Aasmah Mir on growing up in Glasgow: Boys wouldn’t even touch my hand

From Monday to Thursday the Scottish-born broadcaster is up at three and in the studio for the Times Radio morning show she presents with Stig Abell by 4.15am. The show itself begins at 6am.

“We’re there ’til 10 and then there’s a bit of debriefing. Might have to do something for tomorrow. Then we leave.

“And everyone’s like, ‘Oh, you’ve got the whole day!’ Yes, I do have the whole day, but I am exhausted. I’ve got a small child. Single parenting.

“She’s in school till three mostly, so I do have the whole day. But you don’t feel normal because you’ve been up since three and you’re beginning to come apart a little bit at the seams by three, four.”

Which is why Fridays are so special.

“That’s the one day of the week I get to take her to school. So Friday is definitely my favourite day. My day all to myself and I can de-stress.”

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It is 9.30am this particular Friday morning - which must be, what? Early evening by Mir’s clock? - and I’m beginning to feel stressed about breaking into her destressing time.

But it’s for the book, she says. “I’m probably only going to ever write one book, so I want to give it the best chance that I can.”

Last year Mir published a memoir, A Pebble in the Throat. It’s been renamed A Glasgow Girl for the new paperback edition, a nod to the city where she grew up.

On the cover there’s a photograph of Mir as a smiling child superimposed against a backdrop of Glasgow University (she actually went to Bristol University herself), approving quotes from the likes of Samira Ahmed, Fern Britton and the Reverend Richard Coles, as well as the legend: “A memoir of growing up and finding your voice.”

That is doubly true, you could say. Because not only does it speak (ahem) to Mir's current job as radio presenter, it also reflects her own teenage experience. When she was 12 that smiling young girl on the cover of her book effectively disappeared. Mir retreated into herself and into silence.

But hold that thought. Mir has been on our radios for a quarter of a century now. After studying law at Bristol (“I remember thinking, ‘I’m not doing this,’” she recalls), she joined STV as a graduate trainee.

Mir then moved to London in 1999 to take up a job with 5 Live. More recently, there was a six-year stint (or near as dammit) co-presenting Radio 4’s Saturday Live alongside the aforementioned Reverend Coles, before she joined Times Radio in 2020.

Aasmah Mir (Image: free)

Mir and Abell launched the station on June 29, 2020 with an interview with the then Prime Minister Boris Johnson. How much has changed since then? In Mir’s case, quite a lot. Divorce, a new home, going through the menopause. Oh, and becoming an author.

The memoir - which tells both her own childhood story and that of her mother, Almas, growing up in Pakistan in the 1950s and 1960s - is a finely crafted piece of writing that follows a young girl from a happy childhood to her miserable, withdrawn teenage years when she was forcibly made aware of her skin colour, of her difference.

“Everyone has a story of childhood,” Mir tells me when I ask the basic question, why write A Glasgow Girl? “It can be happy. It can be happy and sad. It can be terrible.

“Mine was good and bad, but there are certain experiences that happened, specifically school experiences, that were always there at the back of my mind, that informed a lot of the stuff that I did and made me who I am today. And that doesn’t mean in a good way. It’s given me lots of flaws, personality character defects.

“On a low level, If you have a bit of trauma at school, it can make you become a different person. It can make you quite closed off.

“And,” she adds, “I just always felt I wanted to get it out because it was just always in.”

Mir is one of four children. Her mother arrived in Scotland in 1966 to live with her new husband Arif in Glasgow. Her dad ran a petrol station. Eventually, he would have a string of them. The family lived in Baljaffray and then Bearsden.

And Mir’s childhood was a happy one. “I just loved being a child," she says emphatically. "I loved the rough and tumble of a seventies childhood. We all played in the burn. It was a very outdoors childhood.

“I felt like I really occupied a space. I was all elbows and knees. I was always kicking people if they kicked me. I was very physical and I just loved everything about being a child; the friends, the school bags, the little weird shoes we used to wear in the gym for our PE lessons.

“From zero to 10, I thought it was idyllic. There were always idiots who said weird things, but I was able to shrug a lot of that off.”

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That all changed as she moved towards her teens. There were other factors involved. The family moved house when Mir was 11. Her mum then went back to Pakistan for eight months, with her sister and her little brother Imran who has Asperger’s (then undiagnosed). Mir was left at home with her dad and her brother. Her new school was huge, unpredictable, often violent. And she began to be noticed; for the colour of her skin and for being a Muslim (even though she wasn't religious). She began to stand out and standing out is never good in such an environment.

It was, Mir admits, an uncomfortable experience. “You suddenly realise you’re different, you will always be different, you cannot change your skin, your hair, your body. You can't change it.

“And I think there was just that moment where you suddenly realise, ‘Oh God, life’s going to be quite hard.’ “And when you say life you just mean next week at that age.”

Next week can feel like an eternity when you’re 12 though.

There’s a line in the book, I tell her, that broke my heart. At one point Mir says to family friend and helper Helen (one of the book’s real heroes), “I hate being this colour.”

A textbook example of internalising the otherness that is being directed at you.

“I think a lot of my generation really did hate it because it made life impossible,” Mir suggests. “And then you become so uber-aware of it. You’re constantly bristling. ‘When is someone going to say something?’ “And it would be constant. They call them micro-aggressions now. Small things that would happen. And then I suppose you would relax because no one had said anything in a while and then all of a sudden someone would say something again and you’d be like, ‘Yes I’m still brown.’ “And largely, Teddy, because I was the only one. I look at my school photos. I was like a little bullet and I just stood out so much. I really did. So I was so aware of it. And I definitely hated the colour of my skin between maybe 12 and 17, I think. Maybe less. But it was that kind of period when I would think, ‘Oh God, I just want to be like everybody else.’ I absolutely did.

