Chips and Vinegar

Glasgow is not-so-secretly proud of its wild rep (the wild west?). It likes the world to think we’re aw heid-the-ba’s. Edinburgh plays possum knowing that it too has its square-go masters, scheme’s where you’d be brave to live. A rep is hard to shift and masks a truer story. City of poverty and personal pain and too much drink and Presbyterians intent on repatriating Catholics at least to the scabby outlands. City of artists and poets and kindness and hippies.

“Whit aboot the swingin’ sixties, Da?”

“Didnae happen in East Kilbride, son!”

Hard, aye, but flawed like everyone else. Jimmy Boyle – a sculptor of faces.  Who would have known that underneath he was a sculptor….of faces?

It’s little wonder that in a city where it can be June in January and January in June that there a few mental anomalies. The wind skitters and squalls in Glasgow like thoughts in an errant mind. The rain drenches the colour out of your clothes leaving you free to fully understand the meaning of words like drab and dreich. When the sun eventually shines for that one week in August the city’s denizens barely have time to realise it and shed layers before it’s gone again and the world is once more monochrome.

Glasgow knows well over 152 different types of rain: as a boy I counted them, and not only that but each little district of Glasgow has rain that is synonymous with it. Toryglen has lashing, slanting rain that slashes horizontally up Prospecthill Road until you can escape it past Mount Florida. Carnwadric has a creeping misty drizzle which soaks you to your bones. The rain in the Gorbals is incessant and cold as if it has the flu and Springburn has April showers all year round in keeping with its name. In Shettleston, the grim trees droop with heavy precipitation until the wind scatters raindrops straight into the faces of passers-by. The word drizzle was invented in Dennistoun.

Glasgow is the city of rain. Even when it isn’t raining you have the feeling that it is in the post, it’s only having a breather to let the sewers empty. There’s been a black cloud hanging over Busby for the past seventy-five years, one day the sun peeked through and the Busbyites panicked, banging on church doors for untimely entry.

Glasgow is not twinned with other cities as contemporaries are; it is twinned with a rain forest in the Amazon Basin.

There’s something special about Glasgow but not as special as before when it seemed to feed on hardship often self-inflicted. Now it’s an old and new city ringed by motorways and carriageways to facilitate escape. Decisions have been made to make it look worse not better. Character has been replaced by the Gerry-built and temporary. Permanence replaced by fly-by-night. There’s more art and poetry in an auld Gorbals tenement than there is in the already-rusting new-builds that appear overnight like cankers. Once proud streets made non-descript by economics. Take a walk down Garscube Road a once bustling thoroughfare of bookies, gangsters, pubs and rain-mated wifie’s, now reduced to a strip of car dealerships and car wash outlets.

Something has been lost yet no-one seems to care. Progress they call it. I have a funny feeling that their idea of progress will lead to several different forms of cataclysm unless it is somehow stopped.

But Glasgow is just a place: just bricks and mortar, it disnae have a soul or a mind or a heart. The way we go on about it ye’d think it was alive, a living entity with thoughts and words and a script. It’s just a place we made up, a reflection of ourselves. Its churches were built by and for religious folk and Hillhead for the well-heeled. There were that many pubs cos we like a swally. We knocked down St Enoch’s cos we wanted a fancy mall and we chose First Bus cos it was cheap and maist of the Glesga folk were sick of all thae Irish tri-colours skitin’ about the toon.  And that river’s just a river that we dredged deep enough for the trading boats. The tobacco. The slaves. If you fell in it you’d get wet.

Glesga’s good and Glesga’s bad and everything else in between. It just happens to me toon and I have an inexplicable and abiding affection for it. Every time I smell chips and vinegar I think of it.

Glasgow is dialectic; a living document; a work in progress.