AND THEN ONE DAY YOU FIND FORTY YEARS HAVE GOT BEHIND YOU...

Sometimes things happen which just stop you in your tracks. Unpredicatable things. Unforeseen. Moments when you suddenly feel the passage of time. I had a couple yesterday. And what prompts me to write them down and throw them out into the ether is their utter incompatability. Well. They seem pretty incompatable to me.

So.

Moment one.

The lads were down in the basement putting away the weekly Tesco delivery. Regular readers will know our weekly Tesco delivery has been a bone of contention for us at times. For years we would order 99 tins of best value spaghetti only to receive ten or twelve. Once we were actually sent a single half tin in lieu of an order for ninety nine. The story of that particular delivery hit the Daily Record and prompted a call from Pat, the new DotCom manager in our local store. And from that moment things have changed and changed utterly. In a nutshell, Pat is a complete star and these days when we order 99 tine of spaghetti, we actually get 99 tins of spaghetti.

So credit where credit's due. Thanks Pat.

But I digress.

The lads were still down in the basement when the bell over the front door announced an arrival. So I paused what I was doing and went down to reception to see a familiar figure waiting. I will call him Issac.

When did we first meet? 2005? 2006? Years and years ago. Tony Blair would still have been Prime Minister. Then as now, Issac was smartly turned out and quietly spoken. Old school polite. Then as now, it seemed like he was wrapped in a shroud of sadness.

Back then, Issac was disdainful of those who had succumbed to the charms of tenner bags of heroin. No sympathy whatsoever. He spat out the word 'Junkie' as if it was a piece of ten day old gristle which had been left out in the sun.

Issac's poison was the booze. Once started, he never knew how to call a halt. And from time to time, he would cross the invisible line and the red mist would descend. He wasn't a guy who tended to lose fights. Hours in the gym made him formidable and the red mist took away his kind side and made him vicious. And slowly but surely, the offences stacked up until the Sheriff decided enough was enough and sent him up the A76 to HMP Kilmarnock.

This outcome in the Noughties tended to be a life changer and so it was for Issac. He walked through the gates an angry young man with a growing drink problem. A few months later, he walked out of the gates as a broken young man with a three bag a day heroin addiction.

At first he couldn't believe the extent of his own stupidy. How could he have? And for his first few months of liberty he was full of plans of how he would kick the habit and find the kind of life he wanted.

The plans crashed and burned. One by one. And soon he was stuck in the revolving door which is home to so many of our clients. Prison. Homelessness. Petty crime. Failed tenencies. More prison. Probation. Failed community service.

Soon he was on a high daily dose of methadone and his teeth started to fall out one by one. He still made his plans. A driving licence. An HGV licence. Weeks away doing long distance work. The chance to be hundreds of miles away from Dumfries and the bad company which always sucked him in. And dry. And down. Every single time.

With every passing year, the plans became a little more half hearted until they became pipe dreams. His rap sheet grew into a slim volume. His mental health slipped and slithered until regular psychiatric treatment was needed. And strong meds which were in no circumstances to be mixed with the cheap and cheerful drugs of the street. But of cource Issac never managed to follow such sage medical advice.

So the hostel to prison cycle just keep of stretching out. For year after year. And like clockwork, we would have our chats at the counter. Groundhog chats. How are things Issac....

Again and again and again until yesterday. Until 2019. In all the years of our acquaintance, he hasn't done so much as a day's work. And I doubt he ever will. I guess he'll be in his mid forties now and his prospects are non existant.

For many of the passed years, I genuinely thought he would manage to find the life he has always craved. A home. A job. A partner. Kids. Nights in front of the tele. A car parked outside. No methadone. No prison. No red mist.

Do I still believe? Sadly not. The passing years have left me hard bitten. I have seen too many Issacs. Once upon a time I genuinely thought if they could make the required changes the world of so called normality would find a place for them. Naive, right?

The world of normality keeps the security chain on when the likes of Issac come knocking. 'Once a Junkie, always a Junkie' is the prevailing wisdom. Second chances are for the birds. The likes of Issac are consigned to a lifetime of being on the outside. Half glimpsed figures we tune out from looking at. Doomed by the merciless truth of their Disclosure reports.

