chapter Twenty-Eight
NOW HERE IS WHY I WILL ALWAYS STAY AT THE PENTLAND HOTEL WHEN I am in Thurso. The night before I left I asked the kindly lady at the checkout desk for a wake-up call at 5 a.m. as I had to catch an early train south. And she said to me - perhaps you should sit down if you are not sitting already - she said, 'Would you like a cooked breakfast?'
I thought she must be a bit dim, frankly, so I said: 'I'm sorry, I meant five a.m. I'll be leaving at half-past five, you see. Half-past five a.m. In the morning.'
'Yes, dear. Would you like a cooked breakfast?'
'At five a.m.?'
'It's included in the room rate.'
And damn me if this wonderful little establishment didn't fix me up with a handsome plate of fried food and a pot of hot coffee at 5.15 the following pre-dawn.
And so I left the hotel a happy and fractionally fatter man, and waddled up the road in darkness to the station and there met my second surprise of the morning. The place was packed with women, all standing around on the platform in festive spirits, filling the chill, dark air with clouds of breath and happy Highland chatter, and waiting patiently for the guard to finish his fag and open the train doors.
I asked a lady what was up and she told me they were all off to Inverness to do their shopping. It was like this every Saturday. They would ride for the best part of four hours, stock up on Marks &c Spencer's knickers and plastic vomit and whatever else Invernesshad that Thurso hadn't, which was quite a lot, then catch the 6 p.m. train home, arriving back in time for bed.
And so we rode through the misty early morning, a great crowd of us, crammed snugly together on a two-carriage train, in happy, expectant mood. At Inverness the train terminated and we all piled off, the ladies to do their shopping, I to catch the 10.35 to Glasgow. As I watched them go, I found to my small surprise that I rather envied them. It seemed an extraordinary business, the idea of rising before dawn to do a little shopping in a place like Inverness and then not getting home till after ten, but on the other hand I don't think I had ever seen such a happy band of shoppers.
The little train to Glasgow was nearly empty and the countryside lushly scenic. We went through Aviemore, Pitlochry, Perth and on to Gleneagles, with a pretty station, now sadly boarded. And then at last, some eight hours after rising from my bed that morning, we were in Glasgow. It seemed odd after so many long hours of travelling to step from Queen Street Station and find myself still in Scotland.
At least it wasn't a shock to the system. I remember when I first came to Glasgow in 1973 stepping from this very station and being profoundly stunned at how suffocatingly dark and soot-blackened the city was. I had never seen a place so choked and grubby. Everything in it seemed black and cheerless. Even the local accent seemed born of clinkers and grit. St Mungo's Cathedral was so dark that even from across the road it looked like a two-dimensional cut-out. And there were no tourists - none at all. Glasgow may be the largest city in Scotland, but my Let's Go guide to Europe didn't even mention it.
In the subsequent years Glasgow has, of course, gone through a glittering and celebrated transformation. Scores of old buildings in the city centre have been sandblasted and lovingly buffed, so that their granite surfaces gleam anew, and dozens more were vigorously erected in the heady boom years of the 1980s - more than £l billion of new offices in the previous decade alone. The city acquired one of the finest museums in the world in the Burrell Collection and one of the most intelligent pieces of urban renewal in the Princes Square shopping centre. Suddenly the world began cautiously to come to Glasgow and thereupon discovered to its delight that this was a city densely endowed with splendid museums, lively pubs, world-class orchestras, and no fewer than seventy parks, more than any other city of its size in Europe. In 1990 Glasgow was named European City of Culture, and no-one laughed. Never before had a city's reputation undergone a more Dramatic and sudden transformation - and none, as far as I am concerned, deserves it more.
Among the city's many treasures, none shines brighter, in my view than the Burrell Collection. After checking into my hotel, I hastened there now by taxi, for it is a long way out.
'D'ye nae a lang roon?' said the driver as we sped along a motorway towards Pollok Park by way of Clydebank and Oban.
Tm sorry,' I said for I don't speak Glaswegian.
'D'ye dack ma fanny?'
