When it's hard to do comedy

"That's my big brother just died" I said as I looked at the Facebook update his daughter posted. Would have been nice to have been told in a more intimate or sensitive way about the passing of my beloved bro, but hey-ho this is my family we are talking about. It was New Year’s Eve 2011 and I was about to go and do a gig to a sold out celebration comedy crowd. I couldn't pull out at the last minute on New Year's Eve....and do what? Stare at the Facebook update?

So, I pulled on a smile and dragged some lipstick across my sad mouth and headed into the club. It all went amazing, but my chest and lungs hurt with suppressing the shock and sadness. I kept staring at the laughing crowd thinking 'my brother is dead and I can't even get time to digest this' but they needed to laugh and he would have loved that I didn't cancel a show for him.

Comedy is one of those jobs, where you can't wear your pain on your face or express it in your work place. Jokes have to be done and a sparky demeanour has to be adopted.

I have done a comedy show right after a close family funeral, a child abuse trial and the night my daughter landed in hospital.

I know there are many jobs where personal circumstances have to be dampened and priority is given to the workplace, but not many where you have to tell jokes and hear people laugh as your soul feels like lead inside.

You can't tell the other comics about a recent death, unless it's another comic onstage, then tell that story in minute detail. If it's an actual family bereavement, you hush as you don't want to be the joke killer...you have to grin and bear it. Not everyone wants to witness a sad clown backstage...it's seen as unprofessional. Despite my comedian friends being the most bitter, twisted cynical bunch of folks you can find, they are also the most supportive and the way they convey their touching attitude is funny as well -

"Is your brother still dead Janey? That's a shame, is your mammy the one that was flung in the Clyde? Yeah...that's a funny story...anyway go out there and do your shizzle, see you on the other side" We bond over the gravity of life.

I am proud of my fellow comics, who have been through marriage breakdowns, cancer diagnosis, car crashes and yet immediately stood on stage and delivered the goods.

We are a hardy bunch of people and as I head to the Edinburgh Fringe with my daughter I want everyone to know that we comics put our heart and soul into our shows. We want everyone to have a good time, so come out and bring your laughing gear with you - hopefully nobody in my family dies the first week of our run.

So thanks for reading, if you want follow me on twitter @JaneyGodley for updates and daily shenanigans

 

 

Summer time in Glasgow 1970

"Get out there, the sun is splitting the trees" my mammy would say, it's an old Glasgow saying. I was nine years old living in the East End of Glasgow. Our school summer holidays were so different from the kids today. These pampered children who have play schemes, play dates and a collection of activities to keep them away from computers and hopefully engage them in positive social interaction.

 

Back in the day we made do with a three legged dog to play with and a creepy old man who was the park keeper to hide from, our scope to learn interaction was right there on the streets.

 

Looking back, I have no idea why every park in Glasgow I went to in the East of the city seemed to have a dirty old man in a brick hut who liked to show you his wrinkled penis. The council hired them as 'park keepers' and their hut was always directly opposite the swing park....for perfect viewing I suspect.

 

We kids all taught each other, no matter what injury you sustained falling off swings "don't go near the parky hut" as he liked to rub parts of your body that clearly weren't injured. Times were different in 1970.

 

On the hottest days, we wandered our city armed with a bottle of diluted orange juice, some bread and margarine wrapped in a loaf wrapper, packed into a string bag. The bag always contained old remnants of papery onion skins, as it was your mammy's vegetable carrier. Us kids would be a raggle taggle bunch who would set out on adventure to find another green park in Glasgow on the other side of the city. Glasgow has more parklands than any other European city, a legacy of Victorian times, where poor people never had much food but many pretty flowers to look at.

 

We never told our parents where we were going, we had no mobile phones nor bus money we just heard there was a good park on the south side of the city and we were going!

 

Without street knowledge or maps we would set off on foot. We knew basically that the river Clyde would need to be crossed and we would head south to Queen Park over past the Gorbals.

