Friday night, and over to Leeds for a night with Kim and The Racing Commentator. We all chipped in for some pepsi. Enjoyable at the time, streams of consciousness as conversation, but it made my stomach croak with the pain of repressed farts as soon as me and Kim were in our restless bed. I tried to relieve my gut-ache by doing minimalist farts that would not be out of place in Cork Street, but the operation proved noisier than I had hoped.
I had to get off the next morning because I was up to Glasgow. I fiddled a much reduced fare, paying only for the section where they're likely to check your ticket. Me, Trina and a female friend of mine I introduced her to, were going to my favourite club of the moment, a wee little basement place in the Merchant City.
I was staying in Govan, so I called in for an hour at The Brechins, one of those combinations of Scots Baronial and chipped 70s plastic that Glasgow does so well. I invited myself onto a table half occupied by a sixtysomething couple. When he stood up to leave, he took her in an embracing, mouthy, lippy kiss.
"Are yous two going out with each other?" "No, no, that's my brother-in-law. I've never had anything like that off him. Never. Never before known him like that in my life." "Oh right, it just looked like you'd been going out for years." "No, he's just so quiet normally. He's never had a girlfriend, I think. I've never known him do that. I'm not ready for anything like that though." "It's nice though, isn't it?" I didn't want to leave her, and we bade each other a stroky farewell short of lip-kissing.
In the club, girls outnumber blokes. A girl comes up to me and puts her hand round my waist. "Yer dain thess wegglin." "What?" "Yer dain thess wegglin. No -- yer dain thess wegglin. I'll show ye. I'll copy ye," and we wiggled together. I wasn't aware that I was wiggling, but was happy to go along with a touchy imitative Weegie bird on a dancefloor.
A man came up to me. "Next tam ahm heer, I'm wer'n those hot pants, lake Ozzez galfrend." Ozzy is one of the DJs, and he did have a woman arraying herself about him who was dressed in an orange translucent top, dark blue bra, orange hot pants, and black kitten heels.
I got touched round the waist every time someone I half-knew left the dancefloor, both by men and women. My policy on dancefloors is to say nothing, do nothing, never approach women or say a single word to them. And in the club I was at, it works.
Trina got jealous of girls talking to me, shuffling away in a stoop, before doing an ostentatiously unaffected dance a few yards away from me while I am being interrogated about mah wegglin. She had a cold, and at half past one she said she'd like to go. I tried not to look relieved. Once we'd gone through the long ritual of leave-taking, and once I'd clamped the women into a taxi and watched it turn into Ingram Street, I went down the stairs, went straight back onto the dancefloor, and exhaled with real relief.
My journey back was eventful. I thought it'd be about an hour's walk back to my airbnb in Govan. I dispensed a couple of quid to beggars and got some chips from the chippy outside Central Station. I walked out along Dumbarton Road, through Anderstoun and past Kelvin Hall, and got as far as the Clyde Tunnel, which I needed in order to get to the south side. Beside the tunnel for vehicles, there's one for pedestrians.
Arriving at the entrance, it was double padlocked. To cross the Clyde legitimately would have meant walking all the way back to the next bridge at the SECC (the Exhibition Centre), adding another two hours to my walk. I had 40p on me and had lost my cards at this point, so no money for a taxi. I clambered over the barrier separating pedestrians from cars, and started my descent into the vehicular tunnel. There's a narrow walkway less than a foot wide, every car roaring itself into a fury of noise. One false step, and that's it; and whilst dying from having been hit by a car at 3.30am in the Clyde Tunnel whilst full of powdered refreshments is an honourable way to go, I'd prefer the most mediocre demise, much postponed.
At breakfast the next morning, in a disarmingly bohemian place -- framed poems in the bedroom about letting yourself go -- I casually ask whether the Clyde passenger tunnel is open twenty-four hours a day. "Yes," she said. "You just have to buzz yourself in and wait for them to open it." I do vaguely remember an intercom button now.
In the pub the following morning, I saw a young lad about twelve wearing a T-shirt with the word "CUNT" in eighteen-inch-high letters printed across its back. I went up to him and told him that that was a brave T-shirt to wear. Someone, possibly his mum, didn't know what I was talking about until he turned round and showed it to her. She was laughingly nonplussed. I told him he'd be on this blog on Monday, so with apologies for being late, a drink in your direction. I'm not sure what to think about it.
