Tenement Kid

My dad also introduced us to the joys of the Marx Brothers movies and many a Saturday afternoon was spent with the three of us [Bobby, his dad and Graham his brother] falling off the settee onto the carpet, our faces wet with tears of joy, our bodies convulsed in fits of hilarity, shaking so hard that I thought I was going to die of laughter as the anarchic antics be of Groucho, Chico and Harpo exploded onto out little black and white TV screen, transforming our tiny tenement into a theatre of pleasure and mirth. Films such as A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races and Horse Feathers poked fun at the absurdity of the world and made nonsense of consensual reality. Shane McGowan once said to me, when I asked him about politics, that ‘the world is just one big Marx Brothers movie’. Shane may well have been correct about that. If all the world is one big lunatic asylum and we are the inmates but most of us don’t realise the fact that we are merely minor actors in a movie that someone else is directing to our misfortune and their benefit, then it takes a genius like Karl [Marx] or Groucho Marx to point out the scam that has taken us for fools. In our house Groucho was equally as important as Karl. Without fun and dancing, what was the point of revolution?

On the terraces we thought the enemy were those on the other side of the stadium wearing different team colours. I remember my dad saying to me that the Celtic and Rangers sectarian conflict played nicely into the hands of the establishment, the old ‘divide and rule’ tactic the British had perfected over centuries of imperial conquest, learned from the Ancient Romans. The war in Northern Ireland was the perfect example. He told me it divided the working class of Glasgow. The Old Firm fans were all from similar backgrounds, lived in the same council schemes, but were wasting their energy fighting each other when they should be fighting the real enemy, the ruling class.