The Blog
…the Big Bid for Infant Freedom… and the dire consequences lurking thereby…
By Seumas Gallacher
…from the outset, this ol’ Jurassic would like to make it clear that I’m not a strong advocate for needless wholesale corporate punishment… but there are times when the administration of… of… well… just read on… it’s almost a ‘once-upon-a-time’ true story… over 60 years ago, when Master Gallacher was possessed of all the WURLD-ly knowledge available to a wee five-year-old lad from Dockland Govan in Glasgow… my even wee-er sister was all of three-and-a-half, going on forty… with money always scarce, Mam and Da rarely went out on a date together back then, but on one such blue-moon event, they went off to the cinema (I think it was after the silent movies era, but I couldn’t swear to it)… a very, very, very much older girl of around fourteen or fifteen was detailed to babysit the pair of us… the trouble started the minute the door closed on our parents’ over-the shoulder ‘goodbye…see yeez later’… it was only about 5 p.m., and we generally didn’t go to bed until at least 8 or 9 o’clock… we wanted to build a cardboard box fort around the legs of our tiny dining table… the sitter, Helen Foster by name, resisted all our efforts to construct our castle… we squealled, we screeched, we screamed… proper little brats, truth be known… eventually, when Ms Foster’s back was turned, we made it… the Big Bid for Freedom…
…hand-in-hand, this infant Govan version of Bonnie and Clyde bolted through the door and off down the street… the budding Evil Mastermind in me had a plan… about four streets away the River Clyde presented a playground universe… particularly in the form of the free ferries that crossed from the Govan side across to the Partick side of Glasgow… the service shuttled forth and back every 8 minutes… a passengers-only fleet, and more attractive, the vehicular ferry…
…this was the craft of kids’ dreams… ‘coz it had an upstairs deck with railings from which to scan the length of the Govan shipyards… magic land indeed… we scampered aboard the big boat and stayed there for what seemed like hours, heedless of the panic we’d left behind with the Forlorn Foster Witch… about ten o’clock, we docked on the Govan side for the umpteenth time, and there waiting for us were Mam and Da, and the tearful Ms Foster… the editor should prob’ly draw a curtain over the punishment proceedings when we arrived home… suffice to say, my sister and I had hardly any skin left on our respective criminal backsides when we went to bed…
…did we suffer mental anguish for the rest of our lives from that?… not a bit of it!… if it had happened in these modern times, with all the P.C. nonsense that swills around, we could prob’ly have had Mam and Da locked up in jail for centuries… I reckon I’m the better respecter of proper authority nowadays… but I’m still a bit leary of boats… see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!…