I hate it when this happens - when a person from Glasgow speaks to me. Tm so sorry,' I said and floundered for an excuse. 'My ears are very bad.'
'Aye, ye nae hae doon a lang roon,' he said, which I gathered meant Tm going to take you a very long way around and look at you a lot with these menacing eyes of mine so that you'll begin to wonder if perhaps I'm taking you to a disused warehouse where friends of mine are waiting to beat you up and take your money,' but he said nothing further and delivered me at the Burrell without incident.
How I like the Burrell Collection. It is named for Sir William Burrell, a Scottish shipowner, who in 1944 left the city his art collection on the understanding that it be placed in a country setting within the city boundaries. He was worried - not unreasonably - about air pollution damaging his artworks. Unable to decide what to do with this sumptuous windfall, the city council did, astonishingly, nothing. For the next thirty-nine years, some truly exceptional works of art lay crated away in warehouses, all but forgotten. Finally in the late 1970s, after nearly four decades of • dithering, the city engaged a gifted architect named Barry Gasson, who designed a trim and restrained building noted for its airy rooms set against a woodland backdrop and for the ingenious way architectural features from BurrelPs Collection - medieval doorways and lintels and the like - were incorporated into the fabric of the building. It opened in 1983 to widespread acclaim.
Burrell was not an especially rich man, but goodness me he could select. The gallery contains only 8,000 items but they come from all over - from Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome - and nearly every one of them (with the exception of some glazed porcelain "gurines of flower girls, which he must have picked up during afever) is stunning. I spent a long, happy afternoon wandering through the many rooms, pretending, as I sometimes do in these circumstances, that I had been invited to take any one object home with me as a gift from the Scottish people in recognition of my fineness as a person. In the end, after much agonizing, I settled on a Head of Persephone from fifth-century-BC Sicily, which was not only as stunningly flawless as if it had been made yesterday, but would have looked just perfect on top of the TV. And thus late in the afternoon, I emerged from the Burrell and into the leafy agree-ability of Pollok Park in a happy frame of mind.
It was a mild day, so I decided to walk back to town even though I had no map and only the vaguest idea of where the distant centre of Glasgow lay. I don't know if Glasgow is truly a wonderful city for walking or whether I have just been lucky there, but I have never wandered through it without encountering some memorable surprise - the green allure of Kelvingrove Park, the Botanic Gardens, the fabulous Necropolis cemetery with its ranks of ornate tombs - and so it was now. I set off hopefully down a broad avenue called St Andrews Drive and found myself adrift in a handsome district of houses of substance and privilege with a comely park with a little lake. At length I passed the Scotland Street Public School, a wonderful building with airy stairwells that I presumed was one of Mackintosh's, and soon after found myself in a seamier but no less interesting district, which I eventually concluded must be the Gorbals. And then I got lost.
I could see the Clyde from time to time, but I couldn't figure out how to get to it or, more crucially, over it. I wandered along a series of back lanes and soon found myself in one of those dead districts that consist of windowless warehouses and garage doors that say NO PARKING - GARAGE IN CONSTANT USE. I took a series of turns that seemed to lead ever further away from society before finally bumbling into a short street that had a pub on the corner. Fancying a drink and a sitdown, I wandered inside. It was a dark place, and battered, and there were only two other customers, a pair of larcenous-looking men sitting side by side at the bar drinking in silence. There was no-one behind the bar. I took a stance at the far end of the counter and waited for a bit, but no-one came. I drummed my fingers on the counter and puffed my cheeks and made assorted puckery shapes with my lips the way you do when you are waiting. (And just why do we do that, do you suppose? It isn't even privately entertaining in the extremely low-level way that, say, peeling a blister or cleaning your fingernails with a thumbnail is.) I cleaned my nails with a thumbnail and puffed my cheeks some more, but still no-one came. Eventually I noticed one of the men at the bar eyeing me.
'Hae ya nae hook ma dooky?' he said.
'I'm sorry?' I replied.
'He'll nay be doon a mooning.' He hoiked his head in the direction of a back room.
'Oh, ah,' I said and nodded sagely, as if that explained it.