 

The walk would full of excitement as we anticipated new shops to look in, new dogs to play with on the route (back then dogs walked about without owners) and new people to meet on the way. What would this magical park have? Would there be different swings? Would it have a big slide chute? Would the parky be a pervert? We didn't know!

 

The sun would beat down and we burned slowly as we didn't know what factor 30 sun cream was back then. We had Calamine lotion for the after effects, we Glasgow people didn't do prevention, we did cure! Popping the blisters later was a past time for us.

 

Walking down strange main streets we would see children in prams, mums walking with shopping bags, men outside betting shops, pubs that spewed drunks and all the while our eyes were fixed on the ground for a dropped penny or a lucky find of loose fruit near a shop front.

 

We didn't see it as stealing if an orange was rolling on the ground!

 

Sometimes we would look in people's dustbins on the way and pick out stuff, like a discarded/broken toys or clothing. Yes, we were recycling and up scaling way before the middle classes found it interesting. I once found a great pair of ladies burgundy patent leather shoes in the bins outside a big smart house in Kings Park and carried them home in the string bag, my mammy wore them proudly for years afterwards.

 

The tall tenements passed, the street names were read out loud so we could retrace our journey, we stopped women and asked them directions and plodded onwards. Nobody thought a bunch of nine year olds walking themselves through streets was a bad thing, they pointed the way and waved us on. We patted strange dogs, ran our fingers along metal railings, splashed through burst water mains on the road and asked a nice Italian man if we could use his cafe toilets and on the way out watched people eating their lunches. Glasgow had the best Italian cafes outside Italy. The shops often had colourful displays of giant knickerbocker Glorys made of plastic outside on the pavement...making every child yearn for one as they walked past. It looked the height of ice cream sophistication.

 

I can still recall jealousy of watching a wee boy standing outside the cafe with a big ice cream in the baking street, the envy overwhelmed me, who gets a whole big ice cream to themselves? "One day I was going to buy a huge big tub of ice cream" I told the gang and they all agreed that they would too. We would buy a whole big tub and eat it with a spoon near a swimming pool that we owned and it probably would have a dolphin in it.

 

Yes, we all thought that was amazing and ran off to a grassy patch where we slugged on the diluted orange juice and headed on towards the River Clyde. The sun beat on our heads.

 

We crossed dangerous railway lines, we marched through high stretches of tall grassy fields, ran through grave yards, spoke to drunk men in the street and watched buses rattle past us on busy main roads.

 

We came upon a small burn with a rope swing and all took turns of being a commando, we waded through dirty water in our sandals and squidged towards Queen's park.

 

When we finally arrived two hours later we were amazed to find it had a pond! This was like America to us.....it had a POND!

 

Of course we threw ourselves in, with no thought to the filthy algae or worry about getting dried afterwards, the sun would dry us!

 

We roamed the whole park, speaking to people we didn't know, chatting to mammies on the grass and telling them where we were from and how we got there. They were fine with it, we rarely spoke to men, not because we were scared or anything, there just weren't that many about. It was mostly women in the park with kids....we played on the swings, we met new kids, we formed wee gangs and played rounders with new kids we just met, one who had a baseball and a bat and a few adults helped organise the teams.

 

We were also pleasantly surprised to find their parkie was a man and a woman who were kind and helpful, not creepy and would wave at us as we circled the park and gave us plastic beakers of water as the sun scorched the landscape. This place was just magical to us.

 

Finally the sandwiches would be shared on the grass with wet bums and then as the sun was dipping in the west, we would head for home.

 

It wasn't better times, it was just what it was. Different times....of course kids were abused back then, bad things happened but we knew they didn't happen all the time! I was aware that bad things could happen in your own home, so the bigger world couldn't be as bad could it?

 

Staggering back with sore legs and chafed feet from wet sandals, we ambled up to our doors -where my own mammy would say "Where were you today? I never saw you once in the street" and I would tell her where I was and she would ask if we all behaved ourselves and not blink twice at the thought of us walking five miles across the city. We kept ourselves occupied. It was back in 1970....where I stayed out all day walking in the sun, meeting new people and would finally go to bed and dream about owning a swimming pool in America and feeding my dolphins.

