Ned In A Suit

Just minutes after I passed the busker the other day, I was walking up Sauchiehall Street and passed a fire appliance with two fireman at the rear talking, in their full outfits.

In front of me were three guys. One in a suit, light blue shirt, very neat hair. To his left were two neds....trainers, polyester tracky bottoms tucked into their white socks, tracky tops tied round their waists, polo shirts and....caps perched away back on their heads.

At a safe distance from the burly firemen the guy in the suit turns and shouts back over my head...

"Neeeeaaaarrright...cun ye no' find the fire, nnyyeeeeha ha ha ha"...... all delivered in the typical Glaswegian ned's nasal tone.

His two pals in the tracksuits burst into much laughter. Oh yes, hilarious, I thought as I fantasised about beating all three of them senseless with a baseball bat.

I realised that the suited guy was just meeting up with his wee unemployed pals in his lunch hour before heading back to the office where he would immediately drop his nasal vocab and talk properly in front of his colleagues. If only they could see him in his natural habitat.

On closer inspection when passing him my observations were that his "neat" hair was in fact shaved nearly to the bone almost to the top so it resembled a small hat, his suit was a royal blue cheap piece of tat (called a "fashion suit" in the Littlewoods catalogue some years ago with the strange collar, sometimes called in Glasgow, a court suit) and dirty black slip on shoes.

I'm sure his colleagues know exactly what he is.