GREGOR ADDISON was born in Dalkeith in 1966 and raised in Alexandria and Clynder. He worked as a chainman/labourer until he was twenty-two, then went to Newbattle Abbey College where he studied Philosophy and English Literature; from there to Aberdeen University, studying English Literature and Gaelic; then to Jordanhill College. He teaches English at Clydebank College.
Harold Pinter once said that, at some point, the world and your world must meet. For a long time it seemed to me that life was lived elsewhere; why would I write about where I live? What is there to say? But I gradually saw that the push and pull of historic changes might be read in the working lives and movement of my own family members. Families tell stories – not all of them true, perhaps – and for some of the poems here I was torn about how much of the truth should be in them. Did I even have a right to tell the stories? I reminded myself that these stories have been passed down through many re-tellings and I suspect they have been shaped many times before they even got as far as my ears. The poems that appear here are not just a way of locating myself – though they are certainly that – but they point to other lives lived, to abandoned dreams and personal tragedies.
My immediate world is the west coast of Scotland, particularly the area around Loch Lomond, the Gareloch, and extending all the way to Glasgow. Balloch and Dumbarton are where my parents were born and I can’t help but remember two stories told to me over the years. In the late 1940s, my mother was taken on a walk up a local coffin road known as the Staney Mullan, which offers views over Loch Lomond and the Vale of Leven. My mother’s uncle had a small portable radio and this was playing Edith Piaf’s ‘La Vie en Rose’. Still a child, my mother looked down on Loch Lomond and its many islands and thought she was looking out upon Canada and Australia. The second story is one my father recently told me and involves another local place, the Dumbarton Crags – a volcanic ridge that runs along the hills above Dumbarton. As a boy, my father used to sit with his father listening to Conan Doyle’s The Lost World on the radio. Later, up on the Crags, he’d imagine this was his lost world. At some point, the world and your world must meet; sometimes, it occurs through a child’s imagination; sometimes, through the need for employment that forces us to travel. Many of these poems are about the points at which the local and the world meet through various individuals’ experiences.