A wee bit of myth and magic

Beautiful image of George Square, Glasgow, courtesy of Pix by Pedro

When I write about Glasgow, I’m probably writing about a place that doesn’t exist outside of my imagination.

I talk about Glasgow’s streets as the stage for my characters to play out their stories, but a city isn’t just bricks, roads, and buildings. We can re-paint any city, overlay its streets with memory, myth, and meaning until it becomes something more.

I’ve long been fascinated by the business of mythologising places, giving them stories, or exposing the stories they already have. I want to deepen and play with my understanding of a place, shaping it into more than the sum of its parts – even if that just happens in my own mind.

The movie industry has done this so well for cities like New York. The idea of visiting there at Christmas tips us into a Christmas on 34^th Street/When Harry Met Sally/Sleepless in Seattle mash-up. It’s immediate.

I’m pulled to search for that magic, that collective, heightened vision of a place I’m attached to, to uncover its energy and the people who make it unique. To create a new point of contact between the two.

Alasdair Gray discussed this sense-memory of cities in his seminal work, Lanark:

“Glasgow is a magnificent city,” said McAlpin. “Why do we hardly ever notice that?”“Because nobody imagines living here… think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he’s already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.”

I find that hard-hitting because when I lived in Glasgow, I’d never seen a version of it portrayed in theatre or on the screen that wasn’t the rough, tough version of itself – all very one-dimensional. In real life I couldn’t see the city as a whole. I only knew the corners where I lived, unrelentingly amongst it, in it, its immediacy, its minute-by-minute insistence.

I was shaped as a human being by that experience; growing up in Castlemilk with its sprawling hills and valleys of council-owned flats and houses, bordered by countryside that was both idyllic and spelled danger for a child whose parents wouldn’t articulate what that danger actually was.

When I was 16, we moved back to Scotland after three years in Australia, and for three months the three of us - mum, dad, and I - lived in one room of my aunt’s two-room and kitchen tenement on Cathcart Road. It was winter 1977. Auntie hung her washing from the pulley in the long hallway, laying newspapers on the hall carpet to catch the drips. There were three or four long strides between the front door and our room, so if the laundry had been hoisted that day, you’d need an umbrella to traverse the lobby, and on some wash days, I swear there was a rainbow playing between the walls of woodchip wallpaper. There was an inside toilet, but no sink and no bathroom. If you needed to get clean, there was no privacy available in the one communal room – a shared living room/kitchen - and you had to beg a bath and hot water from a friendly relative or queue at the Calder Street public baths.

Then, when we eventually got a council flat, I lived with my parents in the notorious Red Road flats where we could see as far as the peaks of Arran from the window on a clear day, and the permanently parked ice cream van on the corner of the street. It’s where I learned that the ice cream van didn’t just sell ice cream, and that the best winter entertainment was to watch the double-decker buses skid and slide as they tried to go up and down the hill that was Red Road.

But I also got glimpses of other Glasgows. Drama school in the West End, where people gathered in trendy pubs to pose, but which also held communities driven by art and ideas. Friends moved to posh suburbs like Bearsden and Bishopbriggs and had homes with two toilets – a state of life that I felt I could never attain. I write about those other Glasgows because it’s a way for me to be able to live there in another life, even if it is from 12,000 miles away, and only in my imagination.

I’ve been away from my home town for a long time, and I now see it with a different kind of clarity.  My experience of the place has become a long-tail memory that has candied in my mind. I feel it connect me to the place with a thread to the heart that outwits time and space.

The question is, how much of this version exists in real life? Is it worth creating and maintaining this version?

For me, it is, because it brings me possibility and keeps the door open to whatever the future holds. Nothing is locked down. It intrigues me to wonder if this version of memory can seep through the veil of imagination back into physical reality.

I live in my head a lot, so, personally, reality is only part of the story. The rest is made up from memory, feelings, and sensory fragments.

It’s a hill where double-decker buses slide down in the winter, it’s the smell of Lewis’s food hall when you’re just tall enough to see into the glass display cases of fudge, and it’s knowing that the smell of elephant shit will always transport me back to the Kelvin Hall’s Christmas circus.

Our cities live in us long after we leave them. They exist in those slivers of scenes past that we stitch together in our memories. That’s how we keep them alive. If I get to choose which version of a city holds me and calls me back, then I’ll take the one that glows just a wee bit, even if it never really existed that way in the first place.