 

So thanks for reading, if you want follow me on twitter @JaneyGodley for updates and daily shenanigans

 

 

 

  

Abuse and Threats Online

Seems to be a theme this week of attacking comedians, what with Scottish comic Susan Calman getting bullied for her non- opinion on Independence and Reggie Hunter getting booted for being himself at a corporate gig- the papers raged on with accusations of 'fees to be returned' in Reggie's case and 'Bullying from the Nats' in Susan's case.

 

Either way it was a bad week for comedy, especially as the Scotsman and various other newspapers emblazoned their headline "death threats for comedian" never since Salman Rushdie have we seen adverse reaction to an art form. Though I still don't know who threatened death to Susan as it hasn't in itself been publicised (maybe due to a police investigation) and can only imagine the horror that it rang- having been threatened online two years ago myself for talking about Old Firm Sectarianism....it's scary stuff.

 

I took screen shots and reported the website and death threaten-ers to the police and made an official complaint. So what is this special new Scottish force  Police Scotland doing about this onslaught of abuse towards female comics?

 

In my case they took all the details and assured me to watch out for more abuse, but they basically told me not to be contentious on Twitter....I explained "I am a comedian, I am allowed to make jokes and contentious remarks without being threatened by death" But I was happy I reported it and made sure the cops were aware of the people who being abusive for future reference.

 

So many politicians came out to support Susan and quite rightly so, but it's just lip service....we want to be protected for our freedom of speech without being threatened by death....what's next a Scolds Bridle for 'cheeky women'?

 

I would like a Police Scotland and Chief Constable Stephen House to have a full investigation into the death threats given to comedians and am appalled that Susan had to turn to a newspaper to highlight this issue as clearly the cops are so far doing nothing.

 

Having been a victim of online bullying and name calling, and threats of 'getting my house burnt down' I know how this feels and the police did reassure me they would help me, but by telling me 'not to be contentious' on twitter? what the hell is that about? I will quite happily face criticism and tell me you hate my comedy, explain how much you think am a fat ugly woman...fair play...but to THREATEN ME WITH DEATH? It's not on.

 

On a side issue I speak about this situation in my recent show, how famous people get the press to highlight their online abuse and how the cops will kick doors in at 6am if some Olympiad is abused, but if you are wee Betty McDade from a housing scheme and someone is threatening you on Facebook....you are on your own. I know this to be true as some of my Facebook followers have testified to such....there shouldn't be a law for one and separate law for others. This isn't Victorian times, where the Middle classes are protected and the lower classes are left to defend themselves. All online abuse should be treated seriously, whether you are an Olympic swimmer, a comedian or someone who is living on benefits trying to use social networking sites.

 

I want the death threats to stop and the only way they will stop is if we constantly report them, screen shot the tweets and facebook threats and remember there is always a way to trace them. Everything every written on the web can be traced. Stay safe and lets all work together to stop death threats online.

 

 

So thanks for reading, if you want follow me on twitter @JaneyGodley for updates.

 

 

You are either out or you are in

I was in a supermarket in London last month.

 

I watched three young children, around five or six years old, sliding up and down the store squealing and pulling stuff off the shelves. They were like chattering, screaming meerkats on a hunt through the Kalahari Desert.

 

I looked for the parents and spotted three women chatting to two men. Every now and then, the kids would huddle round them and then bound off screaming again. The parents were pushing those extremely expensive three wheeled prams and feeding organic seaweed sheets to a baby who was spitting it all back out. One child had one of those wooden bikes with no pedals, let's be honest pedalling is SOoooo last year.

 

That wee munchkin was crashing into giant displays of organic cereal. One child ran up and kicked it's mum right on the shin, she merely rubbed her leg and limped off.

