My friend First Punk, anarchic, funny and missed

I’m back in my hometown with my school pal for our friend’s funeral and we’re early. So we do what we always did, go for a wander, a daunder, a bogle aboot, because it’s a place where the wind is take your face off and standing still isn’t an option.

Killing time, we walk and talk about our friend, the first punk in town. Gazing again at the big sky, big river, big sea, we remember anarchic, bright and funny First Punk , the time she baked a cake for Sid Vicious in prison, the CND marches, Poll Tax demos, when she came to school wearing a bin bag and a blazer bearing the studded legend F*** Off on the back. She was class. But not in class. Sent home to change. Again. Then the headie had to go and fetch her back because they knew she was supersmart.

Later, up at the wind-blasted cemetery high above the town, we watch as the coffin is lowered. Next to the headstone there’s a tin filled with daffodils, a nod to First Punk’s habit of returning from a wander with a few flowers to stick in the nearest receptacle. Suddenly a gust skites the tin over and bright yellow blooms cascade onto the brass nameplate. And there they rest. Good.

Then it’s on to catch up with Country Girl, Queen of Parks, who is beautifying the town plant by plant: along the riverside, through the rose gardens, beside the swings – even car parks burst with blooms.

“Come on, I’ll show you,” she says and leads us through landscaping and wood sculptures to a shelter crouching below the castle ruins. As we survey the park, across the crocus carpets down to the churning pewter river below, I tell her it’s amazing that she and her team have given the town this Park Life.

“Aye, it’s no a bad life,” she says, crossing her boots. “What amazes me, is that no-one wrecks any of it.”

Maybe it’s just too cold for vandalism, but I like to think it’s down to appreciation. Especially by First Punk, picking the occasional daff on her daunder, planting them in a tin and brightening her day. Plucking happiness where she found it on her walk through life. n