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more cherished than I might have been otherwise because my parents had had a child a
couple of years before me, Martha Ann, who was born with spina bifida and died after
only six weeks.
For whatever reason, I started life with all the taken-for-granted advantages of the
only child, plus a few more, maybe, because my father - faced, say, with the best cut of
meat from a joint - would smile and wave it aside and say, 'Oh, let the boy have it. He's
growing.'
And that was always the way it was, and so I grew up kind of assuming that matters
should be arranged largely for my convenience and I should have the pick of things. In
fact, this assumption of superiority was so ingrained that I usually wouldn't even mind if
somebody else was occasionally given precedence. I'd just smile tolerantly and think that
was nice for them; really whatever they'd just got should be mine, obviously, but it was
good that other people got a share of the spoils now and again, even if they didn't really
merit it, and I could even take pleasure in my own - albeit imposed - magnanimity.
The only area where I conceded rank on a continuing basis was in general smartness;
there was a pretty blonde girl in my class in North Queensferry Primary School called
Mary Henderson. Mary always came top in tests and I was always a worshipful second
(there was one time after she'd been off school ill for several weeks when the positions
were reversed, but even in Primary Two I knew that didn't count). Brains and beauty. Nat-
urally I fell as completely in love with her as it's possible to fall at such an undeveloped
age, and Mary became my first girlfriend, from the age of five to when we were both
nine, and I left the village. It didn't entirely end there - not that she ever knew - because
I kind of fell hopelessly in love with her when I was fourteen, but that's another story. We
kept in sporadic touch and, years later, when she was working for a firm of lawyers in
Edinburgh, she sold me my first flat in the city.
In any event, I had a happy childhood.
A lot of people who've read
The Wasp Factory
and have fallen for those old non-
senses about people only writing about what they know and first novels always being
autobiographical seem to think I must have had a really awful, disturbed and even abused
childhood, but it just ain't true.
Years ago the launch party for
Canal Dreams
was held in Edinburgh. This was a first
for me; all my book launches until then had been in London, however my publishers had
finally given in to years of me whining that we always had these shindigs in London
where they were frankly a bit lost in amongst all the other launches and general media
clutter; wasn't it time to have one in Scotland where it might be a bit more of an event?
So they'd relented. Desperate, after my years of wheedling, to make sure that the evening
wasn't some awful one-man-and-his-dog affair where almost nobody turned up, I'd in-
vited as many of my family as possible along, including my parents. The topic shop was
