1. Realising that People Die

WHEN I was very young I was most worried that my parents were going to die. I felt they might not know they were going to die and I was too shy to tell them. I felt awfully sad for them when I realised they would die and would cease to exist.

Then I realised I would die so there were a whole lot of sadnesses. But I was a kid so I would get distracted by ice cream.

Life is very distracting but I have always been renegotiating the death thing. As you get older you think ‘is what I am doing a worthwhile use of my time given my time is a finite thing?’ And you want to leave the place better than you found it. It is not a terrible thing to think but we are in a culture that doesn’t think about it at all.

Our endless consumption and materialism do not make sense if we are going to die; you can’t keep any of your things. Basing your entire philosophy on your things is kind of interesting. It is an immense cosmic stupidity.

2. Finding Out About The Holocaust

MY parents were quite groovy and there was no idea within our household that you could get on someone’s case just because of something they were born with. There was just no information about racism or sectarianism and the people we knew were actively interested in different religions, not afraid of them, or angry about them.

One of my mum’s best friends at college was much older and she had escaped the Holocaust by hanging underneath a railway carriage to get out of Europe. My mother was, and still can be, quite anxious in unfamiliar situations but Ilsa was ‘f*ck that, they nearly killed me – that does not matter’. My mother spoke very highly of her, as someone who had worked out what’s important.

It was a huge shock for me to discover that this huge machinery had been made to just eat people and no-one prevented it. I find it horrifying that people are so poorly informed about the levels of horror and all the varieties of people found to be imperfect and killed. People still say the Nazis were socialists. Seriously? They murdered socialists.

I read people like Primo Levi and Viktor Frankl and I began to get a map of what the opposite of Nazism is – but that does not stop the horror. Never Again should mean we’re obsessed with spotting how this shit starts ... and we are flirting with it again.

3. The idea that everything is narrative

WHO we say we are is narrative and who someone else says we are is narrative. When I was a teenager I was thinking ‘sometimes I am one person, sometimes another. I talk to my parents with one voice and talk at school with another voice and I am being told lots of different stories about who I am’. It was a breakthrough when I realised I could write my own narrative and could write anything.

This applies to the idea of Scottishness. My idea of Scottishness early on was of very angry men drinking, singing slightly incomprehensible songs and who tended to be aggrieved. Being Scottish seemed quite an empty/emptied thing.

Now I think the idea of Scottishness has been re-explored and also rewritten. It has stopped being something we can’t change. It has stopped being tartan, bagpipes and haggis.

Just now Scotland seems to be saying ‘we are this and we are this and we are this’. It is not about being better than somebody but having that fluidity and a bit of confidence. We exist and that allows us to let everyone else exist. We can have this progressive nationalist narrative where you can be Scottish if you want to be. You don’t have to have that blood and soil crap.

4. Realising I wouldn’t run out of ideas

WHEN you are a writer part of the narrative that other people give you about writing is this idea that you can run out of ideas: that your material can run out. One time I had just gone to a movie and I was walking home in pouring rain and I suddenly realised I wasn’t ever going to run out of ideas and it was insane to think that I would.

You can be ill and you can be preoccupied with the fact that you have no money and it is extremely unlikely that you ever will, but writing is writing and writers are stuffed with ideas. People are stuffed with ideas.

I felt elated, running in the rain. I ran past someone I vaguely knew who asked what had happened to me, because I looked strange. I couldn’t explain, because it was a bit of a writerly thing to be happy about, so I just said I was happy.

You don’t get an idea for a novel like some kind of birthday present, all complete – that never happens. It’s more like adding a bit of this and a bit of that and from addition comes the thing that you can see as one an identifiable idea. That’s how the brain works and the more you do it, the more the brain will add something to something to something to something and make a narrative. The threat that you will run out of ideas comes mostly from people who write about writing rather than people who do it, I think.

5. Living In The Moment

OF course if I am making dinner I have to think about the ingredients I am going to buy but beyond a certain point looking into the future is quite toxic as it prevents you enjoying where you are. You see people in terrible situations and they are dealing with utterly unbearable situations by being in the moment. They are aware that living is a finite resource and they are living the hell out of it.

Facebook and all these ways of looking at other people’s lives that are not quite real can trick you into the past or the future, lots of things can. We also get a lot of propaganda from adverts and the media and so on about fake futures, fake pasts. We’re offered lives that don’t exist and that we think we need.

I am always at my happiest and most peaceful when I am in the moment particularly if I am in my kayak because if you are not paying attention in a kayak then you just get in trouble – you’re closer to drowning. I think I have worked out how to live in the moment a bit better.

6. Going on Demonstrations

I USED to go on demos when I was a student but I didn’t quite know why. I was on a demonstration when Maggie Thatcher came to our university. I knew I was not a fan but at the same time people were shouting “cut her throat” and I wasn’t sure about that. A policeman shoved me for no reason -– that was interesting. I was a real mix of being annoyed and not necessarily agreeing with everything about the crowd, even though I was in the crowd.

When I was older I went to Faslane and then it totally made sense. Trident is obscene and the protest was so well organised and rooted in Quakerism.

I also got kettled in an anti-war demonstration in Glasgow. Some MSPs were caught as well and were outraged at being trapped against their will. It wasn’t pleasant to see the police doing things that were dangerous to the crowd and could go wrong. I think the behaviour of these young people at the Extinction Rebellion demos has been inspiring – so smart and so organised.

7. Being Aware of Media Agenda

THERE’S a point where you discover there is a mismatch between reality and what you read in the papers. You go on a demonstration with lots of people but in the media there are suddenly only eight and they’re actually queuing for chips. While you have to avoid being paranoid and always yelling “fake news”, you do have to think ‘what is the agenda here in this paper or this TV channel?’ If it is making you emotional, constantly nudging you towards addictive outrage, you have to think about why it is doing that.

8. The Importance of Intersectionality

REALISING that the black struggle is everybody’s struggle, the Muslim struggle is everybody’s struggle. That is what makes the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) so chilling. It has for years now been effectively starving disabled people to death, just harassing them, or stressing them so that their condition gets worse. Now they have moved on to Universal Credit and crucifying the poor and demonising millennials, single women and rape victims. What is it going to take before everybody is picketing DWP offices?

9. Finding Out What Politicians Are Really Like

INITIALLY I came up against local politicians when I was working in community arts and that was a universally disappointing if not a revolting experience. Then I came across more high-ranking politicians. Everyone says politics is just showbusiness for ugly people and it was like meeting people who were doing panto in Wolverhampton who thought they were more famous than that.

They seem to be constantly checking to see what your impression of them is, whether they’re winning you over. I have very rarely met people in genuine showbusiness who are that weird.

They should just put them on a dedicated channel doing gameshows or I’m a Celebrity or just pointing a camera at them so they can talk endlessly. It would keep them out of everybody’s way. You could shoot it up into space to deter aliens. We shouldn’t let anyone watch it here – it would be morally corrosive.

10. Reading and Writing

AT some point you kind of decide your way of being is that you’re someone who writes books. It becomes comfortable but I can remember being most excited about being able to read books. I thought I couldn’t read, then one morning I woke up and thought: ‘I can read everything!’ I ran through to my parents’ bedroom and started jumping up and down on their bed – which was unusual in itself – and said: ‘I can read, I can read!’. And my mum said: ‘I know, I taught you’.

After that I always made up stories and wrote them down so it was quite organic. I think the most important thing I have written was when I dedicated my second book, Looking for the Possible Dance, in part to my grandmother Mildred Price.

Her name was first. She died before it was published, but the dedication made my grandfather happy. I’ve probably never done more good than with those words.