Aye cheers, Googlehill

Close up of a yellow sunflower with a wall in the background

So Google wrote me a letter in pen and ink on headed notepaper telling me everywhere I’d been and how long I was there.

Busiest day, shortest day, most steps, fewest steps, various visits for food and drink, shopping, attractions and sports.

How I went this way on Tuesday, another way on Wednesday, eight miles on Thursday, poached eggs on Sunday.

A second-hand copy of Ulysses. Forty eight cups of coffee. Three nil at half time.

Why are you telling me all this, ya mad maniac tech tyrant eavesdropping search engine bastart?

Denial is my friend. Ignorance about my life is all I have left.

Stop showing off. Quit boasting how much you know about me just because you can. What’s next, harvesting my organs?

So I kept on reading but then I had to sit down when Google told me my all-time data, the total number of places I’d been in my entire life and all my days was just 419.

Is that it? I wanted to travel the world, expand my horizons, experience other cultures and all I’ve been to is a lousy 419 places?

Poor show, wee man.

Talk about a life unlived.

Wait. I’ve been in Shawlands a few times, Pollokshields, Langside and Polmadie. Aw naw. I got lost coming out the pub and ended up in Strathbungo one night too. Battlefield, Mount Florida, Cathcart Road, a few more. Aw Jeez.

Throw in the Gorbals for visits to my brother and that must add up to 419. Nightmare. Pollokshaws West ruined my life.

Aye, cheers, Googlehill.

Stop shrinking my world with data. Some things are best left alone.

So to cheer myself up I used some crayons to draw a map of where I went yesterday, my direction of travel, and lo and behold it was shaped like a huge cock and balls.

Roundabout at Nithsdale Drive, left along Darnley Street, back down Titwood Road, wee tour round the pond in Queens Park and there you have it, man with giant erection.  

It’s just like that ancient chalk drawing on a hillside in Dorset.

Anyway. Not in my name, Googleballs.

I didn’t ask for this, I don’t want it, of course I do, I can’t help it, yes please.

You spent six hours seven minutes in Paradise, Google said.

Not long enough, I replied.

Cheers.

Ten club king size mate

close up of a mural, two men smiling, one with a beard

People sometimes ask me who the hell I think I am and what the hell I’ve ever done for Govanhill and I’m like ffs, calm doon, I only came in to buy fags.

But let me think about it.

I don’t sit on any committees, it’s true, nor any board, working group, task force, or forum. I was on the panel for a while, but that’s a different story.

I’m not an entrepreneur or a social enterpriser either.

Landlord, stakeholder, partner, investor? Aye, right.

I don’t even like hanging out with my dog, listening to true crime podcasts or baking.

I am nobody, unknown nobody no one knows.  

The only places I’m a regular are the pavement, Celtic Park and my living room.

But I’ve walked the streets of Govanhill more than ever before. I’ve appreciated it, written about it, painted its pictures, sang its songs. Endured it, stood up for it, taken the piss a little.

Also howled at it in the middle of the night, slapping my forehead, gnashing my teeth.

I’ve never shut up about Govanhill, to be honest.

You were always on my mind.

Because I’ve always been here and always will be, for ever and ever, amen.

There was never a different time or a better time, only this time.

I was there back in the day, the old day, in black and white photos of old Govanhill, how clean it looked before car ownership and home ownership, fast food and disposable culture, austerity politics, social media, gig economy.

Remember the wee guy picking his nose and staring at the camera?

I haven’t changed a bit.

I wish my fishmonger were still alive and that mass unemployment had never been invented.

If only the dry cleaners hadn’t closed down and people worked reasonable hours and had nice homes and a pension.

Where is the haberdasher and how come my phone knows everything about me?

I just want to go home.

But you are home.

I know.

In Govanhill.

Yes. I want to go home but I don’t know what that means, where it is, or if it even exists. It must be a place in your head you can always come back to, like a dream or a never-ending story.

Sorry, what are you talking about?

Ten club king size mate.

Cheers.

Attack of the 50 Foot Mango

close up of a cardboard sign with mangoes on it in the street outside a shop

Govanhill is the fruit capital of Scotland.

Vineyards, plantations, vast orchards of pistachio, chocolate chip, vanilla.

We like chips and pies but we also love our greens.

Grass, absinthe, limeade, remember?

What I mean is, Govanhill has the best fruit shops in Glasgow.

Kumquats and blood oranges are as much part of our brand as crumbling tenements and stupid trousers.

