Fiere by Jackie Kay

After a no  newspaper Saturday yesterday, Grey Granite rejoiced in having The Observer to browse over her coffee this morning. (Well worth the perilous icy walk to collect it.) She particulary liked this article and has already taken advantage of Amazon 'one click' to order  a copy of Fiere, Red Rust Road having being one of the most enjoyable and stimulating reads of the year.

 How a Mancunian taxi driver taught me the true meaning of friendship
Poet Jackie Kay reflects on the things that really count as the old year fades away

Last year at Christmas, my 84-year-old dad went to tell his next-door neighbour he would be away for 10 days. He slipped on the ice on his neighbour's path, bruised his hip very badly and never made it down to my house in Manchester. (The moral of that story is don't tell anyone you're going away!) My mum was gutted.

But on Christmas Eve when I phoned, they sounded unexpectedly exhilarated. Sean, next door, had shovelled the snow from their garden path, twice. Barbara, across the road, had brought them a homemade stew. Isabel, down the road, had brought them a bottle of whisky. They were just having a wee nip: "Nothing like it; warms the old heart."


But what had really cheered them was the winter camaraderie, the way the extremes of cold somehow allow people to behave spontaneously, warmly. "You wouldn't believe the amount of people who have rung to find out if we're OK!" my mum announced proudly on the phone, as if the bad weather had suddenly given her a glow of celebrity.


Two years ago on New Year's Day, my friend Ali Smith phoned and sang the whole of "Auld Lang Syne" down the phone. She has a lovely, tuneful voice, quite high. "So gies a haund my trusty fiere/ and here's a haund o' thine;/ And we'll tak a right guid-willie waught/ For auld lang syne." "What a great word fiere is," she said. "You know that it means friend, it's an old Scots word for friend, like jo." I'd known that auld lang syne meant something like "old time's sake" and that a right guid-willie waught was probably a decent measure of whisky, but I'd never stopped at fiere. I looked the word up in my Chambers; there it was, fiere, companion, mate, equal. And, if used as an adjective, it means able, sound. We've called each other fiere every since.


At the close of one year and the beginning of the next, the turning of the tables, I always find myself feeling especially contemplative. This year, I've been thinking about friendship; good friends are lifesavers. They make everything seem possible and difficult times bearable. Once, I remember being glad to see the back of a particular year and desperate to get on to the good, clear path of a new one. That year, it was my friends who were my saving grace: companions on the dusty road, the "sound" friends are in it for the duration. There's something glorious and nourishing about a lifelong friend.


The other day, I was in a taxi coming back from Manchester Piccadilly. The taxi driver said: "Is that a Glasgow accent I hear?" "It is," I said. "You've got a good ear." "I used to go to Glasgow a lot. I met a friend of mine there. We were both 16 and in the junior boxing championship. We fought each other in the final and after that – friends for life. We're 63 now. He's just had a stroke. Where are your family from?" he asked me. "My father was from Nigeria..." "I was going to say Nigeria," he said, looking at me keenly in the rear-view mirror. "I looked at your face and I thought: Nigeria.


"Let me tell you a story. When I was about 19, in the 60s, my brother and I were on our way home when we came across this black guy, black as that taxi in front of us, who'd been badly beaten up. It was a freezing winter. He'd have died of hypothermia if we hadn't come across him. We dragged him home and he stayed with us for years. My mam just swept him under her arm, gave him a clip in the ear, and he became part of our family. Connie was a student doctor from Nigeria. Well, I'm from a big Irish family; to my mother, a doctor in the house was like having a priest.


"My family knew what prejudice was. Someone once said to me, 'Do you Irish keep pigs in your house?' When I told my dad, who never read a book in his life, he said, 'People will say many things, but we know who we are.' I said to him, 'Where did you get that from?' 'I made it up myself,' the old man said. He was a bit of the homespun philosopher was my father. Connie became a lifelong friend too. We went out to visit his family in Nigeria just after Biafra. Oh the things I saw then. I wouldn't want to repeat.


"Have you been to Nigeria?" he asked me. I told him I'd been twice, that I'd not grown up with my birth father, and that when I'd found him, he'd spent the best part of two hours dancing around me, that he saw me as his past sin who needed to be cleansed. I told him that I grew up with my mum and dad in Scotland.


"Ah," the taxi driver said, "any man can be a father, but not every man can be a dad. That one you grew up with, he's the real dad."


And then we arrived at my terraced house and I shook hands with Charlie, as he turned out to be called, and got out of the black taxi into the freezing cold air, warmed and cheered by the whole encounter.


Last year around this time, I'd been worrying about what my mum and dad would make of Red Dust Road, the memoir I'd just finished writing about tracing my birth parents. In the new year, I went to visit them and by this time they'd read the proof. My dad pointed at a bit that said he was threatened by me finding my Nigerian father and said: "Why would I be threatened? I wasn't when you found your birth mother and she's in this country and he's all the way in Nigeria." And my mum chipped in: "Because he's another father, John." And my dad said: "Well, can you put in, 'My dad disputes this'."


Now, the snow is thick outside my house again and the year has come round quicker than it seemed it was going to in June. Only when you get the winter boots out, the scarves, gloves and hats, does it suddenly seem no time at all since last year when my dad fell and they didn't have their Christmas here. This year I'm keeping everything crossed that by the time you read this they'll be here. Every Christmas with 80-plus parents feels like a blessing; I'm grateful to have them still here. They are great lovers of coincidence. When they get here, I'll tell them about the taxi driver. And my mum will say something like: "Isn't that odd! Do you see what paths our lives cross?" And I'll nod.




Red Dust Road is published by Picador; Fiere, a new collection of poems by Jackie Kay, will be published on 7 January