IT WAS A greasy, grey morning and I greeted it with an expression to match. I’d taken a taxi back from Tesco, my dwindling mental and physical resources swiftly drained by the many repetitions of ‘the Red Deer Inn’ that had proved necessary to prevent the driver dropping me off at ‘the railway station’ (his first and third guesses) or ‘the radio station’ (his second and fourth). Enfeebled, ravenous and suddenly quite keen to make a terrible mess of his back seat, I’d unsheathed my pastry en route. My word, it was bad: a sawn-off suet drainpipe blocked with clumps of congealed haggis, smelling like it had been baked in an old lady’s handbag. I had no condiments on hand with which to pimp my pie, but to forestall coma I forced half of it down.
The other half looked at me now from the bedside table, dented and sallow and leaching transfats into the wood-effect melamine veneer, a demi-pie reminder of the truly terrible crap I’d been running on for long days. I recalled that the Japanese, who eat very little in the way of dairy produce, find that Westerners reek of sour milk; it was only a matter of time, and probably not much of it, before my pores started to excrete some strange and ghastly new odour. Would my family disown the batter-sweating bridie-breath who was coming home for Christmas? After showering myself free of clinging bits of pastry and bypass I proceeded directly to the Red Deer Inn’s breakfast buffet and ate five bananas.
Back in the room and packing up, it became apparent that reserves of usable clothing were running dangerously low. Almost automatically I threw a few socks and pants into the sink, cranked the taps on and with a seasoned king-of-the-road flourish squirted in a sachet of bath gel. When this failed to procure the requisite billows of froth, I retrieved the sachet from the bin and read its labelling with dismay: Moisturising body lotion. Smoothes and nourishes skin; mires wet pants in slime. My intention had been to quit Cumbernauld forthwith, but as I draped my viscous underwear across Craig’s rear seat and parcel shelf, I sensed the imperative of a visit to a local launderette.
I drove off into the cellular housing units confident one would turn up, fairly certain a launderette had featured in Gregory’s Girl, and adamantly unwilling to ask a local eight times and receive directions to Auchtermuchty badminton club. Even in grumbling drizzle it seemed inevitable that daylight would improve Cumbernauld. The landscaping certainly looked a lot better now that I wasn’t having to conquer it on foot. All the smoothly sculpted vales and whalebacks I remembered from Magnus’s film were now neatly embellished with forty-year-old trees and shrubs, no doubt each having matured exactly as their creators projected. I later read that students of landscape architecture are drawn to Cumbernauld from all over the world, to see how it should be done. And also that they’re distantly outnumbered by their bricks-and-mortar counterparts, who come here to see how it shouldn’t.
‘Every four hundred homes are served by a corner shop,’ Magnus had smoothly intoned, as birds twittered and pigtailed schoolgirls in Start-rites played hopscotch on newly laid cobbles. ‘A little local store – in this case, a converted farmhouse.’ With a few cellular housing units under my belt, it was clear that pledge had been lost somewhere along the way. Puttering around the cul-de-sacs of dank, dun-coloured terraces and apartment blocks, I had yet to encounter any sort of shop, let alone one that might have seen previous rural service.
Circling yet another roundabout I caught a smeary glimpse of The Megastructure, at this distance a dead ringer for the kilometre-long aluminium smelting plant that dominates the western approach to Reykjavik. Before it stood the glass-fronted rectangular solid that was the über-Tesco, and just up the road lay an only slightly smaller new Asda.
The brave-new-world Megastructure hadn’t been rejected because the citizens of Cumbernauld found it hideous and soul-destroying, even though it most emphatically was. When it comes to shopping, I don’t think people really care that much about environment or ambience. Let’s face it, cultivating the seductive retail appeal of an automotive parts warehouse hasn’t done places like Aldi and Lidl any harm. Hear my wife speak of John Lewis and you might picture a stately pleasure dome of ornamental cascades and hanging gardens, staffed by muscular centaurs who know all there is to know about kitchenware and soft furnishings. But really it’s just a big hall full of wanky chrome fridges. No, The Megastructure failed because, ironically, it was too parochial – an enormous place filled with tiny retail units. At some point in my malnourished wanderings the previous night I’d found a store locator map, and noted that nearly all its surviving tenants were running the sort of businesses you’d expect to see on a small-town high street: T. McClean, chemists; Dunipace, Brown, solicitors; R. & J. McClachlan, optician’s. Everything else had been swept away by what Cumbernauldians tended to describe online as ‘the best news we’ve had in years’ or even ‘the only good things about Cumbernauld’: that new Tesco and its neighbouring Asda.
