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Scotland, the meaning I draw from my memories as a man are defined by my family’s lessons about love and laughter, and singing, lots and lots of singing.

‘Defying Gravity’
    O ur house in Mount Vernon, where I lived until I was nine, had a fenced yard for privacy and for restraining Pagan, our family dog, a mournful-looking beagle who liked to wander. When I was four years old, I figured out how to jimmy the lock on the fence’s back gate, and one afternoon I decided to visit Murn at her flat in Sandyhills, about four miles away. Of course, I walked in the wrong direction and ended up in the middle of the Hamilton Road, a busy street that eventually becomes one of the main roads connecting Glasgow and Edinburgh.
    The traffic whizzed past on either side of me – horns blaring, tyres screeching – until a man about my dad’s age at the time realized that the obstruction the cars were swerving to avoid was actually a wean trying to cross the road. He skidded to a stop, darted from his car, and yanked me to safety. I didn’t know my address, but I was able to tell the stranger my name, which he recognized. Mount Vernon in the early 1970s was still a relatively small community of middle-class homes and had not yet morphed into the sprawling Glasgow suburb that it has since become. Families who’d lived in the area for generations – as both my mum’s and dad’s had – knew of each other.
    Leaving his car in the parking lot of The Woodend, our local pub, the stranger gripped my hand and walked me back home, where my parents and most of our neighbours were combing the streets and nearby park in a frantic search for ‘Wee John’. I learned later from my mum that the stranger then proceeded to ‘gie them laldy’, which is to say he tore into them for not paying closer attention to a curious toddler, fenced yard or no fenced yard. To my parents’ credit, they stood under their carport in front of many of their neighbours and accepted the dressing-down because they knew he was right.
    I suppose it would be easy to see this experience as having some kind of symbolic significance in my life. I could’ve been roadkill that day, turned into mince by a Corporation bus, or, just as terrible, abducted, but since neither of those outcomes occurred, I could imply that from this incident I learned early in my life that there’s a fine line (in this case a double white one) between life and death. But that’d be a load of bollocks. The experience has remained one of my most vivid early childhood memories not because of its possible figurative connotations, but because it was my first manifestation of the Barrowman risk-taking gene. 1     Over the years, that gene has shaped many of my personal and professional choices.
    Anyone who grew up in Tollcross or Shettleston in the 1940s knew Emily Barrowman’s boys: my dad John, and his three brothers, Neil, Charlie and Alex. Emily herself was a formidable woman and in another era she might have found herself in a position of corporate power or even practising medicine, but instead Emily was forced to leave school at fifteen to help run her family’s billiard hall atParkhead Cross, which may explain another genetic cord – to this day, whether it’s pocket, nine or shooter, your balls are not safe on my table.
    I’m sure raising four sons often put Emily’s intelligence and organizational skills to the test, especially since her husband was a meek man. My Papa Barrowman was a good father, but he was happiest with a pint in his hand and a pound in his pocket for the bookies. Like many working-class women who came of age between the world wars, Emily was essentially a single parent, and so it wasn’t surprising that the exploits of her sons sometimes escaped her.
    My dad and his brothers had reputations for being ‘wee rascals’ who grew up to be ‘big toerags’, and although each of them eventually became a successful professional in his own right, even as adults they