It’s been a year since kenneth passed, so I think it’s a good time to share some stories. Many of them are funny and some of them literally scatalogical, so I thought I’d give it a wee while.

He was a man that loved a good story round a campfire so I will add to this as I think of old stories I’ve not told in a while. I think the best way to remember people is to tell stories about them. So here we go….

Images are provided by ChatGPT - cos I don’t have Kenneth to make images for me any more and I was enjoying the novelty.

Buying bog roll in Bulgaria

It’s hard to know where to start. Chronological wasn't working, so I’ll start with the story that I’m asked to tell most often.

We had been inter-railling for about 3 weeks. We had relaxed into the pace and rhythm and if anything we were getting quite good at it. We’d had a great time in Romania. On the last day in Romania - Kenneth shit the bed. He’d been complaining about some sort of stomach thing. To be honest, he was always complaining about some sort of stomach thing. I had drunkenly insisted that he tried a particularly delicious home made roast aubergine dip, which he hated, but was convinced that the teaspoon he had imbibed had done a number on him.

We had been living on take away food and beer and sleeping in train carriages. So either he had Aubergine poisoning or he'd picked up a bug.

It wasn’t a huge problem. We took the executive decision to bin his bed clothes on our way out the hotel. The management probably wouldn’t have made that decision but I’d like to think the cleaners would have thanked us.

Whatever it was that had hit the big man, he seemed to have overcome it for the big long train trip from Bucharest to Veliko Tarnovo. We had a great couple of nights in Tarnovo and then took a bus to Sofia - where the problems began.

We arrived in Sofia bus station and Kenneth made it clear that he had an urgent need to get to a loo. He ran in while I waited and then ran out clenching his bum cheeks and screamed “there’s no toilet - it’s just a hole in the ground and then markers where you are meant to put your feet!”

I told him to drop the tweeds and touch his toes.

He went in and immediately came back out again.

“There’s no bog roll!”.

Now the reason that I know that this was Bulgaria is that they have(or at least had - ask any Bulgarian over 30) a strange custom relating to their public toilets. There was a wee toilet attendant - usually a wee old woman in a head scarf - and on your way in you had to buy toilet roll off her by the sheet if you needed it. I always found it comical that you were expected to predict how much you would need. I don’t know whether you were expected to do this on (literally) gut feeling alone or whether you were meant to predict it based on recent diet.

Kenneth bought a wad and then headed in.

I waited about outside and tried to not look like a tourist. With two camping rucksacks the size of small cars.

Eventually Kenneth came out and threw about a weeks wages at the wee woman in the head scarf and made it clear we were to flee the scene. He told me that he’d bent down too far and when he stood up to survey the damage, there was a perfect circle of shite on the wall - 6 feet in diameter with a wee clean circle in the middle.

To this day, one of my biggest regrets in life is that I didn’t go back for a photo.

Light the fuse and then retreat 50 metres

For Kenneth’s stag do he wanted to do something a bit different. He hadn’t drank in years, so he didn’t fancy the “travel lodge in Newcastle with the boys” stag or the “debauchery in Prague for the weekend”… he wanted to do something a bit more outdoorsy, so we decided to recreate camping holidays of our youth and head off to Arran.

I think we had discussed various outdoor pursuits. Fishing(him). Hillwalking(me). We decided that all he wanted was a campfire and some tents. We’d give an open invitation to various friends and family and then just “hang about in Arran” for two days.

Now for some reason some one had a “firework connection”. I can’t remember who it was and for legal reasons that’s probably a good thing.

We were apparently getting “commercial grade” fireworks which you needed a license to own. They all looked fairly normal except one which could only be described as looking like an extremely large novelty dildo.

So we all arrived in Glen Rosa. We’d had the ubiquitous “ferry pints” and there may even have been some hip flasks and “pocket cans” for the walk. Glen Rosa sits in the centre of Arran and there’s a path that winds up through the valley and takes you into an amphitheatre of big granite mountains. It’s about an hours walk from the ferry.