It’s tempting to conclude that Cumbernauld’s planners were endeavouring to humanise the town’s most brutal, crushing edifice by cramming it with homely little enterprises, local shops for local people. But actually that’s just how shopping was back then: a chore made bearable by social interaction, a gossip over the corner-shop till, or a chat about bi-focals with nice Mr McClachlan at the optician’s. Geoffrey Copcutt presciently anticipated a future in which shopping would take place in huge buildings accessed by motor car. His only failure, if you can call it that, was neglecting to predict the extraordinary march of mass consumerism that would elevate shopping to an end in itself, a leisure activity played out in ever more anonymous, ever huger retail theme parks like Tesco Extra. I had, with my own tired eyes, seen grown Cumbernauldian males taking turns to play Guitar Hero in the electrical aisle: glazed and slouchy, they had clearly been hanging around there for hours. The sad truth is that though we’re forever bemoaning the decline of local retailers and the loss of Britain’s high-street community spirit, that decline is nobody’s fault but our own. However much we might like to picture ourselves wheeling tartan sholleys past bow-fronted shops and exchanging cheery waves with butchers and bakers and candlestick makers, the fact is that when offered a soulless, corporate, 40-billion-square-foot one-stop alternative, we grab it with both sweaty hands. And in doing so, we’ve effectively privatised town planning, shooing away the earnest if occasionally deluded public servants who once did the job, and allowing commercial developers to fashion our urban landscape to their cynical, self-serving whim. Superstores were once stuck out by the ring roads, but now we’re letting them annex our town centres. I say ‘we’, but my wife – a diehard local shopper who gets Christmas cards from every candlestick maker in W4 – seems fairly certain it’s all my fault.
Distantly wondering if Tesco Extra plumbed in any of its washing machines, I U-turned and dog-legged from one discouraging, shopless housing unit to the next. It was hardly hopscotch weather, but on a Saturday morning there wasn’t a single kid out in the streets, and barely a parent either. Cumbernauld’s domestic hibernation seemed almost heroic when you considered the horrid little houses its citizens had shut themselves up in, with their fungal blooms and mossy door frames, the poky windows that looked across ranks of lock-up garages made of soggy cardboard. It was another Craigworld centrespread: I nipped out with the camera and snapped a few moody portraits.
Though not in a way Magnus might have foreseen or desired, Cumbernauld was indeed a Town for Tomorrow. Completing the process that other towns had merely begun, it was now ahead of the sociological curve as a place that had completely and utterly eschewed any communal focus, whose insular downtime revolved around driving to the twenty-four-hour misanthro-mart or staying in to watch Britain’s Got Biscuits and Police, Camera, Nudism.
Well, that was that. I flicked Ozzy to life and jabbed in the digits that would lead me to luncheon: G3 8RE, home to a Glasgow takeaway and its speciality, a saveloy swaddled in strips of kebab meat then deep-fried in batter. The ‘stonner’ – thus named in tribute to the local slang term for an erection – weighed in at 3lb and was considered so deleterious to health that its creator limited customers to one per week. ‘Just Say No’, as the cast of Grange Hill now warned me in song, and ad nauseam. I was rather glad to find my ponderings on a stonner’s taste and appearance disrupted by the Vauxhall Corsa that now filled my rear-view mirror, flashing its headlights and moving about the carriageway in an excitable manner.
I smiled and hoisted a hand of acknowledgement, for it wasn’t the first time that a citizen of Cumbernauld had transmitted their appreciation of Craig’s rarity. Crossing the Red Deer Inn car park an hour or so before I’d noticed an executive in a snappy trenchcoat giving Craig a quizzical once over. ‘First one of those I’ve seen on an R plate,’ he announced when I came up and stuck a key in the boot.
‘Well, there’s actually quite a funny story attached to that,’ I began, with an indulgent chuckle, and although at this point he was already walking smartly away across the tarmac, I felt myself warming to Cumbernauld as a place – so far the only place – where oddball native motoring tat was respected, or at least noticed. Why, this Corsa driver seemed exceptionally keen to satisfy his curiosity – so keen, in fact, that he now overtook and drove me right off the road. I bumped up on to the landscaped verge and slithered to a halt a foot from his rear bumper, in the process knocking my MP3 player out of its socket and cutting Zammo off in his quavery prime.
