Once you had climbed the sludgy heights of the bing and the abandoned scrap yard below, your trainers filled with ash, you next had to cross Devil’s Corridor, a narrow field surrounded by trees and owned by the angriest farmer in Scotland. The word in the playground was he shot Fraser Hamilton as he bent down to fill a black bin bag with tumshies and there were rumours that his Doberman attacked big lanky George Fleming as he sprinted for cover across no-man’s land and that he once held Derek King’s head in the cow trough and tried to drown him. But beyond that field lay The Promised Land. A place with normal mums and dad, cars, golf clubs, kids with skateboards and safety helmets, garden hoses, patios and barbecues. But here’s the point I’m trying to make to you. The bing was bad. But it wasn’t THAT bad. Not in the way Galbraith describes it. It was as if he was trying to turn it into something like one of those Charles Dickens novels, but it wasn’t. Territorial wickedness, twisted and tribal, what’s that all about? There were parties up there as well. Life is about having fun too, that’s what they forgot to inform us. And I think that’s why something happened, or was made to happen.

Kenneth Pratt trained as a news and feature writer in Glasgow and was one of the first journalists on the scene at The Lockerbie Disaster. He also reported from Jerusalem during The First Gulf War and from The Soviet Union during the collapse of Communism. He was recently a finalist in the Guardian Award for International Development Journalism for his disturbing reportage from DR Congo and Uganda. His Ph (D) deals with the impact of post-traumatic stress on the sons of returning war veterans.