Kenneth and I had been camping numerous times all over Scotland. I had my trusty £20 euro hike dome tent that had seen countless festivals and many munros. It was our assumption that all the friends and extended family had experienced a similar youth. Surprisingly many of them turned up in white trousers with mountain warehouse carrier bags with brand new overly complicated £300 tents in them.

So as the sun split the sky, kenneth and I erected about 15 tents and we got a fire going,

We all then went back to Brodick - the main town - to seek some pubs. I think when you are from Ayrshire you grew up in the 80’s and visited Arran where the grans and the mums would take the weans to the beach and the dads and grandpas would go and stoically sit propping up a bar and definitely not having feelings or emotions. They would self medicate the ups and downs in their testosterone while sharing stories describing their significant others as hormonal. As wee boys we’d think - I fancy a wee bit of that…. These forbidden “adult only spaces” that smelt of fag smoke, scampi fries and bad decisions.

30 years later and that aspect of Arran has died with those type of men and those types of holidays so we wandered round a soggy Brodick trying to find a lively old man pub from the 80’s. We visited the brewery and the distillery and some of us thought it would be a good idea to wade through a river that they thought wasn’t deep.

Back at the campsite at night we all drank around the fire and told stories and had laughs and then decided we were putting on an amateur fireworks display.

So it all went quite well. We had a launch spot far away from the fire and the tents etc. Some good quality fireworks lit up the mountains and it looked spectacular, then it came the finale…. the comedy dildo…..

So I recall some sort of instructions that said “light the blue touch paper and retreat 50 metres”, or maybe “only to be ignited 50 metres away from the igniter”. Who knows…. we stuck the stick in the ground, lit it and then retreated about 5 metres behind a shrub giggling like little boys. We watched in suspense as the fuse diminished…. and the firework slowly….. fell over….. and was no long pointing upwards and then exploded on the ground.

I don’t have that much experience of fireworks…. or bombs… or warfare really…. but it exploded in close quarters and the blast just kind of blew out our ears…. so we were crawling about signing “You okay??” while cartoon birds tweeted above our heads. It was like a scene out of Saving Private Ryan. At the time, Kenneth loved a bit of Call of duty, but I don’t think it had prepared him for a real life flash bang.

I’m not proud. We’d let off explosives in a granite amphitheatre, so I think most of South Ayrshire got woken up, but they were still voting tory back then, so swings and roundabouts.

We returned to the camp fire to pretend everything was okay looking like Wile E. Coyote after a particularly disasterous run in with an ACME invention. Our hearing returned reasonably quickly.

I get my hearing tested regularly for work and bizarrely the result is “no major damage”

19 second fart

So growing up in the arse end of nowhere, there is very little to do when you start to approach adulthood. We had never had much interest in sport. Kenneth would watch it and I hadn’t yet got to the age where it was a necessity to participate to battle the beer and crisp bulge, but we had little to no interest in taking up a sport.

We were too old for computer games and hanging around in bus shelters drinking sugary colourful alcoholic concoctions. I’d never managed to interest Kenneth in making music and we’d kind of got bored of driving to pubs to play pool while putting the longest songs we can think of on the juke box(Shine on you crazy diamond by Pink Floyd and The Box by Orbital). Mainly cos Kenneth would beat me 95% of the time.

Back then it was still pretty cheap to go to the pictures. It was a great excuse for me to eat loads of popcorn and for Kenneth to eat nachos with that strange orange plastic goo on them. The problem was that great films didn’t always land at the same time as your free time.

I’d love us to have had the know how or confidence to start thinking about making film back then, but we were usually pacifying our minds with Hollywood blockbusters. So for whatever reason we went to see a film called Young Adam with Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton. Films must have been thin on the ground that month or we must have misunderstood the synopsis because I’m checking wikipedia now and it’s described as a neo-noir erotic drama film.

Now I’d like to think I had a bit of patience for art. Kenneth less so. Wherever he lay on the various spectrums of dyslexia and/or adhd made him incredibly creative but also very short in the attention span division when it came to art being too wanky or self indulgent. I remember going to see the Passion of Christ with him(see! We didn’t neeeeed a car chase) and he sighed when he realised it was in Aramaic and he’d have to read subtitles.

Kenneth: (whispered) Who is that?