I agree with fruit, I support it, plums are my friend. Back in the day when I worked in an office I had a fruit bowl on my desk, next to the ashtray, the spittoon and the ejector seat.

These days I wear a big Velcro hat, Carmen Miranda-stylee, with watermelon, kiwi, pomegranate, maybe six cans, in case I fancy a mid-morning snack or some afternoon delight.

You’ll also catch me strolling down Westmoreland Street in my big banana boots, cherry on the end of my nose, belly button pierced with pineapple ring, impromptu coconut shell earphones.

Community acupuncture with ambient beats here I come.

Heavy is the heid that wears the crown but so make sure that Carmen Miranda fruit stack disnae topple over.

Blue velvet, green tambourine, red lorry yellow lorry.

Anyway. What I really mean is, Govanhill is the mango metropolis of north Britain.

June till August every year is Feast of the Immaculate Mango, Our Lady of the Blessed Mango, all over Govanhill and Pollokshields, with boxes of sweet honey mangos imported from Pakistan piled up outside every fruit shop in the area. Night of the Living Mango, Attack of the 50 foot Mango, Last Mango in Paris.

Forget the terrible puns kids, put down those swedgers and try this sweet yellow flesh instead.

Juice on your eyebrows guaranteed.

Cheers.

Place is a mystery to me

A skyscraper against a blue sky with smaller buildings om both sides

I don’t live in a village or small town or some rural outback where everyone knows your name.

I come from the city, a big city, bigger than it looks.

Nobody knows me round here, and I know nobody.

Except Rab fae Torrisdale Street, of course. Mad Tracy who torched her flat that time. Franco the barman, Tony the Gherkin, Raj the Reindeer, Catherine the Great and George the electrician.

But everyone knows them.

Then there’s old Albert, limping round Govanhill Park a hundred times a day on his crutches, two broken legs from a car crash ten years ago, in constant pain but tries not to think about it until he has to go get the plates straightened or the screws tightened.

Maybe Rekan the wee Kurdish barber who lives with his twin brother in his cousin’s flat in the Gorbals and opened a shop in Govanhill.

Said he was covering a shift at his mate’s place in Dennistoun last week and a Celtic player came in for a haircut.

A fancy wee winger on loan for a while who flatters and deceives without doing very much and twinkles with mediocrity.

Hundred quid tip though.

I said that’s us, mate. More than a club. Are you going to set fire to my ears?

Wee Mags is back in town too.

Couple of weeks in hospital, she said. Not the virus, something to do with her legs. I didn’t follow what she was saying.

 We never really listen to each other, me and Mags. We just play along making noises and making faces while the other one speaks, answering questions you weren’t asked, cracking jokes the other misses.

How are your legs?

Ooh, I like Nigella. She’s on TV later. Will you get me the TV guide?

Is your daughter coming over?

I had a pet rabbit called Sparky I accidentally electrocuted trying to cut its hair with a beard trimmer.

Okay, cheers Mags.

She’s got bandages on her shins and a walking stick now but glad to be out because everyone on the ward wore visors and you never saw anyone’s face and Jeanie and big Babs couldn’t get in to visit.

Mags is okay but Maureen who plays the harmonica, Bridie with the hairy feet, big Philomena who’s allergic to altar wine all had to give up their season tickets.

Charlie the Mick and Mick the Charlie too.

Anyway. Apart from all of them, I don’t know anyone.

Place is a mystery to me.

Cheery.

Welcome home, Govanhill

colourful mural of three cartoon heads on a wall, each with speech bubbles

At home in Glasgow looking out at Govanhill.

Home is a city, streets and a set of buildings. 

See how I’ve changed, see how I’ve stayed the same.

I used to be world famous for heart disease, cancer and house fires, with the lowest life expectancy and highest murder rate in Europe.

But I’m working on it. I’m reinventing myself, like.

Now I’m more into green space, cheap rent, low carbon, hi-tech, social enterprise, vibrant scene.

Home is a set of memories, pictures in your head, someone else’s head.

From back in the days when I was a ghetto, a slum, full of immigrants and crime and bedbugs. An exemplar, I was. The most demonised neighbourhood in Scotland, they said.

But I was still at home, I was always at home.

Look at me now. Staycolders, gentle flyers, reinventionaries, new heavy industry, the Govanhill industry.

But the view outside the window is still the same.

Home is a city that keeps on reinventing itself but where people still die young.

High-density housing, old tenements in poor condition, transient population, a wide range of languages other than English.

