(Snod) Raymond McHard. 1963—2024

Notes on nostalgia. Adolescence, when neurons exploded and rearranged themselves into them or us. Your senses discombobulated by girls. Everything tasted better. We scattered ourselves on a sea of faces. Some familiar. Some not familiar enough.  Our voices thin as scratch-marks. Snod’s hair, flame-red as the hottest summer of 1976, but soon to be eclipsed and forgotten. We knew we were indestructible. All answers copied from the back of an old math book.

Assumptions: Snod and me spent equal amounts of time in school during this period. Neither of us dogging a double of math on a Tuesday morning, taught by Mr Coyle or Miss Barclay with the big tits, or looking out the window and thinking, ‘what the fuck am I doing here?’

2. Proportion of Life Spent in School (as of Today)

Using my age (approximately 62 years) and Snod’s age (61 years) as the basis, the proportion of life spent in school for those four years. Then, project that same proportional time spent in school (gradually diminishing as life expectancy increases)

Music does the lifting. Hard-wiring us for remembering and connecting. Practiced until everyday miracles became commonplace. I didn’t know (Ray) Raymond McHard, the musician and digital creator. Ray McHard - I Just Wanna Play Guitar: Link to SoundCloud.

I don’t listen to music. Not on the list when he married Elizabeth Kane in 1982, four years after we left school, but I had met him in another life.

Raymond Mc Hard (Snod Mc Hard) was born 1963. (Doctor Who Theme Tune (1963): Link to video. He lived in Whitecrook. That buried map of where our childhood lies. Dr Who was a must-watch but nobody could afford time machines or tellies, unless they were rented from Radio Rentals. A slot snaffled shillings or sixpences.

 A Sunday Mail cost 5d. The media tapped into a Scottish link to The Great Train Robbery. America was still mourning the loss of J.F. Kennedy. Rangers won the double of League and Scottish Cup. Hundreds of Aberdeen fans gathered outside Pittodrie jeering at the team and telling their manager Tommy Pearson to get to fuck back to Newcastle after the team lost five games on the trot.

Snod was in my registration class. The home-economics block. Mrs Ferry taught sewing to girls and how to cut their cloth to suit the Victorian ideal of the 1870s, not 1970s. She counted us in and out of our lives for the first two years of High School. Snod’s name has a line through it now. Gone like most of our teachers. Like others in our class, such as Tam (Caveman) Collins, David (Dade) Simson and George Devine. The world was ever young. Weaned on sweeties. Watch Neil Reid on Hughie Green’s Opportunity Knocks: Link to video

Good Catholic girls dressed like their mother. They inherited anything their big sister or big cousin had grown out of. Duffles and anoraks were fair game for everybody, including boys, which was a reddy. Lena Zavaroni - Mother, He’s Making Eyes at Me: Link to video

Our classroom windows faced the PE block. Adidas tracksuits and domains of Spiers and McCluskey. Girls had Miss Thompson to deal with. Two of PE was the best part of our day. Their job, found money, we thought. They just gave you a ball and told you to kick it about outside on the gravel hockey pitch or do something in the gym hall.

Those walls witnessed musical atrocities committed in the name of education. Girls and boys randomly flung together and taught a different kind of Shang-a-Lang, which wasn’t even a proper word. We might have aped the Bay City Rollers with their two-tone jumpers. Our feather cuts and high-waister denim with tartan trims, https://youtu.be/ytii7-bUxuk but the Gay Gordons fostered camaraderie and an appreciation of Jimmy Shand and the Scottish culture. 

Snod was wee. That made him a natural winger. If he’d been a bit taller, he could have played in midfield. But he did his own thing in and out of the classroom. We’re on the March with Ally’s Army: Link to video

Smokers huddled in and out of the rain in doorways at the back of the PE block. Ten pence for a single out of the corner shop with two matches. It was cheaper stealing them from your mum or dad, but smoke clung to you like a hex. Ten pence got you five ice-poles, which you beat to mush on the railings or walls or on the seats in the cloakroom, with your head against the back of the playground windows.

Fahey, the history teacher, never forgot that he’d been a school janitor. Kids like us ruined a new school. Black Weegins and brown brogues with segs to scuff up newly polished floors. Doc Martens, with red or yellow football laces, for kicking things that should have remained unkicked. Desert boots and not just for the desert.  Adidas Samba. Adidas Bamba (no, please Mum, not Nordock with four strikes) for style and kicking balls through windows. Spit-balls on roofs, hanging like stalagmites for the unwary, sticking chewing gum under the bannisters and smashing windows with balls. Flooding toilets. Leaving rubbish everywhere but the bins provided. A history of being in your face for no good reason. He gave our class—including the girls— two of the belt for talking in the corridors.

Eggshell head, waiting for the sky to fall on him, like Calimero. ‘It’s an injustice! It’s an injustice!’  Baldy Burnett with the big specs listening in on the language lab to the sounds of silent breathing. The Vice Principle knew how to make you sweat, sitting in the seats outside Skinnider, the headmaster’s office. ‘La Fenetre’. We knew enough not to grass on each other. The Sensational Alex Harvey Band - Framed: Link to video

Baldy Burnett, like Jesus, like The Sensational Alex Harvey, liked to give off the vibe of being in two places at once. Alex Harvey offered a simpler solution. He recruited lookalikes from good mates and the cast of Hair and sent them out across Scotland as far as the Hebrides with a Gibson guitar. Told them to multiply and bear fruit.

The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, Apollo 1975

Alex Harvey dressed up as Jesus but wearing a loincloth. He went for authenticity in a big way. A crown of thorns made of barbed wire that bled into his music. ‘Framed,’ he screamed at his audience was the story of a man set up by the screws.

‘Dae yeh, believe me?’

‘Nah,’ shouted back a guy at the front of the audience. ‘Cause yeh shagged my sister and jist fucked aff’.

Snod, was like wee Archie Gemmill, against Holland in Argentina. He had that knack with girls and found a way the rest of us didn’t. We fucking hated the lucky bastard. That’s jealousy.

We were unintelligible to girls as lumps of clay. Ten cans of Kestrel (30p each) before you went out. A drunken stumble. A bottle of the finest wine from Eldorado and you were ready to weave through the obstacle course of false smiles and sweetest sobriety, like an iguana with two penises. But you fell over things. Frightened smaller animals and children.

Hard-working parents raised the Whitecrook lassies to be polite. ‘Fuck off,’ they’d say in unison, in a nice way flashing teeth and tits. You’re the One That I Want - Grease: Link to video

Olivia Neutron Bomb might guide you by the elbow away to a place of safety where boys pogoed in a frenzy of sneers and disregard, where danceability had never been to a disco. Sex Pistols - God Save the Queen: Link to video

‘Alright.’ You’d explain to your mates that you didn’t fancy any of them cows, anyway. What you really needed was another Kestrel.

Time bends but also speeds up. Snod’s uncle had got him the answers to a test he’d be sitting for an apprenticeship as an electrician. His grasp of maths was on par with Super Ally’s prediction that Scotland would win the World Cup or be thereabouts. Youth unemployment at its highest level since the 1930s.  UB40 - One in Ten: Link to video

Physics and Art were in the top block of our school. Space and time are determined by the way internal clocks behave, which is calculated by the equation of motion, not self-promotion. Snod had over sixty years on a small planet. He left a family and grandchildren. He was an artist. The kind of guy that liked the melodic sound of humpback whales singing and knew where to get a record where they did the same thing but better with synthesisers and it didn’t hurt or exploit the whales. One of the good guys. Ray McHard - SoundCloud Profile: Link to profile

 RIP.

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