This is Glasgow journalist Cliff Hanley’s sparkling, unsentimental and uproariously funny account of growing up in the Gallowgate and then Shettleston in the 1920s and 1930s and his working life as a radio broadcaster and journalist in the 1940s and 1950s. A natural-born raconteur with a marvellous ear for dialect, Hanley has an extraordinary ability to bring alive the people and places to give a vibrant snapshot of Scotland’s largest city.

These razor-sharp observations of times log past cover a huge range of themes, from family life, art and showbiz to more weightier topics such as politics, sex, TB and what it was like to be a conscientious objector during the Second World when Hanley’s brothers and friends were all overseas serving in the armed forces. But the grittier episodes are always leavened with irrepressible humour, and the true Glasgow spirit shines through.

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Author’s Foreword
• There’s Something Out There
• A Breathless Hush in the Close Tonight
• Shopped
• Blood and the Demon
• High Living
• The Bridge
• Somebody’s Wean Is Lost
• I Am The Ghost of Gogar
• Not on a Lamp-post, Surely
• The Secret Life of the Baron
• Jessie, Ah, Jessie
• Here’s the Lions
• That Music Stuff
• Okay, Well, Draw!
• A Friend Is a Friend
• Roosty Pockets
• Never Look at Your Face
• You Learn Things, Travelling
• Have You Ever Been a Public?
• The Gutters Will Run with Tea
• Hard-bitten News-hawk
• You Should Have Listened, Lily
• Green and Pleasant
• Don’t Call Me, I Won’t Call You
• Smash Hit
• Dodging the Column
• Cats Are People Too
• Courting Is Pleasure
• Dad Wouldn’t Like It, Beloved
• Whose Conscience Is This, Anyway?
• One Has a Duffy at the Auld Chantin’ Gemme
• These Are Prison Bars, Mac
• A Wee Refreshment
• Life Is a Gamble, if You Can Find a Bookie
• The Purest Diamond
• They Should Subsidize It, It’s Good for the Country
• The Thin Red Line
• Who the Hell Are You Calling a Celebrity?
• The Rich Free Life
• The Link Who Was Rarely Missing
• Who, the Drummer?
• Hark at Sonny Boy, Mammy Mine
• Thomas Morgan, Esq.
• Billies and Dans
• Small Change, Big Change
• So Strange a Thing to Die
• Small Change, No Change
• Birlinn