 

It made me recall childhood shopping trips with my mammy in Shettleston. She would frequent the King-Co shop, the nearest thing we got to a supermarket in Glasgow’s East End. It contained about seven aisles of food, a few shelves containing bleach, carbolic soap and some household goods, with maybe four till points. There was a cold meat counter and usually two women in men's socks wearing slippers, pushing a steamie pram full of washing tied in a tight bundle.

 

Before we entered the glass doors, my mammy would grab me by the neck of my damp duffel coat and read me the riot act: “If you touch anything, I will stamp on your neck”

 

I would walk the cool aisles of that store, scared to even look at stuff. If my mammy caught me making eye contact with the ice-cream freezer, she would hiss: “Don’t even think about it!” The rest of the shopping trip would be spent with me staring at the ground.

 

Then we would waddle down the road, struggling with our shopping, a string vegetable bag full of papery onions scratching my legs and plastic bags full of cans cracking my knees. Once we got home, she would take the bags off me.

 

“Go out and play!” she would yell. “Take your skate with you!”

 

Rain or shine, we all went out to play, even if it was with just one broken roller-skate tied to the ankle with a discarded brown nylon our mammy could no longer wear. That was how I spent my long summer holidays. You weren't allowed back in for ages or your mammy would shout "you are either out or you are in bastard face" It was illegal back in the 60s to open and shut a door too many times (obviously a joke).

 

I know I must be getting older, now that I start to tut at other mothers’ parenting skills.

 

Today’s kids even answer their mammy back! I don’t know anyone who was born in the 1960s who would have dared to mouth off at their mammy. We didn't come from mothers who tolerated a kick to their shins. I would still be in a coma ward to this day if I had.

 

I know better than most people that the old days weren’t as good as we think. I know there was a lot of poverty, abuse, robbery and murder, but I still believe that kids didn’t dare disrespect their parents the way they do in today’s society.

 

Then again, in our day we didn’t have shedloads of TV shows that explained how to make your child behave. We had The Golden Shot and The Avengers: two things my mammy was already good at. She could fire a sling-back shoe like a warrior and – trust me – she could avenge like no one I knew.

 

Ah …the good old days.

 

So thanks for reading, if you want follow me on twitter @JaneyGodley for updates.

A day of Sore Ears and Twitter Storms

You can guarantee a few things in my life, one is my ears will hurt and the other is I will get abused online.

So I woke up Saturday morning with the usual leaky sore itchy ears and spent the day dosed up with painkillers. There is nothing can be done about my ears, they keep being leaky and wet, and specialists don’t know what to do.

I went onto twitter and saw that Armando Iannucci the Scottish comedy writer had been given an OBE by The Queen (something am not really into) but anyway, he was taunted by Alistair Campbell (former press aide to Blair and who Iannucci based his character Malcolm Tucker on the TV show Thick of it) Campbell taunted Iannucci for accepting the ‘establishment’ and added those three little letters make a lot of difference to which Iannucci replied “WMD” referring to Campbell’s involvement in the illegal war over ‘weapons of mass destruction’ made me laugh my ass off.

Anyway I captured the hilarious online twitter spat and uploaded it to twitpic upon which many famous tweeters decided to reTweet and so my timeline went mental. You need to understand twitter to get that last paragraph, to think the words Re tweet weren’t even forming on our lips until at least 3 years ago now we say it daily. Or at least I do. So thanks to Peter Serinafowitz and Rob Delaney I have heaps of new people reading my tweets.

So, after I got swathes of new followers, I got some twitter people abuse me and call me fuckwit and gobshite etc and I embraced them. The thing about trolls (the name for anonymous people who abuse you on twitter) is that they like to think they can hurt from afar or at least from behind a screen.

It’s a bit like being at a huge super bowl crowd and someone sneaking up through the throngs of people and stabbing you in the groin with dirty needle on a long stick, watching your expression and running away before you can call them out.

I tend to block abusive people not because I am weak but I want to imagine I run back through the same crowd and gaffer tape their mouth and run back again to my own space.

