Christmas past songs 🧵 1/8...
I'm in Banbridge. I'm here every few weeks. I spent half my life here, and being here at Christmas is special. Music, of course,
takes me back to here... to my childhood, teenage years, and wild times in pubs and clubs,

April 1981.
I'm 15. I'm lying on my bed reading a book(probably @CliveCussler_, John le Carré or Arthur C. Clarke or a book about the Titanic,space,motorbikes or the @NME, Sounds,@hotpress or The War Papers).
I hear a piece of music from the TV downstairs which captivates me... I run down. My mum is watching the end credits of a drama. I ask her what it is. She tells me it is a drama about Lloyd George whose name is dimly familiar to me from my o level history class. I buy the single Chi Mai, by Ennio Morriconé the next

1984 2024 style.
We are in the future.
That future of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
That future of The Man in the High Tower.
The future we fought hard against when Mandela was freed and peace exploded Where the Streets Have No Name.

And we won't sit in drafty rooms planning it's end with other pseuds in moth eaten wool. We won't jump from town to town on trains, gathering a revolutionary parade.

We'll Boycott and type our frustration and our words will be buried by a Billionaire Big Brother, and work and be silently happy that

Im half-way through "Dirty Linen," by @MartinDoyleIT. A book that needed to be written about the wee place I'm from.
I've paused as I know what happens next... the next few chapters include the lead up to and the awful death of my dad's cousin (they were brought up next

door to each other in Banford, Tullylish and were like brothers) in a bomb in Gilford- a bomb I heard from Tullylish as a nine year old on a sleep over with my Grandparents. My father collapsed when he was informed of Billy Scott's death at a new years do in the Shoe Factory

After watching @professororock on @ABBA, & his "not quite getting them," I've been listening to Arrival,& ABBA the Album which were huge in our house in the late seventies. And it really is their musicality and the harmonies and contrasts that did it for me, and hooked me. Abba, when our family adopted them as family favourite, had not gone through the Blancmange and Erasure electronica revival- and they hadn't been adopted as gay icons. They were pure pop, with that

I've been thinking of friendships lost. One particular friend (amongst a few) I really wish I hadn't lost, was a wonderful woman,"Tish." She was sharp witted,punk,artistic, incredibly kind, and damaged(like most of us). I've been thinking about her for two reasons. 1 the exchange in @MrPaulSimpson1's book, between him and an 'Orla' in the Cushendall section of his book, Revolutionary Spirit. It's the kind of quick-witted conversation Tish would have won back in the late eighties /nineties when I truly knew her.
The second reason is my sister is moving

I wrote the attached thread about my schools. Places were many of us were sent in fear. I've also written a few times about how my High Scool years were made hell by other young people. (One of the times, here unsocialized.co.uk/2020/11/knocko…) and on that same blog and also in

https://twitter.com/nwScotty/status/1635022297080922114

publications such as @blitzed80smag1, I've written about the eighties, which for me were the time I was let out of the traps. And I hit the ground running, literally (I did a lot of long distance running and cycling) & marathon session drinking, dancing & partying. Paula Yates

I've just re-read Absolute Beginners. It really is as good as I remember and so very different from much of the film that was made.. though I won't completely pan the movie as it did have greatness in parts... though like I did, please read the book before you go to the movie. Although even the hero is steeped in what we would see today as cultural bias, the LGBTIQA+++ allyship, and what we would now see as pro BLM, multi cultural, pro diversity comes through like a heralding angel. The sparsity in Colin Macinnes painting characters and their back

Remembering @TheBabelFish @TheBabelFishDSM - I took a trip to the Clyde where we had visited a couple of weeks back.

"Unapologetically a GenX who knew the world we inherited was veering off in a terrible direction. A fixer. A Babel Fish who wanted everyone to talk, while _we_ ranted at each other.

Complex, yet simple in his grounding. Uncompromising in his rebellion, I envied him.

Born in the shadow of Titan, escaping its hold only in a life long adventure to love, sing, and live across the world to reminisce about his heart tied to land

Back in the late seventies, my town Banbridge, like many in mid-Ulster, was suffering attacks concealed in carboots. The carbombs frequently caused damage, some in controlled explosions, some not so much controlled. During this time I found a bullet, and badges that once adorned sectarians, and bits of post bombing wreckage. One odd thing me and my friend Mickey found, still sticks in my mind.

Mickey was a Catholic, I was told... a "fact" that puzzled me for quite some time. I discovered the meaning of sectarianism and

#education #teaching
Creatives are absolutely wrecked by Scottish education conservatism, bureaucracy, the ambition of those who want out of the classroom and the utter distrust of teachers who cannot/will not replicate lessons by
heraldscotland.com/politics/20190… numbers.

The past ten years of teaching has been pretty bad for my mental health. The past two years even worse, as

1 the control freaks lost control but pretended they hadn't and

2 the untalented managerial types practised -insisted upon- their fantasy of education