Who needs normal anyway?

Photo by Dug Blane

My son has always sung from a different hymn sheet. He was special in the modern sense of the word that in less enlightened times would have been labelled backward or delinquent. 

He was none of those. He was dyslexic and he was thrawn, which is one of those old Scots words that has no exact translation into English. Stubborn, obstinate, determined to do things his own way. All that and more. A battle of wills between a mum and a one-year-old should end in mum's will prevailing, the child-rearing manuals tell us. Aye right. 

From an early age he was always breaking things. If he didn't break them he bent them out of shape. We gave him a Rubik's cube once and within an hour it was a bunch of brightly coloured bits, aesthetically arranged on the kitchen floor. A trike became a dismantled wheel and pedal mobile, suspended from the ceiling.  

His mum said he was a vandal but I figured him for a young engineer, taking things apart to see how they worked. The same idea occurred to him, so he studied car mechanics at college for a while. He was good at it but it wasn't really him. 

"I see being an artist hasn't made you less annoying," I tell him in the St Louis café bar at the far end of Dumbarton Road, as he shoogles our table and keeps on shoogling it, long after anyone else would have folded a menu and shoved it under the short leg.

"Just the opposite, as it goes," he says. "Thing is I've been hearing that from people all my life: "'What's that you're doing?' 'Stop it now!' 'Don't be so bloody annoying.'"

"Did you ever consider not being so bloody annoying?" I say. 

"I did, but it's like that writer's mum who said, 'Why be happy when you could be normal?'"

"That's a coincidence," I say. "I was talking about that with Carol the other day. Are you telling me you tried to be normal?"

"I wouldn't go that far," he says. "But if everyone tells you to stop doing stuff for years and years and years it has an effect. You do that stuff less. Which was all wrong for me."

He angles his head back so he can see under the table, then tries shoogling it from side to side, instead of back and forth. "Is it going to take years and years for you to stop doing that?" I say, as my coffee sloshes over and spreads across the surface.

"Sorry," he says. "The thing is, this is part of my artistic process."

Photo by Dug Blane

"That's becoming your answer to everything," I say. "'I'm sorry I burned down Westminster, your honour, with all the MPs inside it. It was part of my artistic process.'"

"Cracking idea," he says. "But listen. I'm only just getting this myselif. I've discovered there's different stages to fiddling with things - which I've done all my life without knowing why.

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then you annoy them, then they try to make you stop."

"Then you win?" I say. 

"Then you get art," he says. "Not always but often enough to make it worth sticking at it. That's what I've discovered. It validates all that fiddling I used to do, without knowing why I was doing it."

"Now that is really annoying, " I say. 

"What is?" he says. 

"As a dad who wants his son to succeed, I can't tell you to stop shoogling the table now, can I?"

"You can't," he says, giving it an extra shove that tips my cappuccino into my lap. 

"Performance art?" he says, looking pleased with himself.

"Behavioural science?" I say, smacking him gently round the head.

Postscript

"They're your nail-varnished hands in the photo, aren't they?"

"They are."

"I don't want to sound stupid but what were you holding the camera with?"

"My other hand. I took two shots then photoshopped them together. If you look carefully you can see the join. A bit like the back of your ..... "

"Don't push your luck, son."

Soul wings and roundabouts

Photo by Dug Blane

"I'm worried," I confide in Carol, as I'm driving her home after her work. 

"What about?" she says.

"I think I've made a wee mistake and condemned my soul to everlasting torment."

"Normal people mislay their car keys," she says. "How did you manage to lose your soul?"

"Susan was going to church this morning and wanted my company," I say. "Everyone there has been praying for wee Sally. She had a lot on her mind and didn't tell me what to do."

"And you received communion?" she says.

"I did," I say.

"But you're not a Catholic," she says. "You shouldn't have."

"I know that now. I've looked it up. But it seemed rude to stay seated. I did it with respect and good intentions. So I'll be all right, won't I?"

She says nothing, as I slow down to let a posse of tiny tots in triple pushchairs, shoved by green-smocked nursery workers, get safely across the road. 

"Won't I?" I ask again, and my peripheral vision tells me she's staring at me. 

"I don't think so," she says at last. "I think you're screwed."

"Define 'screwed'," I say.

"Eternity in the big bad fire, tormented by demons."

"That's screwed," I tell her. "Can I get a second opinion?" 

"You should," she says. "Talk to the priest. Explain what happened. The trouble is you weren't in a state of grace when you received communion."

"Because I'm not a Catholic?" I say.

"Because your soul is stained with unrepented mortal sin," she says.

