Swearing, smoking, eating, more swearing, pornography, swearing, drinking endless plastic cups of tea.

Like many all-male environments, working offshore was the intellectual equivalent of Animal House, only without the clever bits. Lovely place.īut university and I did not see eye to eye, so off I went to work offshore. The highlight of walking to the art school in the mornings (yes: we were students, but we still did mornings) was trying not to tread in the fresh bloodstains outside our front door, and dodging the undercover CID officers trying to buy drugs.

Next up was an elongated spell in Westhill - a small suburb seven miles west of Aberdeen - where I embarked upon a mediocre academic career, hindered by a complete inability to spell and an attention span the length of a gnat's doodad.Īnd so to UNIVERSITY, far too young, naive and stupid to be away from the family home, sharing a subterranean flat in one of the seedier bits of Edinburgh with a mad Irishman, and four other bizarre individuals. Nothing much happened for years and years and years: learned to play the recorder, then forgot how when they changed from little coloured dots to proper musical notes (why the hell couldn't they have taught us the notes in the first bloody place? I could have been performing my earth-shattering rendition of 'Three Blind Mice' at the Albert Hall by now!) appeared in some bizarre World War Two musical production did my best to avoid eating haggis and generally ran about the place a lot. Stuart MacBride (that's me) was born in Dumbarton - which is Glasgow as far as I'm concerned - moving up to Aberdeen at the tender age of two, when fashions were questionable. The life and times of a bearded write-ist.

Cold Granite by Stuart MacBride