Category: memory

If we build it, yes they can come

'Post no bills' sign on a door, with picture of actor Bill Murray looking at it

Must have been some square-go back in the day when Govanhill broke away from sunny Govan to form its own neighbourhood with its own development trust and swimming pool and everything.

A right stooshie, ken. 

I know Govan, and Govan likes to throw its weight around, so fair play to the Hillsters for standing their ground.

Shut it Govan, right. We are the city on the hill and if we build it, they will come.

And Govan’s like okay, ffs, calm doon. We’ve still got Linthouse, Wine Alley, Teucharhill and Drumoyne, so go. And take Polmadie with you.

After the Govan team, Govanhill was occupied by the ancient Egyptians.

I know what you’re thinking. Surely it was the Trojans. Or the Abyssinians. Or the Maryhill Fleeto? Tongs, ya bass.

Early Byzantine settlers were the first to introduce cycle lanes, even though bicycles weren’t invented until much later by the Cherokee, I think it was. Or it might have been the Monkees.

It took the invention of Locavore in 2018 or whatever for anyone to think of growing veg in a field and selling it in a shop.

Govanhill also has many ancient burial grounds. Christopher Biggins was buried in Butterbiggins Road. Other fossils discovered from the 1970s included kipper ties, flared trousers, Labour governments and punk rock.

They’re still looking for the remains of a dead football club, apparently.

And Third Lanark too.

Cheers, Govanhill.

Like meditation, only worse

photo of paintings in a shop window

Sleepwalking, who needs it? It’s like meditation, only worse.

Me, you, us, as zombies, the undead, roaming around the house, bumping into furniture in the middle of the night.

It’s like some eerie twilit world. Twigs cracking under your feet, wolves in the forest, trolls under a bridge.

And all this supposedly happening here, right in front of you, in your own flat, just off Victoria Road?

Madness.  

I hear people sleepwalking in Govanhill all the time. Top floor up above, downstairs underneath, next door left and right. Cheers, tenements. They’re madness too.

How do they remember to stay upright? Is their blood still flowing round their bodies and do their toenails keep on growing?

Nobody knows. You could get up to all sorts of things during the night and be back in bed asleep before you know anything about it.

Solve cosmic mysteries, witness intergalactic revelations, attain some fleeting oneness with the universe.

You know, like after drinking ten cans and passing out on the couch.

Because that’s what happens when you become temporarily free of the conscious mind.

Once you get your head round that your brain will finally be at rest.

I know. I’ve been there. I’ve tasted it.

Absinthe, man. Crunchy nut cornflakes.

I’m telling you.

Cheers, Govanhill.

Why is the devil driving a speedboat?

People sometimes ask what gives me the right to talk shite about Govanhill and I’m like shut it, right.

Then they’re like got any advice for a new blogger and I’m like thanks for asking dude.

It’s all about the start-up.

Get your marketing and social media strategy right.

Then just talk to strangers at the bus stop and in the pub.

Also, try not to get yourself banned by a popular local facebook group.

I set myself a target of as many followers as Jesus, or Kim Kardashian, or Govanhill Go.

But I got stuck on 666 instead.

That’s when the devil drove by in his speedboat.

All right my son.

And I was like whooooa goat face, idiot horns, you must be the prince of darkness and he’s like yes I am Lucifer, I will lead you into temptation and I said I’m tempted to knock you out, how about that?

So that sponsorship deal fell through.

Then there’s your advertisers.

Those global brands want a piece of your ass.

A Nike executive chased me along Bowman Street waving a contract above his head.

Okay, all you can eat at Anarkali and ten per cent off at Locavore, that’s our final offer.

Even Jeff Bezos, bless him, from Amazon, came with Alexa and got me drunk in the Penny Farthing and pestered me for a Kindle version of the blog.

I was like grow up Jeffy-boy and tell me again what it’s like being a twat in space.

He said there’s a special place in hell for bloggers like you and I said I know, mate.

Cheers, Govanhill.

Thou shalt be fond of the bevvy

Global brands, our pathway to a higher world.

Coca Cola, obviously. Apple, too. Google, Amazon, Poundland.

They know more about you than you do yourself. Especially the cashier at Poundland. 

Then there are brands that are your friends.

Celtic. Radio 4. Govanhill.

They speak to you, understand you, know what you want. 

And there’s the I Belong to Glasgow brand.

Old mean city, united by football, thriving razor scene. Tough, sassy, salt of the earth.

