Tam Donnachie 1962—2024.

Tam Donnichie was always a welcoming presence. There’s a great photo of him and a couple of the lads in the Drop Inn. Swiggy (2001? RIP) with a moustache. Barry Brennan (2020, RIP). Tam (2024, RIP) his curly black hair retreating to baldness and he wore specs. The sensible one in and out of the photo. Turning to stare at the camera, And the youngish, black-haired Charlie Mac, the insensible one. Eon Brennan, Barry’s older brother, with his arm around Charlie’s shoulder. Out of the frame, Minx, who Tam grew up with in Faifley. A group of misfits.

I last saw Tam at Julie’s fiftieth. Working backwards, before that, he was at Charlie’s sixtieth in 2020. Everybody likes Charlie, but we know his brain dissolves like a battered VHS tape left in booze overnight after two pints. He’d get lost in a two-man tent. Find Robinson Crusoe on his island and pick a fight with the wanker that thought it was his island because he was here first.

Tam made a tape of Charlie swearing at a fucking remote control. The secret wasn’t to point the remote at the telly, but to point Charlie towards the door. ‘Get im tae fuck,’ as Swiggs concluded after one too many, in the same way you couldn’t let a rabid dog in your living room that would chew your couch.

Tam had that ability to stand back and say, ‘That’s Charlie Mac for you.’ It’s only a couch. Holidays in Goa were a luxury he could afford. They could afford. Friendship counted for more than stuff you would throw away.

There’s a picture of Tam and Charlie underneath the Eiffel Tower in their Scotland tops and kilts. Smaller objects such as glass tables had been set aside and left Charlie blooded but unbowed. The Eiffel Tower was too big for Charlie to have a fair fight with. Perhaps that’s why they’re smiling. Scotland had qualified for the World Cup in 1998. We opened the tournament. A game against Brazil. We lost, as expected.

We didn’t claim we were going to win it, like we did in Argentina in 1978, under manager Ally McClown. But we did almost do something Charlie Macish when Archie Gemmill scored one of the best World Cup goals of all time. It all fizzled out, as it always does, but that’s why Scotland as a nation remains suspicious of people and nations, like our near neighbours, that get above themselves.

Tam watched Scotland failing to perform in the Euros 2024 for the last time from his home in Scott Street. We opened the tournament again against the host nation Germany and got thumped.

Tam was a Bannkie supporter, which perhaps explains why he was so keen on Scotland. He kept all the programmes from when Clydebank had their own stadium. Their manager Bill Munro had a bright young winger Davie Cooper on the wing and they contested the old First Division with St Mirren. Their up-and-coming young manager Alex Fergusson was doomed to take charge of serial winners, Aberdeen and Manchester United.

Fergusson’s job with Scotland was like the YTS apprenticeship Tam did after leaving school in 1977-78. Tam’s job was a factory job. Making double-glazed windows. Fergusson’s makeshift job was to give us something to watch after Jock Stein’s heart attack in Cardiff in 1986. He failed, of course. It’s Scotland we’re talking about.

Tam did better with the windows. His was the kind of worker and family the Tories love. He turned up for forty-two years every day for work and overtime and died before he could claim his pension.

He was the same age as Ally McCoist. There was an American blockade on Cuba in the year they were born. John F. Kennedy was President. There was a countdown to nuclear Armageddon as U-2 spy planes flew sorties over the Soviet Union. Dundee were Scottish Football champions and a Daily Record cost 3d. Clydebank FC didn’t exist except as an idea.

Tam was born in Overtoun Hospital in Dumbarton. His mum and dad had been brought up during the hungry thirties and married as teenage sweethearts. They already had two boys. Tam was the fourth Donnachie, because his twin sister Anne was the third. Arriving and thriving five minutes before him.

They both attended Edinbarnet and then Braidfield. While the rest of us were shang-a-langing along with the Bay City Rollers and wearing flared trousers and tartan shirts, Tam remained cool to their appeal and championed a lesser known group called The Beatles. There was a call for action on Dole Misery as the Scottish TUC published a report showing there was only one job available for every five Scottish school leaver. Youth was on the dole. None of these things mattered as much as his mum, Thomasina, dying aged 47 in 1975. Tam and Annie were thirteen.  

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book On Death and Dying outlines the five stages of grief. It was a Scottish Referendum year and we were living in the past. Our oil being sucked from our shores to pay for unemployment benefits. The hottest summer since records began. A backlash against open-air bevvying. The Man from Atlantis was on the telly, cooling off in the water with flipper feet bigger than Michael Phelps. The Man from Atlantis later popped up selling oil to J.R.Ewing in Dallas in the eighties.  

‘Denial’, ‘Anger’, ‘Bargaining’, ‘Depression’. That ray of sunshine on the horizon, ‘Acceptance’. Not everyone will experience the five stages of grief. And they don’t tally before Jimmy Stewart, age 50, died too. Tam and Anne, twins, living in a care home with strangers. A local authority that did their statutory duty.

‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad/They may not mean to, but they do,’ Philip Larkin’s opening lines on This Be Verse. The poet laurate wasn’t orphaned at an early age or he might have been better versed in getting fucked up. Every middle-class boy, of course, has their own opinion.  

Tam stayed close to home in Scott Street, Dalmuir. He got out, had a life and made a life. And was the kind of uncle that never said no to his nieces and nephews. He knew the value of friends and didn’t like to make a fuss. That’s what Charlie Mac was for. He voted with his body for a humanist ceremony. Charlie helped carry the coffin. A hand on his shoulder, to keep him right. Tam would have liked that. Perhaps he’d have liked it more if Charlie dropped him, because he wasn’t really there. RIP.       

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