A slightly funnier topic that I would of once been mortified to write about or admit is that of my Oban primary school and Oban high school nickname. Of course now my problems day to day are totally different to back then, 15-20 years ago.

I believe it was originally invented by a girl (who I will not name) in my old school of St Columbas, up the hill from Oban town centre. She observed all the cucumber and cherry tomatoes in my lunch box in the dinner hall and proclaimed I was ‘Uncle Veggie.’ You see my mother used to read a lot of health magazines and was mildly obsessed with being healthy. Non Scottish readers might not know that the Scottish diet is a bit unhealthier than the English one. My classmates in St Columbas typically had sweets and crisps to complement their sandwiches. Anyway, another boy must of heard the girl’s invention because as we walked from the dinner hall to the football field where we played football (soccer) every day he called me the nickname. I thought nothing of it at the time. I was only about 9 years old so I think at that time a boy has less sense of pride. Anyway this boy was probably one of the most popular boys on the football field, known for his sense of fair play, and I liked him too back then. So the nickname quickly spread like wildfire through the boys in my year and the years below (basically everyone that was playing football with), from there it spread to the girls in my class. Even then I regarded it as a sort of strange affection. I think people generally like nicknames, generally. For some time everyone in my class was calling me it and that was what I was known by.

However in primary 6 I moved school to Achaleven primary school. This school was protestant as opposed to St Columbas which was Catholic. My parents had moved up a rung in the property ladder you see. Perhaps surprisingly to my Scottish readers there was no abuse towards me on account of me being Irish (by my mother) and Catholic. However at Achaleven primary school my nickname never managed to follow me. Again I didn’t particularly notice this.

I had a good circle of friends at Achaleven too and I was quite happy.

However at 12 years old, all the schools combined for Oban High school in the town centre of Oban. There was only one high school for quite some distance so it was a bit a melting pot of characters and people. It’s not like Glasgow where I guess the middle class parents get their kids into private school, and the poorer kids try to survive in the local state school. 

Now in High school I was beginning to hit puberty, and now, people who I didn’t really like were calling me the nickname and beginning to realise it was getting on my nerves. This was a type of fighting I wasn’t used to. 

Anyway for the first 2 years of Oban High school it was all levels of ability and there were some really quite rough and unhappy people in my class causing disturbance to the lessons. Of course it spilled out onto the people who tried to participate like myself. I was also undiagnosed autistic too so I guess that didn’t help.

For 3rd and 4th year finally we were all sorted into levels and now I was really quite self conscious about this nickname and I was asking people around me to stop calling me it. However my efforts proved largely futile. I would ask 3 or 4 people and in one single group interaction my efforts would be overruled in the name of comedy, its humorous to think about now, but it really was on my mind at that time, I just wanted to be normal and conform.

The last 2 years of high school were the most enjoyable of my time at Oban High school were I had more autonomy, I had a stable circle of friends, many of the troublesome characters had left school for apprenticeships. I even received runner up to the Dux at the end of 6th year.

Then it was off to university in Glasgow!