“Voiding bowels in those days was unheard of. People just kept it in.”

"The Sixth Beatle. Fan of bacteria. Enemy of loud noises. Ivor Cutler. Creator of the finest gallows humour this side of Beckett. An accidental Scotsman born after his Jewish parents, fleeing the pogroms of Russia for the promise of the New World, were unceremoniously ditched in the pleasant mild-mannered city of Glasgow. In his masterpiece, Life in a Scotch Sittingroom, Cutler would reminisce on his Great Depression-era childhood (and lampoon the perception of an austere Presbyterian Scotland) by inflating the misery and masochism to the point it became a thing of hilarity. He recounted how one of his favourite childhood games “was battering each other around the head with a thistle whilst shaking hands” and how instead of going on holiday, his grandparents would place a single grain of sand in their hands and spit saltwater in their faces to replicate the seaside. Billy Connolly compared him to the dreich, that endless depressing Scottish rain that soaks you to the marrow and resembles, to any sane visitor, a mild form of nuclear winter. It’s an astute comparison, the thing about dreich that gives it it’s resonance, isn’t just the bleakness of it but the fact that the natives seem to like it, despite all reason and protestations to the contrary. And that you can go so far into depression, into the dreich that you come through the other side into humour and something resembling wonder. “I might as well live for a bit longer,” Cutler once shrugged, capturing the mood."

- 3:AM Cult Hero: Ivor Cutler