Going to the dogs

I took a paper round when in my teens, delivering the local weekly rag come rain or more rain around local houses. I wasn't what you may call 'independently wealthy' but I took more from it in terms of effectively being self-employed. It was to stand me in good stead years later.

My first job upon leaving school was as volunteer hospital radio dj. In short, it was short-lived. More on a future blip. At the end of the summer I had a place offered at uni and I began even in May dreaming of ivory towers. I also had a student grant to come and I began thinking not of the things a fresher should think of, but of adding to my vinyl collection of 80s jangly guitar music. Why wait, though, and I looked for a summer job.

I took a job in this place, Shawfield Greyhound Stadium. At the time, it was home not only to a dog-racing track but to Clyde Football Club. It was a bustling place, barely changed in forty years you imagined, and home also to, let's just say, local characters - this was border-country, Rutherglen and Gorbals if you know them. Gritty. That's the word.

My job was to pull the traps onto the track, where the handler would then gently (or forcibly) place the greyhound in, for the dog to burst out and chase a mechanical rabbit for a lap or two. We would pull the traps back in by the time the dogs came round again. It was good experience, especially if you like dragging very heavy lumps of metal across (often wet) sand and standing in a lab coat (we were to look official and the story went that they had run out of brown ones) for four hours in pouring rain four times a week. 'Think of the money' they said. I did. This was the 80s and we didn't have call-centres.

The football team moved out twenty years ago and there's been no modernisation programme and really, no lick of paint around the outside since. It's a good night out by all accounts, but I haven't been in since I worked there (I also worked in the tote, the betting side things which is even more er, colourful, but at least drier, and yes, my cv is 'varied').