Neil: (whispered) Judas!

Kenneth: (whispered) How do you know that?

Neil: Cos someone just gave him big bag of money! You were the one that went to Sunday School! Not Me!

Kenneth: Yeah but we just played God Ball. It was like Football but one team was the Christians and one team was the Romans

Other cinema goer: Shoosh!!!

So we sat in a cinema with a handful of people in it watching Ewan McGregor try to win acting awards between earning the big bucks in films we were more in the mood to see.

You could tell when Kenneth was bored. He’d start asking you questions.

Is she really skinny, or does she have bigger than usual hip bones?

Is Star Wars the only film where Ewan McGregor doesn’t get his willy out?

I did say it was a Neo-noir erotic drama.

Eventually he asked:

What’s the longest fart you’ve ever done?

I responded with my usual diplomacy.

I think you’d be surprised if you timed it. 1 second is a long time when your foreskin is caught in your zipper.

Whether I was as uninterested in the film as Kenneth was or whether I just wanted to be a good friend, I set my watch to stopwatch mode. Cos it was a while ago and we didn’t have phones and we still had watches.

Kenneth proceeded to fart for 19 seconds….. please take a moment to yourself to count for 19 seconds. Thats how long he did an audible fart for.

Ever since, I’ve often counted 19 seconds out in my head. In moments of silence at the top of mountains. While nursing a baby - sleep deprived and ponderous. While farting myself(I’ve never made it to double figures). It was a thing a of beauty that will stay with me for ever more.

The cinema was almost empty. I’m not sure what the other cinema goer’s thought.

I can’t believe someone is doing a loud fart!! No. It can’t be it’s gone on too long, must be some sort of distant alarm or something. Oh look. there’s Ewan McGregor’s willy

Frustratingly we lost interest in competitive farting. We didn’t follow it up by timing more or going into training to beat personal bests. We often made reference to the 19 second fart, but think what we could have become with a more competitive streak!

Serbian gun running

By the time we got on a train to Serbia for our interrailing trip, we were changed men. We’d cast off our western addictions to Pringles and Walkers and could easily survive on “holiday crisps” with untranslated flavours.

Our muscles, feet, minds, and stomachs had become pretty toughened to the lifestyle. We had various rules about planning our next trains. I had maturely made a rule about not arriving in a city after 10 p.m., because a one-hour delay soon turns that into a time when everything is closed, and you don’t want to be the obvious tourist getting lost in a foreign city. Kenneth, in turn, enforced the "no trains before 11" rule, as he didn't take well to early starts. We were therefore trundling out of Sofia station at around midday with a packed lunch for the 8-hour trip.

Immediately upon entering the train, we realised that it was a pretty busy service. The train was one of the old-style ones with compartments on one side and a narrow corridor on the other. The corridor was the same width as our rucksacks, and two-way traffic meant a lot of sweaty, frustrated reversing, pushing, and shoving before we finally found our "Reserved" seats. There were people sitting in them, but the corridor was no place to be standing, so I was pretty determined to get them out so we could put down our rucksacks.

It was pretty clear that these people weren’t moving. They shoved me back out into the corridor and closed the door. With a more British-based arrogance this time, I went and complained to the train guard. I was between a rock and a hard place—constantly reversing and moving out of people's way. Everywhere I stood, I was in the way of traffic, so unless I wanted to run a marathon with my rucksack on in the August heat, I had no real option other than to keep fighting for my seat.

The train guard spoke English (woo hoo). He went to the carriage in question. Words (maybe even money) were exchanged, and he informed me that it might be a good idea to find a different seat. I decided that I had probably pushed my luck as far as it would go. At a loss for what to do, someone solved the problem for me. A friendly guy named Mensah introduced himself and told me he had found two seats we could share between all of us. Traveller paranoia—and the neck of the woods we were in—told me to be wary, but I also got the impression he was trying to bail me out of a dodgy situation.

We settled into a sleepy little carriage with six seats. 4 taken up by sleeping men in workman attire and two taken up by us. We tried to make conversation with the other passengers based on Kenneth’s knowledge of international football players. They didn’t take the bait and soon retreated back to sleep.