Tenement life, tight-knit community, doors always open, poor but happy. Yer maw, a jeely piece, the backcourt.

No dull nostalgia or sentimental gushing here. No sweetie wrappers or kids’ comics or Chopper bikes.

Just satanic closes, whole blocks boarded up, evil dereliction, pouring rain. Sword fights, brutal police vans and the busiest courts in Europe.

But wait.

Escaped its industrial, violent past. Reinvented itself with nightlife and galleries and Britain’s best designer shopping outside London.

And the Duke of Wellington, the traffic cone, a wacky and enduring symbol of our irreverent sense of humour.  

But wait.

Vegan food, green space, cheap rent, creative scene. Online start-ups, hip new festivals, east end, south side, merchant city.

But wait.

Smart arse alcoholic maniac thieves. Black teeth, chip fat, quick to take offence and start fights then fall over.

Our brand name is hinterland here.

Stay angry, be poor, sit down, drink up, smoke more and above all remember to die before you’re old.

Glasgow belongs to me. Cheers.

Single to Babylon, please

Cartoon photo of two reggae musicians, Sly and Robbie

I love fog. The soupy mystery, the smoke-filled uncertainty. Makes the whole city look more interesting.

Not in the living room but. Disnae augur well for one’s house-keeping skills, ken what I mean?

Haven’t emptied the bins in a month.

I’m joking, of course. It’s two months.

Last time I looked, the kitchen sink was empty and the cooker was clean. And isn’t a bit of dirt good for the immune system anyway?

It’s fine. Everything’s fine. Even in Babylon.

Been through a lot lately. Really hard time. Screaming terror of the yawning chasm at the very heart of this empty godless universe affecting my mental health, yeah?

Time to put myself first for a change. My own time, my me time, sat in a room with nothing to think but my thoughts.

Cup of tea and a slice of cake, glass of beer and a whisky chaser.

It’s because I’ve been listening to that dub reggae.

Prince Far I, King Tubby, Burning Spear.

Started seeing Jah all over the shoap too.

Neeson’s at closing time, the wtf aisle in Lidl, that empty space on Victoria Road where the bus stop used to be.

A who’s who of who knows. Fog patches and fag packets, dread beat and blood.

Sometimes decreasing, otherwise poor.

Can’t see the living room at all now.

Cheers, aye and aye.

Why Govanhill is just like New Jersey

Photo from TV show the Sopranos, featuring Tony Soprano, Chris, Paulie and Syl

So I was with my brother in the Queens Park Cafe and we might have been drunk but I can’t really remember.

I told him I saw Tony Soprano in Govanhill and he said stop breaking my balls over here.

It’s true, I said. He was with his goomar. Fur coat, high heels, chewing gum.

Who, Tony?

Naw, his goomar.

Tony from the Sopranos in Govanhill? You being a wiseguy?

I’m telling you. He was talking on the phone. Something about needing a sit-down because that crew is way outta line.

Tony wouldn’t talk on the phone. Feds all over his ass.

Then something about Vinny coming out of a two-stretch in Sing Sing and wanting what’s rightfully his plus a little on top for keeping schtum all that time.

Where was he?

In Greggs, queuing for a pie.

Tony wouldn’t wait in a queue.

Might go for a Scotch pie though.

We each had a drink of our drink and looked around for a bit before he asked if I thought he was a schmuck on wheels and I said not really and then he asked if I spoke to Tony and I said of course.

I asked him if he paints houses and does he clean up afterwards.

What did he say?

Something about me being a cocksucker motherfucker. And a bit about how we won’t be seeing that schnook no more. So I gave him directions to the hardware shop on Vicky Road.

Are you drunk?

I can’t remember.

Stop making shit up.

Cheers Govanhill.

Do not believe what you think

Fed up with the quirky and the new. Don’t want to be individual or unique, interesting or esoteric.

Sorry, Govanhill.

Sometimes it’s good to be anonymous, where no one knows you and no one wants to.

Hello, uniformity. Come on in, orthodoxy. Welcome home, self-destruction.

Is this an airport, a hospital, a restaurant, or a slave warehouse, sorry, fulfilment centre?

Walk in, press screen, pay with card, stand around, say nothing, collect your items, almost items. Lucky dip, multiple choice, pick a winner. Leave or continue in silence.

Is this a furniture shop, a cinema queue, a job centre?

You don’t know any more, and it doesn’t matter.

