Things used to feel vast.

I remember vividly how small I felt when I was young, looking up at the hill behind the nursery in Croftfoot. It looked like the valleys in Ivor The Engine to me, impossible mountains, and all the way at the top, stretching far above the pylons and the telegraph pole wires, a row of houses on the very crest of the hill. We must've gone down early sometimes, because I can remember what those houses looked like in the dark, the windows lit in silence, the light wavering and flickering in the cold. I felt frightened and thrilled by the scale of it all, of other people and lives and distance beyond the mossy lawned and turned earth of our garden, and the rowanberries and the cobwebs.

My aunt says she thinks our house in Croftfoot was haunted! I can believe it.

That single memory is so important... when I was twenty I was sure I would never feel anything again. I Still dreamt a lot, but it was a tangle. Knots of reflections and faces. I would come up to Glasgow and walk and walk, aimless treks through Rutherglen and back again, looking out for milkshakes, being tired, trying to tire myself out... and I could remember how things were SUPPOSED to feel, but I just couldn't feel it until I made it back to Croftfoot and I looked up at the hill behind the nursery. That sense of joyous helplessness filled me again... I felt alive again! It was winter when that happened; the air was like cold water in my lungs at that precise moment.

And now it runs like stitches through me. I went to Keith's on Saturday, for the John Peel and Larry Rhodes night. I walked up Kingsacre Road, pretty much along the spine of the hill, one side falling down to Hampden, the other towards King's Park. I was leaning into the wind as I walked, my eyes watering a little, but enjoying a civilised darkness in the streets I don't get where I live. And I felt it again... the same telegraph wires, the same chill in the air, the amber glow of the lights, the iron banisters and the impractical sloping gardens... whole parts of Glasgow seem set out purely for viewing pleasure. So beautiful. I felt utterly insignificant but my heart was swollen. We're carved into the woods I guess.

I think about the softness of how some memories are and I sometimes worry about how much it hurts, knowing I'll never get them back. These are small things: my granddad teaching me to play chess on summer afternoons, the TV ceremoniously off, the clock ticking sombrely in the hall. The gentle routine of tea, the pools, the evening paper, of drawing curtains. I dream about that sometimes. Once, when I was five, I came home from school for lunch and my mum had bought me a packet of colouring pencils and two packets of Empire Strikes Back stickers. Just for nothing. There were in a white paper bag, waiting for me to finish my peanut butter sandwich. The last time I really cried was after dreaming about that, and remembering how happy that had made me feel. The simple tenderness of the gesture, and the wholehearted way I was able to take it, the wholehearted way I was able to appreciate it.

The things you appreciate when you're little! Birds pecking the tops of milk bottles to get at the cream. The times of the tides, breath in cold air, the names of the planets, the definition and purpose of the seasons, the dates on coins, a whole penny of change to yourself.

I am glad to have found these memories again, and to be able to call on them. I'm happy that, in the end, this is what our record is about.

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