Our new friend had studied in the States (my memory says Alaska). He was keen to show off his English, his knowledge of American films, and his familiarity with European football. He was a great storyteller and a natural charmer. He told us he was from Montenegro and waxed lyrical about the beauty of its nature and birdlife. It was a real shame—we were running out of time and hadn’t had the chance to go south to that even more remote pocket of Europe.

The train trundled slowly toward its destination, and we assumed it was going to be a pretty sleepy journey punctuated only by stories from our new friend. We couldn’t have been wronger….

The train passed the Serbian border without incident. Scary men came and took our passports away for five minutes, then brought them back, but we were used to this.

The drama began once we hit the first stop after the border. The four sleeping guys in our carriage weren’t really sleeping. They all sprang into action and started pulling guns from everywhere. Yeah... I’ll say that again. They started pulling guns from everywhere. You know those things you see so often in American films that they lose meaning, but in real life, you can count on one hand how often you’ve seen one? Yeah. Those.

There were guns hidden under the seats, but the most conspicuous moment was when they pulled out screwdrivers and started taking the dustbin off the wall to retrieve parts of a sniper rifle and bullets from behind the panelling.

We could do nothing but look on in shock. We were so stunned, in fact, that fear didn’t even have time to show up.

I was sitting with our trusty travel guitar, and my memory says I started playing Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door ("Mama, put those guns to ground..."), though that might have been added to later retellings during a wine-fueled after-dinner storytelling session.

The next hour or so was spent feverishly brainstorming the backstory of what we had just witnessed. Mensah was quick to tell us that Serbians were all bastards and that the troubles weren’t over. We started with the assumption that someone was about to be JFK’d. Since we hadn’t seen any news in the past four weeks—and our knowledge of Serbian politics was terrible even at the best of times—we figured something must have kicked off and we were in trouble. Eventually, that line of thought took too much energy.

I told Kenneth to take off the Rambo headband and put his shirt back on. It was far more likely that, for whatever reason, smuggling guns across the border was a bit like smuggling cigarettes and booze back from France. In all likelihood, even if someone was going to get popped, that gun was going to change hands a few times before it did.

Mensah left us and looked worried about our prospects traveling onwards through Serbia. I’ve since decided he was probably just having a bit of fun with us.

It wasn’t long before an old woman in the carriage next to us asked if we could help with her luggage. We lifted various cases and packages off the overhead rack—which included a bazooka.

As soon as the border officials had left the train, it had become a hub of activity. The main contraband was guns and big black bags full of clothes. The further the train trundled on, the more blatant people became. Our carriage seemed to be the only one that remained intact. Entire walls were being removed to offload guns, and eventually, an entire toilet was dismantled so that when you opened the door, you saw only the tracks whizzing by beneath where the floor had once been.

My difficulty in finding a seat had become clear now. The people in our seats clearly had a stash of contraband munitions they were not going to leave unguarded. The train guard knew this and was trying to warn me off—and maybe Mensah knew as well and had done me a favour.

Something else also became clear: there was no way this train was going to arrive in Belgrade on time. By the time the sun had set, we had run out of every type of sustenance except water. We were also among the few passengers left on the train. We wandered around, marvelling at the ingenuity—and destruction—that had taken place.

After a particularly long, unscheduled stop, we investigated by looking out the windows. The train staff were offloading cargo onto trucks. They seemed to be getting their cut of the munitions pie.

It was 2 or 3 a.m. when we arrived at Belgrade station. We were famished and exhausted. The hotel was cheap, communist-style fare with concrete walls and military-issue beds—but we were asleep in seconds.

When you lousing?

One of the best things about introducing Kenneth to foreign lands was that he pretty much had a refusal to change his Ayrshire ways. He even stood out in Glasgow for this.

I remember he helped me move into my student accommodation at Glasgow Uni. He had moved into his the week before as he went to Strathclyde. There was a communal kitchen which we sat in to be sociable afterwards. There were various Americans there who had arrived a week earlier for some reason, so they were quite good at showing people where the cutlery drawer was etc. Kenneth asked them all the same question.

“Oh! You’re American! Do you have any friends called Herb? We don’t have people called Herb over here”

No one ever knew how to react.

