Thursday, February 28, 2008

A Day Among the Glaswegians

--February, 2008: Glasgow, Scotland

Flying toward Glasgow International Airport. Our latitude brings us just across from Hudson Bay, as the frozen crow flies—and at 35,000 feet, we get a residual midnight sun effect over the horizon. The darkness far below seeps upward like spreading inkspots onto the lighter cloud carpet just beneath us. We plunge below the clouds on approach, and soon we’re soaring over the blackened waters of the River Clyde under a full night sky.


The guidebook points me in the direction of a massive auditorium on the river, which the natives had appropriately dubbed ‘The Armadillo’—a standing testimonial to Glasgow’s international leanings. And there are white-tableclothed brunches in Victorian gardens, fossils (both living and dead), Scotland’s ubiquitous castles, and a 70-mile-long Whiskey Trail that I know I’ll need to follow sooner or later, for purely medicinal purposes. But for the nonce, all I really need is a day among the Glaswegians.





I awoke to the gray comfort on our first morning in Glasgow, drizzle trickling off the eaves like a water feature. The sun began flickering, an enormous candle just beyond the curtains. Light shifted and dipped into oversized shadows. Then, a long moment of morning sunlight settled in. The locals say, “If it’s not raining, it must be summer”; and so it was.



But there were no sandals. Most folks seemed to keep their toes to themselves. No sparkling gold chains and airy summertime décolletages. People here were closely wrapped in unimposing beige, browns, and blues, with a few subdued accents—the brighter hues apparently reserved for lager louts, tourists, and children.






Billy Connolly, national comedian and treasure, bemoaned the pointlessness of a Scottish 5-day weather forecast. “We kno-o-o-ow what-ta cloud looks like!” he wailed, pointing to the line of identical two-toned cloud drawings on the wall behind him. “Why di’ they bother!" You're never too far away from a bit of cloudshine; and 'partly cloudy' over Glasgow can mean a full range of color, rather than just a sky that can’t be one or the other. Around blue patches as bright as summer over a Mediteranean port, the gray clouds fairly roil, reflected in glass towers on the river, with all the drama of a sky-born Laird and his troubled Lady.




I went out to watch the play of light over a real city that I only knew as an historical monument. Boats now wend their way down the dark river, past signs of a booming economy. Tower blocks, luxury flats and offices, leisure and retail developments line the banks where factories once idled, coal-blackened and obsolete. The river was a time machine that carried you back. Just a few miles out, the Clydebank Blitz had destroyed shipyards and taken a toll in human lives during the Second World War. From the colonial period to the industrial age, Glasgow was ideally situated for commerce with the West Indies and America. Its trade barons first built their wealth in New World commodities—sugar, rum, tobacco, cotton—and eventually applied Scottish inventions and inventiveness to the flourishing locomotive and shipbuilding industries.




Farther back, in the darkest corners of the 6th century, St. Mungo brought Christianity to the consecrated land where a Celtic monastery once stood. Today’s Cathedral occupies the same site, with its earliest, original stones nestled into a corner of the lower crypt. All of this at a mere midpoint in the lifetime of a town that began nearly 2,000 years ago—a village at a crossing point on the River Clyde, where the salmon catch was good. When the Industrial Revolution created the modern slum, the salmon stopped running. But this century’s good news is that salmon have returned to the Clyde. The old river and the strangely comforting gloom of its precincts beckoned. Ironically, brunch in a Victorian garden paled by comparison.



There’s a rough-and-readiness about Glasgow—a kind of workingman’s stance against getting stepped on. Alexander Millar captured the spirit in his ‘Marquis of Queensbury Rules’. But the phenomenon has apparently been around for quite some time. 16th century Town Records of the Burgh of Glasgow show an abiding preoccupation with “the felane of bodely harme” with a fair number of citizens “voundit to the effusioune of blude”. Police amnesties to get knives off the streets and out of circulation are a reasonably regular feature of law enforcement nowadays. But the young, testosterone-driven lads continue to vex local bobbies, reportedly for reasons of “pride…so they won’t think you’re a pansy. [CNN]” Fortunately for some, unfortunately for others, the lusty lads are mainly after each other.


They say there's a battle a week, usually on a Saturday night, outside the pub. They say that their post-partum mothers were fed Guinness in hospitals (with a pre-partum nip?), for the iron of course. They say that a 25 ml shot in England becomes a 35 ml swig in Scotland, merely as a selling point for The Cheapest Pub in Town. And so they gather, raucously railing against it all with a draft o’ this and a jigger o’ that. And who’s to say which came first, the chicken or the egg, the lager or the lout?








