And so I stayed in the late Mrs Ippot's enormous town house in Park Terrace, overlooking Kelvingrove Park and the River Kelvin running through it. The museum and art gallery sat red, huge and stately to the left, its sandstone bulk crammed with the silt of time and human effort, while on the hill to its right, skirted by the black outlines of trees, the university soared with self-impressed Victorian fussiness into the grey autumnal skies, positively exuding half a millennium's experience in the collation and dissemination of knowledge.

The high ceilings and vast windows of Mrs Ippot's former home appeared to have been the work of an architect anticipating the design of aircraft hangars; the interior was cluttered with paintings, rugs, chandeliers, life-sized ceramics of the smaller big cats, small statues, large statues and objets d'art of every imaginable description, all interspersed with heavy, dark, intricately gnarled wooden furniture that gave the appearance of being volcanic in origin. The house's inventory — drawn grimly to my attention by a spotty clerk who obviously resented the fact I was younger than he was — came in three volumes.

I christened the place Xanadu, but never did find any sleds.

My friends, of whom I saw less these days, suggested parties when they first heard about the place. On seeing it, they usually agreed with me that to mount a serious whoopee on the premises would be to invite cultural catastrophe on a scale usually only witnessed during major wars and James Last concerts.

One of my pals — graduated, employed; moving on to better things — sold me his old VW Golf, and I drove down to Lochgair most weekends, usually on a Thursday night as I didn't have any classes on a Friday. James and I helped mum, who was redecorating the house. She was talking about knocking down the old conservatory and putting in a new one, perhaps covering a small swimming pool. She had also formed the idea of building a harpsichord, and then learning to play it. We took tea at the Steam Packet Hotel on occasion, and James kept an Ordnance Survey map on which he inked in all the walks we undertook, on the hills and through the forests around Gallanach.

Mum and I had started going through dad's diaries. Some were pocket size, some were desk diaries; a couple of early ones were effectively home made. They went back to when he'd been sixteen. I'd suggested Mum read them first in case there was anything embarrassing in them, though I think in the end she just skimmed them. They weren't the stuff of scandal, anyway; the entries we'd sampled when we first discovered them in the box at the back of the cupboard were about as revealing as they ever got; really just appointments, notes on what had happened that day, where dad had been, who he'd met. If there was a single indiscretion recorded there, I never found it. The same went for any but the most basic observation or idea; he'd kept those in the A4 pads.

It was at the bottom of the box containing dad's diaries, in an old presentation tin which had held a bottle of fifteen-year-old Laphroaig, that I found Rory's diaries; little pocket books, usually a week-per-two-pages. Dad must have filed them separately from the other papers.

I got very excited at first, but then discovered that Rory's diaries were even more sparse — and considerably more cryptic — than my father's, with too many initials and acronyms to be easily understood, and too full of week — and even month-long gaps to form a reliable impression of Rory's life. There was no diary for the year he disappeared. I'd tried to make sense of Rory's diaries, but it was uphill work. The entry for the day of my birth (when Rory had been in London) read:

K r; boy 8£. Prentis?!? M ok Eve, pub.

The entry for the next day read: 'vho' in shaky writing, and that was all. 'ho' and 'vho' (or sometimes h.o. and v.h.o.) often followed entries regarding pubs or parties the night before, and I strongly suspected they stood for hungover and very hungover. K meant Kenneth and M Mary, pretty obviously, ok was itself (its opposite was nsg, which stood for Not So Good; he'd spelled it out the first time he'd used it, following a 48hr h.o. after Hogmanay the previous year). A small r meant 'rang'; a telephone call. And I had indeed weighed in at eight pounds.

I found a few mentions of 'CR' — I even recognised some of the notes I'd read the previous year; he must have jotted them down in his diary first before transferring them to his other papers. But there was nothing to provide any new answers.

The one thing that stayed with me as a result was not a solution to anything, but rather another mystery. It was on a page at the back of the last diary, the diary for 1980; a page headlined by the mysterious message:

JUST USE IT!

… a page covered with notes, some in pencil, some in ball-point, some in very thin felt-tip, but a page which held the only instance anywhere in all the papers I had where Rory had made an effort not just to alter or score out some words or letters, but to obliterate them. It read:

show Hlvng pty wi C? (whoops): 2 close??

The symbols just before the H and C had been obliterated by a heavy black felt-tip marker, but the original note had been written with a ball-point, and by holding the page up to the light at just the right angle, I could see that the first letter had been an F and the second an L.

F and L. Those abbrevations didn't turn up anywhere else in Rory's notes for either Crow Road or anything else that I knew of. Rory never crossed stuff right out; he only ever put a line through it.

Why the big deal with the felt-tip? And who were F and L? And why that 'whoops'? And what was too close to what?

found myself cursing Uncle Rory's inconsistency. F in the diaries sometimes meant Fergus (aka Fe), sometimes Fiona (also Fi), and sometimes Felicity, a girl Rory had known in London, also recorded as Fls, Fl or Fy (I guessed). The only L in the diaries seemed to be Lachlan Watt, though he — mentioned on the rare occasions when he came back to visit from Oz — was LW, more usually.

Some nights at Lochgair, after long evenings spent poring over those little, thin-paged diaries on the broad desk in dad's study, trying to make sense of it all, and failing, I'd fall asleep in my bed with the symbols and acronyms, the letters and numbers and lines and boxes and doodles and smudges all swirling round in front of me even after I'd put the light out and closed my eyes, as though each scribbled sign had become a mote of dust and — by my reading — been disturbed; lifted from the page and blown around me in a vortex of microscopic info-debris, chaotic witnesses of a past that I could not comprehend.

I found one thing which — after a little puzzled thought — I could comprehend, but which I hadn't been expecting, in Uncle Rory's 1979 diary. Stuck to the inside back cover with a yellowing stamp hinge was an old, faded, slightly grubby paper Lifeboat flag, without its pin.

The sentimentalist in me was reduced almost to tears.

In Glasgow I had taken to sitting in churches. It was mostly just for the atmosphere. Catholic churches were best because they felt more like temples, more involved with the business of religious observance. There was always stuff going on; candles burning, people going to confession, the smell of incense in the air… I'd just sit there or a while, listening but not listening, seeing but not seeing, there ut not there, and finding solace in the hushed commerce of other people's belief, absorbed in the comings and goings of the public and the priests, and their respective professions of faith. A father would approach me, now and again… but I'd tell him I was just browsing I walked a lot, dressed in my Docs and jeans and a long tweed coat that had been my father's. Uncle Hamish sent me thick letters full of original insights into the sacred scriptures, which I dipped into sometimes when I couldn't sleep. I never got further than page two of any of them. I frequented the Glasgow Film Theatre, and installed a video and a TV in the lounge. I bought a ghetto-blaster which usually lived in the flat's kitchen (and so became known as the gateaux-blaster) but which I would take walkabout with me sometimes, at least partly for the weight-training which transporting the brute from room to room provided. I'd stand and look at time-dark paintings, or run a finger over the line of some cold, marble animal, while the tall, glittering rooms resounded to the Pixies, REM, Goodbye Mr Mackenzie, The Fall and Faith No More.