He continued like this for as long as I knew him. An absolute determination to talk to people. I could never work out if he wanted to put them at ease or put himself at ease or if he was just nosey.

I watched people get off of busy trams before their stop in Amsterdam when he’s sat next to people and asked “Are you going to your work?”

None of this would be unusual in Kenneth’s world. He finds it strange that he wouldn’t know what everyone was up to.. because… Ayrshire. We went to London with the school when we were about 16. Old enough and tall enough to look like adults. Ask a stranger on the London Underground what they are reading and if it’s any good. The whole carriage will tense up and freak out. It’s really funny.

People from Ayrshire simultaneously celebrate our national bard and local boy Robert Burns while also being completely surprised that people think we have an accent and our own lexicon. This has never been more true when Kenneth gets into foreign taxis. Taxi driving is often done by immigrants. If it’s a country where English is an expectation, they may be learning the local language while also being expected by British tourists to understand accented English. It’s for this reason that I’ve never understood what Kenneth expected as a response when he would get in a taxi and say:

“When you lousing?”

Russian mafia chair lift

We were in Sofia in Bulgaria. Stomach problems had subsided and we hadn’t yet smuggled ammunition and armaments across borders. I’d been in Sofia quite a few times and decided that we should get out and see some nature. According to the guidebook there was a ski lift that takes you up the hillsand then you can wander around the mountain top

We thought we'd go up on the ski lift and then walk back down and that sounded like a pretty good deal. So we got the hotel to order us a taxi and this taxi driver put us on the phone to his daughter which was quite strange but his daughter spoke english so eventually I'm talking to this woman on a mobile phoneto tell this taxi driver that we are going to the chairlift.

I’m following on the map and he seems to have gone past where I thought it was. I asked about it, but he said there was a better one. Or he intimated as much.

So he drives us miles along this road and drops us at a different chair lift - but it all seems pretty legit, cos there are mountains beside us and we can see a chair lift. We pay the £1.50 or whatever minuscule amount it cost - and we were probably getting over charged.

We get out. The chairlift isn’t open and possibly isn’t built yet, or it’s a winter ski lift. Who knows. There’s a strange man in a tracksuit. He looks like a caricature of a Russian gangster. He’s about five foot square, dripping in jewellery with peter string fellow type balding long hair.

He said that he would take us back to the town centre for 50 euros a head. It wasn't that we don't have the money it, but we weren't getting taken for a ride - literally or metaphorically. It didn’t look like he had a gun in these Kappa trackie bottoms so we kind of wandered through the middle of nowhere navigating purely by feel until we saw something that made sense. Eventually we were on a bus route and we made it back to civilisation.

We never made it up a mountain, but we'd beat the Russian mafia by just being stubborn and going on a big long walk.

Kenneth was yellow on the inside

When we were living together at uni, I was the cook. We would all go home for the weekend and work various minimum wage jobs, see significant others and practice with bands, then get back on Sunday night and go and do a Safeway(it was a while ago) shop for the week. We’d then celebrate with my version of a chicken korma in front of the telly.

It became a ritual. The curry would often be based on on whatever had a yellow sticker in the reduced section. For Greig and Kenneth the quality of the curry was directly proportional to how yellow it was. I learned quite quickly that it was a mistake to pad it out with Spinach or broccoli from the bargain bin. The results were fine, but there was a general consensus(of exactly 66.6% of the household) that curries couldn’t be green.

So for whatever reason, there was a week that I wasn't in the flat. I suggested that they could have something else, but they were confident that I could relay the cooking skills via the phone. Everything went well. There were several phone calls back and forth.

Eventually some time had passed and they phoned and asked

“why is it not more yellow?”

I explained that Turmeric was the key to yellowness, but we’d ran out and it was 10:30 by now so nowhere would be open beyond Peckhams. Peckham’s was a kind of Deli, but it boasted “munchies till midnight” in the window cos they knew their student clientele. We’d often find ourselves sitting in watching Chewin the Fat eating a Quinoa Salad with dried apricot and tiramisu dip because we hadn't had the foresight to buy munchies while a shop selling Pringles was still open.

