Mutha' Glasgow

Reidski is giving me earache in my comments section to write more blogs, so this wee snippet is for the benefit for my favourite Morning Star reader. It's just to let him know that I'm still alive, despite going to the gym and doing myself a mischief after seeing my belly being outed in Perspective. (I'm having to write this blog from a bath chair, my legs being that sore four days after going to the gym. Who knows, I might even go inside the gym next time.)

Of course, being a wee snippet, it has to be a lift from someone else's blog, but I loved this post from Kevin Williamson's The Scottish Patient blog from a few day's back. In the back of taxis in London you are subjected to rants from the physical embodiment of Daily Mail editorials about the impending fall of civilisation; in the back of taxis in Glasgow, you get riffs from taxi drivers on The Fall's contribution to civilisation-aah.*

There is definitely something different about Glasgow that means it is always out of step with other places. Visiting it for only the second time in a number of years a few weeks back, I realised I was experiencing something a tad different from London when the busker on Sauchiehall Street prefaced his song with the words: "This next song's about the Highland Clearances."

It beats a tin eared version of 'Year of the Cat' at the bottom of Oxford Circus tube escalator any day of the week.

* My Mark E. Smith impersonation.