Andrew O’Hagan

The man from the Corporation was fixing the bin-cupboard by the front door; trying, I think, to rip out the hinges and put in new ones. He kept going on about Rangers and Celtic to a joiner working at the next house along. I could hear their voices from upstairs, where I sat by the fire chewing a corner of the old, purple candlewick that covered my mother’s bed. I stood up on bare feet, and walked to the boiler, a round thing wearing a furry jacket that hung in a built-in closet. They called it the immerser. I put my arms around it, and strained to make them go all the way, but even with my fingers at full stretch I couldn’t grab the wooden thing behind. There was something there; I knew there was; it had been there for ages. My right hand could just flick the edge of the thing, just about pinch a corner, but there was no grabbing it. In the end I squeezed my body halfway round, and pulled hard until the thing loosened and fell into the middle of the room with me underneath it.

On Monday morning, Dursley is full of talk. Half way down Silver Street, at the Aphrodite café, a couple of women sit bleary-eyed over mugs of coffee. The plastic seats are bendy with age, the air is freezing up, and the caramel logs are sweating in their cage on top of the counter. ‘They might not even come from around here,’ says the woman with the Alice band. Her opposite number sniffs in agreement. They are talking about a group of travelling vandals, said to reside in Dursley. Two young trees have been broken on the Innocks Estate in North Nibley; tiles were ripped from the bus shelter, and Councillor Ray Manning – hero of the moment – has removed a broken seat. I pick up a copy of the Gazette later on, and see there is more. A £300 Amaco mountain bike (‘with 21 gears, coloured purple and black’) was stolen from a garage at Clingre Farm, Stinchcombe last Saturday. The theft is mentioned on page two and again on page four.’’

It was getting dark one sulphurous evening in Glasgow in the winter of 1990, when a pop-eyed cultural apparatchik – almost breathlessly ripe from a Chinese paper-lantern parade she’d just led through the naked streets of Carntyne – sat down beside me in a bar to the side of the City Chambers, to gab about the glories and horrors of Glasgow’s reign as European City of Culture for that year. The city’s better writers, it seemed, would have nothing to do with it. The £50 million jamboree, led by the municipal council, set its sights on ridding the city once and for ever of its razor-slashing, wife-battering, whisky-guzzling image; all to be blown away during a year-long bonanza; of painting and singing and exotic tumbling; with street-sweeping Bolivian choristers at the crack of dawn; with face-painting schools and afternoons of community theatre on Glasgow Green; and an evening of carry-on in the company of Pavarotti at 75 quid a throw. My bar companion flushed as she coasted through the vodkas, saying how pointless and infuriating it was that the better writers – whom we may as well call James Kelman, Alasdair Gray and Tom Leonard among others – wouldn’t join in on the song. ‘It’s their loss,’ she said. ‘I mean, what do they want?’’

A relative of mine, a white-haired Capuchin friar now working on a mission in Zambia, spent the early days of his vocation at St Bonaventure’s, a strict residence a mile or so out of Cork city. There was no drinking, of course, and no cigarettes or newspapers either. When not doing the do – working and praying and partaking of the holy sacraments – the good Reverend Brother would now and then make for the flat roof of the house, from where he enjoyed a decent view of the greyhound racing taking place in a park over the way. By then, despite his local upbringing, the dogs must have seemed otherworldly to him, enticingly alien. And as those nameless, sleek bodies scampered around the track – carrying with them the variously-priced hopes of those secular specks whooping and hollering from the terraces – I can imagine him wondering, high on his priory rooftop, at what manner of life was passing, unhindered, before him.’

George Baroli and I were soaked to the skin. We sat on a wooden bench in the rain, a green bottle of sherry sat between us. George stared straight ahead most of the time, tilting the bottle up to his mouth with both hands, getting it into position, holding it there, and breathing through his nose. I tried to roll him a cigarette inside my jacket while he spoke of Newcastle, of how he thought he’d never leave it, and then telling me stories of his life now, as a beggar in London. He tapped my arm: ‘Times’s bad,’ he said, ‘but good times is just around the corner.’