Growing up in the Southside of Glasgow during the seventies and eighties was a great time and I’ve got loads of good memories. I did well at school and went on to have some good jobs. I loved all the punk music that came around in the late 70’s, my friend Jim was in a band called Johnny and the Self Abusers and we’d all spend our weekends watching them play gigs in the local pubs and clubs. Jim went on to be the lead singer of the band Simple Minds and had a lot of success.

Football and music seemed to dominate people’s lives back then and we’d always be out and about doing something.  We’d either be playing or watching football, taking turns to have house parties or going to gigs. Midge Ure was a friend of my sisters, he’d often come over for a few drinks and a sing-song. It was just a great time to be alive and I sometimes feel I was blessed. The rest of my life didn’t turn out to be so rosy however.

When I left school I went to college and got my A-levels, I got a job maintaining trains at the St Rollox coachworks, I was there for over ten years until we were all unexpectedly made redundant. It’s always a worrying time when you have no job, but I never got too stressed out about it. I could handle those kinds of situations back then. This is a big contrast to how I am now. I got a part time job in a pub called the Dart Inn in Rutherglen to keep some money coming in until I found a new career. My mates all drank there and it was owned by Kenny Dalgleish, the Scottish footballer who was at that time playing for Liverpool.

He used to send up tickets for all the boys to go down to Merseyside every other weekend to watch his Liverpool team play. I had loads of friends back then and I was always out and about working, playing golf and having fun. I became a Prison Officer at Glasgow’s notorious HMP Barlinnie. I worked there for over twenty years and witnessed things that no one should ever see. I was happy go lucky and life was good. I got married in my early twenties, became a father to two boys, and things were going well. After working in the pub for a year or so, I decided to get into the same profession that my father had been in and I became a Prison Officer at Glasgow’s notorious HMP Barlinnie.

I worked there for over twenty years and witnessed things that no one should ever see. I always treated the prisoners with respect and I think they appreciated that. Even today, I occasionally see some of the ex-prisoners around and they’ll say hello and me and ask how I’m doing. In a prison environment, it’s hard not to judge people, but I always tried to be fair to them. Saying that, I had my nose broken a couple of times – but two broken noses in more than twenty years isn’t too bad in that line of work.

Newspapers are full of stories about prisons being a breeding ground for crime, and that they are riddled with drugs with the same old faces coming in and out like a revolving door. Well I’m sorry to say it is all true, that’s exactly what it was like for all the years I was there. Drugs were everywhere and I’d often find parcels thrown over the perimeter wall, while other people had them smuggled in deodorant cans and things like that.  

Seeing these things is bound to affect you in some way; you wouldn’t be human if it didn’t. A culmination of things also happened which led to my own world of crisis causing personal destruction. I began to use alcohol in excess to forget the things that I’d seen and I ended up having an epileptic seizure at work, a pretty bad one. I had always liked a wee drink socially, but this is when the heavy drinking started. I was self-medicating.