Home is a set of colours, football colours for example, food and pubs, churches and trade unions, music and literature, comedy and dislocation.

Maybe things were better in the old days.

Good times, growing up, carefree. Smiling faces in photos from the past.

The city may change, but the place you invented stays the same.

A motor car stopped at traffic lights, pot plants near a window, a conversation across the road.

The city belongs to me.

If only I could leave the house.

Cheers.

Why Govanhill, why?

A grey box on wheels on the side of a street with a big orange question mark on the side

Govanhill is whatever you want it to be because it only exists in your head.

Just like thoughts. Or a headache.

You only see what you want to see. 

It might be some creative hub with studio space and vegan eateries and graphic design and young somethings with something ideas and these or those side hassles.

Wallahs queuing outside twelve coffee shops on Vicky Road. Sightless, sorryless, motherless.

Or you might see the same high street stomp as all over this city, and places just like it.

Overwork and lack of work, the relentless drag of poverty killing the body and the mind.

Three jobs, two kids, new shoes, lost shifts, zero hours, nae money, rent’s due, still owe big Malky for that half n half too.

Young, old, poor, ill, excluded, disabled, invisible.

Me and you, in other words.

Baking cakes of concrete and exhaust fume, garnished with broken table leg. Slow cooked tenement beans, side dish of noisy neighbours. An Allison Street omelette.

But it’s not just that, it’s more than that, and it’s not all just in your head.

Flowers in the air on a Friday evening in the rolling fields and open moors of Govanhill.

Three Pakistani families outside Kebabish, a wee tubby Romanian kid giggling with his sister. Spoon carvers, ring binders, rib ticklers.

Me and you again.

We don’t stop, we never stop.

Ugly beautiful, noble bawbags.

Dazzling smile and snotters in our nose.

Us, in Govanhill, and you, wherever you are.

Parkhead Cross, Riddrie Knowes and Paisley Road West, or Springburn, Tollcross, Drumchapel. Down Great Western Road and Cumberland Street, Alexandra Parade and the Gallowgate, Cessnock subway station and the north face of Mount Vernon. Drumoyne, Shettleston, Thornliebank. Dear old Glesga toon.

Bet it’s the same where you live.

Cheers.

If you can’t be terrific, be cool

White sticker with 'Cyclists stay awesome' on a black background

So I was walking down the street not minding my own business when I spotted this sticker on a car window.

It wasn’t in Govanhill, it was in a place nearby which starts with ‘Strathbung’ and ends in ‘o’.

But I’m not sure cyclists are all that awesome in the first place.

Obsessing about ankle clips, fondling wee tins of puncture repair kit, saving up all their pocket money to buy a space helmet. They might just be pedalling pedants instead.

I saw a cyclist picking her nose last week, heard another one farting in the saddle at the lights, and I know at least two more who voted for Brexit.

See, that’s the reality behind the ‘sustainable future for our kids’ brigade and the Chris Hoy’s thighs fanatics. Madness, I tell thee.

Actually, don’t stay awesome, cyclists.

Stay terrific instead. It’s much better.

What’s for tea tonight?

Beer soup.

Terrific!

See? It works a treat. Say ‘awesome’ and you’re just a twat.

Wheel spokes are on special at Lidl.

Awesome!

Shut it, ya twat.

See? It works both ways.

But if you can’t be terrific, at least be cool. Cooler than you’re being right now in Govanhill.

Try going the right way up a cycle lane for a start, ya fannies. Think of us poor pedestrians with our big clown feet, weighed down by our anxiety, neuroses, never ending trauma and struggle, plus a couple of shopping bags too.

Just ask Rab fae Torrisdale Street. Knocked over by a yoga mat sticking out a cyclist’s backpack, stepped on a baby pigeon and ended with his legs all up the wall.

Namaste, Govanhill.

The noise of this place

Black and white sign with an arrow and the words 'Hidden Gardens' on a brick wall

Listen to the music of the pipes in a tenement.

The low-level hum through the whole building when flat three-slash-two flushes the toilet.

The high-octave drone when ground-slash-one turns on a tap.

If top floor guy runs a bath it sounds like a spaceship coming in to land.   

But at least the neighbour through the wall is quiet.

Must be exhausted after last night’s cattle stampede.

Or maybe he’s fixing the bolts in his neck.

The noise of this place.

A mouse scurrying, the trap’s snap, a faint squeal from under the sink in the bathroom.

Nae luck, wee sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous bastart.

