1. Kelvinhall to Buchanan Street
The Glasgow subway system is an underground railway which is small enough to be disconcerting. The water running on the tracks at Kelvinhall was disorientating, and the bright orange decoration reminded me of the subway in Brussels, New York and Milan. But not London. Yet having spent some time away from the metropolis, to visit another city was reassuring. On the subway I was reading Paul Theroux’s 1975 book The Great Railway Bazaar in which he travels from London across Asia to Japan and back again.
My journey on the subway was 12 minutes long and I almost stayed on longer just to carry on reading. I should perhaps have been studying my fellow passengers in the four carriage trains which circular around the inner ring and outer ring of the Glasgow system. It was enough just to remain in the system, looking up at the same adverts for Glasgow in bright pink. This tropical shade reminded me of the jacket worn by Douglas Dalrymple, a 19th century explorer and businessman. While the painting of him (hanging in the Kelvingrove Museum) may have been over-restored, his pink jacket was unlikely to be something he had ever worn.
Theroux was now in Russia, and seemed rather bored travelling through Siberia in December. His solution, itself somewhat destructive, was to bribe the manager of the dining car to provide him with a constant supply of wine and vodka. I didn’t see anyone drinking on the subway. There is something of a British problem in that we are far too keen to stereotype places where we have never been, and Glasgow itself is obviously prone to this. Going to a different city is always problematic when you live in London, itself both a cultural treasure house as well as a bit of a black hole. Being in Glasgow made me consider that London perhaps takes itself a little too seriously, if cities can be given such vague emotions. One example of this is that in the Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art, one can buy average tourist-style postcards of the city. Whereas in Tate Modern in London, there is some kind of barrier in which such items are inappropriate and are consigned as tourist tat.
2. St Enoch to Cowcaddens
After leaving the Gallery of Modern Art, I was a little disappointed. I often suffer from the condition known as gallery (or museum) fatigue, which is the result of over-expectation at what one might see and the subsequent lack of interest in this. This was very much the case in the Gallery of Modern Art and the main problem was that the things on show just looked like modern art or more accurately, contemporary art. The sculptures, paintings and installations were all trying so desperately to be interesting that they failed.
I do unfortunately have an attraction to place names which sound amusing or at least just silly. So I found myself walking down Trongate (not to mention the previous evening’s frolics along Sauciehall Street). The sight of two large glass windows being hauled up a building site, together with a stream of friendly abuse reminded me that it is very hard to capture the so-called realities of life, especially if you attempt to imprison them in large white rooms. On a smaller scale, I was delighted to find a shop with opening hours of 12.05-17.30. As it was only 11.30, I decided not to wait and see if this schedule was adhered to. This kind of very particular information stands out, much like the absence of any information about the pineapple industry in the label next to Dalrymple’s portrait. Browsing in the Oxfam bookshop (only because the museums and galleries of Glasgow do not open until 11am on Friday) I found a reproduction of the portrait in an old guidebook to Glasgow, which stated that Dalrymple ‘had famously lost his family fortune in the pineapple industry’.
On the train back from Glasgow later was a middle-aged man who was really enjoying taking off the cellophane wrappers from several CDs he had just bought. Having got rid of my own CD collection last year, I was fascinated to watch him entranced in a plastic box with a small silver disc inside. A few years ago I wandered through Spitalfields Market in London around 10am and found a horde of perhaps 15 middle aged men all frantically looking through a second hand record store. Although I tend to find people’s sense of nostalgia rather boring, I can almost start to understand the appeal of records, and the artwork on their sleeves.
3. Kelvinhall to St Enoch
If I really were a travel writer, rather than a Paul Theroux fan, I would have looked up all the places on the subway line and then tell some story or fact about them. There is something German about Kelvinhall, and its neighbour Kelvingrove, the addition of words together. Sadly in English, Kelvinhallstreet and Kelvingrovejunction are ridiculous, just like the Forest of Ae. Like Theroux, I had hoped to sketch some pen portraits of my fellow passengers, who were mainly small women in leather jackets, men in jeans and polo-shirts. Then, Theroux having reached home, I forgot to leave the book on the train, thus not creating one of those serendipitous moments which you only read about in books.
As Geoff Dyer writes about his visit to Leptis Magna, and antiquity in general, I am often prone to becoming bored by what I am interested in. Thus in the Kelvingrove Museum I simply could not sum up the energy to take in the Egyptian artefacts, which I do often tell people that I am interested in and ‘doing research’ about. It takes a lot of effort to go from 2014 Scotland to 2000BC Egypt. Instead, I wandered and as rewarded by the sight of half a tiger, and a Victorian drinking fountain which guarded the entrance to the room which contained Salvador Dali’s Christ of St John on the Cross. Not wanting to stare at Scotland’s favourite painting within its own little shrine (perhaps a welcome throwback to pre-Reformation days for pious visitors) I swiftly moved on to a room of dark Dutch paintings before ending up in a large room entitled Cultural Survival.
In deciding whether you can be interested in something, for me there needs to be some kind of seed, an initial piece of information that confuses or intrigues. The problem with ancient Egypt is that I know nothing past the usual facts, and have no way of distinguishing different dynasties or Gods. In Cultural Survival was a small display about the island of St Kilda, which lies 40 miles off the coast of the Outer Hebrides towards North America. Only a day after visiting, I can only remember the small box on display which contained the possessions of the last man to leave the islands in 1930. Yet it all provided me with a sense of place about somewhere which now only exists in black-and-white photos.
4. Buchanan Street to Partick
At least Glasgow is a relatively new city, whose ruins are yet to be excavated. I wonder if our cult of the past, where it would seem that everything old is to be considered both valuable and interesting, does sometimes hold us back. The years spent in archives, the chiselling away at foundations, and the need to write down everything that has happened. I wonder again if we are recording the wrong sort of information, still enraptured in the lives of kings and queens (or at least the obvious modern-day equivalents), rather than the details that we would rather forget.
That Glasgow has the M8 motorway running through it, and neatly dividing the city centre from the West End, reminded me of Los Angeles. I have never been there, but feel an affinity for the city through watching TV shows such as 24 and Curb your Enthusiasm. While it might be useful to have such easy motorway access, it does create something of a dividing line, and the closer you get to the motorway, the city almost seems to start to disintegrate, because no one wants to hang out near motorways.
Just spending a day (arrival time 13.35, departure time 16.12) in a city allows one to get a feel for one or two areas, a few attractions, and a few non-attractions. The weariness of having seen too much or too little, of having eaten too much snack food, or having looked at a map too many times, has yet to fit in. Travelling alone also allows me to indulge in whims such as walking up a street, pausing and then walking back down, for no particular reason. I did this by the fire-damaged Glasgow School of Art, up past a large crane and some people taking photographs, past a white building and then it looked well, not so exciting, so I turned around, walked past the same people and then walked away down the hill.