So a few days later I was back up in Glasgow and I asked how the curry was.

“It was okay. Peckham’s only had two wee jars of that Turmeric stuff”

They’d used both of them. Not only was there a uranium coloured glow on the plates and crockery that had come into contact with the concoction, there was even a tideline on the “Stainless” steel cutlery they’d used.

In more recent time Turmeric has become the catch all remedy for alternative therapies. If the internet is to be believed, it can prevent inflammation, constipation, diarrhea, hypothyroidism, hyperthyroidism, cholera and pirates.

I have always assumed that Greig and Kenneth were immune to SmallPox and Leprosy and had a faint yellow glow on the inside.

Hungry in Hungary with a short hand notebook

Due to a Polish train station refusing to let us buy a ticket for the train we wanted(You couldn’t buy a ticket without first having queued for “Information”), we took the scenic route to get to Romania and ended up in a town called Eger. We had no plans to be there. It was just an overnight to break up the journey from Krakow to Timisoara.

We arrived late at night with no expectations. We stayed in a wee B and B, where we were charged next to nothing for a room and given a bottle of wine each for our troubles. We walked to the main square and it turns out there was a wine festival on with a lot of free samples. Kenneth wasn’t keen on alcohol at the best of times and definitely wasn’t keen on this dense heavy red wine. He’d been on a trains for the best part of 10 hours surviving on crisps and Diet Coke and he wanted some real food.

We sat down in a Bavarian influenced place called Etlap. At the time we seemed to be doing quite well with exchange rates and it turned out the most expensive thing on the menu was less than a fiver in UK currency.

Kenneth was famished. Our last sit down meal was a hostel breakfast in Krakow over 12 hours ago where the cornflakes disintegrated when they came into contact with the UHT milk.

He couldn't decide what to have so I told him to order everything he wanted and sit with my shorthand notebook beside his plate. Don’t finish everything and make notes the entire time.

They thought we were food critics and the service was impeccable. Kenneth fulfilled his fantasy of ordering everything on the menu and I fulfilled my fantasy of trying to complete an entire page of a wine list.

Half a prawn in Barcelona

My 20’s were spent travelling around Europe going to conferences, making presentations, attending meetings and generally doing the politics of academic research. I was young free and single, so eventually I was doing the travelling for other people’s projects as well as my own because of my lack of family ties and responsibilities. It was an absolute dream. There’s very few places in Europe I’ve not been and I got paid to go to them.

This was also the period where Ryanair, Easyjet and a few other players were competing to see who could have the lowest prices to fly around Europe. My Glasgow to Amsterdam return was £11 for quite a while.

For this reason, I’d always tell Kenneth where I was. I could always book a twin room if he had the free time and Ryanair were accommodating. So we managed to squeeze a few city breaks in on the cheap.

One of the memorable ones was a trip I made to Barcelona. I can’t even remember why I was there. It got to the end of my day of work and Kenneth had spent the day at the Nou Camp. I got asked if I was going to the social dinner. The bosses were Italian.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 “I’m going to give it a miss”

🇮🇹 “You’ll have to eat! You might as well eat with us.”

This was often the argument when I wanted to eat a Pizza in my pants while watching a film in my hotel room rather than spend the evening with the same people I’d spent the day with. This time I thought I had a good excuse.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 “I’ve got a friend in town and I don’t see him often”

🇮🇹 “Bring him along!”

…..and thus I had not only negotiated a free feed for Kenneth in a swanky restaurant…. I was pretty much encouraged to work with Kenneth to dream up a back story better than “He’s a mate from School. He works in William Hill the bookies”

So we got our stories straight in the Taxi. He was doing a Phd in group theory at MIT. We had gone to school together and hadn’t seen each other in a while.. Group Theory at MIT is from Good Will Hunting. I was confident that I knew more about abstract mathematics than any of the social scientists that would be in attendance and I reckoned that it was the branch of mathematics that was most likely to have a great mind that came across a bit left of field.

The restaurant was “Restaurnt 7 portes” down at the docks. I can’t really remember why, but we ended up at the top table. I guess the powers that be were trying to involve my organisation in a project, or trying to get me to agree to do work that I didn’t have budget for or something.

