The music kept us going

Monday evening, listening to Tank by the Stranglers courtesy of my excellent Sennheiser cordless headphones and I am right back there in that gold Ford Granada, my father having taken his two early teenage sons for a fortnight drive-about in the borders. I think that you would call that a low point. Everyone would rather have been somewhere else.

I can’t remember a great deal about that holiday. The damp smell of the bungalow we had rented or, egged on by my brother and me, my dad’s abandoned overtaking manoeuvre on a country road. When confronted by a tractor coming the other way there was a seemingly interminable, noisy and dramatic locking up of breaks. Next, an odd moment of irony as our tyre smoke wafted gently past us, leaving the three of us behind us to quietly reflect.

Apart from listening to the Stranglers, Magazine and Kraftwerk, one other thing comes to mind. Working from the back seat as we drove along, vigorously rubbing my dad’s head and utilising the volume enhancing properties of static electricity, I succeeded in getting his comb-over to become a kind of jaunty Mohican.