BOUND FOR GLORY

There is a gentleman who lives near my mother who is often involved in mountain rescue and dangerous missions to the Middle East to aid in the war on terror. He must drop everything when he gets the call and hours later he is flying into the hornet’s nest with scant regard for his personal safety. Upon his return he is back walking his dog around the streets of a crumbling West of Scotland housing scheme, anonymous, waiting for that fateful call.

The general consensus is the man lives in a dream world. This is likely the case. However what has always fascinated me about tellers of tall shaggy dog tales is: do they really believe the stories themselves or are they just winding people up for some personal amusement. I don’t really know.

My brother once told an intelligent but somewhat naive former school mate he was going to Australia to make his fortune in the Opal mining business. Infact he was going away to England to University but couldn’t resist a bit of fun, never expecting any of his audience would actually take him seriously. This led to a rather bizarre interlude in a pub toilet as the chap quizzed me about my sibling’s quest for open cast riches.

Having no idea what the man was going on about I palmed him off. [With an excuse, of course, I wouldn’t want to give the wrong impression about any improper behaviour in gent’s convenience]. I later discovered my brother’s well spun yarn and subsequently kept the gag running for a time.

Nevertheless I have met individuals who told monumental fibs on a daily basis. They almost always involved either extreme violence or close friendships with the rich and famous. Sometimes both. One of this band of serial offenders claimed to have not only punched Sid Vicious in the face at a 1976 Sex Pistols gig at the famous 100 Club in London but went home with Siouxsie Sioux of the Banshees fame, who became his long term girlfriend. Aside from the various errors in his story, he couldn’t escape the fact that he would have had to have done all this aged 13.

What I could never work out if they knew I knew they were lying and they were telling me for the hell of it or were they so deluded that they had convinced themselves it was true. Pathological lairs are a subject worthy of further study, that’s for sure. Do they look at their empty lives and fill it up with derring do and boy’s own adventures. I suppose it all relies on a catch 22 situation. In one hand a spy would have to appear completely normal, but at the same time wouldn’t be telling people they met at the corner shops the details of covert operations.

In fairness most of them are harmless fantasists but some like Barry George, the killer of news reader Jill Dando, are dangerous particularly when the line between dreams and reality become too blurred and thoughts become actions. I recall a letter in a boxing magazine many years ago. A woman claimed to have befriended an aging former world champion who lived in her neighbourhood. She wanted to know a little more about his career. The magazine replied warning that the champ in question had been dead for years and not to talk to strange old men.

But for every Walter Mitty, there is a Real McCoy. The following cautionary tale proved the old adage that the exception proves the rule.

Two men visited a close friend in hospital. Afterwards the men spoke to his doctor, an Austrian psychiatrist, [complete with comedy ‘Sigmund Freud’ accent]. He grimly reviewed the facts as he saw it: ‘A very sick man. Very sick. Delusional! He says he has written more than a thousand songs! And a novel too. And he says he has made records for the Library of Congress…
One of the friends interrupted him.
‘He has.’

The ‘delusional’ man was in fact legendary folk singer Woody Guthrie, who eventually died of Huntington’s disease in 1967 after many years of hospitalisation. So remember the next time an old geezer tells you he won the Victoria Cross trying to sink the Tirpitz or the like, he may be telling the truth. However the chances are he isn’t.