I will be 67 years old soon – so should I go to university?

IONLY saw my dad cry twice. Once was at my mother’s funeral, the other was on a clump of grass, high above our digs in Inverinate, at the Falls of Glomach. We were preparing to descend, fuelling ourselves for the scramble downwards on a piece and a slug of ginger. He suddenly started talking about an incident in his early life. He was then 74. I can state this precisely because he began by saying: “Sixty years ago, when I was 14, the headmaster came to my house.”

It was framed as the opening sentence to a classic novel. It demanded my attention. The story unfolded and I sensed a break in his voice and took my eyes from the tumbling waters to a face that glistened with tears.

The tale, in truth, must have been repeated elsewhere in the early

1940s. The headmaster had visited a room and kitchen in Possil to inform the parents of an intelligent boy that they should seek a way to send him to university.

My father, with a forced laugh, explained that it would have been easier to send him to the Moon.

My grandparents thanked the heidie for his time and interest and explained slowly, as if to someone who spoke only Esperanto and had just been struck on the head, that my dad had been accepted for an apprenticeship. This, in any workingclass home of that era and somewhat beyond, signalled the end of any arguments about future employment.

My father headed to be an electrician at the local sewage works. He lived until he was 84. He never studied at university. But he studied. And learned.

There is a category of Scots – men and women – who were denied formal education beyond senior or junior school. Their thirst for knowledge continued forever, occasionally becoming a pang that could never be satisfied despite their prodigious efforts.

They – like my dad and my mum – were intelligent, curious and held knowledge close to their bosom, like some priceless family heirloom in the midst of a house fire.

There was no discrimination in this. My father, for example, became a self-taught expert on the ‘45 rebellion, the history of the Templars and the politics and culture of Iran. But he could also tell you the names of the 12 Angry Men and the stadium where Hitler watched his only football match.

Knowledge, then, was important whether profound, perhaps unfathomable, or exact and trivial.

His disappointment when I spurned university can only be fully gauged by me in retrospect. He may even have been disgusted. I gave up the chance to go to university to head straight into journalism. I have only occasionally regretted that but never so much as readers of this column.

My father moved from being a sparky into advertising. He became highly successful and respected. But satisfied? Fulfilled? Who knows? The tears of Glomach tell of the regret of the road not travelled.

If he was denied formal education, he passed on the love of knowledge to his five children. The house was scattered with books ranging from the Lyon in Mourning to Flashman to Lord Liverpool’s Scourge of the Swastika, a short history of Nazi war crimes.

We thus read indiscriminately. I still do. I still gather information as if it is nourishment, that it will feed and warm me through winter. In times of trial, it has.

My journalistic life has now reached its 50th anniversary and, yes, I know it seems longer to readers.

It has been marked by more than occasional failures but it has been sustained by my finding almost anything interesting, in the manner of a dog chasing a crisp packet on a blustery beach.

I have never become an expert in anything. I have written Herald leaders on the folly of the Exchange Rate Mechanism, advised Walter Smith, when I was chief sportswriter, on how to pick a football team and used my platform as literary editor to pick holes in the works of established authors. My saving grace – and it may be the only – is that I regularly accepted how absurd this all was.

I knew I had bits of knowledge. I knew I had the right to express my opinions. I accepted some of them might even be valid.

But every time I launched into a subject I realised quickly that my process was ultimately superficial. Formal, dedicated learning had not been denied me as it had been my father. But I had made a choice and moved to a life where I picked up knowledge through often bitter experience or by personal, unsupervised and unstructured study.

This has become clearer in my later years. I developed a passion for art. I have travelled extensively, even obsessively, to see a painting. I have read the equivalent of a small library of books on art. I have even understood some of them or, at least, bits of some of them.

But I am now contemplating taking it all further. I will be 67 this summer, if the Lord spares me, and have a healthy recognition that all decisions now should be acted upon quickly. I have the means and the auld Highers to make a study of art history at university a viable option.

But will I? Only one question remains. Am I doing it for me or for my dad?