A glorious — and three-day — weekend continues with the chance to spend a Monday relaxing with our friends in Aberdour and exploring its stellar beaches: this one, known (erroneously) as Black Sands is particularly fine. This weekend has reminded me why I should come to Scotland more often.
The football season comes to its many and diverse ends, each club finishing in different ways with different emotions. Raith Rovers of Scottish League One have managed to blow their hopes out in the last three games, promotion hopes have disappeared and at the final whistle today all was over. It was a very melancholy place all round — club, and town (Kirkcaldy in Fife). Maybe this picture captures something of that.
Another stop for Joe and I in our efforts to see lots of different football competitions in one season — today was our 13th, the Scottish Premier League. Hamilton Academical have a great name and I like their red-and-white hoops. I can identify the player on the left as their captain Xavier Tomas; not sure about the other two however, but let me off — we were not even supposed to be here today, having headed for a different game entirely which was postponed as we arrived in Glasgow, hence this emergency replacement, which made all my prior research irrelevant. Accies should have won, but their failure to put the ball in the net when given clear chances to do so meant they lost 1-0 to visiting St Johnstone.
I have been excessively mobile during June. The trips to and from Siberia and Norway had already taken 11 flights and eight different airports, and on the last day of June I added one more flight and two airports — Aberdeen to London City. Too much… I need to reconnect with home over the next seven weeks (the next major trip being the last two weeks of August to the USA). How is Aberdeen airport? Same as other airports, except that it doesn’t seem to have been refurbished since about 1980.
Aberdeen is known as the Granite City and for good reason, as almost every building in the centre seems to be made of this mid-grey stone. It’s not unattractive, but on a day of foul weather like today was the effect can be to swamp you in grey. This picture was a matter of being in the right place at the right time, but yes, I could perhaps have been six inches to the right for perfect symmetry.
It’s conference season… I got up at 5am this morning and spent seven hours on a train to come north to Aberdeen, where I was two years ago at this time of year, for the same conference (i3, at the Robert Gordon University). We had our opening reception in the Sir Duncan Rice library of the University of Aberdeen, and that was an extremely impressive building, with this eight-storey high twisted atrium running up through the centre.
After we visited Hampden Park last year I decided that at some point I wanted to see a match there. Football tourism, why not. Something different to do other than hang around at home on a Saturday. It is one of the world’s great football stadia and I’d never before seen a Scottish league game in my 47 years on this planet. Hampden is home to Queen’s Park FC, the oldest club in Scotland (150 years old in 2017), and the last remaining bastion of amateurism in senior British football. The crowd for their game with Brechin City was a few hundred strong, swelled by Joe and myself, and we saw the home team win 2-0 (despite Virgin Trains’ best efforts to screw up our day trip).
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.