“I wanted to fit in, I wanted to be like everyone else, wanted boys to like me. Boys wouldn’t even touch my hand.

“When it got to that point when boys would start pairing off occasionally with girls … They would be my friends, but they would never, ever say that they actually liked me or fancied me because that would be like, ‘Oh my God, what’s wrong with you.’”

When did she get her first boyfriend?

“First official boyfriend, I was ancient. I was 23. But when I went to Bristol I had a fantastic time. I had so many … Boyfriends is not the right word … But suddenly realising it didn’t matter. You were in a place where there were other people of other skin colours.

“And by then it was 1990 and things had really changed; 89/90, things were just different. I remember feeling much more confident in myself.

Radio presenter Aasmah Mir with her mother Almas (left) and sister Uzma, a former Herald columnist (right). (Image: free)

“In terms of a boyfriend I went through school, never went to a school dance, never had a date, never had a boyfriend and I remember thinking, ‘Am I ever going to?’ And that also hardens you. You put up your barriers.

“But it’s not the end of the world. It worked out in the end … Or didn’t.”

Maybe there’s a rueful smile there, a reminder to herself that she’s recently divorced.

What is striking, I say, is that her experience was so different to that of her parents. There’s a strong sense that they didn’t really understand what she was going through.

“Absolutely not. We were like night and day, my parents and me. We shared a nose, we shared a skin colour, we shared a name, we shared DNA. But we shared nothing else.

My mum and dad were born and had their childhoods in Pakistan where they were with people who looked like them.

“And also they were the cream of the crop. My mum was head girl and my dad, he was known as golden when he was at school because he was so fair. And that is something that is really prized and is still prized to a degree in Pakistan.

“They had an amazing childhood, they were very secure and, my God, don’t ever underestimate the importance of 20 years of security.

“So, they didn’t understand what I was talking about. I don’t blame them, but I remember thinking that’s really short-sighted because, ‘Why do you think it would be easy for us?’ “I know we were the second generation, but we were the first generation of children in numbers to go through the child of immigrants’ experience - going to school, trying to fit in. And it was more difficult in places like Glasgow because there were very few people who looked like me. If it had been London or Birmingham or Bradford or wherever, it could have been a very different kettle of fish.”

Sometimes love - and she grew up in a loving family - is not enough.

At school the name-calling and the snide comments were bad enough, but worse was to follow. When Mir, in a fit of pique, told her teacher that one of the boys in her class had copied her homework, she feared he was going to beat her up.

What he did was worse. He told everyone not to talk to her. And no one did. She then internalised that silence herself. She clammed up, stopped communicating.

“I couldn’t speak to anyone, couldn’t go in a shop. My poor mum had to go in and get my magazines, my comics.”

Combine that with adolescence and spots and self-consciousness and Mir was struggling.

What’s striking though, I remind her, is that she largely found her own way out of all of this. She didn't sink. The question is how?

A Glasgow Girl by Aasmah Mir (Image: free)

“I just remember thinking, ‘This is bad. I’m at the bottom here, scraping the barrel of my life. But it’s not always going to be like this. Because life is so amazing. There’s so many things to do and places to go. And I’m just going to really live life. I’m going to fill up my lungs and I’m going to speak.’ “Whatever a good life is, I’m going to have it.’ “I went to a new school and that helped a bit because I was able to calm down and not worry about things as much and just accept that just a few people are going to be … nice.

“Actually, it’s a life skill. If you go through life thinking everything’s going to be easy, then you’ll have a few shocks.

“And I do think I never wanted my life to be bad like that again so that drove me. It still leaves its marks and you are still closed down to certain people. I was for a long time. And you are still less trusting perhaps. It does leave a mark.”

But Mir is 52 now and she can say she is what she wasn’t back then. Confident in herself. In conversation there is no shadow of that withdrawn silent girl she was.

“It was a difficult period in my life, but it was a very tiny small period in my 52 years,” she points out.

Writing the book was a kind of therapy, she admits, "which is weird because I was actually going through therapy while I was writing it.

“I always thought the book would be the therapy.”

In the end, life is change. A Glasgow Girl was also written whilst Mir was going through her divorce. She had married her husband Piara Powar, the executive director of Football Against Racism in 2007. They separated in 2021, divorced the following year. In short, in the last four years Mir has started a new job, moved to a new home, basically started a new life.

Is she good with upheaval?

“I used to be really good at it. I used to love a challenge. Now I’m tired, I’m 52. I’m getting up at three o’clock in the morning. I'm a single parent. I’ve got too much on. So, when new challenges happen I don’t really like it the way that I used to. I don’t think, ‘Oh yummy.’ “But a lot of people say when you get to this age you don’t make any friends. I’m the absolute opposite of that. In the last five years I would say I’ve met three or four women who have become pretty much my closest friends.

“We’ve had to deal with a lot of new. We have a new house. We live in a new area, my daughter goes to a new school. So there’s a lot of new, all at once. And I do actually love it."

In short, Mir has arrived at a new chapter in her life and she's embracing it.

“I don’t want constant change, but if you hate the situation you’re in and you are able to change it - in other words, leave a marriage, leave the area you’ve lived in and move somewhere else and start again - then I do like that. I do like that.”

A Glasgow Girl by Aasmah Mir is published by Aasmah Mir will be appearing at the Boswell Book Festival at 10.30am on May 12. Visit boswellbookfestival.co.uk for details