"I don't think so," I say. "I'm a good guy."

"You'd be surprised," she says. "It's a long list."

"Such as?" I say.

"Such as homosexual acts, idolatry, incest, lying and masturbation," she says. "You're in the frame for at least one of those, I'm thinking."

"I am," I say. "I don't want to talk about it. It's embarrassing."

"We've all done it," she says. 

"Worn an amulet of the Buddha and rubbed it at times of stress?" I say. 

"Oh, right," she says. "Idolatry. No, I've not done that."

The nursery worker at the tail end of the expedition smiles in our direction, and a ginger-haired squirt in the buggy she's shoving waves at us. I wave back at him, slip the car into gear and pull gently away.

"You are down for one on that list though," I say. 

"I am," she says. "I can't go to church now because of it."

"I thought God allowed gay feelings," I say. "As long as you don't act on them. Tell Him you haven't done it in a while."

"I'm hoping that'll change," she says. "I want a long-term relationship. If I promise God stuff I can't stick to, it'll make things worse."

"Worse than eternal damnation?" I say.

"Satan's inventive," she says.

"It's a high price to pay for being yourself," I say. "Reminds me of Jeanette Winterson's mum: 'Why be happy when you could be normal?'"

"Like you have a choice," Carol says. "And occasionally it is easier being a lesbian."

"Yeah, when?" I say.

"When I was stopped by the police a few months back. I got confused at a roundabout, with them in a car behind me. They pulled me over and gave me a hard time and endless questions. Then I mentioned my girlfriend and they're like 'Whoa', and let me go right away."

"Scared of being done for discrimination?" I say.

"Right," she says. "It's called 'playing the gay card'."

"Any idea what card I should play when I talk to the priest?" I say. 

She studies me in silence some more. "Perplexed Protestant," she says.

"I'm not a Protestant," I say. 

"Brainless Buddhist," she says.

"I can do that," I say.

"I know you can," she says.

It's possible to be too attractive

The firm conviction that no animal is ever going to hurt me would, if I lived in some parts of the world, be a fatal error.

I don't believe for instance the stories about hippos being deadly killers. They live on leaves, bark and vegetation, for heaven's sake, which is pretty much what I eat every day. Vegetarians aren't dangerous.

I like spiders and snakes, having had a tarantula walk on my hands and an African rock python wrapped around my neck. 

The snake smelled my forearm with a darting tongue before nuzzling the back of my hand with its head, as a cat would, while the spider touched my palm softly with her foot, feeling for danger and finding none, before planting her surprisingly heavy body and raising another tentative leg for the next step. In both cases I got a strong feeling of shared sentience. 

All this, I'm guessing, has its origins in a childhood spent in Scotland, a country devoid of dangerous animals, except for the female Homo sapiens, which will attack when provoked and has been known to bite the head off the male after mating. 

So when the biggest pig I've ever seen comes lumbering out of the New Forest at me, I stand my ground, certain I won't get hurt, despite the huge disparity in our weights and probably intelligence. 

Sure enough the quarter-tonne sow stops short of trampling me into the dust and contents herself with nuzzling my groin with a wet and substantial snout. 

The civilities satisfied, she hangs out with me for a while on the grass verge before, like an oil tanker at sea, turning majestically into the wind and setting off into the woods again, on a mission that Rachel explains to me, as we stroll back to the car. 

"It's called pannage," she says.  

"What is?" I say, furtively wiping my trousers and hoping sow slobber doesn't leave stains.

"What you've just seen," she says. "The owners release their pigs in the autumn to wander around the forest, eating the acorns that could otherwise poison horses and cattle. It's a practice that goes back centuries. It's even mentioned in the Domesday Book."

"Fascinating," I say. "My Mum thought pigs were great. Her grandparents had smallholdings in Shropshire, and she'd often spend holidays there as a child. They kept pigs, hens and ducks, she told us, and she loved them all. The pigs, she said, were especially affectionate."

"They are sociable animals," Rachel says. "And at least as smart as a three-year-old child. They're very clean too, contrary to their image. Newborn piglets leave the nest to go to the toilet within a few hours of being born."

"Impressive," I tell her. "It took me years."

"What's more, pigs don't eat like pigs," she says. "They take it slow and savour their food. I'm with your Mum. Pigs are gorgeous. According to one biologist, no other animal is as curious and willing to explore new experiences. "Pigs are incurable optimists," he says, "and get a big kick out of just being."

"Are they ever dangerous?" I ask.

"Only if you threaten their young," she says. "Or look like competition to a dominant male for the affections of a female."

