Stuart

My name is Stuart. I was brought up and still live in Clydebank, Glasgow, Scotland, Earth.

Welcome to my bit.

You can look at Clydebank on Google Maps and Street View. To steer you off right, you should, because, unlike Tolkien, I will not be attempting to eloquently describe the beauty and shadiness of my literary world in all their physical minutiae. Satellites can do that now.

Clydebank is in the government council area of West Dunbartonshire which goes out to the west coast at Balloch and Milton and includes some beautiful and interesting towns and villages like Alexandria and the parish of Old Kilpatrick. A lot of people from Clydebank, including myself, call themselves Glaswegian, the same as a person from Whitley Bay might call themselves a Geordie.

My mum (born Vanessa Bia Roget) is an only child, born and raised in Portugal. She met my dad when his parents and his grandparents took him holidaying in the Algarve at 18. It was all very romantic, lovely, soppy bullshit. I never met my mums mum or dad as they both died before I was born, but I will most likely get back to them a bit later. My dad (Robert Lucan McStuart) is Clydebank born and bred, his dad, my Grandpa Boab, an airman and a shipbuilder. My Gran Joan is from Bellshill in Lanarkshire and moved to the Glasgow area to start work as a secretary in a solicitors office in 1952 and shortly after met GB. Dad’s older brother, Steve, has two boys, semi-identical twins Drew and Kyle who are 4 years my senior. Their mum, Aunt Moira, pissed off to Spain with her fancy-man at some point at the start of the 90’ and as far as I know nobody in the family has heard anything of her since. My dad has been a blacksmith since school, and he works council jobs four days out of five and makes items for sale at artisan stalls on a few Sundays throughout the year. My mum is an accountant for a big firm in Glasgow, a job she’s had for 25 years now. Mum moved here to be with my dad after 5 months of Airmail dating. I often questioned why mum was the one to move; I could’ve been brought up in sunny Portugal, and if the quilted multi-universe theory is correct there should be at least one version of this book floating around in which I describe my adventures of being Portuguese. After a 6-month engagement, two years and one day of marriage (including 38 weeks gestation) mum gave birth to me in April 1984. The US president was Ronald Reagan, and Hello by Lionel Richie was top of the UK charts. I was named Stuart McStuart, which isn’t funny but I feel was obviously meant to be. My mum and dad both have a twisted sense of humour, which is, I imagine, part of what I attracted them to each other in the first place. They are obviously a lot more rounded and interesting characters than I’m outlining here for the purpose of this introduction.

One of my earliest memories was of being in my gran and grandpas high rise flat. I remember the living room having garish green wallpaper and a massive wooden fireplace with a tiny Calor gas space heater in the middle. My Gran had loads of little porcelain figures of cute babies and stylised dogs, and they had a big wooden cabinet full of busily patterned plates and cups and elaborately cut crystal goblets and decanters. They moved out of that flat into an upper maisonette in 1987 so I was very young in this memory and I was on my Grandpa Boab’s lap, looking up his nose, and he was telling me memories.

Clydebank was much more of a shithole back in GB’s day. (I’ve always called Grandpa Boab GB, I’m not just being lazy here.) Back in those days it was all steel and coal and grumpy, dirty looking little men and women, laden donkeys and tiny doorways. Smugglers’ coves and smugglers’ codes. Then War and rations and Blitz. Severe poverty. A lot more fields and less Tesco’s in them days. Clydebank’s always been full of cats too, and I reckon with gentrification round here or whatever, people are getting more and more cats. I’m not a fan of the creatures, screaming at each other about their horniness. I remember being around 3 or 4 and Gran’s cat (whose name was simply Cat, hissed with an exclamation mark; CAThh!) used to sit under chairs and beds and take vicious swipes at my ankles. Grandpa Boab hated the cat too and sometimes referred to him as Satan. There was one day in particular (and many more afterwards) when I suspected GB had been trying to poison the bugger because she came lurching into the kitchen from outside and spewed loads of foamy green crap up. Even though the cat could have been out binging on grass, my young self was convinced GB had been feeding the creature Stardrops disinfectant in her cat food. Gran caught me trying to phone the police to report Grandpa Boab.

People were brutal to cats and mutts round our streets. I seen a few strangled and mangled looking cats flow by me at different points along the river Clyde. Beefy’s granddad shot his own dog with a .22 handgun and there was a vicar I heard boasting of how he would trap and spray-paint squirrels, foxes, badgers and magpies. I never did find out where he lived, but a lot of nights I would vividly imagine flying on goose wings across Clydebank, find his traps and cages and jump all over them till destruction. And I would give the evil vicar The Magic Finger, and he’d be away being a spray-painted badger himself, deeply regretting his cruelty to animals.

My mum taught me to read and write before I started school at 5 years old. Just under 4 years later I was at the GP’s with my mum, and I vividly remember the doctor, oblivious to me for a few minutes, asking my mum about her mental health. He asked her about “self-harm”, a horrifying and haunting concept to my young self, and my mum shook her head. The doctor advised her to keep a diary, something about being able to make sense of the world and for my mum to record her moods along with her activities. I asked my mum about this as we were leaving the surgery (I don’t remember what either of us said, so I won’t invent dialogue) and she passionately advised I do as the doctor had advised her, and she took me to John Menzies to buy four mechanical pencils and 25 bright jotters between us. Keen to save myself from self-mutilation, I started my new hobby that evening.

My nubile brain struggled with describing my moods and emotions, and this struggle would often evidence itself as crap doodles in my books. I wrote a lot of lists of things I liked: my favourite dinosaurs, an itemisation of my football player poster collection, my wrestler action figures, pretty much everything I owned. On the run up to my birthdays and Christmas I made little scrap books of things I wanted from the Argos and Littlewood catalogues (other catalogues Are available). I started writing book reports and found these allowed me to start expressing my opinions and feelings. I wrote about experiences and emotional states I didn’t want to forget.