The haters and trolls really take pleasure in hurting people as I have found out.

One troll who is related to a comic I know started writing to my daughter telling her she fantasised about my own childhood abuse...this shocked my daughter for a few moments then she laughed her head off as she imagined him with a long stick and a dirty needle...and then she felt sad he would want to hurt someone and begged me not to get angry at him.

I wasn’t angry- I was amazed nobody had said something like that before, as Ashley and I have both cracked very dark jokes about my past and we like to think that’s our way of coping. That poor bloke just pointed that out and I like to think of him as perceptive to a point, but then we blocked him as he did sound suicidal and that’s not my area.

Witnessing haters on other people really disturb me, for instance a wee chubby pre-teen boy uploaded a really cheesy video of him singing and dancing. Personally his parents should have stepped in and stopped him, thats my opinion.- maybe they were unaware he was uploading videos?

You see something that looks cute and cool to a 13yr old with no critical input can come back and bite you in the arse. Am glad YouTube wasn’t around when I was 13 as there would be a plethora of clips of me looking wistful singing weepy touching songs to photographs of Donny Osmond as I hang over damp rocks near the stream at my old home. (it was the 70s all music montages looked like that)

Anyway the wee chubby boy got millions of hits and thousands of hateful ‘kill yourself fatty’ responses. There is the flip side to this, maybe the wee boy enjoyed the attention and can cope with the haters after all Irish irritators Jedward taught us one thing, stupid people with no talent can make millions.

But I digress, I despise people being hurt by trolls online and yet, I will always strive never to have them charged by the police. Unless someone is psychically threatening my life I can cope with verbal abuse, I am a comedian, I fight for the right to say things onstage so therefore I have to accept the things people say to me offstage.

Follow me on twitter @janeygodley

Am still here

I had an extraordinary posting on my facebook wall from a relative of my husband, not only did they accuse me of organising a ‘hit’ on a brother in law with his own fathers money but they reminded me that I have a bucket mouth and change in toilets in pubs to go onstage.

A few things need corrected here, firstly I have no idea about the ‘hit’ and secondly (this irks me more) I don’t change to go onstage- do people from my past believe I wear a leotard onstage? If so, then I fucking don’t!

I can only imagine and am greedy for the knowledge of the many rumours I left behind when I walked out of that pub in 1994. What other fucked up juicy rumours can there be that I know nothing of? Did I kill my own mother? Did I eat my old dog? Have I fucked the pope? (The last one was a response to the graffiti that suggested most Glaswegians should fuck the pope) any my point is- am missing on the gossip.

Then another woman chipped in that she heard someone else had lived the life I wrote about in my autobiography Handstands in the Dark and I copied it. Well, I suppose there was more than one poor wee working class girl who had an Orange walk flute playing rapey uncle, but I defy anyone to have owned a dog like Major or had a mum who was murdered in the exact same fashion or had a brother who thought he was Bryan Ferry for two whole weeks in 1976.

But I suppose there will always be people who say I lied or I copied or I try to get people killed etc.

That’s life I  – stranger things happen I suppose, like that wee taxi man in Banbury who asked me if my husband ‘minded’ that I was a comedian and I told that driver my husband died in a house fire. The taxi man was so distraught then I explained it was me who started the fire, then I laughed and explained it was a joke, then he asked me if thats the kind of comedy I do, if so it’s ‘not really funny’. That’s the strange things that happen to me.

Meanwhile back in reality- the summer has fucked off, Glasgow is wet and windy, apparently we had great sunny days when Ashley and I were in NZ so that’s our summer over then I take it?

Back to Edinburgh tonight for a lovely wee gig at The Shack.

Follow me on twitter @janeygodley

Being Bullied By A Kids Charity Online

Employees use Registered Charities Twitter account to Bully.



