“I did it to stand up for Airdrie. I did it because of Memorial Device. I did it because later on everyone went off and became social workers and did courses on how to teach English as a foreign language or got a job in Greggs. Well, not everybody. Some people died or disappeared or went into seclusion, more like. I did it – well I was going to say I did it because back then anything seemed possible, back then being 1983 and 1984 and 1985, what I call the glory years. The glory years in Airdrie – what a joke, right? But really that would be untrue because back then everything seemed impossible.”
“…we’re looking at a time before the internet, when routine access to anything but local culture was hard work. The music papers gave you glimpses of music from all over the world, and not just music—there was also film, comics, science fiction, radical politics, all kinds of layers of pop and semi-pop and avant-garde weirdness It was a fascinating map of the wider world, full of information you wouldn’t happen on by any other route, in the 1970s especially, and certainly not from TV or the grown-up papers.”
It provides the police with something to do, and as junkies and potheads are relatively easy to apprehend because they have to take so many chances to get hold of their drugs, a heroic police can make spectacular arrests, lawyers can do a brisk business, judges can make speeches, the big pedlars can make a fortune, the tabloids can sell millions of copies. John Citizen can sit back feeling exonerated and watch evil get its deserts. That's the junk scene, man. Everyone gets something out of it except the junkie. If he's lucky he can creep round the corner and get a fix. But it wasn't the junk that made him creep.
No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats… these are the facts.