You might be trapped inside your own head, but don’t worry. What you think and say are not who you are.

You hope you’re a person, almost a person, now you’re here, the invisible here.

But don’t believe what you think you are.

Banish the ego, immerse yourself in the routine nausea, the ordinary horror, the here-we-go-again desperation.

And lo, thy parcel shall be delivered unto thee but the workers shalt have just ninety seconds for a toilet break.

Thank you. Please remember it is forbidden to set yourself on fire within the bagging area.

Cheers.

Go.

Van.

Hill.

The invisible here

detail of a stained glass window

Many different cities have been here over the years.

Each one a memory of a story overheard, a photograph, a fragment of written word.

City of industry. Tenements lining the great arteries of the old town, the black streets of this dark metropolis and the buildings that went on for ever.

Factory gates and subway stations, slamming doors and shrieking whistles, where the trains take you all across the country and the ships all over the world.

City of the past, where big guys in oily blue overalls play19-a-side football in the park at lunch time and when the four o’clock horn sounds the streets crush with men.

A radical city, red Clydeside, trade unions, class struggle, suffragettes, rent strikes.

Mary Barbour, John Maclean, Manny Shinwell, Jimmy Reid. A workers’ city, not a merchant city.

City of the dead. Factories closed and derelict yards, silenced docks, shadowy warehouses in the rain. No more locomotives or tramlines or container ships.

Just acres of empty land with giant puddles like vast lakes beside mounds of earth and piles of tyres that seem hundreds of feet high.

A lost civilisation, defeated and stripped bare, its people abandoned.

All that’s left is the terrifying groaning of the dredgers on the river, sounding like the rise of the killer machines in some science fiction nightmare.

Me and you and our ancestors’ songs of anger and loss.

Still here, the invisible here.

Why Govanhill is first, best and most

Names of neighbourhoods around Govanhill written backwards

It’s a scientific fact that Govanhill is one of the world’s best places to live.

The rest of the south side, not so much.

The sinister neighbourhoods surrounding Govanhill – your Queen’s Parks, your Langsides, your Mount Floridas – have an air of menace about them.

Best not to venture there after dark. Everyone’s in bed.

Polmadie’s like that too, but with added siege mentality. Nothing much comes out of Polmadie. I’ve known good people go there and never be seen again, just like Toryglen.

Places like King’s Park or Oatlands don’t appear on any map and only really exist in people’s imaginations, like in ghost stories.  

Then there’s Crossmyloof, where the weather is different and the language is too. It’s a foreign country, like Strathbungo.

I used to work beside a guy from Crossmyloof who spoke in code all the time. What year was your granny born and how many sugars do you take in your tea?

And your Gorbals, your Shawlands and your Pollokshields are all tartan trews, shortbread tins and thin-lipped fundamentalists who chain up swing parks on a Sunday.

They pretend to have beautiful scenery of lochs and castles and glens, but when you get there it’s just horrible weather, terrible food and songs about jumpers. Fiddly-diddly bollocks.

Govanhill is too weird for all that.

We have our seductive urban vibe of loft apartments, art galleries and boutique hotels. Our radical poets, golden retrievers and overlapping left backs.

Kurdish-slash-Romanian-slash-Ghanaian-slash-Vietnamese.

It’s in our nature, and everything has to be true to its nature. Don’t you worry your sweet ass about that.

Cheers, Govanhill.  

Buddha, can you spare a dime?

photo of dozens of empty cans of beer on a wooden floor

Sometimes I think maybe I drink too much. Other times I think being a jakey might be my ideal job.

You know, a tramp, a dosser, a blue-sky tinker.

Self-employed, flexible hours, working outdoors, casual dress code. Could be just what I’m cut out for.

But the pay’s not great and there’s malnutrition, hypothermia and the constant threat of violence to think about too.

I remember as kids, me and my brothers used to talk about being a down and out when we grew up.

Not like a beggar or anything but like sitting in the park drinking champagne out of a glass slipper.

Or bin men, raking through the middens all day, finding stuff, be great.

Or playing for Celtic, aye, and having eleven kids and naming them after the Lisbon Lions.

So I sat down and opened a can and started thinking about my brothers and wondering who was the jakiest of us all.

I looked down at my thinning denims and Charlie Chaplin shoes. A right trampy baws, to be sure.

So I opened another can and tried not to think about the past or the future and decided just to wait for enlightenment instead. After that I went straight to bed, jakey or not.

Buddha, can you spare a dime?