the workers to their satisfaction, the house cleaned (it was a big one) and dinner cooked for all eight of us. Could life get any better? Nope!