AUGUST 17TH, 2007 | ARCHIVE

Four in the morning..

Well it’s very late. I fell asleep on the couch, and it’s too late to do anything, and the town is quiet. I spend time picking the font that I will write to you in, in case it makes me a better person. I think that I will go for something boxy, like a EUROSTILE or something, but it’s just not me. I slip into a nice booky-smooky text, and we can begin.

I’m up with the quietness, and now we’re in late August, there is a proper night. Most of the summer in Scotland is spent in eternal twilight because of the high latitudes of our domain. But now the night has returned.

It is rather feeble of me to be up so late. There must be a certain person who craves life so much (but is too cowardly to grasp it) that they hang on to the tail end of the day, engaged in frivolity. This type of person is me. If it is you aswell, then I feel kinship with you. But I still ask you, what are we doing?

My neighbour just crashed in. Wonder if he was engaged in frivolity, or something more substantial. He’s new, I haven’t met him. It’s four in the morning. You can tell from 50 yards away and four plaster walls when a person has had too much to drink, because they just don’t care about waking people up when they stagger in.

Drinking tea.

Earlier, I received an email offering me free business cards. I’ll have those, I thought. You should have them too, from www.vistaprint.com. You should try this game, it’s like a typing assault course. See if you can get the free business cards without ordering anything else from them, or paying anything more than cheap postage. It’ll take you 20 minutes, but it may be worth it.

I was trying to decide what type of business I’d like to be in. Then I thought I ought to be truthful. So I put down

Stuart Murdoch

Playing football, drinking tea
Making records, digging trees

My business card has got a nice picture of a tree on it. Well, not really nice. A watercolour distaster of a tree really, but it goes with the general Alan Partridgeness of it all. I can’t wait to get them. I got a free wallet for them too.

A Kissing Puritan

So I drift around the question answer page, and I see one from Benedek that asks

Stuart: What would you do if you found yourself in 1985?

I find myself on Union Street in Glasgow, on a hot July day of that year.

I dust myself down. In the general confusion of time travel there is still a trail of music in the air. It’s the strings at the end of the Commotion’s Heartbroken.

I look across the street and there in the window of Virgin is the new Commotion’s record Five Easy Pieces. There’s a big window display. It’s weird to me that something that I perceive as being a bit swotty could also be so popular. But I like it. There’s no one else around, at least no one who likes music like I do. It’s 1985. Glasgow is full of Glaswegians.

So I go to a shop and buy a checked shirt. I get some jeans that aren’t skin tight, and I tuck them up at the bottom. I go to a cobblers and buy a pair of Doc Martin shoes. I have to really look for them. Buying Docs is like buying Monkey Boots, condoms or a Buzzcocks' t-shirt. It takes a bit of looking around.

I go into this bar because I reckon I should try to get a job and shake myself up. This place is pretty stylish. I’ve never even been in before. It’s full of Glasgow soulboys and fifties' Americana. They ask me where I usually drink.

“I don’t really go to pubs.”
“So where do you go on a night out?”

I usually twist off the bottle sweet Italian wine and drink it fast, then run out into the park to get a buzz going. Then maybe we’ll head down to the 50p disco and dance to The Blue Nile and Hipsway. I don’t tell that to the guy though. I don’t like him, and he doesn’t like me. He is definitely never going to give me a job. (In the following 15 years I will always to fail to get any sort of job which could be regarded as remotely hip, or even pleasant. I am not to know this at this time…)

I wandered up the road after that. There’s a girl that I said I might meet up with later but I’m feeling a bit funny about it. You would think I would be glad, but I just can’t get to feel so good about it. It’s been ages since I had a ‘date’. Years even. In fact, did I ever have a proper date? Probably not. But I’m not nervous. I think I’m just a bit numb.

We kissed a bit when I met her the other night. We were both a little bit drunk. Well, I was certainly. And she smelt of wine. And I didn’t mind that. But she also smelt of smoke; she was a smoker. I never thought it would bother me, but it really put me off kissing her. I just couldn’t get past it. Maybe after all this time of non-kissing I have become a kissing puritan.

When I meet her later, I kidded on that I wasn’t feeling well. You should have seen me. The thing is, I sort of made myself not feel too good, just by kidding on that I wasn’t feeling too good. I felt sick and I think I looked pale.

“You look pale,” she said
“ ... ”
“You better go home and take it easy.”

So I went back over the hill to my house, and locked myself in like one of the three little pigs. I didn’t kiss her goodbye.

In a while, one of the other little pigs, Sean, phones me up. The phone shocks me, because it’s dark now, and I realize that I was dozing.

“You want to go to the club? Peter’s going.”

Peter's the third pig.

“Yeah, ok. Meet you downstairs in 10 minutes.”

So Sean comes along the street, and we go out to the club. We just have to walk back over the hill, it’s close. We’re practically jogging along, in a good mood. As we come round the corner, we walk straight into the girl.

Man, she gives me this look that is meant to freeze! And it does freeze me. For a while it does. Until we get to the club and start having a good time, dancing to The Blue Nile and The Housemartins and Hipsway.

I mean, it’s 1985. I’m dumb and young and I know what I like and I do it, and when I’ve stopped doing it, I go to bed, and wake up early and have breakfast, and survey the day.

But if you’re asking me to write a different ending to the story now, then I would write a different ending. I would have danced with the girl. I would have taken her to the club and let her polka dot dress fan out. I would have let her chiseled bob-cut hair touch my face as she spins out. I would have touched her waist, and given her a shove. I would have watched her, dancing to The Blue Nile, to ‘Faron Young’ , to Hipsway.

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