The WIP #2: The Return of Medieval Glasgow?

The Week in Photos (6-12 January 2024)

I recently had a dream — perhaps it was a vision — that Glasgow is destined to return to what it was like during the medieval period. During the 19th century Glasgow was inflated by colonial trade, much as the world economy has been inflated by fossil fuels. What is left when capital moves on?

We get what we focus on. If you are thinking a lot about decay, you’ll only see decay. No one observes reality — or Glasgow — through neutral eyes. So when Laura was invited to Comrie to run a yoga workshop I was happy to escape the city to be the chauffeur.

The roads were icy but the sun shone bright on the Perthshire countryside. While Laura was teaching I went for a walk to the Deil’s Cauldron. Comrie is a beautiful village, but after a couple of hours, I felt like I had exhausted it and was happy to return to the city.

We made it in time for a birthday dinner in honour of Kate Clayton. Kate is a total inspiration and still causing mayhem at 74. The party was hosted with great panache by a chap called David, who I didn’t know but with whom I’d had an argument about gentrification in the sauna earlier in the week. Well, I say argument, it was more of a heated discussion.

The next morning was as foggy as my head, so I walked along the Clyde towards the Kelvingrove Museum.

I went there to see the newly hung painting by Alasdair Gray, whose novel Poor Things has recently been turned into a film. There has been some controversy because the director, Yorgos Lanthimos, moved the film to London. However, the painting depicts an area of the city that was demolished in the sixties, which makes it all the more poignant.

Dan Fox

saw the film recently and, in his review, quoted Gray’s classic line from Lanark:

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. What is Glasgow to most of us? A house, the place we work, a football park or golf course, some pubs and connecting streets. That’s all.

It’s true. How can we see a city if we haven’t seen it depicted in art?

On Monday, I went to my first festival of the year, the Medieval Trust’s St Mungo Festival. There were no glow sticks and no portaloos, just Dr Gordon Wyllie, a former lawyer explaining the rights and duties Glaswegian burgess had under the feudal system. I considered it preparation for the years to come.

Here is the Ferris wheel from the Christmas market, being dismantled for another year.

This week I have been thinking about Bill Brandt, a master photographer who used shadow and light to achieve extraordinary psychological insight. Here is my shadow after spending an hour in the library immersed in his work.