by Michael Bloor
[first published in Literally Stories, August 5th, 2025]
lan stepped out of the shower, singing that he wasn’t going to work on Maggie’s farm no more. He threw on some clothes and headed off to the baker’s for a couple of Aberdeen Rolls (‘rowies’), well-fired. En route, he picked up a copy of the Saturday edition of the Press & Journal (‘Start the Day with the P&J’).
His flat was on Prospect Terrace but it was soon to morph into Desolation Row. He dug into his pocket and checked his phone: a text from Lorna. She wouldn’t be at the pub tomorrow evening, after all. Liam, from her work, had a spare ticket for the Springsteen concert in Glasgow.
He’d met Liam previously, an older guy with a carefully distressed, expensive, leather jacket and a misplaced sense of entitlement. He was a creep, with a string of ex-partners, including Rona, Alan’s cousin. Rona had said that, after he’d gone, his legacy lingered on in her flat like an unflushed toilet.
Alan was suddenly bereft. He’d thought that his friendship with Lorna (she of the big brown eyes and the tumbling hair) had been progressing nicely. He’d been hoping that their forthcoming night out at the pub, with mutual friends and a local band playing in the upstairs lounge, might be the precursor to their relationship ‘moving to another level.’ There’d be no use warning her about Liam – it would sound like jealousy – demeaning spitefulness.
Weirdly, he’d sat through this movie before, when he’d been working down in Glasgow. Back then, the girl had been Jenny and the concert had been Bob Dylan’s. He’d been too slow off the mark, getting tickets, and some wealthy scumbag with a green sports car (unbelievable!) had waved a couple of blackmarket tickets under her nose.
He sighed deeply as he bit into his well-fired rowie and flicked through the P&J. A job ad. caught his eye – ‘Keeper of the Snowy Owls’ on the Isle of Fetlar in the Shetlands. Could it be just the job for him, while he healed himself of his ‘grievous wound?’ Looking after a few owl roosts at the extremity of the British Isles, just south of the Arctic Circle? …He got cold feet.
He reached over, switched on the CD player, and hit Judy Collins’ version of Dylan’s ‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues.’ It was a track he’d inherited from his mum. She said she’d played it every morning just before she’d headed off to sit her disastrous final exams at the Uni.
He saw the point: the musical mood was certainly sombre. But, he reflected that though Dylan had been stuck in the rain in Juárez, sick, lonely and humiliated, he’d turned right around and headed ‘back to New York City.’ Alan didn’t need the sorrowing solitude of the Isle of Fetlar. He needed the jangling hubbub of New York City. Or, the next best thing: he could settle for a welcome and a pint or two at The Prince of Wales on St Nicholas Lane. What’s more, he’d heard that Jenny, older and wiser, was back living with her parents and popped into the Prince of Wales occasionally.