To live in close proximity to a hard drinking, sharped tongued and overbearing bastard is so fucking sole chilling. Nothing can describe the fear or the tension unless you have been in the room. Neither the comments nor the fists toughen you up or make you a man.

Good straight male role models are hard to find. There are generations worth of work to be done. I could descend into many reasons why we think of male working-class parents as incapable or vacant, it’s root is in a narrative created by classes above their own. The toxic nature bred by people and by other forces.

The forces have a burdening weight, previous and current generations of the working classes are shackled to a history of work as a means of identity. The nostalgic infinity loop is fucking dyer. Do as I say not as I do, a common shitty line from the Patriarchal looking bake bean. Gladly we have not been conditioned into believing there is no identity without work.

While to be Working-Class has become a hot commodity, a costume to be adopted in order to be allowed to wear a sportswear and a sovereign ring or a box ticking topic for cultural institutions and applications. The elephant in the room often avoided is the violence and trauma. They want the fur coat but not the knickers.

Ideas, language and policy are still being funded by governments and ‘philanthropic’ business to perpetuate patriarchal ideas to destabilise and damage communities. These modes find their way both quietly and belligerently into educational programmes and economic structures. Permeating the daily grind leaving you feeling that there is no point to the challenge.

But we can and we can take enjoyment in doing it. There is a positive and beautiful circle of Jims work “Tha’s a pillock”, When I had enough of my own old man, I used a similar phrase, the same for his dad when he was being a fucking doyle to my Nanna.

Choose someone you have had that relationship with and say it say it loud in your head ....... THA’S A PILLOCK

go find somewhere and shout it from the top of ya pipes. Get it out.

It's a  blunt to the point and a slice of language that makes my heart fucking sing. It can be delivered with love or venom like a slice of cold as Pek pork to the face issued like dry wit to a stranger at the bar in the big end. It’s form is perfect social club dialect.

I have struggled to write about the things Jim and I have discussed because they are raw, at times to close to home. It is too easy to see it’s in the past. It’s not it is ever present. It is hard to face the past when it holds trauma, but it is even harder to face that trauma, and attempt to address the myriad of complex baggage past on. I admire how you are trying to question the memory and harsh reality of your Grandfatha. To challenge the local myths and tell them he had his fucking moments of being a Pillock.

This is for those kids of the rough, work shy, problem families, the Bairns, babby’s young’uns, waynes, chavs, loons not benefitting from the cultural capital and were genuinely spawed from Pillocks and trying not to be one.

As the snow flies
On a cold and gray Chicago mornin' A poor little baby child is born
In the ghetto... 

Text by Arron Guy.

Photography by Megan Mechelle Dalton.