sunday times column week fifteen

Stspiecewk16

This week all of America’s celebrity magazines are full of Kevin Federline’s subpoena spree, his attempts to serve court orders on various employees/relatives and rehabs in the run up to a bid to change the custody arrangements.

Britney Spears is accused of being an unfit mother, of putting fizzy drinks in her kids’ baby bottles, keeping them up all night so they’ll sleep the next day, dating a Vegas magician, and smashing into parked cars in full view of thirty paparazzi then walking away. She has also been photographed snuggling up to various people in pools and hot tubs all around town.

One magazine’s shrink suggests that she might be bi-polar. To give her credit, she’s not devoid of all maternal feelings, she did ask her dentist if he’d whiten her kids’ teeth.

With Lindsay off in rehab in Utah, Nicole Ritchie pregnant and Paris keeping a relatively low profile, someone has to pick up the slack. Even Amy Winehouse who said no, no, no to rehab has elected to address her pharmaceutical intake and is in treatment here. She reportedly overdosed on a large cocktail of class A drugs including ketamine, or special k, a horse tranquiliser.

The obsessive and constantly updated coverage of Britney’s sad demise has a motorway pile up quality to it, you know that you shouldn’t really be staring but you just can’t help sneaking just one more look. I wonder how future generations will view our unsavoury voyeurism.

It makes me think of Bedlam, the Royal Bethelem Hospital in London. This was the Victorian world’s first psychiatric hospital. For a penny visitors could peer into the cells, view the freaks and laugh at their fights and sexual antics. Visitors were permitted to bring long sticks with which to poke and enrage the inmates. We are much more sophisticated, we have the paparazzi with their long lenses.

On Friday my kids went to yet another theme park with their summer camp. This one is called California Big Adventure and the camp suggested they be given twenty dollars each for lunch and souvenirs. My ginger brood insist that this is not enough.

At my high school we once went to Glen Shee in Aberdeenshire for a one day skiing trip, we were meant to wear water proof clothing and I remember that I wore these painter’s trousers on that were too big for me, covered in yellow paint and not actually water proof.

I only got as far as putting skis on and shuffling around in icy puddles. I went to the café where I discovered that I couldn’t even afford a Mars Bar. We went with Mr Connolly the technical drawing teacher who looked like Peter Cushing and was the colour of tracing paper due to his constant smoking.

On the way home along the winding roads some kid threw up, triggering a chain reaction. By the time we pulled up in Cambuslang we were all knee deep in honked up Opal Fruits and regurgitated Curly Wurlies. Thank God for the painter’s trousers.

In a couple of weeks time Grace starts a new school and she tells me that she is nervous about it all. I try to console by telling her about my high school but it doesn’t help as she thinks I’m either making it all up or at the very least exaggerating.

My worst teacher was Mr McGann, a gingery, bull necked psychopath who ‘taught’ technical drawing. He was big on blanket punishments, and loved belting the whole class. There was something so openly sadistic about him that makes me shudder even now . He carried two belts with him and alarmingly gave them women’s names, one was called Wee Ina, the other Big Bertha.

This sounds like a joke, but I promise you this is the truth ; at our school even the janny carried a belt. He was an intense red head with a beard. He once tried to belt me out in the yard for taking a short cut past some building works. I felt that there was something not right about a janny giving you the belt out in the playground after school was over and I ran off. He looked exactly like Van Gogh, if Van Gogh had been an irate janny.

To be fair to the teachers, there were some crazy kids at my school, like Gerry Duffy who spent a morning rolling around in puddles so that he could come back in the afternoon wearing his new Wrangler jacket and jeans. He once stood on his desk and challenged the head of the school to a ‘square go’. He was eleven years old.

He was from the Circuit, an area of Cambuslang which was as rough as a bear’s arse and had one or two crazy families who worked in the Chunky Chicken factory. Every now and then an entire family would show up outside our school to settle some kind of vendetta. They were easy to spot, they were the ones with a couple of dogs, an air rifle and an array of chicken slaughtering equipment.

A TV film crew once went in there to do a documentary on social deprivation but their investigation had to be abandoned when the locals broke into their van and stole all their equipment.

“Excuse me, pal, wanna buy a TV camera ? It’s no knocked.”