Rab Swannock Fulton

Now those of you wanting a fuller account of my storytelling and writing career could always have a peek www.geygallus.com or www.myspace.com/rabswannockfulton. In fact I’d be very grateful if you did look at those two websites, but before you do I would like you to consider one very important fact, which is this: When I was a young boy back in the nineteen seventies I almost came face to face with a real live dinosaur – a Triceratops to be exact.

You see, my Uncle Jimmy had taken us weans out in a rowing boat. He worked away at the oars; creak, bump, splash, creak, bump, splashing us across the stretch of water that glittered and rolled from the coast of Rothesay Bay all the way to the mist snatching green of the Cowl Peninsula.

If the journey out was fun, and the journey back exhilarating – due to the Triceratops - the pause between was fraught with danger. After my uncle stopped rowing he brought the oars in, sat back, took out a cigarette, had a puff and began to relax. He told us that he was expecting a letter back from Paul McCartney any day soon. What with my uncle being a Beatles fan and a railway track repair man – a vital service to the nation – he was confident that Mr McCartney would be happy to help him out with some loose change. How much loose change? Only a million pounds or so.

Now it was a wonderful thing to hear that my uncle was about to become incredibly rich, but then he stopped blethering and focused on the pleasures of smoking his cigarette. In the quietness I began to feel a little worried. The boat lolled and drifted from side to side like it was drunk. A drunk boat tipping about atop dark depthless waters with a gaggle of weans and a momentarily indifferent railway track repair man. I tried to control my imagination, tried to stop thinking about how deep that water was, how black it would be a mile down, how it would reach into my lungs and squeeze and squeeze till there was not a drop of air left in them…

Uncle Jimmy came out of his sun kissed, nicotine blissed reverie and casually asked if we would like to travel back in time to the ‘Late Cretaceous Period’. It was apparently very easy to do so. You see when we had rowed away from the shore we had followed the direction of the ‘Earth’s Rotational Axis’. However, returning to shore would mean we would be going against the ‘Earth’s Rotational Axis’. Now everybody knows, explained my uncle, that if you go went fast enough against the ‘Earth’s Rotational Axis’ you travel back in time. This, of course, is why aeroplanes are legally obliged to fly slower to New York than to Nepal. Well the challenge was set. Could us lads row so fast that we could go back in time?

I grabbed one oar, my cousin James the other, and we began rowing as fast as we could. My uncle meanwhile had the heavy responsibility of sitting smoking and keeping a look out for any dangerous obstacles that could bring disaster crashing down on our time travelling endeavour. Well my young arms were soon booming out pain, but I kept my focus on the Cowl Peninsula - as it swayed up and down beyond my uncle’s head - gulped down buckets of air, and, every so often, gasped out the universal cry of childhood: Are we there yet?

Just when I was at the point of collapse my Uncle shouted out that Rothesay Bay was changing shape; the houses and boats were vanishing, the hills transforming into mountains, the woods into jungle. This was it - we were on our way. Next stop the ‘Late Cretaceous Period’! I was so overwhelmed with excitement that I turned my head round, but in doing so momentarily slackened the pace of my rowing. Our speed dropped and by the time I had turned my head all the way round we had slipped back into the twentieth century. Yet, for one moment - the very briefest minutest moment of time - the retina of my eye carried the image of a massive three-horned beast stomping its monstrous paws on the crazy golf course.

As a child I was surrounded by tellers of stories - my parents, my uncles and aunts, my granny May Letham, my cousins and my sister and brother – but nobody ever regarded themselves as storytellers. As an adult in Glasgow I was surrounded by people constantly trying to put one up on each other with words, adding colour and passion to the philosophical concerns of the day (even if they didny ken Plato fae Blotto), telling ever taller tales and uttering the most shocking yet straight-faced lies ever. All my life I’ve been surrounded by stories, shared stories, passed on stories and conjured new stories out of my head. Now a few of them are up on this website’s archive. There are tales of Gods, Sinners, the Devil, Swan Maidens, Property Developers, Soldiers, Lovers, Magic Dogs, Ghosts. There is Love, Hate, Lust, Confusion, Death, Magic and Trickery. Hopefully some will take you great journeys as wondrous as my – all too brief – visit to the ‘Late Cretaceous Period’.

Slàinte Mhath!