"What?" I say in sudden alarm, ending the fruitless trouser-wiping and looking up to see another pig, even bigger than the first, emerge from the trees, sniff the air and fix an undeniably irate eye on the two of us.

"Tell me something," I say, lengthening my stride and trying to estimate our chances of reaching the car before this big boar gets to us. "How attractive, on a scale of one to ten, would you say that sow just found me?"

"Ten," she says.

"Run!" I tell her.

Pigs and pannage in the New Forest

Top Ten Fascinating Facts About Pigs

Who's the woman in this relationship?

Insults in Scotland are a form of bonding, a cultural device that doesn't travel well I discovered when I first went to England to work, and tossed a bit of friendly banter at a guy called Granville, who took mortal offence and never spoke to me again.

"Big girl's blouse," I thought, until I grew some cultural antennae and noticed the attention to courtesy, even among good friends, that prevails among our southern neighbours. 

Then on a writing trip to Helsinki a couple of years ago, I found Finns using gentle insults in the Scots fashion, and came up with the theory that it's about resisting pressure to conform from a powerful senior partner - both Sweden and Russia having laid claim to Finland throughout much of its history.

I still believe there's some truth in this. What I know for sure is that creative insults, done with humour in the right company, can generate shared pleasure at being on the same wavelength. 

But there is a line. And Susan just crossed it. 

"No I wouldn't," I tell her in Mary's house, where we've gathered on January 1st, to get the New Year off to the traditional sociable start, with whisky, chat and Belgian chocolate.

"You wouldn't what?" Carol says, coming through from the kitchen. "And why are you sitting so far from Big John on the couch?" 

"They were closer a moment ago," Susan says. "Much closer," she adds archly. "They separated when I asked if they were exploring their gay side."

"And I said I didn't have a gay side," John says. "But if I did, I'd be the man." 

"I agreed," Susan says, nodding at me. "And he'd be the woman."

Carol takes a cursory glance at the two of us and sits down in the middle of the sofa. "He would," she announces. "Anybody can see that."

"No they can't," I say, feeling beleaguered. "I don't want to be the woman. I got nothing against women. I like women. I just don't want to be one."

"All we mean is that you have a soft side," Carol says, patting me on the thigh. "You're sensitive," she says, stroking my arm. "It's a good thing."

"That's right," Susan says, keeping her face straight with a struggle. "Lots of guys would envy you."

"Do you envy me?" I ask John and his laugh is loud, raucous and, to my sensitive ear, bloody tactless. 

"He doesn't envy me," I say. "Listen, I got in touch with my feminine side once. She didn't like me."

"Build a bridge," John says, in his gruff, manly way. "Get over it. It's all hypothetical anyway. We're not gay. You and I are not going to have a relationship."

"That's true," I say and start to chill. "This is excellent whisky, Mary," I tell her and she flashes her lovely smile across the room.

"Because if we were gay you wouldn't be my type," John adds.

"What?" I say, the tension back in an instant.

"You heard," he says. 

"This gets worse," I say. "I'm not just a woman. I'm a woman no one could fancy." 

"I fancy you," Susan whispers. "I'll show you when we get home."

I give her a smile and relax - too soon again.

"After you've washed the dishes and made the beds," she tells me.

Speeding through the dark night

"You know what annoys me?" I say to my son, as I'm driving him home after the holidays.

"Bankers," he says. "Windmills. Me." 

"All of the above," I say. "Also people who complain about my singing. I like music. I got a great sense of rhythm. But they tell me I sound like a spaniel with its paw stuck in a fence, when I sing." 

"What annoys me is people complaining," he says. "They do it all the time now, about everything. I get a lot of complaints about my spelling, grammar and pronounciation."

"It's pronounced pronunciation," I complain.

"See that's what I'm talking about," he says. "If you recognise it's wrong you've got the meaning. So picking me up on it is pedantic. Language changes all the time. I'm just ahead of the curve." 

"Well ahead," I say, as the steady beat of the windscreen wipers brings an old Motown number to mind, and I burst into song. 

"Red light, green light, speeding through the dark night, driving through the pounding rain. I gotta see Jane." 

Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, R. Dean Taylor, Don Gooch

"What on earth is that?" he says.

"Great track from the sixties by a guy called R. Dean Taylor," I tell him. "I always thought his name was Ardene."

"There you are then," he says. "Who gives a toss?"

"He does, I'm guessing," I say. "You wouldn't like it if people spelt your name wrong."

"I wouldn't care. I spell it wrong myself. Shakespeare never spelled his name the same way twice."

