Scotsman Sessions #413: Julie McNeill
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Hi, I'm Julie McNeill. I'm going to share three poems with you today, two from my new
00:16book We Are Scottish Football that's published by Lewith Press and one from a new poem that
00:23I've written for a forthcoming collection. The first poem I'm going to share with you
00:27today is called Kickabout and I've dedicated it to my daughter who's 10 and has grown up
00:34in a world where she's watching these brilliant female footballers and role models in front
00:38of her who've laid the ground for her really. Kickabout.
00:44These games are won and lost in moments, in scuffs and snatches, trips and fallbacks.
00:52Plant your feet, raise your heads, and look what you have done with games lost and games
00:59won. Our expectations grow because you made it so.
01:05Tonight, wide-eyed, my daughter watched you play. She dreams of being you one day.
01:12Her jacket's in the wash again, bogging, masquerading as a goalpost in the mud.
01:18She's ditched her school skirt for a Scotland strip and plastered her walls with posters of you.
01:24She doesn't measure her team in inches. The mud splats and missed shots bring her back
01:31to the centre spot where she will rise and fall and rise again.
01:41The second poem I'm going to share from We Are Scottish Football was written after we
01:46qualified for the Euros the last time when we played the game against Serbia when we
01:51were on in lockdown. At the time, my little girl was sort of six or seven at the time
01:59and I thought we were going to lose so I sent her to bed and then as the excitement started
02:05to build downstairs, she crept down the stairs in her pyjamas. So this one's called Yes Kids,
02:13It's extra time, we've blown it. I'm sending the wee yin to bed. She doesn't need the disappointment.
02:20This year's filled her head with quite enough dread. But somehow we hang on and thirty minutes
02:27done as Griff walks to the spot, the door creaks open. The Ben appears, a wee pyjama-clad
02:37beacon, a bed-ruffled mascot drawn down the stairs by magnitude and snacks and potential
02:44jubilation. One by one, the hope, it grows. We are all Davey Marshall's glove and Kenny
02:52McLean's foot. We are the pause to wait for the thumbs up. Then we're Scotland in the
03:00European Championships. We're couches used as trampolines. We're kids thrown in the air.
03:05We're bedtimes long forgotten. We are Ryan Christie's tears. We are there.
03:12And I'll end on this third poem. I write a lot about my grandfather. My grandfather was
03:21part of the Irish travelling community. He travelled all over the world but in his later
03:27years he used to kind of sit in his house at the window and wait for me to come and
03:33visit him and then tell me his stories of the road. There were such special times for
03:38me and for him together. The Abbotsford Bar, Rose Street. It's a museum piece, this place,
03:48the Jacobean ceiling dripped in rich reds and gold. A dark mahogany bar, solid as a
03:55Spanish ship. Built in the golden age of pubs, I've already got a favourite table. But my
04:02eyes are fixed on a man alone in the corner. He places his hands this way, then that, carefully,
04:12with purpose like he's trying them on. He looks in wonder at their movement, their patterns
04:18and lines. They're not new though. I've seen these hands before as a girl. I curled my
04:26fingers around one thumb. Reached for them on walks and was always surprised when they
04:32folded my own small hand into theirs. Affection was hard won. He was always waiting in the
04:40window when I visited. Even on days I tried to surprise him, even in new windows when
04:47he was too old to stay far away. I thought you'd come today, he'd say, the sun was shining
04:53or the rains have brought you here. It must have been hard for a man like that to wait
05:00for life. We would sit in the smell of wax and petrol and Brylcreem in his shed and I'd
05:06lean in to hear his stories of the road, feel the walls shake with his wicked laugh. When
05:14he died, I dreamt of his hands every night for a month, rough, shoveled, worn, too big
05:23to hold delicate things. A life mapped and etched into every rivet and scar. I traced
05:32them when he opened his palms long enough to let me in. Thank you very much.