Memorial Diamonds

 I finally managed to visit Airdrie -:

Broadly speaking my life was, in the words of WB Yeats, “a waste of breath.” Happiness was either transient, illusory or both, meaning I sought solace in books and music, finding comfort in depictions of a richer life than my own, in words and in sounds. If I could have chosen to live any life, I’d like to have been a spinner for a poor first class county and the bassist of a post-rock musical behemoth like Mogwai or GY!BE. Being frank, I’d probably have preferred to be female, as I would have been better as a woman than I was as a bloke, and I would definitely love to have been born in Ireland. All those things were out of my reach and so, after a childhood of unending misery in a household where emotional, physical and sexual abuse were the only gifts my parents gave me, I can only recall any sense of ease or fulfilment from the age of 14 until probably 17 and a half; autumn 1978 until the very end of December 1981 specifically.

Leaving sport to one side for a moment, it was music that initially fired and inspired me: Rough Trade records, Fast Product, the whole panoply of post punk from Metal Urbain to the Gang of Four, from Cabaret Voltaire to A Certain Ratio and The Mekons to Clock DVA. Anything that painted complex, drab, uncomfortable pictures in the sky above the hell I called home in Felling, NE10. Then books; Camus, Kafka and Sartre for starters, in the summer of 1979, then onwards into the heart of the enormous darkness in the human soul with Conrad, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert and Mann. They articulated the dislocation I felt from the normal world. That deracination never went away. For almost my entire life, long before my diagnosis of being on the autism spectrum, I felt unable to fit in anywhere properly. Though I was pleased not to be normal, it made my professional and personal life an unending trauma of broken relationships and maddening frustration at the miscommunication that repeatedly impacted on everyone who came within my orbit.

If I could have had the choice of any fictional teenage experience, it would have been either the salacious demi-monde presented in Jeremy Reed’s The Dilly: A Secret History of Piccadilly Rent Boys as, in retrospect, I would have enjoyed pursuing a youthful career as a male sex worker, or David Keenan’s exhilarating, fascinating and profoundly atmospheric This is Memorial Device, which tells the story of a fictional post punk band and their camp followers, acolytes and enemies in late 70s Airdrie. My own memories of creating challenging, atonal drones as part of the beloved, but terrible Pretentious Drivel aggregation of anti-musicians, from January 1979 to March 1982, along with so many anti-musicians I’ve lost touch with: Chris Dixon, Rob Gosden, Stephen Parkin, Francis Robson, Carole Rushbrooke and Andrew Wilkie, were more modest than the incredible events Mr Keenan describes. It was This is Memorial Device that provoked my ultimately unfulfilled wish to make “music” once again and the eventual visit to see Airdrieonians play at home.

Having made two unsuccessful attempts to see Airdrie v Queen’s Park in December 2021, the first being COVIDed off, sending me to Falkirk 0 Cove Rangers 3 and the second falling foul to Jeanette Mugabe’s imposition of Hogmanay Martial Law, the March 26^th visit of Cove Rangers was set in stone. Cheap train tickets were booked and a brace of briefs at a tenner a pop secured, with former work colleague and now resident of Leith Walk, Big Tam the Tax Man, earmarked as travelling companion.

Saturday morning was glorious. The first day of the year to wear shorts, not slacks. A wonderfully deserted train, with a window seat in the quiet carriage, where the beauty of the Northumberland coast and the grandeur of the train’s entry into Berwick made one glad to be alive. Well, almost… We pulled into Waverley, having seen the sunshine on Leith, glinting off the greatest football ground in the world, Easter Road, and how I will miss that place, almost 5 minutes early, meaning even I could not fail to locate the correct platform for the 12.36 to Helensburgh, which stopped at every inhabited settlement in the Central Belt, disgorging us at the closest station to the Penny Cars Stadium, not Airdrie, but the evocatively named Drumgelloch, gateway to a respectable social housing development of pebbledash adorned houses, with neat gardens and well maintained motor cars and the best named takeaway I’ve ever seen. It was an adequate vista, as Big Tam, who also presented an Estrella carry-oot on the train, directed us via his telephone right to the ground. After stopping off to buy a pin badge for my mate Ken the cricket-loving photographer, we hit the club bar.

Despite the absence of draft beers or craft ales, I thoroughly enjoyed several bottles of Moretti in a busy, though not especially welcoming environment. I’d seen Airdrie play live twice in the past; firstly in May 1997, when Paisley Mick, who was then Ashington Mick, drove us to the second leg of the Premier League / First Division Promotion Play-Off between Airdrie and Hibs. The Hibees had won the first leg 1-0 and, in Darren Jackson’s final game, strolled to a 4-2 win at Airdrie’s temporary home of Clyde’s Broadwood Stadium in Cumbernauld. Airdrie’s original home Broomfield Park was vacated in 1994 and they spent 5 years groundsharing with Clyde, before what was then called the Shyberry Excelsior Stadium, opened. It only took me 23 years to get here, and it isn’t a bad ground at all, even if only half of it is open. Optimistically, the capacity is 10,101 and, other than the Cove game, attendances were averaging 722 in a season where the team are in second place.

I only know one Airdrie fan; Del, the Teenage Fanclub loving drummer and keen golfer. He is an absolutely lovely bloke, but I couldn’t square his infectious wit and gregarious personality with the numerous Airdrie supporters attired in Scottish Defence League polo shirts and hoodies, who made it down to Whitley Bay for a pre-season friendly in 2013. Basically, unlike neighbouring Coatbridge, home of Albion Rovers, Airdrie is another one of those lovely Lanarkshire towns that ostentatiously parades its allegiance to the Royal Family and all that bollocks. The inescapable conclusion to be made from this game is that most Airdrie football fans wouldn’t have been fans of Memorial Device and a fair percentage of them are fairly nasty people, though their patience may well have been stretched beyond the point of endurance by the absolute incompetence of the club’s management of the game.

Emerging from the bar at 2.45, Big Tam and I were confronted by 2 snaking, snail’s pace queues of slightly fractious fans. Despite the increased number of advance tickets sold, Airdrie hadn’t bothered to open more turnstiles than usual; instead of the previous average of 722 punters, a suspiciously round figure of 1,650 was declared as the crowd. While this included 100 or so Cove fans on the far side of the ground, the extra 1,000 potential onlookers in this number were still outside the ground when Gabriel McGill put the home team ahead after 2 minutes, though the cheer was fainter than it ought to have been. Indeed, I’d estimate it was after 3.10 before Big Tam and I gained entry and probably 3.30 before we found seats, having spent about 15 minutes stood on the yellow hatched stairs in the Main Stand. It took about 15 minutes for a competent steward to realise our predicament and find us a pew. Almost inevitably Davie Stoker, who attends every single game of football in Scotland, was sat near us. Him and Big Tam talked tax as Airdrie kept Cove at bay, much to the chagrin of Coves loathsome boss, Paul Hartley. Sadly, in the 93^rd minute, we got to see a goal; former Hibee Fraser Fyvie lashed in a quality equaliser from outside the box. This goal apparently prompted some Airdrie hotheads to attack a few isolated and elderly Cove fans. Very poor show that, though I didn’t see evidence of it I must stress, as at that point Big Tam and I were buying a quality Argentinian carry-oot.

We took the train back to Waverley in the company of an Aberdeen fan and his Livingston supporting laddie who’d been at the game. At Edinburgh we staggered up the steps and into The Guild Ford for a couple more. I ended up with a supply of M&S G&T, which helped me home. It was a lovely day and one I wish I could have reflected on for longer.