Living in the Lull

God I love Glasgow!

Not only does it have the facilities of a large city: museums, galleries, pigeons and people, but it also has that quiet village feel, especially if you are like me cutting about the city or around it during 'office hours'. Take this photo for example: not an unusual event by any means, boarding an utterly empty tube train, or railway carriage for that matter in my many excursions to Irvine, Kilpatrick or Balloch. You try that in any other 'major city' and you'll invariably get hit, not only with excessive prices, but with overcrowded and noisy carriages with little opportunity for study or for gazing contemplatively 'oot the windae'.

Each morning I take the train to Kilpatrick (at the moment I am exempt from cycling due to a broken wrist) I rejoice in the 'travelling lounge' I have at my disposal for the 20 minute trip to the foot of the braes. Not only do I have the meditative vibrations of a smooth flowing locomotive, but I have a whole carriage to myself (not that I need it), a table upon which to rest my books, and views of the city petering away as I leave it, and the country entering in.

It is this lack of congestion - of coagulation - that is vital to the soul of the human being (the spirit of the animal). Not to mention reasonable prices for its carriage ;)

I have lived in cities like London and Paris, bold and brash and verging on the monstrous. Sure, if you're one of the limousine liberals with more money than brain cells, then of course it's a joy, but if you're not, if you're one of the many who struggle to pay the rent or to 'not work', then it sure as hell ain't. What it is, instead, with its congestion, its exorbitant prices, and its general overcrowdedness, is a crime against humanity and a non-stop headache. Cities like this are not so much cities as they are businesses, and symptoms of an over-excessive economic model which only sees good in calorific growth.

Glasgow, apparently, has no such illusions, although it may have had in the past.

I sometimes think it is a lull. A period of quietness, not necessarily deliberate in this case, that lies between two periods of excessive activity.

In any case, this lull is joyful, and I make the most of it, for I fear that soon, Glasgow may become again the mess that it once was. Is that not the whole aim of the economic model? To make a mess of our cities? To prostitute them out to tourism and migrant workers? To cram them full of buildings and people? And enslave them to the small-minded ego-nomic model with both eyes on the money?

But a city should not be a mess. It should be a celebration of space and of life, of buildings and of fields. It should be affordable and pleasant. It should en-joy the citizen as the citizen en-joys it. Indeed, the citizen should be as much 'paysan' and a man of the land as he is of the city.