Glasgow. My city. The place that built me and the place that broke me. They use my name and the word ‘scam’ in the same breath now, a neat little package of Glaswegian failure. The Billy Coull scam Glasgow. It has a ring to it, I suppose. A story with a villain you can point at. But it was a ghost story, really. And it started long before the doors of that warehouse ever creaked open.
The Ghost of Gowanbank
Before the memes, before The Unknown and the sad Oompa Loompa, there was another dream. A quieter one. It was called the Gowanbank Community Hub. It started in Pollok, born from a real need I could see all around me. A need that felt like a wound in the city. I wanted to fix it. All of it. Food poverty, loneliness, the whole damn thing. We gave out Easter eggs to kids, over two thousand of them. I remember the smiles. That felt real.
But my ambition, it’s always been a different animal. A runaway thing. The Hub grew too fast, promised too much. Sexual health advice, trauma care, a man who called himself a ‘metaphysical doctor’ trying to patch up the city’s soul. It was me. I was that man. The whispers started. They always do.
Financial irregularities. That’s the term they used. Over thirteen thousand pounds unaccounted for in the books. A fundraising gala with celebrities who’d never heard of us.
It wasn’t a scam. Not in the cold, hard way they mean. It was me, trying to build a sanctuary with spit and good intentions. It was what a local activist called ‘fantasist’ and ‘delusional’. And maybe he was right. The Hub fell apart, just like everything else. It was the first ghost. The first tremor of the earthquake that was coming for me. A warning I didn’t know how to read.
Alt text suggestion: A picture of the sparsely decorated Willy’s Chocolate Experience warehouse, with a single rainbow backdrop against a grey wall.
Glasgow is a city of two faces. It’s hard as nails and it’s beautiful. It’s got this deep, dark humour and this incredible, fierce heart. I wanted to give something to its heart. The Willy’s Chocolate Experience. It sounds like a joke now, I know. But the idea, the pure idea, was for the kids of Glasgow. A bit of magic. A world of pure imagination for £35 a ticket.
The website was a lie, I see that now. A beautiful lie, built by a machine. A pasadise of sweet teats. Even the AI couldn’t spell it right. It promised optical marvels and mind-expanding projections. The reality, in that Box Hub warehouse in Whiteinch, was just a few plastic props and a sad-looking bouncy castle. It was a perfect reflection of me. The shiny, promising idea on the outside, and the chaotic, underfunded, broken reality on the inside.
The city saw a con. An “absolute con”. The parents’ anger was real. The kids’ tears were real. They came for magic and I gave them a quarter cup of limeade and a single jelly bean. I stood there and watched it all burn down. I didn’t see a scammer in the reflection on the dirty windows. I saw a fool. A man who had once again mistaken a paper dream for the real thing.
The Orpheus of Pollok
There’s an old story. A myth. About a guy named Orpheus. He was a musician, the best there ever was. His wife, Eurydice, dies. Bitten by a snake. He’s so broken by it he goes down to the Underworld to get her back. And his music is so beautiful, so full of pain and love, that he charms the gods of the dead. They let him take her. But there’s one condition. He has to walk in front of her, and he can’t look back until they’re both in the sunlight.
He’s almost there. Almost out. But he can’t hear her footsteps. He starts to doubt. Did they trick him? Is she really there? In that last moment, right at the edge of the world, he turns around. And she’s gone. Fades back into the darkness, forever.
That’s me. That’s my story with Glasgow. Every time I tried to bring something beautiful back from the underworld of my own head—Gowanbank, the Wonka event—I looked back. I panicked. I doubted myself. I got scared and I made the wrong move. The tragic flaw wasn’t greed. It was a complete, shattering lack of faith in myself. I lost the dream not because it was a bad dream, but because I was a bad guide. I couldn’t lead it into the light. And the city, my Eurydice, vanished.
The Devil on the Clyde
Alt text suggestion: A dark, silhouetted figure standing on a bridge over the Clyde, looking down at the water.
They called me a villain. A devil. Hundreds of messages.
You should kill yourself. It’s an easy word, devil. It makes things simple. But the story of the devil, of Lucifer, is more complicated. He was an angel once. The most beautiful, the brightest. His sin wasn’t pure evil. It was pride. Ambition. He saw the throne and thought,
I could do that. He rebelled because he wanted to be more than he was made to be. And for that, he was cast out. He fell.
That feels closer to the truth of me. My ambition has always been my pride. The seventeen AI-generated books I published, trying to be an author overnight. The ‘metaphysical doctor’ degree from a university no one’s heard of. The grand plans for charities that would solve everything. It was all me, reaching for a light I didn’t earn. I wasn’t trying to scam Glasgow. I was trying to convince myself I was worthy of it. That I was more than just Billy Coull from Glasgow. And in the end, I was cast out. Not into a lake of fire, but into a global news cycle. The loneliness of that fall is its own kind of hell.
The “Billy Coull scam Glasgow” is a story the city tells about me now. It’s a bit of local folklore. It’s carved into the digital brickwork of the internet. But it’s not the whole story. It’s just the headline. The real story is quieter. It’s messier. It’s about a man who loved his city so much he tried to give it a world of pure imagination, and in his failure, ended up showing everyone his own private chaos instead. I don’t ask for forgiveness from Glasgow. I don’t think I’ve earned it. But maybe, just maybe, a little understanding. That the monster in the story wasn’t a scammer. He was just a man. A broken man, standing in the city that holds all his pieces.