On to Glasgow

It may be my mood these past two days, but Glasgow doesn't particularly light my bulb for an inspiring place to be. A busy M road bisects it into workaday east and posh west, and even though it has two main pedestrian-only streets on the east side, I can't seem to get far walking the area. It’s like there's some Acme Marketing Magnet that keeps sucking me back to Sauchiehall ("Socky hall") and Buchanan Streets--full of their mega department stores, salons, mobile phone stores, pharmacists, high-priced restaurants, jewelry shops, boutique stores, and shopping malls. The thoroughfares are packed with weekend shoppers.

I arrived on Saturday by two-hour train from Dumfries, moving through a low ceiling of clouds--soft gray, shadowing the fields. The train's vibration set up a very loud, deep harmonic that hurt my ears. A deer bounded through an unmown field, but the grass was so high all I could see was its brown back bouncing in and out of waving green.

The hotel I'm at here, McLays Guest House, has little merit beyond its location about a mile from both train stations and a few blocks from the Glasgow School of Art. The interior is serviceable enough, but it feels old and shabby, like a dowager who has aged poorly and is trying not to show it. The breakfast room is crowded with so many tables and chairs that getting to the cereal and coffee areas takes dexterous maneuvering, several apologies, and walking sideways. That's the view from my third-floor room. Most of the buildings on this street looked like this.

A few blocks from the hotel is a small U-shaped laundromat, which I welcomed after a week of hand-washing in sinks. Pay the grocer next door £3 for a funny-shaped token for the washer--a silver medallion with two opposite sides cut straight--and take your chances with the dryers for 20p for ten minutes.

I've been to two movies here so far. The Glasgow Film Centre is close to the hotel and has the charm of a small, local theatre that has been lovingly refurbished. Went to see The Wind That Shakes The Barley my first night here, and walked out half an hour into the film--no plot beyond English and Irish killing each other in brutal shootouts in the 1920s, with not much effort to hook me into the characters. I didn't want to stomach the rest of it. The man and woman I walked over in order to leave my seat were surprised I was going.

The second show was an American film, Thank You For Smoking. I found the satire wickedly funny, but the rest of the audience didn't seem to get it, or perhaps Glaswegians prefer not to laugh out loud. I overheard one young woman ask her boyfriend, "Who's Jimmy Stewart?," clearly missing the allusions of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. But, then, most younger American audiences wouldn't get that, either.

The anti-smoking campaign in the plot seemed out of place here, too, since all cigarette packages in the UK are marked in red with phrases like SMOKING KILLS in words that take up half the package. And Scotland has just passed a country-wide no-smoking-in-public law, which is sending some smokers to distraction. We just passed a similar ordinance in Washington state, and it's already meeting with lots of flak.

I came too late for a folk festival that ends this weekend, but I like the humor and art that is all around Glasgow. Even a parking garage becomes a canvas for interesting metal sculpture.

My tour of the Glasgow School of Art on Sunday was given by one of the students at the school. This is one of the many buildings Charles Rennie Mackintosh designed in Glasgow. Alas, no photos allowed. Mackintosh is a native-son architect who practically defined the Art Nouveau style. He was working in the same time period as Frank Lloyd Wright, and their styles may have fed off each other. The rooms are an odd mixture of nature and geometry, of symmetry and asymmetry.

Mackintosh's famously simple rose pattern has grown on me. I've seen it a lot since entering Scotland, for the country is celebrating a 100th anniversary of Mackintosh this year. The Art Nouveau theme is in a lot of jewelry. And of course it's on everything in Glasgow from coasters to picture frames and aprons. I finished most of my souvenir shopping at the school's gift shop.


Took high tea at the Willow Tea Room, also designed by Mackintosh and renovated in that style during the 1980s. I like the fact that he created a unique design for each client--no one has the same thing, and the furnishings are easy to identify for where they came from because of it.

Glasgow does have some good dining places. My first dinner here was at Anduluza, a Spanish tapas restaurant. Good food, and very crowded--I ate at the bar in order to eat there at all. Reservations definitely recommended.

Will watch what I can of the football game today--England v Equador in round 2 of the World Cup. Whoever wins this one continues on; losers go home. England's been playing pretty badly in the last two games...they look out of their league against some of the other teams I've seen.

(England made it: 1-0.)