I wondered if this was too dark to write about. Everyone likes looking at old photographs.
But there’s much more to an era in your life than old photographs. They were kept in an old album. Heavy and blue. A bit like this era of my life.
The photos lived in an old stone house with us but that house has been totally gutted, all traces of our time there dug out and scraped away. The house is just a shell now. An empty, hollow shell.
But shells can have their own beauty, that’s why we pick them up on the beach and put them in our pocket.
The family exploded. That’s the only way to describe it. Like an earthquake, everything that had seemed solid just fractured and fell apart.
And suddenly it was just me, my twin and our younger sister left in the house. Eventually she moved out too, at fifteen or sixteen. I think me and my twin were seventeen years old.
Living in a sea shell, washed up on the shore after an almighty storm.
But we pick up shells on the beach for a reason. They’re beautiful. Because they held life once. Because they’re shaped by what they contained. Because they’re evidence of something that was.
So here I am in this funny little corner of the internet. Picking up the shell of that era. Holding it up to the sunlight so I can see it more clearly. Showing its beauty even though it’s empty now.
My twin and I started a portfolio course in Dundee. Over a year. Very intensive. The whole point was to create a portfolio good enough to get into art college. No easy task, but I guess a lot of people probably think making art is fun. This was work.
Four buses a day to get there.
We’d walk a mile in the dark, usually through the woods to the nearest village. Sometimes carrying our portfolio cases, which were not designed for cross country adventures. We’d see the milkman, that’s how early we left.
Then the bus from Falkland to the next village. Another bus to Dundee. Another from Dundee centre up to the college.
The regime was strict. Very skills-based, life drawing, traditional techniques. We worked like absolute dogs. A baptism of fire.
We had absolutely no money. We’d come home and the house would be so cold, condensation running down the inside of the stone walls. No one had been there all day. Just cold stone and damp and the two of us trying to keep going, keep the routine, even though everything had fallen apart. It was good to have each other though.
We survived with music and teenage parties. We had this record player, ridiculously huge, the size of a piano, and we’d play records and drink mugs of vodka and get absolutely obliterated. People would come out from the surrounding villages to party out in the sticks in our old house.
But here’s the thing: we were trying to feel like normal teenagers. Having fun like everyone else. Except there was this intense feeling of existential dread underneath everything.
I could tell there was a difference between me and my sisters and our friends who had actual proper homes.
They were drinking to have fun.
We were drinking to obliterate ourselves.
I listened to a lot of music then. It was as important as food. On my crappy little Walkman with batteries on the bus. Through the woods. In the rain.
I remember sneaking into a Napalm Death gig in Dundee. At a club called Fat Sam’s. The music was a catharsis. An exact, poetic description of my inner turmoil. Teenage angst gold.
I couldn’t listen to any of it for years afterward. It took me straight back, the cold, the dread, the condensation on walls, the feeling of being seventeen and alone and angry and unable to make a sound.
But now I can. Now it’s actually cathartic.
To own the whole experience, pain and all.
In this crazy little era of my life my friend and I decided to hitchhike to Ullapool, to a party in the woods. As we got further north the lifts got stranger. One was with some old church minister with a car wallpapered in a thick layer of white cat hair. Bibles littered the footwells. Unceremonious sacred passengers of his, unlike us hitchhikers catching a lift. He urged us to go and hand ourselves into the cops. We laughed.
Standing in a lay-by next to bright yellow gorse bushes waiting for the next lift I got a phone call to say I’d been given a place at Edinburgh College of Art. A golden moment, in that passing place. After years of waiting, my lift had arrived and I was on the road again.