The Ghost of Christmas Past

Merry Christmas High Wallers,

Christmas as a bairn was a great time. Up at the crack o' dawn to get tore in aboot the presents. Subbuteo, Oor Wullie annuals, Aurora Monster kits, Johnny West. One year I mind I got a metal "Robin Hood" crossbow with a fair powerful elastic band that fired wooden arrows wi suckers on the end. Once the suckers were off and the arrows given a healthy sharpening on the pavement it was good to go.

By aboot 4pm the auld boy would be snoring in his chair. yer Ma would be fussing aboot, doing dishes and offering you mair food. We of course had ate oor body weights in Selection Boxes, knelt on Charlie George (permanenlty reducing Arsenal to 10 men) and lost the rat from the Forgotten Prisoner of Castel Mare.

The telly in the evening was always a good way to round off a happy day. Mike Yarwood was pish but the "Two Ronnies" were aye a class act.

This year it is all Ipods and high tec stuff for my bairns, who think it is funny to make wee films of me snorin' in my chair so that they can put them on their Facebook for aw their mates to laugh at.

Nae Two Ronnies but at least we've got The Royle Family.

I'm off for a Yuletide log !!!

Have a guid yin.


P.S
Without a word of a lie, I was looking after the wife's shop last weekend and a woman came in and bought 4 candles. I admit I was tempted.

The night Joe Strummer came to town

It was 16th November '78. The boys of the High wall had left behind their innocent carefree days and embarked on the world of work. Factory worker, bank monkey and trainee squaddie.

Despite growing up in the shadow of various world renouned seats of learning, there was no University route mapped out for the High Wall lads. Yer auld boy might have printed text books or worked as a Jannie at the Uni, yer Ma might have been a cleaner in the place, but it was not for the likes o' us.

University is a load of pish anyway as Arkos later discovered. Daft young laddies are better off in the real world, you learn more that will help you oot in the long run.

Anyway I digress.

There is a great wee Johnny Cash song called "The night Hank Williams came to Town" It's all about that moment of enlightenment you get as a young man when really great music comes to your wee corner of the world. The important thing about the sentiment of the song is that it is not about going to your first "T in the Park", it is a much more personal than that. It is about the great artist coming to where the real people are and how the music touches their lives.

As kids in Edinburgh you refer to your home/home area as your "bit" i.e "Come roond tae ma bit aboot 7 ish and we'll head oot"

On 16th November 1978 Joe came roond tae oor bit. Not only that he brought the rest of the Clash with him.

I'm not going to wax lyrical about the gig other than to say I have never seen another band come even close to the energy and passion. I now realise what a privilege it was to have seen the Clash at their height. To have just turned 17 and witness that, left it's mark. The Clash politicised you, gave you a real sense of equality and social justice, and also made you skank like a Mofo.

In June 1999 Arkos and I saw Joe and the Mescaleros play their 4th ever gig at King Tuts and as Arkos said on the night "it was like they had wheeled him out of a Clash storage cupboard and back onto the stage". Joe was a few pounds heavier (I'm a fine one tae talk) but still rocking good style. Grown men were close to tears hearing "White Man in the Hammersmith Palais" and other Clash standards sung by the man himself. It was the stuff we thought we would never hear again, and whilst it was not the Clash, it was more real than a money driven nostalgia circuit reunion. Joe still wanted to create new stuff and celebrate the old stuff. He had the spirit of punk.

His Mescaleros catalogue stands up against any volume of work. Over the next few years Arkos and I caught Joe whenever he came to Scotland, usually the Barrowlands. The shows just got better and better. It was our wee winter night oot and it fair lifted the gloom.

On 11th November 2002, almost 24 years since we first saw him, Joe came back tae "oor bit". After all the Liquid Rooms is an easy enough daunder from the High Wall. It was a fine night of music.

6 weeks later, Joe sat down at his kitchen table after walking his dogs and left us forever.

Joe Strummer

21 August 1952 – 22 December 2002

Seaside fun.

We used tae love gaun doon tae Porty. A day at the shws wiz like the High Wall highlight o the year.
Wi about 10 pence in yir grubby mit thit wiz more than likely earned by collecting auld juice bottles, ye were through the door and intae Nobles arcade wonderland wi its smell o Westler hamburgers and sweeties. Now came the hardest part! What tae spend the pennys oan? Ah wiz aye a man fur the video games more importantly Battlezone!
Ah hud spen most o ma money before you could say shit. The game wiz pretty simple. Ye hud tae shoot o the tanks withoot gettin shot yerself. As ye can see on the top pictue ye hd tae look through the view finder and steer wi the levers. Ye hud tae be big enough tae see through the viewfinder.
Auld Noble wiz a clever man he hud pit doon a step fur us bairns so we could play the game, ahm sure he wiz hooked on it an all. So fur a you High Wall batlezone blasters heres a link fur you tae play the real game.

http://atari.com/arcade/battlezone

Huv fun bit watch oot fir auld Noble coz he could go radge if ye kicked his machines!

Chicken's Feet

As we get on in life it's mair aboot Crow's feet, but back in day it was all aboot these wee beauties.

