Perhaps what I like best is the way out of it: Glasgow Central train station. A baroque palace of possibilities and other destinations preferably past Motherwell.
Like Ayr. Ayr train station is airy and redolent of the sea. Kiddies laugh and scream with joy on its platforms and cry and moan at the end of the long day in the sun, candy floss sticky on cheeks and bellies full of chips and limeade.
St. Enoch’s was the best: dark and gothic, it stood on a hill and looked like you could catch a train to Transylvania to meet Dracula for a late supper. But they tore it down to make way for a plexi-glass mall that you could find replicated in a hundred cities.
O’Connell Street station, Dublin was where she waved goodbye.
Liverpool Lime Street where we maybe said hello again.
The best thing about Birkenhead Central is that it affords the welcome opportunity to flee Birkenhead.
Southport station was my favourite because it meant being with her; my unlikely femme fatale. After Birkenhead, Southport is Las Vegas. Its Floral Hall a Caesar’s Palace and Lord Street is The Strip.
But, Glasgow Central is iconic; the heartbeat of the city. I mind the day, I mind the day. I mind the day, said Shuggie Gallagher, the ghost of Glasgow Central. I mind the day when everyone wore a flat bunnet, even the women.
Folk that ‘commuted’ through Glasgow Central on a weekday worked in the shops and the offices. They were dressed in suits and ties and polished shoes, white blouses and high heels (women were a lot sexier in those days, precisely because they didn’t mean to be, though they had lines up the back of their stockings as if leading you to the promised land that no-one ever talked about. It was a wonder to everyone how procreation took place at all).
At the weekends it was a free-for-all of excitable juveniles aiming for Lewis’s toy department and women off to Arnott Simpson’s to try on perfume while their men-folk headed east for Parkhead or South-west to Ibrox (maybe, too, the odd mental case bound for Firhill or Shawfield but folk that followed Queen’s Park travelled in Vauxhall vehicles or not at all).
The ghost of Glasgow Central saw them all and often had cause to laugh at their antics. Drunk. Moroculus. Pished. Blootered. Glasgow had names for inebriation like no other place. Howling. Hammered. Reekin’. Steamboats.
“We were aw hammered man, it wis great. Hammy fell under a train”
Only poor folk use buses. You notice when its posh folk not used to this mode of transport. They think it’s ok to ask the driver all sorts of questions or to not know the correct fare and how to pay. Anything that holds the bus up will do for them; smug bastards with their strident voices; whole bus can hear about their self-importance. But, mainly it’s just ordinary Joe’s.
There’s a guy arguing with the driver up at the front. Slight American tinge to his accent with wee Scottish words thrown in. Foreigners do that, they pick up words and phrases and end up talking in pidgin dialects. He says the fare is only £11.40 and the driver’s saying it’s £11.60. I, myself, along with several others have after a few minutes of this offered the guy twenty pence to put an end to this charade but he’s having none of it. It seems to be a point of principle but pretty soon it’s apparent that the bloke is not quite the full shilling.
This is another phenomenon on long-haul bus trips, folk that maybe need a check-up from the neck-up.
Eventually, the police are called and a few passengers are getting into arguments with the guy, but he’s sticking to his guns and is now sitting on a seat behind the driver. I envisage that he may be a hi-jacker just gearing up to clobbering the driver with a hammer he has hidden up his jook then driving us all off to Troon to be held for ransom. In many ways, this would be more exciting than just toodling along to Glasgow which is what we eventually do when the troublesome chap gives up before the police finally arrive. He trundles toward Haymarket train station no doubt intent in repeating his mayhem there. Maybe he has some grudge against people attempting to travel to Glasgow.
Or maybe he once lived there and is getting his own back...
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