I noticed that they were both still looking at me.
'D'ye hae a hoo and a poo?' said the first man to me.
'I'm sorry?' I said.
'D'ye hae a hoo and a poo?' he repeated. It appeared that he was a trifle intoxicated.
I gave a small, apologetic smile and explained that I came from the English-speaking world.
'D'ye nae hae in May?' the man went on. 'If ye dinna dock ma donny.'
'Doon in Troon they croon in June,' said his mate, then added: 'Wi' a spoon.'
'Oh, ah.' I nodded thoughtfully again, pushing my lower lip out slightly, as if it was all very nearly clear to me now. Just then, to my small relief, the barman appeared, looking unhappy and wiping his hands on a tea towel.
'F*ckin muckle f*cket in the f*ckin muckle,' he said to the two men, and then to me in a weary voice: 'Ah hae the noo.' I couldn't tell if it was a question or a statement.
'A pint of Tennent's, please,' I said hopefully.
He made an impatient noise, as if I were avoiding his question. 'Hae ya nae hook ma dooky?'
Tm sorry?'
'Ah hae the noo,' said the first customer, who apparently saw himself as my interpreter.
I stood for some moments with my mouth open, trying to imagine what they were saying to me, wondering what mad impulse had bidden me to enter a pub in a district like this, and said in a quiet voice: 'Just a pint of Tennent's, I think.'
The barman sighed heavily and got me a pint. A minute later, I realized that what they were saying to me was that this was the worst pub in the world in which to order lager since all I would get was a glass of warm soap suds, dispensed from a gasping, reluctanttap, and that really I should flee with my life while I could. I drank two sips of this interesting concoction, and, making as if I were going to the Gents', slipped out a side door.
And so I returned to the twilit streets along the south bank of the Clyde and tried to find my way back to the known world. It's nearly impossible to imagine what the Gorbals must have been like before they started tarting it up and inviting daring yuppies to move into smart new blocks of flats around its fringes. After the war, Glasgow did the most extraordinary thing. It built vast estates of shiny tower blocks out in the countryside and decanted tens of thousands of people from inner-city slums like the Gorbals into them, but it forgot to provide any infrastructure. Forty thousand people were moved to the Easterhouse estate alone and when they got there they found smart new flats with indoor plumbing, but no cinemas, no shops, no banks, no pubs, no schools, no jobs, no health centres, no doctors. So every time they wanted anything, like a drink or work or medical attention, they had to climb aboard a bus and ride for miles back into the city. In consequence of this and other considerations like lifts that were forever breaking down (and why, incidentally, does Britain alone among nations have so much difficulty with moving conveyances like escalators and lifts? I think some heads should roll, frankly) they grew peevish and turned them into new slums. The result is that Glasgow has some of the worst housing problems in the developed world. Glasgow Council is the largest landlord in Europe. Its 160,000 houses and flats represent half the city's total housing stock. By its own estimates the council needs to spend something like £3 billion to bring the housing up to standard. That doesn't include provisions for new housing, but simply making existing housing habitable. At the moment its entire housing budget is about £100 million a year.
At length, I found my way over the river and back into the gleaming centre. I had a look at George Square, which is to my mind the handsomest in Britain, and then trudged uphill to Sauchiehall Street, where I remembered my favourite Glasgow joke. (Also my only Glasgow joke.) It's not a very good one, but I like it. A policeman collars a thief at the corner of Sauchiehall and Dalhousie, then drags him by the hair for a hundred yards to Rose Street to book him.
'Oi, why'd ye do tha'?' asks the aggrieved culprit, rubbing his head.
'Because I can spell Rose Street, ye thieving cunt,' says the policeman.
That's the thing about Glasgow. It has all this newfound prosperity and polish, but right at the very edge of things there is always this sense of grit and menace, which I find oddly exhilarating. You can wander through the streets on a Friday night, as I did now, and never know when you turn a corner whether you are going to bump into a group of tony revellers in dinner jackets or a passle of idle young yobboes who might decide to fall upon you and carve their initials in your forehead for purposes of passing amusement. Gives the place a certain tang.