So we passed the time of day and I didn't bring up the subject of plans. He was amused by the plastic World Cup 2019 wine goblets on the counter. Where had they come from? I said I didn't know. Someone had donated them. Fifty or so. In boxes. Could he take one? Nae bother. Help yourself.

"It will remind me to drink more water. I need to drink more water. Don't you think?"

"Sure. You can't drink enough water."

And so Issac's plans had shrivelled from dreams of crossing Europe from north to south in a thirty eight tonne wagon to drinking more water from a plastic wine goblet souvineering 2019 Cricket World Cup.

He left. And the remaining hours of my working day drifted by. Tesco. Home. A walked dog. And then YouTube sent me back all the way to the early 80's. Toxteth ablaze and Exocet missiles streaking across iron grey South Atlantic skies. 'This town is coming like a ghost town...' A banner headline blazed across a French paper carrying the image of a British riot cop with his face bathed in blood.

"Grande Bretaigne Sur La Verge!"

And as Thatcher's mayhem hit the north like a force nine gale, I was all wrapped up in a Disney World of cotton wool. Magdalene College, Cambridge. Ancient courtyards and punts under weeping willows. Wearing a gown for dinner in a candlelit Elizabethan Hall nobody had ever gotten round to wiring for electricity.

I was the Blackburn grammar school boy in a world of tweed and 'Ya' insyead of 'Yes'. Suddenly in the midst of a kind of end of the world mania. Everyhing was on tick. A world where the clocks had stopped somewhere in the fourteenth century

And in the midst of the mayhem was Big Jim. We were mates from different solar systems. I was all Blackburn. Mill chinmeys and NF marches. Jim was Radley and Kensington. I was the Liverpool of King Kenny and Graham Souness. He was the West Ham of Frank Lampard Senior and Billy Bonds. I was History and no work whatsoever. He was Law and the fat books all but killed him.

We did Disneyland for three years while the rest of the country descended into near anarchy. Excessive. Idiotic. Manic. Drinking bouts Issac could only dream about. Jim came up to the burning north and I headed south to the Kensintonness of Kensington.

And then in 1983 we both picked up our degrees and headed out into different lives. Alan Kennedy slammed home a late winner against Real Madrid and I took off for years of hippydom in India. Jim entered the world of grown ups as an up and coming commerical lawyer.

By the time I moved into two years in Moss Side, he was in court stripping the assets from the National Union of Mineworkers. We stayed in touch, but it was infrequent.

The last day I saw Jim was the day he got married.

And then nothing for thirty years. From time to time his name would hop off the pages of the papers. He was on the TV during the fallout from the Ian Huntley killings. Then he was back in the limelight representing the Government in the Leveson Enquiry. In 2013 the Guardian splashed on the fact HMG had paid him £2,2 million for his Leveson efforts at a time when they were slashing legal aid payments to nickel and dime criminal barristors.

A couple of years ago my eyes almost popped out of my head. When Gina Miller took the Government to the Supreme Court over Parliament having the right to a vote on triggering Article 50, HMG fielded their top attack dog to hold the line. The attack dog went by the nickname of the 'Treasury Devil'. Yeah. You've got it. None other than Big Jim who by now was a QC.

Well, devil or no devil. He lost that one. Just like West Ham lost the 1981 League Cup Final replay at Villa Park when a certain Ian Rush exploded onto the scene.

Yesterday YouTube brought me up to speed. The Treasury Devil was back in the saddle fighting the good fight and defending Boris Johnson's right to make like Robert Mugabe. I chuckled to see that James Eadie QC was now Sir James Eadie QC.

We've taken quite a journey in utterly opposite directions. Jim has ventured to the very beating heart of the British Establishment. A Knight of the Realm going out to bat for great and the good. And me? A food bank manager in a small town in Scotland. A writer of blogs about the dream of an Independent Scotland which have been deemed to be sufficiently against the British Establishment for Russian Troll Farms to give my efforts a regular boost.

So I sat and stared at the screen and smoked as four decades drifted through my head. Issac and Big Jim and Ian Rush bursting onto the scene under the Villa Park floodlights.

Tick, tock....