"He got away with it because he was Shakespeare," I say. "You're not. You don't want people thinking you're illiterate. They won't give you a job."

"I don't want them to give me a job," he says. "They can shove their job."

"What will you live on?" I say.

"Art," he says. "Fresh air and vegetables. The universe will provide."

"No it won't."

"It has so far," he says.

"That wisnae the universe," I say. "That was me." 

"Cheers, man," he says. "Appreciate it."

"Aye, no problem. Windscreen wipers, splishing splashing, calling out her name, I gotta see Jane."

"What I do with people that complain about my spelling or grammar is to thank them," he says. "Then I make the same mistake again as often as possible. It drives them nuts." 

"Why do you want to drive people nuts? I try very hard not to drive people nuts."

"And you still drive them nuts. Wasted effort, I'd say."

"Fair point. I used to make your mother criminally insane by being in the same room with her."

"Same house is how she tells it," he says. "Same town."

"Same country," I say.

"Speaking of which, I'm going to Newcastle for Hogmanay," he says. "Have you noticed how guys in Glasgow are into this Geordie thing now of wandering around with no shirt on, to show how hard they are?"

"I don't get out much," I say.

"You'd see it all the time, if you did," he says. "I'm like all that proves, pal, is you're going home to a nice meal in a warm house with the central heating turned up high. Put a shirt on, ya tosser."

"Although I tried I could not survive," I belt it out and he picks it up and sings along with me. "The frantic pace, the constant chase to win the race, it's not a part of me. I've gotta find what I left behind. Oh, I gotta see Jane.

"Oh I gotta see Jane."

"So you do know the song?" I say when our last notes have sped together through the dark night.

"I do," he says. "Just not the way you sang it. You are a terrible singer, man."

"Are you complaining?" I say. 

"No way," he says.

I Gotta See Jane by R. Dean Taylor. 
Science of singing by Nandhu Radhakrishnan at the University of Missouri.

Deep and crisp and even

Photo by Dug Blane

Three o' clock on a chilly Christmas morning. A woman laden with parcels strides along empty avenues, their wet pavements silver and gold in the streetlights. Occasionally she darts an apprehensive glance behind, before strolling swiftly on. 

Fifty yards back, two dark figures freeze in mid-step, like cartoon characters, every time she does so, before resuming their pursuit. "Slow down, man," the taller one says, wheezing loudly. "You'll give me a heart attack."

"You should lay off the cigarettes," the other replies. "At least you're warm in that big coat. I can't feel my legs. Whose daft notion was this anyway?"

Minutes before it had seemed a great idea, after Anne had set off into the night, refusing to let any of us big, strong men accompany her. She had a point. Chuck was lounging on the sofa at an angle of forty-five degrees, drinking beer and looking fuzzy. I was in an armchair opposite, trying to remember my middle name.

"I'll be fine," she said. "You'll only hold me back and we'll likely all get mugged. I'll be home before the two of you can stand up straight."

The sound of the front door closing behind her seemed to galvanise Chuck. "I'm going after her," he says, leaping to his feet like a young gazelle, then toppling slowly sideways, like a young gazelle that's had ten pints of Guinness, and saving himself by grabbing the standard lamp.

"I don't like women wombling around at night on their own," he says, screwing up his face and trying harder. "Wandering," he says. "It's not wight."

"I'm with you, Elmer," I say, hauling myself vertical and heading for the door.

"Oh my God," Susan says. "Batman and Robin. At least take your jacket," she says, handing it to me. "Don't frighten her and get back here before the New Year."

"Which one am I?" Chuck says, as we head into the deserted streets. 

"You're Robin," I say.

"Why do I have to be Robin?" he says.

"Because you're a follower," I say. "I'm a natural leader - fearless and decisive with a powerful personality."

"And a Batmobile," he says, nodding to my Vauxhall Corsa parked on the road.

"Sarcasm doesn't suit Robin," I say. "There's no sign of her. We're going to have to run." 

Around two corners we catch sight of Anne not far ahead and go into our freezing and wheezing routine, since she's going to be really annoyed if she sees us.

"This is daft," Chuck says, when we've let her put some distance between us. "I can't breathe. If someone jumped her, I could only shout 'Stop that or I'll come and get you in five minutes!'"

"It's more than I could do," I say. "We've lost her again."

"Oh bugger," he says and sets off, before I can stop him, in a long slow lope like that used by his ancient ancestors on the African savannah, to eat up the miles and hunt down their prey.

Unfortunately Chuck's prey has heard him coming and is waiting behind a privet hedge, with a parcel of mince pies in a Tesco plastic bag. 

