Kerfuffle Press

AN AULD BOY NAMED

SHUG

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An old acquaintance of mine got in touch recently to congratulate me on winning the Booker Prize. He had obviously not been keeping a close eye on my ailing literary career. I patiently explained that nobody called Shug could, or ever would, win the Booker. I also informed him that the guy who pocketed the prize money was called Douglas and that his novel was named after a character he made up called Shuggie.

 

Unlike the narrator of Johnny Cash’s classic, “A Boy named Sue”, I didn’t even have the pleasure of a knock down, barroom brawl with my dad over the subject. My parents never named me Shug, or even Hugh. They christened me Stuart. It’s my primary school pals who must take all the blame. The moniker morphed from Stu to Stug and eventually to Shug. At the time I didn’t mind. It was neat to have a nickname and it was better than being called Clarence (after the cross-eyed lion in Daktari) or Morocco Mole, (in tribute to a Hanna Barbera cartoon character) like some other boys I hung around with.

 

I even looked forward to a contented old age, when, with a faithful friend at my feet, I would be a part of the supporting cast in some snug bar and be credited as “auld Shug and his dug.” What did worry me slightly was that being a boy named Shug might be more problematic as I set out on any future romantic and business careers. Loud cries of “Shug! Shug!” would be entirely inappropriate in the either bedroom or the boardroom.

 

When I started getting my writing published in the mid-1990s it was still OK to be a Shug. My stuff fitted right in with the contents of Rebel Inc and Ahead of It’s Time. Even when my novella and short story collection Hi Bonnybrig came out twenty years ago nobody suggested I’d only make it big in the UK book business unless I went back to being called Stuart.

 

Being a working-class man named Shug did suggest a disturbingly predictable stereotype. During certain media interviews for Hi Bonnybrig, even though I was working on a PhD at Glasgow University on US Fiction in the 1960s, I was more likely to be asked about which moves I thought Falkirk FC might make in the transfer market rather than my opinion on Thomas Pynchon. I suspected that people would have preferred me to have a backstory like Wattie, lead singer in the punk band The Exploited and be the part-time frontman for a council-scheme combo called Schnauzers on Temazepam.

 

I’m currently writing a book called Becoming the Big Yin and discovering that the pubs frequented by the young Billy Connolly were simply awash with Shugs and Shuggies. It was Glasgow in the 1970s where Icelandic midfielder Johannes Eovaldsson was, for convenience sake, renamed Shuggie by Celtic fans. For cultural role models it’s perhaps best to look to the USA and to the great soul brother Shuggie Otis or Shug Avery (one of a small list of fictional, Afro-American, bi-sexual Shugs) in Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple. Americans, however, can’t pronounce Shug properly and it comes out as “Shooog”, which sounds like they’re trying to usher a distasteful looking creepy crawly back under a boulder.

 

Perhaps it’s best to be proud of every page I continue to write, battle on and reconcile myself to the fact that it’s extremely unlikely that anything written by a Shug or published on a shoestring by Kerfuffle Press, will ever win the Booker. I’ll simply just have to accept that my stuff might just be seen as shite by some people, and that it would have made no difference if I’d been named Marcel, Herman, Toni or Kurt. The last word (slightly paraphrased) should belong to the man in black,

 

“Shug you just fought one hell of a fight,

that name you got helped you write.”