The Scottish Exodus

I am Glasgow

1 October 2000
Merchant City, Glasgow

Jim Schmiechen, my doctoral advisor at Central Michigan University, wrote in an e-mail to me that Glasgow has a soul. This is true, to a point. However, one soul is never enough for a city. Glasgow has two souls, one bright and clear and the other dark and unnerving.

Glasgow’s true soul is its eclecticism, its jumbled mix of culture, creed, and veneer. It’s an eclecticism found in places like Logic, a trendy Euro trash bar with neon back lighting, postmodern steel rod furnishings, and buffed wood paneled floors, or Chambers, a proto-typical utilitarian British pub with three basic lagers on tap, black leather sofas, and Abba on the jukebox. It’s an eclecticism reflected in the preponderance of East Asian restaurants (while certainly not as densely packed as London’s ‘one Chinese restaurant per city block’ regulation, I’ve never lived anywhere with ‘two’ Japanese noodle bars) and a standard menu fare in many places of curry and chips. It’s an eclecticism accentuated by the juxtaposition of the reflective glass façade of the Millennium Hotel kitty-corner across George Square from the magnificent Victorian opus that is the Glasgow City Chambers (this particular trend is, of course, found across Europe, just visit Berlin, with its sky line dominated by construction cranes). This unreal juxtaposition reminds me a lot of Exeter, with its collapsing Roman ruins framed by a bus stop and a BT phone booth. Or perhaps the massive Mercedes Benz ad hanging off some construction scaffolding on a building overlooking George Square just annoys me.

Glasgow’s true soul is its people in all their varied shapes, sizes, and colors. It’s a young Asian woman working at a trendy girl’s club clothes store in St. Enoch Centre speaking English with a mixed Asian/Scottish accent. Imagine that if you will, the staccato rhythm of an Asian-born English speaker slurred quickly together by the Scottish brogue. Almost incomprehensible. Glasgow’s true soul is McCabe’s English flat mate Simon of Kent, nose held high as if his time spent studying architecture at Strathclyde was a safari in the African bush. It’s a young Scottish woman wearing only a black satin blazer and a black bra, with the blazer open enough to show significant cleavage to the earpiece-wearing bouncer at Waxy O’Connor’s (a pub/club with large torches over the front door, a massive plus in my book). Glasgow’s true soul is globalism, as much as that would bother the natives to hear.

Glasgow’s true soul also has a dark side, as most cities do, but that doesn’t make it any less unnerving. It crystallized for me earlier tonight when Andrea made a comment that she had seen more violent acts in ten days in Glasgow (four) than she had ever seen living in suburban Detroit (zero). Now legitimately, two of Andrea’s violent acts were violent accidents involving old people fainting or falling and cracking their heads open, but I understand her point. Glasgow’s dark side is real and near. It’s reflected in the throngs of Glasgow’s homeless panhandlers, divided into their own individual hierarchy, a homeless feudal system, if you will.

First, there are the homeless Big Issue peddlers, trying to pull themselves out of the proverbial gutter and working their pre-assigned territory (for instance, outside Sainsbury’s, a British supermarket chain). Then there are the backpack-toting change beggars, some scamming for change outside convenience stores and others belligerently accosting every pedestrian who walks by, even to the point of following them. And then there are the reticent change beggars, too hungry and too sick to even move and practically ignored by Glasgow’s kinetic throng. These are the people who pick out and eat garbage from litterbins on Sauchiehall Street, making Scottish teenage girls grimace in horror in the process.

Glasgow’s dark side is apparent in the teenage hooligans who loiter in the streets at night causing trouble. They’re rather easily picked out in their chosen uniform of blue or white track clothes and sneakers. Their presence is not so unnerving because of it, but rather because of how many Glaswegians seem to ignore them when they do something. Andrea and I were walking around Argyle Street several nights ago, mostly just to walk around. We suddenly heard someone scream stop and saw some people running. It was a couple of teenage hooligans who had ripped off some Spanish or Portuguese international student (probably a bait and switch move, one distracts while the other lifts). He chased after them, screaming for people to stop them or help him. He had on a large backpack that slowed him down, and Andrea recognized him as someone she had seen staying in Baird Hall when we did during first contact. The hooligans were mocking him and his heavy backpack as they jogged around the block ahead of him. They ran right by us, not ten feet away, and nobody, not even I, made a move.

Ten feet away. That’s it. I could have slid away from Andrea, spun back around, and smashed my steel-toed boot into the little bastard’s kneecap. Before he knew it, I could have been on top of him, knee crushing his punk-ass chest and hand squeezing his throat. Ten feet away.

Hindsight is always 20/20.

There is a reason Glasgow is blanketed with close-circuit television cameras. The fight Andrea and I witnessed in front of Queen Street Station tonight, with requisite hooligans, bottle throwing, and gang-up assaults (as in four on one), is certainly a major one.

Glasgow has two souls, one light and one dark. To conquer the dark, you must embrace the light and reject the dark. But never forget that the dark still lingers in sneakers and track clothes on a street corner. I for one plan to enjoy Glasgow for what it is, teenage hooligans be damned, but I will never forget what it is, too.

Glasgow is now forever in my blood. I am Glasgow.

---drew, sarcastic quips don't seem proper right now. . .

Copyright ©Andrew D. Devenney, 2009, all rights reserved.