Football on agenda that is already set

question I ask him with a secretive shrug, being unused to attention.

Not so much inarticulate as unable to comprehend the very notion of

articulacy. He tells me that he goes back every year for the

fruit-picking. His rejection of my attention makes this a salutary

encounter.

They are talking football at the bar. The local team have been

training in Kilmarnock for quite a few years and have had few or no

local players. But the breeding ground for players -- the big

five-a-side tournaments and the summer league -- has gone. The landlord

points irritably and significantly at the telly and there is a general,

elderly sigh at the breakdown of another valued local institution.

Elsewhere I hear another viewpoint. The boys like their amateur

football and will not risk their amateur status by playing in the

professional game. Stranraer FC is the bottom rung of the ladder but the

middle rungs are missing and we are not here within the catchment of the

big stadiums. Professional aspirations are blunted by sheer distance. We

are no longer talking only about football.

In the evening in the centre of town young people drive around the

one-way system, radios blaring. A young girl, gainfully employed, is

amused. ''They are using up their daddy's petrol.'' An elderly man,

working in Stranraer after years spent working all over Britain, is

tolerant. ''They are just promenading.''

Elsewhere the anxieties about this behaviour seem imported from a

generalised feeling of pessimism about the world and common adult

intolerance. Mixed with this is real worry about youth unemployment.

''Doon here they'd vote for a monkey in a blue rosette,'' I am told by

a Stranraer man, though he is talking about the rural areas of Galloway

and the Stewartry. Political support in the town is weighted towards

Labour and SNP, a combination of passive Labour voting and the kind of

lumpen ''support Scotland'' feeling which is like populism without its

virtues.

The sophisticated and party activists find more solidarity and support

from formal associations throughout the south-west extending as far as

Dumfries, rather than directly from their own community.

There is a kind of line going up the Ayrshire coast which droops down

into the apolitical then rises again towards Irvine as we go nearer the

economic centres and bigger populations. In a town such as Girvan there

is a strong sense of community and mutual help which is far from being

formulated into a political idea.

There is a tendency to see opinions which crystallise into specific

political attitudes, still less party choices as expressions of urban

vulgarity or even as a threat to the community. There is half a notion

that Glasgow is solely populated by social workers, single parents, and

political activists.

So the habit of neighbourliness is maintained by inherited activities

-- whist drives, charity organisations, educational and recreational

projects, dances, concerts -- and to some extent dissipate energies

which might go into resistance and defence of the local community.

However, the world intrudes. Behind the pride that the shipyard in

Girvan is doing well is the uneasy realisation that the time has gone

when doing the everyday useful work of the world is a guarantee of

success. Still, I meet a Glasgow man who has used his redundancy money

to emigrate to Girvan where his 12-year-old son is more likely to have a

decent upbringing.

Next, golf country. Passing the Turnberry Hotel where we are unlikely

to feel the pulse of the nation. We go past the big residences in Ayr

and through Troon on towards the harbour area of Irvine.

Here we are within commuting distance of Glasgow and less sense of

isolation from the centre. Inevitably, in Troon I speak to some

businessmen. Humane, liberal, decent people -- yet with their agenda

thoroughly set for them -- and they speak in the vocabulary of the day

about an economy as uncontrollable as the weather.

All the way up the coast there is talk about the recession. Some

people express anxiety or hope and estimate the direction of the economy

according to how well they themselves are doing. Yet there is a

pervasive fear that so much of the world is owned -- manufacturing,

banks, services, insurance, retailing -- by vague conglomerations of

national, European, or global size.

An unease often expressed in an aesthetic distaste for the appearance

of the high street and the replacement of familiar regional names by

unidentifiable logos and initials. A sense that responsibility and

authority are not just out of reach but illusory and cloudy.

But standing in the main street in Irvine I begin to feel further away

from the ideological emptyness of populism and nationalism and from

local quietism. A place inhabited by some notion that the public world

can be understood and acted upon.

Here, where the real urban miseries begin, there is a glimpse of that

inheritance of the radical notion that there are ideas which are tools

for the intelligence and for action.