In Scotland’s artisan, cycle-lane neighbourhoods where jeopardy only lurks in changing bin-collection times, they talk occasionally of livelier manors considered dangerous.

This is often expressed in a way that implies a native knowledge of these places, the narrator having (of course) once been raised there. He’ll still have "cousins" who live on these streets to this day. All of this is intended to add colour and drama to their vanilla back-story. “Did you know that Graham went to school with one of the Daniels? He was a lovely lad, apparently, but Graham says you wouldn’t want to get on his wrong side. Did I show you my new Longhi? You could take a bath in the foam.”

There are dozens of these neighbourhoods and descriptions of them all tend to include an unholy lexicon. They’re "lawless" and "vicious" and a bit unpredictable. They’re places in which you wouldn’t want your car to break down and where the law is maintained by local gang-masters in an informal arrangement with the local constabulary. The raconteur will touch his nose theatrically at this point to show that he’s still privy to what’s going down on the street with his homies.

I can’t really say if I’ve ever had dealings with the kenspeckle Daniels business cartel or their generational competitors, the Lyons. What fecund tribes they must be, though: there must be thousands of them, owing to the number of tales I’ve heard about their exploits from people claiming to know them.

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