Who, or what, is a ‘ned’? The Concise Oxford Dictionary speaks of ‘a hooligan or petty criminal, a stupid or loutish boy or man (Scots, informal)’. Dr Rowland Atkinson, lecturer in the department of Urban Studies at Glasgow University, prefers a more informal definition: ‘a young man in a baseball hat who hangs about the streets drinking Buckfast’. But to me, a ned is and shall always be the pinch-faced, tracksuited youth who now stood at Craig’s door, working the handle vigorously and expressing in the most strident terms his desire that I grant him access, denied some micro-seconds earlier by a reflex clatter of elbow on locking knob.
‘What are you doin’ taken fucken pictures of my fucken flat?’
Those callow features seemed so distorted with rage that his own mother might not have recognised him, but his words were as clear as the raindrops beading the glass between us.
‘What indeed, young ned, what indeed!’ I replied, throwing open the door with a brilliant smile. ‘Come take your ease beside me, and hear my curious tale. Scotch pie?’
Just one of the many gambits I now discarded in favour of lowering the window a quarter of an inch and aiming through it a bleat-like noise, part confused denial and part plea for mercy. Excluding those emitted in response to my children’s appearance in school nativity plays, this might well have been the most pathetic sound I have ever made as an adult. It very shortly plunged down the rankings.
‘We’ve got a wee boy in there, so how do I know you’re not one of those fucken perverts?’
This last word came accessorised with a splendid pair of drawn-out thrumming r’s, though I fear I may not have fully appreciated them at the time. Through a curious osmosis the blood drained from my face and reddened his with the righteous rage of an unhinged vigilante. Sounding like a livestock auctioneer with his pants full of scorpions, I launched into a jabbering saga, which began with my father’s pivotal role in laying out Cumbernauld’s cellular housing units, and didn’t get much further.
‘What the fuck are you on about?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I whimpered. ‘I’m a travelling biscuit salesman with three children.’ A tiny part of my brain registered that this pathetic deception had just enjoyed its final outing. The death of a salesman.
‘You’re a fucken pervert!’ He dredged up a bolus of phlegm and noisily propelled it at the gap above the window; it struck the door frame and clung there, swinging its tail. ‘Cumbernauld has no neds in the old sense,’ breathed Magnus. ‘Every four hundred homes are served by an integrated cellular ned, a ned that rises from the ground itself.’
He seemed to have said all he wanted to say, and I’d already said too much. Cautiously I moved an arthritic hand to the gearstick and engaged reverse, then looked over my shoulder to check the verge behind me for baying mobs, wee boys and the like. In doing so I confronted at close quarters two pairs of damp underpants smeared in hand cream, and I may not have been alone in doing so, because at this point the sole of a white training shoe was forcefully applied to Craig’s driver’s-side rear window.
This impact dislodged the relevant door’s interior armrest, but before it hit upholstery I had dropped the clutch and was very nearly careering backwards through the grass and – ka-BOM, ka-DANG – down on to the road. Some brutal work on the wheel and the gears and Craig was lurching through an about turn. Its apex was a blur of yelling and sportswear: ‘… set fire to that fucken car WITH YOU INSIDE!’
I’ll say this for Cumbernauld: when there’s fucking-off to be done, you won’t find a better place to do it. Two yanks of the wheel and a minute of unbroken acceleration saw me fairly barrelling out through The Megastructure, my peripheral vision a blur of concrete stilts and mildew. A series of roundabouts were dispatched in a fashion that would have upset Gregory’s father no end, and then I was out of there and away, my heart and Craig’s pumping hard and fast.
Off we fucked through the rain. Soon large buildings clustered the fuzzy horizon, and Ozzy was beseeching me to take the next left, then the next, then to turn around when possible. I ignored him. My after-lunch Glasgow schedule was to take in two fortified sectarian pubs, and a hotel variously reviewed as inferior to a shop doorway, a park and a bus station, overseen by a receptionist who swore at children and flaunted her amphetamine habit. In light of the morning’s excitement, I found I had no stomach for any of this: the city of Glasgow in general, and its 3lb battered cocks in particular. Expressionlessly I registered that we’d hit the coast: a firth was broadening out to my right, its opposite bank patched with misty fields. Unhappy thoughts crowded my mind. What other words in common English usage incorporated the ae digraph and ended in o? I could summon but two: paedo and Maestro. Perhaps it was all Craig’s fault. Or perhaps it was just time to accept, finally, that I had passed into a certain stage of life. It could have been that first grey hair, the first time I went to bed before my children, the moment I found myself typing ‘what to do with leggy petunias’ into the Google search box. But middle age only shut its doors behind me when I recognised that from now on, the threat of a good shoeing wouldn’t be down to supporting the wrong team or getting on the wrong bus or dressing too damn sharp for my own good, but looking like a nonce.
