At the age of 25, you might think you have everything to live for. In the spring of 1987, despite having become a father for the first time a year earlier, I felt nothing other than despair.
18 years earlier, my parents divorced, and my mother took me away from the Glasgow overspill that was Cumbernauld to the frozen north that was Aberdeen. Nothing against the good people of the Granite City, but I hated my time there. Come the mid-1980s, I was very unhappy and yearned to return to the central belt.
In Aberdeen, to paraphrase an old Deacon Blue song, I had ‘been working for the Council’ for eight years when the latest ideology from Thatcher’s Conservative government took effect: namely, bus deregulation.
Grampian Regional Transport changed from providing a public transport service to the first seeds of First Bus, a private undertaking where profits rather than the public came first. Huge cuts to staff numbers were made and my unhappiness intensified. I had recently bought a flat in Aberdeen for my young family, and my first child was but a year old. However, I was desperately unhappy. Something had to give.
When I lived in Cumbernauld two decades earlier, my father had wanted me to follow the fortunes of Falkirk Football Club. Falkirk was just a few miles drive away from our home, and he didn’t want me embroiled in the whole Celtic-Rangers thing. He took me to my first game in October 1968 where Hearts were the visitors to Brockville. The experience blew me away. Hearts won 3-1, and I immediately fell in love with the team from Edinburgh, a passion and commitment that has stayed with me ever since. Life means you may fall out of love with your partner (I was married to my first wife for 30 years before, but this didn’t stop us getting divorced) but one’s love to one’s football team is truly a lifelong commitment.
Back to the mid-1980s: I was in the pit of despair. In April 1987, I travelled from Aberdeen to watch Hearts lose a Scottish Cup semi-final to St. Mirren at Hampden Park. Hearts added to my despair by losing a game they were expected to win. St. Mirren’s Frank McGarvey scored the winner. It was a long journey back to the Granite City.
The following day my feelings of despair reached new levels. I decided I had to change my life. As things stood, I felt I had no hope for the future. I worked in a job I hated, lived in a city where I felt miserable. I decided to create a five-year plan to move from Aberdeen to Scotland’s capital city.
I scoured The Scotsman newspaper’s job vacancies page every Friday – in those far off days when jobs were advertised in the printed press. I applied for a couple of jobs in Edinburgh and, to my surprise, was interviewed for both. However, those prospective employers seemed put off by the fact I lived 130 miles away even though I had stated my plan was to move south. So, as the old saying goes, if the mountain won’t come to Mohammed…
My wife gave birth to our second child, a bouncing 10lbs 2oz baby daughter at the end of September 1989. I was still living in Aberdeen, still working in a job I hated. But the clock was ticking. My mental health had suffered to the extent I declared my intention to leave my job just before my wife told me she was pregnant in early 1989. So, as 1989 ended, I was about to take a huge gamble with not only my life but that of my wife and two young children. I resigned from the job I hated and sold our flat.
On 5th January 1990, my wife and daughters moved in with her mother in Aberdeen. I moved in with my father – 140 miles away in Paisley. I had no job and no house with only a small amount of savings. I was apart from my wife and two young children, one of whom was just a baby. Friends and family – especially my wife’s family – declared I had gone out of my mind. They said there was no hope for me. And in those first few weeks of the new decade there were knowing nods from them as I struggled to find a suitable job.
But on 21st March 1990, hope re-emerged in my life.
On that day I was interviewed for an office job with the Lothian Health Board. At around 5.30pm I received a telephone call – ‘can you start on Monday?’ Can I ever!
Within a couple of weeks, I had rented temporary accommodation in Edinburgh and my wife and children joined me in time for the Easter weekend. It was a small flat in Gorgie – an area I knew very well being a Hearts supporter and, being a top floor, it overlooked what was then the wide open terracing of Tynecastle Park! ‘I’ll take it’, I told the estate agent before he had barely managed to open the door.
Six months later, I secured a better paid job with the council in Edinburgh, and we moved to permanent accommodation in Dalkeith. We celebrated Christmas 1990 in our new home while I celebrated a new job that I loved in a city that I loved (and still do).
It was a huge gamble, but I never lost the belief that it would work out. To quote a line from the classic film The Shawshank Redemption, ‘hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies’. As I reflected on that day in 1987, I nearly gave thanks for Frank McGarvey’s goal that instigated my decision to change my life…