More Tony!

Monday 10:15 p.m.
                              So it was just before Christmas in 1968 when Tony got off with Teresa. Probably the other way around. He'd gone off to some debating thing, and I wasn't there for some reason, probably because I'd no money, and this girl has come up to him and said something like don't I know your cousin? Lame lines. So he got off with Teresa Biagi, and this led to our only contretemps, which was about going to the Bellshill YMCA this Saturday night, as we always did, and me getting someone from there to go to the Christmas dance at the school. It was a single sex school. The very nice looking girl who eventually agreed to come with me to this dance ended up in the school hall with just me, and everyone had left, and we were still sitting there winching on our ownio. She was a very nice girl. The next time I was due to see her, she was supposed to get off the 44 bus, and we were supposed to go to the George Cinema in Bellshill, but the 44 bus never came, and such is life! I was stood up by the bus company, not her, but that was okay to say, well, let's move on. She really was very nice though and had a funny sister who didn't look anything like her. She looked like a sturdy, happy Dane, and good looking, but not really my type.
                           Tony asks me if I want to go on this blind date with Teresa's best pal from school, St Margaret's in Paisley, and I says okay.
                           Teresa's old man had been given a chip shop in Renfrew when he married his wife, and he worked in there three or four nights a week. This other joe did the other nights, and you should wish for a father in law like that. Teresa worked in the chip shop sometimes and I think I saw it the on this blind date, but we were taken back to the house. It was a redbrick, sandstone job, and probably the first bought and owned house I was ever in. It had sitting rooms. I think Teresa was a younger kid and all her older brothers and all were smart, the kind who did university degrees. I met one of them that night, but I don't think I saw her parents though I might have. We, the four of us, were led into this kind of drawing room, and the girl I was with sat on my knee and all us us spent the next two hours winching, or snogging as it might be known to folk who don't know what winching is.
                           Where did all that go, Jack? Teenagers are wonderful for this. Spontaneous snogging. It's really far more sensual than any of the other shenanigans you get into later. It really is!
                            I heard later that the girl who was Teresa's best friend wanted to go out with me again, but I told Tony to tell her that I couldn't afford a girlfriend. By then, I'd been sacked from my Saturday job in Galbraiths in Parkhead, and got a pound off the auld maw for my pocket money. This was because I cycled to school in Motherwell and the pound would have been the cost of the bus.
                            For some reason,  my sister wasn't able to get me a fraudulent bus pass for school. I had been getting these for a couple of years. I lived in Bellshill. My garden was in Mossend. If you came from Mossend and stood at the same bus stop as me, you got the bus for free, but being from Bellshill meant you weren't the statutary three miles away from school to get it for free. Anyway, my sister worked in the County Buildings in Hamilton and had a word with the wummin who looked after such things, and a bus pass appeared for a while. But for some reason, not in sixth year. The auld maw gave me a pound for my pocket money anyway, and a pound in those days would have bought you about eight or nine pints of beer. So I could go out to the dancing a couple of times a week and buy a coca cola during the interval, but not much else.
                             It's great when you're a kid and don't have to carry around money. You don't want much. There's nothing to spend it on anyway. It's like being free, so it is.
                              So I tells Tony to tell the girl that I'm flattered, but can't afford to take her anywhere. Like, some guys, those who left school and had jobs, took girls out and paid for everything. I never understood this. It was a wee bit like prostitution without the sex really. Anyway, I said thanks but no thanks and the word came back that the girl would pay for herself. For some reason, it was called going Dutch.
                             We went into the Bellshill YMCA with two girls. Walked across the dancehall, gymhall with these two girls and sat down in the seats around the hall, the ones we used to jump up on to watch the fights.
                              It's a completely different gig when you've got a girl with you. You spend a lot of time paying attention, and a lot of time snogging. Maybe I'll come back to this. I'll be doing the juju for Tony till just about the end of November.
                             I asked the auld maw, who is ninety two, if she thought he'd had a good deal with the heart attack, and the short illness and the death, and she said she thought he had. This is comforting. I think he scored on that too! There are far worse lives to live than the one he did!