Whether it was a nervous thing, or just a hatred of peace and quiet, Kenneth loved to fill dead air. I remember once at my Grandfather’s funeral, there was the awkward silence of lots of relatives that didn’t really know each other sitting in a room not knowing what to say - Kenneth started telling stories which verged on a stand-up routine.

Social dinners can be quite staid - especially when not everyone is mother tongue of the same language. I’ve found that the Scots can be the most interesting people at the table, or certainly the one’s most willing to ease the tension and fill the air. Kenneth settled into this role admirably.

While I did my best to get work done by moving the conversation to whichever projects we were working on, I would tune into Kenneth’s conversation and listen to him retell stories I’d heard 1000 times, but with added bravado and even less respect for the truth than usual. He was holding court and in my experience all the various nationalities of Europe loved a Scot.

The food was fantastic, the courses kept coming and the wine kept flowing. Eventually the question I’d been dreading arrived:

🇮🇹 “So what exactly is Group Theory?”

Kenneth played a blinder and regurgitated a version of what I explained in the taxi..

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 “Well it’s just about seeing the world in different ways. The systems and processes that lie behind everything. Take this paella we are eating for instance. I’m willing to bet that you only have one side of the langoustine. Mine are all the left hand side. Neil’s are the right hand side. Yours will be one or the other”

Everyone looked through their paella and right enough they either had a “left hand bowl” or a “right hand bowl”.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 “Now I can tell from this that the chef has had two big pans of paella, with a chopping board in the middle. They’ve chopped the langoustine down the middle and then moved one half into the left pan and one half into the right pan. This is the essence of group theory”

His audience looked on stunned. For people who hadn’t been listening or who didn’t have the ear for the Ayrshire accent, the explanation moved round the room like Chinese whispers and you could see people checking their plates to make sure no one had an ambidextrous plate of prawns while muttering things about MIT and Scottish Man and Group Theory in various languages.

There is a apocryphal tale of Euler convincing Catherine the Great’s court that God existed because:

No one understood maths so they had to just applaud and take it as given. Like the emperor’s(or Tsarina’s) new clothes.

Kenneth always had a sideways brain that was quite good for creativity, but not great for timekeeping, but he did once convince a room full of academics that he studied theoretical algebra at MIT with the assistance of little more than some shellfish.

This wasn’t the first or only time that he masqueraded as an academic. We got away with it a few times. It was often a great source of what I like to call “Kenneth’s accidental jokes” - jokes when I’m not convinced he realised it was funny - just his brain knew the least appropriate thing to say.

We were once at a social dinner. There was an older French woman who was enjoying both Kenneth’s chat and a cheese cake.

🇫🇷 “Oh my god! This cheesecake tastes orgasmic”

Now I thought this was a kind of strange thing to say, but Kenneth immediately responded with:

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 “Yeah. I thought it was quite salty too”

We were also once taking to Belgian who had lived his whole working life in Asia where he was gynaecologist to the stars. As always Kenneth was interested in people and their decisions.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 “Do you think you’d ever move back?”

🇧🇪 “No. I’m very happy”

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 “What if the work dried up?”

Kenneth made an impression on all these people and I continued to work with them for over a decade. They would often ask after him, and I would have to maintain an alternative reality of Kenneth’s career as a theoretical mathematician.

“Yeah. I was actually with him last week in Switzerland. He’s working with the guys from CERN on a big project. Very Hush hush…”

We should have been spies…..

Camp fire drifting out to sea

I’m not quite sure when it happened, but at some point we became quite outdoorsy. It never occurred to us to take three trains and a bus on a rainy summers day and climb a mountain instead of hanging about complaining you had nothing to do and then going to the cinema.

I guess as Kenneth passed his test and had his own car and I started living in the flattest country in the world, the mountains suddenly started to have more appeal.

I can now see Munro’s from my bedroom window and I point them out to the toddler and wonder when they start to inspire awe.

So we would start going road trips when our down time synced up. I thought nothing of taking advantage of Transavia, Easyjet and Ryanair and nipping home with a passport in one pocket and a clean pair of boxers in the other.

