REFLECTIONS FROM GLASGOW CENTRAL

‘Cappucino.’ It comes, cheerily served.
‘You wan’ white or brown sugar?’ An Italian woman, looking pale and wan.
A second’s consideration.
‘Saccharine?’
‘None.’
‘Brown.’
Stirring the frothy substance, whorls of rich brown chocolate float on top. I take a sip. I need it. I crave it. I’m tired.
Glasgow Central, the finest station in all of Britain. Marbled, colonnaded, iron-roofed. Swirly, squiggly, tempting, taunting. Fin de siecle brilliance in iron, glass and stone.
Another mouthful of coffee. Hot, sweet, gritty, reviving.
A crocodile of passengers, not customers, sashay across the concourse. So many people, such hustle, such bustle.
Another sip. Tart, bitter, not thirst-quenching.
I need something to re-awaken my zest for life. Uppers, no more downers.
Two tables along, a bald man in a tropical suit talks to a retired military type in a blazer and flannels. The retired colourman has eyebrows like furry antennae. They wiggle while he talks, a variation on ‘music while you work.’
The swell of passengers traversing the shiny station floor continues. Concierges, secretaries, handsome young Pakistanis in Armani suits, wasters, tasters and make-hasters, all humanity is jumbled up in here. Old men with furled umbrellas shuffle along next to well-endowed women with faces full of trowelled-on plaster-of-Paris.
Coffee growing cold now, the dregs slithering down the side of my cup like candle-wax. A swarthy tarty lady with a granite bosom orders latte and chews on a Greggs Cornish pasty on the next table. A peroxide blonde drives a Network Rail parcels trundler at a fair lick across the concourse. It bleeps out a repetitive, monotonous warning message, like an aural lighthouse, one bleep every ten seconds.
I’ve finished my coffee now. A small pool of dull brown molasses reposes in the bottom of my cup. I recognise somebody. It’s that dwarf from North Berwick. I played badminton against him a few times. I talked to him six months ago, after the last game we played. He’d been in for an operation. What was it? Hernia? Pacemaker? Artificial leg? It doesn’t matter – I put him down as an egregious sort with some weird mid-atlantic Scottish accent. He’s galloped off to platform 14 for the Paisley train but I’m in no hurry, just soaking up the atmosphere here.
A scruffy pigeon pecks around on the marble-tiled floor. Must have a cast-iron beak. Nothing for it around here, just some cigarette ash from granite bosom next door.
A ‘Towrite’ electric truck hauls two trade waste bins. Each contains the stark legend ‘Caution – vehicle may stop suddenly.’ It does, causing the cast-iron-beaked pigeon to ‘fly up and flutter around.’ Again the ear-splitting intermittent wail of the lugubrious alarm.
A fresh phalanx of travellers shambles by. A woman in a blue hat, a bearded scruff carrying a dozen discoloured rucksacks on a porter’s trolley, a father dragging a reluctant child clad in hooped stockings, a fat man carrying a rolled-up newspaper.
Life goes on in this precious railway station and, for once, I am pleased to be part of it.