ABSTRACT

Deep winter 1998 and the author is sitting in the passenger seat of a red car, driving to a bowling alley on the outskirts of Glasgow. Three boys, aged eight to eleven years old, are squashed up in the back seat brimming with a barely suppressed excitement. Some of the boys give the author the tactful, puzzled once-over. For her part, she acutely aware of a contradiction in her very being, a dash between playing at playing a game and being a professional. Children have always played an important and particularly symbolic role in the iconography of the poor. Their exuberance or wildness has made them easy to portray as untamed savages; they lack the beaten-down passivity of the young or middle-aged adult who has already absorbed the future's lack of hope. The night after the author go bowling with the boys, she returns to the same alley, this time with a group of girls.