It’s been a funny old few weeks, and I’m not going to miss November this year.

This has been partly for reasons I won’t go into here, but Thursday 6th November really kind of took the biscuit in terms of experiencing strange mixtures of emotions.

We woke up in the UK that morning, of course, to the news that more than half of the US voting public had taken leave of their senses and voted for Trump – again. If you didn’t enjoy the first movie, Trump II: This Time It’s More Mental promises to have even more bad actors. Coming to a political and environmental shitshow near you in January.

Another famous American was over here the same day, a promising young singer-songwriter name of Bob Dylan; you may have heard of him. Thursday was the second of his two nights at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh, and I wasn’t going to see him, because TicketBastard had managed to stop me doing so. It was the first time in my life I could have walked to a venue to see him, and I couldn’t go.

Instead, earlier that day, I was going to a gig of a different kind.

Barry Spence played in the same band as me – Isaac Brutal – for about a year and a half. Somehow between a combination of circumstances we were only on a stage together once, but we shared lifts to and from rehearsal rooms a number of times. As such, I only knew him a little, but he was the kind of guy who’d ask how you were when you got in the car. He was the kind of guy who’d compliment you on a chord you played in the rehearsal room. He was the kind of guy, in other words, who was interested in people and went out of his way to make you feel at home, wherever you were.

Also in other words, he wasn’t your standard Scottish monosyllabic bloke. Nor was he your typical musician that focused totally on his own playing to the exclusion of everything else.

Barry played lead guitar, left handed. He produced a lovely, Stones-y noise out of his axe. He’d obviously been playing for years, although he hadn’t been in a regular gigging band for a while, I think. He brought a lot to the band, including songwriting – his song, ‘Devil Highway,’ is on the latest Brutal album.

And then he only went and died on us. He was 58.

So, the gig I went to on Thursday 6th November was at Mortonhall Crematorium, and it

was Barry’s funeral. I say gig advisedly because on the big screen, rather than a picture of Barry, they showed a picture of an empty stage. That said, the funeral wasn’t all about his musicianship: it was about Barry, the man. And everything I’d found about him in my brief time of knowing him was confirmed in spades in that brief hour, from the mouths of the (Humanist) celebrant who knew him, his life long best mate, and  – most affectingly of all – his son and daughter.

What you saw was what you got, clearly, with Barry. He was a loving husband and father, never had a bad word to say about anyone, and grafted from an early age – first as a Kwik-fit fitter, then as a barber. In the very last conversation I had with him, he told me that he was packing in the hairdressing and was going to do something else – what, he hadn’t figured out yet. And he never did get the chance to.

After the funeral was over I said goodbye to my bandmates, and to a good friend who was struggling with multiple bereavements including our mutual friend Barry, and decided to walk back home. Mortonhall Crem is up one of Edinburgh’s many hills, and as I walked down, the city was stretched out ahead of me. Behind, the Crem was filling up with the next set of mourners. Along the coast in East Lothian where Barry came from, cups of tea and platitudes were getting ready to be poured. Somewhere in the city, Bob Dylan was doing whatever Bob Dylan does to limber up for the next gig in his Neverending Tour.

The world, in other words, kept rolling on. But my internal soundtrack walking home wasn’t a Dylan song. It was the acoustic cover of ‘Ace of Spades’ Barry had done that we filed out of the Crematorium to:

You know I’m born to lose, and gambling’s for fools; but that’s the way I like it baby, I don’t want to live forever…

Then, a couple of days later, I went to Scotland’s National Portrait Gallery in Queen Street, had a bad attack of narcissism, and had to give myself a good talking to. It’s Kathleen Jamie’s fault.

A long time ago, when we were both 17, I shared a stage with Kathleen Jamie. We were both winners of a competition, the prize being getting to read our own poems at the Third Eye Centre in Glasgow. We were the youngsters, as I remember – it wasn’t an under-18 event or anything. Anyway, since then, Kathleen has gone on to be a multi-award winning poet, published goodness knows how many collections of her work, acted as Scotland’s Makar (our equivalent of Poet Laureate) for several years, and had her photo hung in the National Portrait Gallery. She’s a significant figure in modern Scottish literature.

Me? Not so much. The generally downbeat mood I was in – partly the funeral, partly other causes – caused me to brood in a way that I don’t very often. Couldashouldawoulda… You see, if you care to ask, I consider myself quite good – but only quite good – at a few things. I’ve had  poems published in a few reputable poetry magazines. Short stories, the same. I did spoken word for a while, and there were some great nights out of that. I published a novel, two editions of a law book, co-wrote other books that have made it to publication. I’m quite good at putting words in an order that other people find pleasing. Currently this is being deployed in songwriting, and this blog.

I’m a dilettante, a tourist, a dabbler. A flibbertigibbet, as my mother would have – and did – put it.

Probably the thing I’m best at is the thing I value least, and that’s lawyering. It basically involves the same skill of putting words in the right order. It had the additional advantage of paying the mortgage and getting Daughter and Heiress through university.

Anyway. Boo fucking hoo poor me… or not. Because I gave myself a good talking to, and reminded myself.

None. Of. This. Matters.

It doesn’t matter a solitary jot if my next album doesn’t sell a single copy on Bandcamp. What really matters, when the time comes and it’s my turn at Mortonhall, is that people can stand up on their hind legs and honestly say that I was quite good at being a husband, father, brother and friend. That I did my best with the limited resources and abilities I had to make people’s lives the better for having come into contact with me, not worse.

I don’t expect folk to say I never had a bad word about anyone. Barry must have been an absolute saint. I’ve had a number of bad words to say about people over the years – although generally not in their hearing. I’m too chicken.

When Bob Dylan finally leaves us (please not yet, Grim Reaper!) his obituary will detail his many musical achievements, his virtually uncontested songwriting GOAT status, his Nobel Prize for Literature. Somewhere along the line it’ll include a paragraph to say he was married twice and had lots of kids. His latest instalment of the Neverending Tour ended not long after that day in November, incidentally – I think he finished up in London. I hope by now he’s home, spending time with some at least of the kids, dispensing the kind of wisdom that only a multi-platinum award winning singer-songwriter can.

For the rest of us, it’s on with the show. The week after Barry’s funeral, Isaac Brutal and the Trailer Trash Express played their last gig in the Banshee Labyrinth, which describes itself as the most haunted pub in Edinburgh. But I know I’ll share a stage with these guys in other combinations at some point in the future. If we’re spared.

There’s a conventional wisdom seems to be in vogue about the ages between 50 and 70 being

Sniper’s Alley, as we dodge the fatal diseases that can take us down as we negotiate that time of life. I’m not quite sure what happens if we manage to reach the other end of the alley: presumably the Grim Reaper sets aside his Lee Enfield and warms up the machine gun.

That’s as may be. Just this week I got yet more bad news about two close friends and their health problems, both, like me, ducking and weaving their way through Sniper’s Alley. But there’s another phrase from the funeral that I’d rather leave you with: Be More Barry. In Scotland it has an especially pleasing resonance, ‘barry’ meaning ‘good’ or ‘great’ in our dialect. So that’s what I’m going to live by.

Be More Barry.

I might even get a t-shirt printed.