Just as the sun came out, we found Lauder’s pub—Harry Lauder’s namesake, honoring the composer and singer of “I Love a Lassie”, aka “My Scots Blue Bell”. He watched us gently from a nearby post, seeming to take it all in with a winsome smirk. The band and singer performed Billy Holiday standards with a brassy flair, while incongruous Hip Hop visuals on an oversized plasma screen featured Jamie Foxx and ‘hood’-flavored babes looking spotlessly Euro-slick—definitely not Gogo artists from DC. A familiar, loving voice shrieked over the cell phone, “Get out of there, you’ll get mugged!” (“You’re breaking up. Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now?”) To be sure, there were a few afternoon roughs. But the spirit of the place was as congenial as Harry’s smile; and three lovely Glaswegians had joined us under his watchful eye. Together we delved into plates of plenty, weighing the pros and cons of Haggis as a national dish—

Take heart, liver, lung of sheep, roll in oatmeal.

Add pepper and stuff into beef intestine.

Boil for 4 hours:

Comfort Food of the North.





A grid of residential streets had been laid out in the early 19th century, when Glasgow’s wealth still came from colonial cotton. But by the end of the century, banks were grand with mining, engineering, and shipbuilding money. They pushed out the quiet townhouses; and merchants and their interests began dominating what is now the city centre. Corporations financed massive city chambers in George Square, which held no monument to King George III, in spite of being named after him. The trade barons could never forgive him for losing the American colonies, and all that cotton and tobacco.




Buchanan Street and the Merchant City area balance commerce and refinement.. Since Scotland’s history and identity are clearly not English, a good case is made for Glasgow as a more European city than, say, Liverpool or Manchester. Fashion, both traditional and modern, as well as sidewalk cafés and fine restaurants support the argument. ‘Scheme birds’—the lovely working-class lassies who just might have a bit more style than class—will be coming out later, after dark, loathe to cover their fashion with overcoats, even on the coldest of nights. But for the moment, the city wears its sunshine particularly well.




Just around the corner from Caffè Uno, in the cultural heart of Merchant City, stands GOMA—the Gallery of Modern Art—a palace of living art, with very strong local ties. Beloved of Glaswegians, GOMA is the people’s if not the critics’ choice. Most of the artists in the Contemporary Collection have studied at the Glasgow School of Art and still live and work in Glasgow. There's a distinct air of history and tradition, class and conflict, often taken with a Glaswegian grain of salt.




Robert Buchanan’s Histrionics’:
FOOTBALLERS AND THEIR T-SHIRTS



Robert Buchanan’s
MIXED MARRIAGE




Graham Fagan’s
CROSSBOW, “Scottish, 1970-73. …usually built by a father for a young son…The main purpose was target shooting, but occasionally it would be used to fire at friends or unknown enemies.”



Graham Fagan’s
PETROL BOMB, “Scottish, 1979-81. Glass bottle, filled with petrol….Often used by violent street protesters…this example is typical of the housing scheme petrol bomb.”



Martin Boyce’s
LIGHTS, objects that cause a landscape.



Toby Paterson’s
BLACK ELEGY, art looking back at art.





The Glasgow School of Art and numerous other structures, venues, furnishings, drawings, paintings, and designs—finished and unfinished—are all the brain children of one of Glasgow’s favorite sons, Charles Rennie Mackintosh. His clientele included some very sympathetic and well-to-do Glaswegians. Known as far abroad as Moscow, he was particularly appreciated by the German and Austrian avant-garde. His style of subtle curves combined with strong angles often came in the context of traditional Scottish architecture. As luck would have it, we stumbled upon his Willow Tea Rooms right at tea time, and learned that it was after these Willow Tea Room designs that Glasgow became more than a little infatuated with him.




At the turn of the 20th century, Sauchiehall Street was a prime shopping area. Miss Cranston’s Willow Tea Rooms, at No. 217, were in need of remodeling. Mackintosh decided to rebuild the Victorian plate-glass shop front, glazing it with small panes so that it would look welcoming but discrete. He began the project in 1900. By the end of his involvement, there was a proliferation of tea rooms in the area making bold use of color, symbolic trees and forests, lattice screens and specially designed chairs. These created distinct spaces that light and vision could pass through; and the pleasure of people-watching could be counted on to humanize some rather angular design. Many of his light fittings, made of crudely pierced metal soldered in rectangular bands, echo vertical bands of outdoor light that stream past exterior windows. All in all, much to his credit, the spaces created are still seen as they were a full century ago—chic, novel and, above all, open to the public.














...and if you should ever have a taste for heart, liver, and lung of sheep, well seasoned and generously served with potatoes and turnips, try the
Haggis, Tatties and Neeps
at the Willow Tea Rooms, in Glasgow.



© Copyright 2008 by Cary Kamarat . All rights reserved.




Please share your travel experiences and impressions by clicking on the word 'comments' below. WATCH FOR NEW POSTINGS AT THE END OF EACH MONTH.