Home Articles The Scots Lad Episode #7: The Scots Lad: Lassitude in Livingstone
Episode #7: The Scots Lad: Lassitude in Livingstone
Written by Gerry Hodes   
Friday, 15 March 2013 14:30
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Episode #7: The Scots Lad: Lassitude in Livingstone
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In 1955, our number came up in the great Glasgow Corporation lottery that was the Gorbals clearance project. Amidst much muttering, my parents dragged my sister and me to view sparkling, semi-detached council houses, newly thrown up en masse in locales previously unheard of by the scruffy denizens of our decrepit slum citadel: Castlemilk,Drumchapel, Possilpark etc.

They were built without regard for humans. Sure, they contained facilities of which the great unwashed had hitherto only dreamt: bathrooms, inside toilets, plurality of bedrooms, small, neat patches of grass front & rear and, often, even central heating. Familiar community components, unaccountably, were missing: like shops, cinemas, pubs and the various centres that people require to enable them to mix and meet other humanoids. The odd church, surgery or school could never properly serve that function, but that fact somehow escaped the thought processes of the planners. Or, if it did, they thought ‘stuff ‘em, they’re all drunks anyway, let’s save them from themselves’.

To these new dwellings, the City Fathers moved an assortment of tribal Gorbalese: mostly deprived, whether aspirational working class or not, usually down at heel, often socially retarded, financially illiterate or dehumanised by reason of family breakdown; or all of the foregoing. Whatever, they were re-housed, then mainly left to their own devices and a long and tortuous bus ride away from all that was familiar to them.

The Corporation bosses themselves generally were ensconced in their own comfortable, amenity-rich, suburban villas, far away from the vast, sterile estates they were creating for their inferiors. There they could bask smugly in their own rosy glow of self-evident achievement in improving the lives of their voters. Except it wasn’t really progress at all.

What happened was that existence in these Gulags became wretched and, within ten years huge cracks appeared in the fabric of almost everything: particularly the properties themselves, which, if not jerry-built, were hurry-built and often proved incapable of long-term protection against the ravages of Scottish meteorology: or the daily assaults by hordes of feral offspring, left to fabricate their own amusement, in the absence of formal leisure alternatives, restraining parents or respected authority.

I am aware that that much of the foregoing is highly challengeable and, possibly, excessively simplistic, but who wants several pages of carefully researched social demography inserted into an episode of the Scots Lad in Zambia? Not even the eponymous SL himself, so forgive my iconoclastic tendencies and here is the point I’m labouring to make: my mother kept us out of Apache-land, by, probably, using her powers of inherited witchcraft to predict the woeful future for such estates and then demand of Glasgow Corporation that they offer her family alternative housing. Which they did. Wise decision chaps, she’s really scary.

And that’s how we ended up in a low high-rise, allegedly luxury, development in a south-western suburb of the city; still firmly working class, but well away from alien items like grass and thoroughly peppered with all the established essentials for community life that were missing from the new estates. Plus we had a balcony and constant hot water, a bath to contain it and radiators hot enough to fry an egg upon, due to them being incapable of regulation.

I’m hard on the old mater, mainly because she bloody-well deserves it, but that burst of unaccustomed perspicacity, I’ll always acknowledge, with gratitude.



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