Or maybe it was a giant cockroach, you just never know.

The noise inside, like tinnitus. Interior monologue, voices in the head, the stories you keep on telling yourself. Round and round, on and on, never stop.

The noisiest place.

The people at the front of the close playing music, smoking weed, drinking cans. Fair enough, quite respectful, you did it yourself back in the day, but not now, it’s a young man’s game now.

Seagulls squalling and circling overhead then prodding through the bin bag pavement smorgasbord.

Six angry women arguing in the street about payment due and tic fae big Malky that someone did or didn’t get.

A speeding car roaring fifty yards down the main road then having to stop at the lights because wee Betty’s crossing to the bookies to put a fiver on Kyogo to score first and nae boy racer in nae kid’s motor is getting in her way.

But tonight it’s quiet in the inner city, in Govanhill. The weather is calm, roads are silent, there’s no one around, no fireworks either.

It’s hidden now, the noise of the people, the will of the people, we are noise and to noise we shall return.

The people are resting, waiting for a happy ending in the strangest corner of the most mysterious city in the world.

Cheers.

No Govanhill, yes

So I woke one morning from uneasy dreams and Govanhll was no longer there.

Gone, girl. Disappeared.

No roads or traffic or trees or people or wind and rain or anything.

Aye right, Gvanhll.

I tried to go outside but it wasn’t the same, it was totally different, nothing was happening at all.

Nae Rab fae Torrisdale Street, mad Tracy who torched her flat that time, vegan young team, nothing.

Aye cheers, Gvnhll.

Where’s Victoria Road and its ever-changing shop fronts selling strange items and trinkets? Tin pot pale face trying to tap you a few bob, slummer with accent and slight entitled air?

None of it there, all of it gone.

Gvnhl, disappeared.

No more stories to write or read.

Not an eye or a pen to neither see nor tell.

Nothing to say, not even a goodbye.

I didn’t know what to do.

I always knew there was something missing in my life. Turns out it’s Gvnl.

Then I remembered that we are dust and to dust we shall return, so I returned home to the dust and shadows to sit on the couch and drink cans. But there was no couch, and no cans either, so I went to sleep and tried to remember those uneasy dreams and bring Gvl back to life.

I heard laughter outside, clinking glasses, a stranger swearing, a motorised wheelchair speeding down Cathcart Road.

An evening class in Mandarin, a night of Lebanese cuisine, knock-off Russian cigarettes.

Vast bellies, slapping flip flops, the smell of baked bread from somewhere overhead.

Not gone, Gl.

Pictures, sounds, impossibilities running through my head.

Still here, G.

Hope I wake up soon.

Chrs.

Word of foot

multi-coloured polka dot thing that looks like a ball with green grass and trees and a blue sky behind

Immigration enriches a place, refreshes it, reminds a culture of its own neglected parts.

Things people used to do but don’t anymore.

Street football, street food, hanging around street corners.

Remember that was us? Immigration brings us closer to home.

Kids from Romania, Kurdistan and Somalia playing football on the basketball court in the park, just as we did when we were young, a Mitre 5 or a plastic job from the corner shop, black sannies or a pair of your granny’s wellies.

Sacred working-class knowledge passed down through word of foot.

We always played football, especially as adults, a game with the brothers every Saturday in the park, whatever the weather and whatever the hangover, then back to the cluttered house swirling in smoke with the endless stream of visitors and friends, relatives and neighbours, the hiss of beer cans opening and voices raised in drunken discussions about politics or Celtic and dad shouting at us to keep it down.

And now a fool like me is kicking a ball around with kids at the end of my street.

The global language of keepie-uppie, noble pastime, a pastime straight from the gods.

An Iraqi boy, fourteen, good player.

Left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot, head, chest, both knees, even that catching it on the back of the neck thing which always annoys me because you can never do that in a game but I let it go man, he’s only fourteen.

Then he passes to me – what, with my hamstrings? – and a clown’s hooter sounds or a comedy trombone starts up as I stumble and flap in mid-air and the ball bounces from my face to a car bonnet and out to the main road and as I run to retrieve it I’m nine years old again, a bus driver beeping his horn and shaking his fist, me giving him a cheeky wee wave. Hope he doesn’t call the fuzz.

So cheers Kurdistan, Romania and Somalia, for reminders of the old city, city that’s always changing but where a good first touch always remains.

We belong to Glasgow.

Drink, smoke, football, die. That’s what we do.

Cheers.