Approaching the town of Port Glasgow I stopped for petrol – since leaving the filler cap in Forth I’d been too scared to drive about with more than a third of a tank full – and walking back across the forecourt I saw Craig through the eyes of an overwrought ned. A sorry old heap rendered weird by rarity, with a thousand miles of wintry road filth spattered up his black flanks: a seedy loner on wheels. When I placed my black-gloved hand on the grubby door handle it looked like a cutaway shot in some public information film about stranger danger. There was a carwash round the back and very soon Craig emerged through its furry rollers, steaming and glossy. Catching our reflection in a Port Glasgow shop window, I accepted the effect was wholly counterproductive, a frankly deviant exercise in turd-polishing. I remembered the sound of heels clicking nervously off into the dark as I crawled the kerbs of old Hull, and the question writ large on the young faces that ghosted into my rear-view mirror: what kind of sick creep cares so much about a car like that? At least I now had an answer: the kind that needs setting fire to.
Port Glasgow offered a complementary backdrop. Pebble-dashed housing blocks shared a cul-de-sac with British Polythene Industries. Ramshackle pubs opted for plywood as a glazing material. An enormous new Tesco sat in the wide open space that had once been docklands and shipbuilding yards. In its car park I squeezed in between a burnt-out van owned by some local tanning salon and a replica of ‘Europe’s first commercially successful steamboat’. Then I got out and found myself on wet pavements thronged with glowering descendants of the Dip the Dyer clan, most grotesque and sinister of all the Happy Families. PORT WOMAN 4 TIMES LIMIT, declared a local-rag newsboard, but the only paper still in stock at the shop behind it was the Daily Mail. I bought one and read it back in the paedowagon, slumped on the passenger seat with a battered black pudding in my lap. This tasted rather better than it looked, but then it looked like a forearm boiled in yogurt.
When you cross the Cheviot Hills you cross a great media divide. ‘Except for viewers in Scotland’ is the catchphrase that defines it, a motto bitterly parodied by satirist Armando Iannucci in a sketch mourning the televisual deprivations of his Scottish upbringing. Visiting TV heaven, Armando discovers that while he and his countrymen endured an animated series about Gaelic accidents, the rest of Britain was watching the first live interview with an alien, and being shown how to turn base metals into gold. The display of outraged violence aroused by this revelation sees him cast down to TV hell, where he is condemned for all eternity to watch a Grampian quiz show about hills.
I accept that the Daily Mail probably isn’t ideal reading matter for anyone who fears they may be slipping into the clutches of paranoia. Its editorial policy is neatly summed up by a website entitled the Daily Mail Oncology Project, which details the publication’s tireless efforts to classify all inanimate objects into two types: those that cause cancer and those that cure it. In fact, it occurred to me now that my battered black pudding came close to a Mail journalist’s perfect storm: underclass ned-fodder, probably carcinogenic and definitely Scottish. Because even with Gordon Brown’s career in its fading twilight, the paper was still running dire and almost daily warnings of the ‘McMafia threat’: a cabal of Scots that the paper’s reporters had discovered nibbling away at the very fabric of England, infiltrating our politics and media, managing our football clubs, poisoning our swans with euros dipped in swine-flu. I candidly confess that at this stage of my relationship with the would-be me-burners of Scotland, I was looking forward to reading many such tales. After much jabbing at its tiny buttons I navigated my MP3 player to an anthology of appalling – but very English – football songs, and spread my appalling – but very English – newspaper across the dashboard.
I turned to the inside back page and felt a smile – accurately more of a sneer – annex my features: a column about the forthcoming World Cup, and Scotland’s absence from it. A paragraph in and the expression was chased off my face by despair. Say it ain’t so, jock-bothering journos of rant-land, say it ain’t so! I had in my hands a very different Daily Mail, some ‘except for readers in Scotland’ edition that I couldn’t believe the excitable Middle Englanders who wrote and read the paper had allowed to exist. This article was written by a Scottish columnist and from the usual Scottish perspective: to wit, the gleeful wishing of ill upon England and its footballing representatives. ‘The target for our contempt is just so inviting,’ he wrote, a quote deemed so toothsome that a sub-editor had stuck it in a box in bold.
The England 1970 World Cup squad launched into their anthem with wayward gusto, and I allowed myself to dwell upon its copyrighted lyrical sentiment. Presently I went outside and retrieved from the boot a tin of Quality Street the size of Lewis Hamilton’s rear wheel, acquired some days before in another moment of homesick festive weakness. Eleven and a half hours later, knee-deep in harlequin foil wrappings, I eased Craig to a halt outside my house.