Meantime

by Frankie Boyle

He was five foot six on a warm day, but muscular, and permanently smoking. He was what your granddad looked like while he was killing people in the War.

I often felt that someone using your first name a lot was meant to be kind of demeaning, but this might simply have been a problem with my self-image.

As a rule of thumb, anyone who talks about their values is generally some kind of monster, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt.

He seemed like the sort of guy who needed to clear his throat to get his reflection to come to the mirror.

Glasgow was often rated as one of the happiest cities in the world, possibly because the people who researched these things didn’t understand sarcasm.

I enjoyed this kind of thing. People believing in things. It meant that I didn’t have to talk, and it was often soothing to hear coherent ideas, when so many of my own ideas were primitive impulses mixed up with dreams and snatches of song.

‘You know what I hate? I have a kind of confidence that means when I talk about something I sound like I have a very worked-out opinion. I’m not really like that at all. It’s all just random thoughts held together by doubt. My opinions are by-products of occasional drops in blood sugar.’

I knew right then that, twelve or thirteen years later, perhaps on a trip with my family to the coast, the memory of this conversation would arrive surprisingly in the front of my brain and ruin whatever I was doing.

I’d first met Amy at a fresher’s fair at Glasgow Uni. She was in the year above me and manning a stall about the right to choice in Northern Ireland. It was a cause I totally agreed with: I’d been to Northern Ireland a bunch, and you always met someone who should have been aborted.

If she didn’t have the desire to improve things against insurmountable odds she probably wouldn’t have been with me, and we made it work for a while, like a Bruce Springsteen song.

After she left, I had a one-night stand with a woman who turned to me in the morning and said, ‘I’m quite a keen racist, what about you?’ I briefly imagined what it would be like to fall deeply in love with this far right ethno-nationalist. Maybe one day she’d catch you crying watching some Holocaust documentary and you’d have to pretend that they were tears of laughter.

Not every day is great, but then I do live in Scotland sober.