(I deleted this earlier but read again as there are further kinks to this story especially at the end)


Last week I got into a robust twitter debate with a woman from http://www.mckeeconsultants.co.uk/  who specialise in diversity and equality. Anyway the lady online persistently demand that as she is a feminist she was entitled to know on why I openly use the word ‘cunt’ online. I told her that I didn't need to explain myself to her nor anyone and refused to justify my language. I then expressed how ironic it was that a feminist was demanding a woman explain her words. I refused to explain my motives to her and will always do so, as I don’t believe I should have to explain my vocabulary to anyone.


My twitter profile says “The most outspoken female stand up in Britain” (Daily Telegraph). I cannot give you the timeline of McKee Consultant’s tweets as she deleted the entire argument (such was her commitment to her own words), though I do have a screengrab of them. In the middle of this twitter debate a person from the charity Sky Project in Kilmarnock (they recently asked me to be a patron to their kids charity) added to the debate by saying  “You are a patron of our children’s charity. Would you say these words to our young people?”


I responded to Sky Project by saying something along the lines of “I don’t think coming online to question my motives is professional and I can always un-patron” I couldn’t understand why suddenly a charity I have been dealing with got into this twitter debate of the word ‘cunt’.


Firstly I felt Sky Project were questioning my ability to work with kids because I say ‘cunt’ (I have never put myself up as a child role model THEY asked me to be patron) and secondly why are they getting involved? Then I quickly realised that McKee Consultants and Sky Project are friends and contact each other regularly. Fine- I thought, she is sticking up for her pal McKee and now she has lost me as a patron. That’s what happens when you use a charity’s registered twitter feed to have a go at people, no big deal.


I opened my twitter a day later and there was a tweet from a children charity Hill House Care http://www.hillhousecare.org/ that said “Calling yourself a comedienne is an insult to all things funny, Call yourself a children’s role model? Hope not”


Now I was stunned, I genuinely don’t mind people calling me crap and unfunny, it happens a lot to be honest on twitter but for a registered charity to come online with this unprovoked attack annoyed me. Yet again it mentioned my ‘children’s role model’ (which I am not) and so a very short blast of past tweets revealed yet again that McKee Consultants, Sky Project and Hill House Care were all linked together and friends on and offline.


Then @hillhousecare1 deleted the offending tweet and sometime later spouted stuff about freedom of speech and then deleted that as well! (See a pattern emerging? Offensive tweets- delete-delete?) So there we have it, I got into a debate over the word cunt with a woman and her mates waded in under the guise of the charities they work for and had a go at me. My online friends all took exception to the tweets and many complained to Hill House Care and some of them were pretty verbal about a charity being used to slag me off.


So then Hill House Care and McKee consultants both claimed cyber bullying. (Sky Project who may have a more clever person working their social media apologised and backed off). To date Hill House Care has never apologised and both they and Mckee Consultants have deleted their tweets regarding me. Yes they did that old nugget of the passive/aggressive world of “we got into an argument, lost it and now claim aggression in our direction” how professional?


Again at this point I’d like to re-iterate that my anger is at the charities public accounts being used to insult me, not the insult itself. In terms of insults I’ve been called a lot worse… but never by an anonymous person hiding behind the guise of a children’s charity.


So the upshot is, I feel bullied by a children’s charity! I have written to Hill House Care and want their board of directors contact details as I believe the person reading my complaint might be the actual tweeter- so the best way to get to the bottom is to let the charity commission know that a charity is using its status to have a go at people.


By the way- Hill House Care claim on their website to be ‘Non Judgemental” and McKee Consutlants claim to promote “equality and diversity” I have NEVER claimed to be a child’s role model.


So after I posted this blog today I got an email from Mckee Consultants and apologising – which I accepted and I accepted the apology from The Sky project- as of yet I haven’t had an apology from the person who actually tweeted from Hill house care. The tweets all came from a mother, a sister and a daughter in the same family.


After I deleted the blog to let the dust settle on the issue I got an email from a journalist and school teacher called Douglas Bane who sent me an email titled “Scottish comedian forces children's charity to close because they said she wasn't funny”.