We basically scooted around Scotland in my mum’s trusty VW beetle and went down roads we’d never been before. Kenneth wanted me to go fishing and I wanted him to climb mountains, so we met in the middle and did very little of either.

Accommodation was usually camping… usually wild…. preferably on a beach…. and the evening’s entertainment was usually a campfire and copious amounts of meat. I’m not sure what was going on, whether it was some sort of quarter life crisis on our testosterone journey. We didn’t go the full hog and buy a sports car or a pickup truck and start dating teenagers, but Kenneth did have a small motorbike at the time… and at one point he bought an old school VW beetle with the thought of being a mechanic, so who knows.

There was lots of plastic swords.

There was lots of checking the admission prices of castles and not going in.

There were lots of fun adventures. We went to Aberdeen because we saw it wasn’t that far away on a roadsign and realised we’d never been. It was raining, Kenneth did a poo on the beach cos we couldn’t find a toilet. I took a photo and then had to delete it cos it showed a bit too much.

We would make up fake back stories any time we were talking to people. “Gunter the yacht salesman” “Sven who was visiting Scotland because he wanted to buy a mountain”.

Scotland’s tourist areas are awash with American tourists. They are wonderfully gullible. You can tell them the Loch Ness Monster is well known to holiday in July and that they should come back later in the year.

School boy silliness all fuelled by bacon rolls and whatever cassette tapes we had available at the time.

One of these many trips, I’d left work at lunchtime on the Friday, flown to Glasgow and by 9pm we were building a campfire on a beach at Kyle of Lochalsh ready to explore Skye the next morning. On the trip to get firewood there’s always the bravado of how big a piece of wood you can bring back. I was probably cooking an unnecessarily complicated dinner on a gas stove(I slow cooked a beef stew at T in the Park once). Kenneth dragged half a tree over and suggested that we could build a fire around it and it would burn all night.

So several stories and speils of drunken consciousness later, Kenneth points out that the tide is coming in. We’re sitting on big boulders that we’d rolled to the fireside. Our sandles and toes are starting to get wet. We’re on a lochside, so as long as there’s a fire and wine to keep us warm and the water doesn’t get up past our ankles we decide we’re not in much danger and that the experience is quite pleasant.

It’s a lovely spot. You can see the sun set behind the Cuillin mountains on Skye and it’s reflected in the still Loch. There’s little to no light pollution so you are illuminated by stars.

We continue to chat and laugh and before long realise that the fire is starting to get further away. The main body of the fire is the partial tree that Kenneth has insisted was a good idea to build the fire around. We sat drinking wine and eating stew watching our fire drift out to sea knowing that no one would ever believe us and we’d never see this moment again.

What this period did do was sow the seeds of our travel relationships which let us hit the ground running when we travelled various places in Europe. We’d created boundaries and priorities. I knew I couldn’t convince him to climb mountains or eat tomatoes and he knew that he couldn’t convince me to buy a Lada and drive it back from Bulgaria.

Possible world record attempt

Kenneth deteriorated pretty quickly in his journey with MSA which would eventually take his life. I don’t think you can ever quite place your head in the mind of someone that has to admit they’ll never drive again or have any sort of independence and it’s not going to improve.

I did everything I could to be a good friend and just act as if it was all normal and fine. Kenneth remained jolly with a brave face the entire time. Probably the biggest change in this was helping him go to the toilet. At first you were just getting him physically into the room and then kind of giving him whatever privacy you could. Eventually I was involved in various catheters in socks and more of the plumbing end of things.

Kenneth approached it with humour and just got on with it, and I’ve never been squeamish so I just tried to provide whatever support I could. Any awkwardness was offset by the fact that we never left an accessible toilet without closing the seat lid and leaving a note on it.

“Please don’t flush. Possible world record attempt. Gone for tape measure”

The best jokes are the ones that you aren’t there for. I just need to imagine someone tentatively opening a toilet - pretty confident that it’s a joke, but still wary of the monster within - and I’m left with school boy giggles.

Thank you Kenneth for this and all the other stories.

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Remembering Kenneth Paterson Clarke (1981-2024)