Douglas Stewart

But John took Cal's hesitancy the wrong way and he answered for him.

So all that money, four years, no woman and no job.

I was top of my year, Dad.

I got a first class with honours.

It's not my fault the country's in the bin.'

He wanted to tell his father about the sorry state of the Scottish textile industry, how Pringle was all but Chinese-owned, how Barry Knitwear had been steadily shedding jobs, how Innerleithen was a milled town with no mills.

But he saw the slump of his father's shoulders, the side of John's index finger thickened from decades of shunting the heavy bobbin, and so he sighed and he turned back to the sea.

Well, in fact, you know, my father left my mother when I was about four years old.

So my brother, my older brother, had to step into the father role in my family.

You know, when I came out eventually at 17, my family were just very disappointed for me, I think, because they knew how hard the world was going to be on me.

But my brother took it very personally because at the time he believed that

that masculinity was a learned thing.

And so somehow he had failed in teaching me how to be a real man, how to be a heterosexual man.

And so my sexuality wasn't something that I was innately born with, but in fact, it was some failing in how he had raised me.

And I felt terrible for him for that.

You know, it took me many years to get him to understand that that wasn't the truth.

And it's his fault.

And in fact, I mean, what a sort of noble burden in a way to sort of care about someone in that way and to take all that guilt in yourself.

But, you know, it was such a dark time.

People just didn't know better.