We didn’t crash the car, the car crashed us.

We were over here minding our own business, cursing the neighbours, arguing in the street, wading through nappies and peelings from bin bags on the pavement.

Now it’s pop-up cocktails and upholstery workshops, invisible privilege, and unconscious class war.

Design agency militants, socials warriors and their curated vintage gallery plant pot hot shop zine frame ecstasy.

Bet they’d never let us migrate to their neighbourhood.

No Asians, no Romanians, no Irish, no blacks.

The music of our native land is Universal Credit, sending money abroad, football training, fly fishing, legal advice, tenancy support, cookery classes, Taekwondo in community venues named after Nan Carmichael or Wilma McKay, heroes of housing scheme repairs, upgrades, new-build and investment.

Now it’s the pale soup and weak eyes of insipid aggressors who are everything you expect and less.

Preposterous coffee bars with opinionated milk, absurd pubs full of people with no friends but awful tattoos on the legs and the neck and those tight perm jheri curls shaved at the side.

I know, I don’t care.

That café bar bakery takeaway is a half place, a non place, twilight online shadow space.

It’s not the steak pie community of three courses for a fiver at the Star Bar, such Glasgow qualities as warmth and humour and openness, the hard-fought glamour of why people love this city.

But pity these charmless fools. They don’t buy their round, they never make each other laugh, the shredded joy of their demeanour.

Yon poor wretch in the yellow dungarees has nowhere else to exist.

Let the young team’s fist of recognition be upon thee and the blows of righteousness shall rain down upon thy napper. Doink, ya muppet.

Feel sorry for them instead.

They don’t know the sci-fi wonder of our streets, our psychedelic chambers, all-night jewellery shops glittering otherworldly. Smashed glass education, broken steps in the dark.

They don’t know that culture comes from us, down here, we who can’t read or write but know how to talk and sing and play.

Yes us, with our unfashionable lack of resources. Managing our social anxiety, worrying about being judged as soon as we open our mouths.

What we could be in a world away from here, autobahn or desert plain, street corner, beach tavern, farmhouse fable, moon age daydream.  

A hundred thousand opportunities possibilities in alternative universes, imaginary cities, what might be in quantum worlds, other Govanhills, more Govanhills, too many to even contemplate.

So, aye, your baby in a papoose will grow up an asshole not in Govanhill but we’ll still be here, bampots and rockets and moonbeams who can’t afford to take a risk, get it wrong and start again.

Us. Roasters and trumpets full of pish and wind. Aye.

Cheers, Govanhill.