There are thirteen people in this photo — notice the two up on the bridge heading at right angles to everyone else’s trajectory — and with the exception of the woman in pink in the background, every one of them is jogging, some more speedily than others. In Glasgow city centre clearly the banks of the Clyde are Jogger Central on a Sunday morning.
I took a picture of this mural on a visit to Glasgow a couple of years ago, but didn’t use it at the time: in fact, the one I took then was possibly better as from outside the pub courtyard we see her left hand coming down to pick up little insect-like pedestrians on the street. But from the courtyard of O’Neill’s pub the ‘Girl With a Magnifying Glass’ (look it up on Google Maps) seems to be inspecting the drinkers, somewhat scientifically…
When I realised the weather forecast was going to stay much the same — that is, warm and sunny — throughout our visit to Scotland, a walk became by far the best choice for a Saturday activity. It wasn’t too hard to rearrange things accordingly, and I did not regret doing so. Below, the River Clyde, winding its way from Glasgow, over in the distance, to the sea, and crossed here by the Erskine Bridge. More photos and details of the day are on my County Tops blog.
This statue of the Duke of Wellington stands in Glasgow, and since the 1980s has famously been adorned, a lot of the time anyway, by a traffic cone. Not specifically this cone, as until fairly recently the city council would dutifully remove each one as it appeared, but another would invariably return not long after. More recently everyone seems to have decided that this ‘tradition’ is not only harmless, but actually interesting and ‘ironic’ in a sort of postmodern way. Local Glaswegian sense of humour, ho ho, isn’t it quaint. I saw a guide going on about it to a group of tourists today, for heaven’s sake.
However, I think what it really is, and certainly what it started as, is pure mockery of the rich and powerful, and of Authority generally, and frankly I think we would benefit from a lot more of this kind of thing — particularly after the weekend just gone. The horse’s jauntier crown can be read a little differently, perhaps.
Thought I’d better do a photo of Glasgow today even though I saw nothing of it except the hotel, the room where we did the viva examination, and a restaurant for lunch. Still, the view from the second of these, being up on the 11th floor of a building at the University of Strathclyde, was a damn fine one and included this monumental structure (in both senses of the word). Celtic Park (aka Parkhead), home of Celtic FC, one of the best-supported football clubs in the world, towers above its surroundings and seems colossal even from two miles away. The ‘mist’ is, rather, steam from chimneys between it and where I stood.
Hampden Park is Scotland’s national football stadium and also home of Queen’s Park FC, currently in the fourth tier of Scottish football, a bizarre but strangely endearing arrangement surely not replicated elsewhere in world football. The stadium has been on this site since 1903 and when it was substantially rebuilt in the 1990s this old version of one dressing room was preserved as part of the Scottish Football Museum. In this room, more or less, Real Madrid and Eintracht Frankfurt prepared before the 1960 European Cup Final, often cited as one of the best games of football ever played (7-3 to Real).
Two faces of Glasgow. Yesterday, the pre-industrial, Victorian, under moody clouds thing. Today, definitely post-industrial, attempts to modernise the remnants of late 20th-century industrial landscapes (the modernistic building ahead being the Glasgow science park, opened in 2001; and the tower is the tallest building in Scotland, apparently). But still, the moody clouds thing.
So I find myself in Glasgow for a couple of days, meaning the four biggest cities in Scotland (Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Dundee) have all made it onto the blog in less than four months. I don’t know the place well but at least this afternoon proved that it does give good cemetery.
Being 42 