Life, lies and things like that

I watched Albert Nobbs last night. It's not a great movie but it is memorable for some great performances, especially by Glenn Close and Helen McTeer. I notice John Banville wrote the screenplay. He is one of the great Irish writers of our time. And Glenn Close was a producer. A thousand blessings on their heads.

The film brought back lots of memories to me. Not so much about 19th century Ireland, when the film is set - just a teeny bit before my time - but it looked pretty brutal and absolutely believable where the lives of working class people are concerned.

There's an anti-abortion demo going on outside the new Southern General hospital in Glasgow during Lent. It seems it's small-scale, peaceful, silent and aimed at making women looking for an abortion think again.

When I look back on my life in working class Glasgow in the 1950s and early 60s, I'm mad at how people were manipulated. The greatest fear then for any teenage couple then was the girl getting pregnant. Contraception in pre-pill days wasn't so easy. In fact, I remember a friend of mine being told by her GP in the late 1970s to come back with her mother if she wanted to discuss birth control.

There was a rumour in my school, which was filled with high-achieving women teachers and students, that one girl had got pregnant and had had an abortion. Abortion was illegal then. Even if the rumour wasn't true, this girl's life and that of her boyfriend were pretty well determined at the age of 17: if she was pregnant, they would 'have to get married' according to the morality of the time. If she had an abortion (assuming she could get one), she would never live it down. I can't imagine how many couples were pressured into marrying by their families and I wonder how many actually stayed together. The potential for being sucked (or suckered) into the misery of a loveless marriage - because divorce was also pretty well unobtainable then - may have kept a lot of young people on the 'straight and narrow' that is, alone. For a while at least. Poor souls.

Let me remind you, this was just 50 years ago.

I don't give a rat's arse what the people on the demo outside the new Southern stand for. The state, or the law or whatever it wants to call itself these days, should feck off and let people get on with their lives.