"Is he dead?" I say, when I round the corner and find Anne leaning over his supine body, spreadeagled on the pavement.

"Don't be stupid," she says. "Mild concussion at worst. What did you idiots think you were playing at? You scared the life out of me."

"We were providing you with manly protection from nameless dangers of the night," I say.

"The only dangers around here tonight are you and him," she says.

"Just a small piece of chocolate cake, madam," Chuck says, sitting up and looking around. "Your lights are a little bright this evening."

"That's more sense than he usually makes," I say. "He'll be fine. We'll see you inside your house, then be on our way. Unless you'd like to repay us by inviting us in for a nightcap."

A gust of wind blows her reply away, catching her front door at the same time and slamming it firmly in our faces. We turn and head for Susan's house. 

"I think that went well," Chuck says. "We don't need to give them all the details. Anne home, job done about covers it."

"I think so," I say. "While the world sleeps we walk the streets, keeping the town safe for the civilised."

"Gratitude is a gift," Chuck says. "Thanks are a bonus. The work itself is its own reward." 

"Have you any idea where we are?" I say, coming to a halt and recognising nothing.

"I'm afraid not, Batman," he says. "I was following you."

Fearless and decisive, I pull my phone from my pocket and call us a cab.

Want more?
Elmer Fudd sings Bruce Springsteen.

Subtle humour sucks

"I've stopped reading Twitter in the morning," Rachel tells me, as we're trying to work in the physics library at the University, and I'm wondering if it can get any chillier in here. The heating system seems to think it's mid-summer and is blasting cold air through large vents in the wall. I'm icing up fast. 

"It's relentless," she says. "It makes me feel everything is far worse than I thought. Sexism, homophobia, Tory cuts, terrorism, climate change, ocean pollution, cold feet, badly-fitting bras, the hierarchy problem in particle physics.

"Twitter tells me stuff I can't do anything about. But once you start reading you can't stop. You're fascinated and appalled. You desperately want to do something to help, but you can't because the world's problems are enormous."

"Don't stand there gawping - help me out here."

"You sound like my son," I say, pulling the collar of my jacket up and sinking my head down, to get some heat into frozen ears. "He avoids the news because it makes him feel bad."

"That's going too far," she says. "You have to force yourself to face stuff or you're not living in the real world. I just don't want it coming at me too early and all at once. It ruins my day."

"Follow some funny guys then," I say. "It's what I do. Lightens my mood in the morning. Paul Bassett Davies makes me laugh. He does these offbeat one-liners on Twitter and writes a blog. 

"I like his advice to aspiring writers: 'Begin with a sex scene. Then do some writing.'" 

"I don't know him," Rachel says. "But what puts me off Internet humour is the brainless boy-jokes. Mostly visual and slapstick, and often cruel. It's like Mel Brooks says: 'Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open manhole and die.' I don't like that. I like subtlety."

"I don't," I say. "I like Mel Brooks. You can't beat a good fart joke. Then there's that scene where the black sheriff shouts 'Hey, where the white women at?' to the Ku Klux Klan.' That was funny."

"Hilarious," she says. 

Scottish humour

"Subtle humour is just a way to flaunt your superiority," I say. "Then you laugh again at the people who don't get the joke. It's not funny. It's peacock posturing."

"And crude stand-up isn't?" she says. 

"I don't like that either," I say. "So is there a science of humour?"

"Not so much a science," she says. "More a bunch of theories that go back to Aristotle."

"Did he do stand-up? Aristotle at the Apollo?"

"No but he had theories about everything, most of them wrong. He reckoned all humour had its origins in that feeling of superiority you mentioned. So did Thomas Hobbes, much later. 

"It was Francis Hutcheson, the father of the Scottish Enlightenment, who first pointed out that humour is multi-faceted and often arises from the convergence of two mismatched ideas."

"Interesting," I say. "So do you want to hear a subtle, multi-faceted joke?"

"Yes, please," she says.

"Two philosophers meet in a bar. 'How did you get so wet?' Descartes says. 

"'Turns out I was wrong," Heraclitus replies. 'Can I get you a drink?' 

"'I think not,' says Descartes and disappears."

"Ha ha," Rachel says.

"I rest my case," I say. 

Science of humour
The good sense of humour (GSOH) everyone's looking for might be different for men and women, according to research. "To a woman, 'sense of humour' means someone who makes her laugh; to a man, a sense of humour means someone who appreciates his jokes."

Prof Sophie Scott regularly tweets and laughter is one of her research interests.