Up Causewayside near Braid Place there was a poultry butcher, which was more of a "making stuff for other butchers" butcher, than yer "go in and buy mince" type butcher. No awfy sure what the boy got up tae in there but he used to have binloads of sawdust covered animal bits ootside.

On the way to school we would often have a quick rummage through his buckets to see if there was any good stuff.

The jewel in the crown were chicken's feet. I think some of them might even have been turkey feet cos they were a fair size. They were yellow gnarly things wi nails and wrinkles. Best bit though was the tendons.

You could get a grip of the tendons where the foot had been chopped and pull them to work the toes. If you had a full set of intact tendons, you had hit paydirt and had a proper working alien hand that would move at your command.

What use is a fully functioning chicken hand? To a '70's bairn the list was endless. Everything from grabbing folks necks in assembly to giving the finger to passing car drivers. A personal favourite was bringing yer money out yer pocket to pay for stuff in shops with a hideous claw. How we laughed..

One drawback is that they went off pretty quick when stored in yer pocket on a summers day. But that was awright cos you just went back the next day and raked aboot for a fresh one.

The marketing tagline could have been...
Chicken's feet ©. The more portable "Armatron" alternative for the less well off "High Wall" bairn who's always on the move.


(click to enlarge)

Spare us the Cutter

High Wall hairdressers came in 2 forms, Bernie or Ronnie.

There was an earlier 3rd one I recall, on Causewayside near the Junction with Grange Road . He was a right bastard. He lured you in with his fancy D.C comics and whilst you were engrossed in the tales of the Green Lantern, he was at you with the scissors. Left you looking like a right fanny.

When you went to school after a haircut you always git the pish ripped oot of you. Wouldnae matter if it had been styled by Vidal Sasoon himself, it had to be ridiculed by the entire playground.

Neither Ronnie or Bernie were exactly "Vidals". They would however have the audacity to put pictures of Tony Curtis on the wall. If you asked either of these jokers for a "Curtis" you had a good chance of leaving the shop looking like the bastard child of Ian Curtis and Curtis Stigers (i.e sporting a mullet that hangs awkwardly).

Ironically Tony Curtis real name was Bernard. I recall that Arkos once went to Bernie for a Bowie cut. I'm still not convinced that Bernie actually knew who Bowie was though.

Now parents liked Ronnie and Bernie because they were cheap and handy. As you got older and had more say in things, you went to Bob's Continental at Tollcross or Woods up at Drummond Street. I had to pay the extra out of my own pocket, but it was well worth it.

A few years back I took my wee lad for a haircut in Blairgowrie. There was a wee cheap place full of farmers. Right traditional looking gaff, still had the wooden till, bay rum, wooden board for the bairns to sit on, the lot. I thought braw, just like the auld days. Ended up having to drive all the way into Perth to get a repair job done before the wife got home. He honestly looked like that wee lad in the picture up the top.

That is the thing about nostalgia, if something was wrong the first time around, chances are it will not have changed. That is also why Woods is still there going strong.


(click to enlarge)

Stand up to yer neeps

click to enlarge

"Stand up to yer neeps" is a brilliant auld Perthshire rural saying.
It is used to describe someone who is often unremarkable and overlooked but yet reliable in adversity. "aye he's a quiet lad but he'll stand up to his neeps"
It means folk that just get on wi' it instead of moanin' aboot awthing or blaming the government, cooncil, guy next door, ect ect.

If mair of us stood up to our neeps this would be a barry wee country.

Lecture over. Check oot ma lantern. Took us aboot an hour. Disnae look much in the first photo but pit the lights oot and stick a tealight in the felly and Boris is yer uncle.

Now I take on board what had been said aboot the tumshie and I do admit that I prefer the smell o a neep lantern. The soup is also a big bonus, but there is no way that you could have rattled of a quick Karloff wi an auld neep. It would have been a trip tae the sick kids.

Remember the auld classic guisin' joke -

"Did ye hear aboot the greengrocer whae died? "
"There was a big turnip at his funeral."

Still gits a laugh.

Happy halloween my High Wall droogs.

Let it glow, let it glow, let it glow!

Aye there seems to be a wee bit o' a theme developing here over the last few posts, all about glow in the dark stuff and Halloween. A good combination if you ask me.

I remember the time that a gang of us were mucking aboot one time, back in the day, around Halloween. It was dark and yon orange street lights were illuminating Clerk Street. We had managed to get free glow in the dark cardboard masks free with The Topper or it might have been The Beezer. The mask was the face of one of the comic character a dude called Splurge Last of The Goblins.

The glow in the dark paint on the masks was pretty cheap stuff and when you touched it, it almost felt like running yer finger along a piece of fine sandpaper. Anyway, we were standing outside the Southern Bar with oor masks on scaring the auld drunks as they left the pub. Trouble is that the glow- in- the- dark effect did not last very long, so we had to keep running into folks' stairs to re-charge them under the stairlights. Aye it was great fun. And all for the price of a comic!

Mind you God knows what scary properties yon cheap glow-in-the-dark paint had. No doubt nowadays it would never make it past health and safety inspectors. And I sometimes wonder if the reason I am losing my hair is really male pattern baldness, or something much more sinister!!!

All the best!

Arkos