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Robin, *please* don't devolve yourself back down to the boring old "plain English"; yer much morebetter the other way.
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Don't encourage me, Pooka. (That an allusion tae Flann Whatsit?)

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"Glasgow Sixties gang-handed [or not]", never having had the pleasure (?) ("Eeep!!!", indeed);
"

Wasn't that bad in the late sixties. Tongs and Cumbie, sure, but relatively civilised. When it blew apart to buggery was the early seventies, when the kids growing-up on the high-rise housing estates ('It looks like a jile, and it stinks') reached sixteen, with the nearest pub ten miles away. +Then+ it got bad, for a bit.

But (honest) I never was gang-handed -- Denniston was so deprived, it didn't even reach to a gang-structure. That was why the hard men came aw the wae frae Brigton tae try tae cop a lumber at the Denny Palais. Safer tae dae yir winchin at the Denny Palais than in the Gorbals.

Mind you, late on a Saturday night outside the Palais could be ... interesting. Studded belts were one thing, belts with the studs punched inwards and sharpened, something else. Nothing showed, but it took only seconds to get it out. Open razors in the sixties were well passe (Sillitoe had kicked them all down a stank long ago, and No Mean City was long in the past) but there were approximations. Amazing what you could create with five old pennies and a pencil ...

+Don't+ start me on this ...

But I was a mere wean when I lived in Denniston, so the only souvenier I have is a triangular scar on my left knee-cap (have I said this before?)

O tempora, o mores ...

Robin