He went on to do a hatchet job on my character BUT went onto paint the women who wrote the tweets in such a naive, innocent way and it emerges I am the woman who is singlehandedly getting the charity shut down- in fact he makes it seem, it was always my sole intention- here is an excerpt of his email about me- the one he intends to get published.


"The attempt to smooth ruffled feathers came too late. By this time some of Janey’s followers had taken up the story and were spreading her “horrific personal abuse” version.


Unaware of the full story and unwilling to trawl through the archives, two board members of the second charity, resigned at the weekend. The Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations withdrew its support. Prospective funders have pulled out. As I said, Janey has influence"


Now I have never contacted anyone regards getting the funding cut and those who know me, know this would hurt my soul.


So I sent a statement to the journalist who strangely gave me the offer to change the end of the story and the headline to "Janey Godley steps in to save struggling children's charity"


So I spoke to the woman from The Sky Project who in fact is the least of all offenders in this weird story, she apologised last week after her slightly hurtful tweet and it turns out she knows Douglas Bane the journalist and in fact they used to be in a relationship together.


She asked him to ‘help’ and his way of helping was to threaten me with a rotten unbalanced article about me. He is also a physics teacher and works in education!


I feel his part in this was to put the ‘frighteners’ on me and hope that I would back down and delete my blog. Well Douglas you obviously don’t know me well enough and if anyone else in the press wants to pick up on this wee debacle of story do let me know. BTW I am still getting emails accusing me of trying to 'break people' instead of 'letting this go'. They somehow have become the victims and I am the bad witch.


Sometimes the word cunt doesn’t quite get across what I mean today.

Domestic Abuse, Red Card it!

This blog is in conjunction with the Red Card Campaign on Twitter.

Scotland’s domestic abuse statistics rise by 80% after a Rangers and Celtic football match was reported by assistant Chief Constable Neilson of Strathclyde Police. During an Old Firm match serious and violent crimes can double.

After one football game back in February this year, police were called out to 185 incidents of domestic abuse- a jump of 52% compared to weekends when a match is not being played.

Assistant Chief Constable John Neilson said the force arrested more than 550 people on the day of the match - all of whom were drunk.

Officers also had to contend with a rise in the number of attempted murders, assaults, and breaches of the peace.

And such incidents have peaked during the past Old Firm showdowns during this year.
Now with the league match next Sunday at Ibrox the bigoted wife beaters need to feel the might of the football clubs. Punching the wife is a serious as punching a fan, yet a violent thug will only be refused entry to a match for fan bashing, and wife beaters will still get welcomed into the terraces. This needs to be addressed. Men who beat their partners and have been prosecuted should never be allowed into a football ground for life.
The clubs should be highlighting this situation, it can’t all be blamed on alcohol and if the clubs are seen to be doing something, it can only help.

Sectarianism has been being tackled with some success.
But thugs have basically swapped one form of abuse for another and yet again women get the brunt of their pent up frustrations.

These cowardly thugs, are restricted from bottling other football fans who wear a different coloured scarf on the streets by the police have now found an outlet for their drunken spitting hatred. They can now do their beating in private.

It is shocking to realise that women and children recognise that when their father’s favourite team gets beat, then so will they.
There has to be some sort of solution to this issue.

Police have warned pub and club owners to reinforce their responsibility towards customers and to make sure that drunks will not be served.

Booze is not always the cause for post match wife beating, it’s not as prevalent with other Scottish premier league clubs, it is mainly connected with Rangers and Celtic fans, and so that rules alcohol out as the sole instigator in this issue.

There is something that runs deeper with the psyche of the Old Firm fans, why do they become so vehemently angry? What makes an Old Firm football attendee kick his wife in the head when his team gets beaten?

Someone somewhere needs to come up with an answer and my opinion still sways towards football managers and committees to come out and talk about Old Firm violence.
Sectarianism isn’t Scotland’s dirty secret- Old Firm Wife Beating is.

Please support this campaign on Twitter, do all you can to highlight this issue. Thanks Janey Godley