MARYHILL MUSINGS

Here I am on a cold, bright morning, sipping a cup of hot, sweet tea, looking out over Maryhill from an overheated, sterile office not 100 yards from Partick Thistle’s football ground.  From my desk, I can see right out to the west and the hills that divide Glasgow from the Highlands and the coast.  Signs of redevelopment are all around.  Cubic boxes rise like silos from the ruins of the ancient tenements that once adorned the streets.  Many of the tenements that are left have a scrubbed, bright, optimistic look.  However, there are some parts of the region that are just too ghastly for words, putting me in mind of Beirut on a bad day.  Here, litter is strewn all over the pavements and in the gutters, few folk seem to bother to pick up their dog’s dirt, the shops are peeling or closed for good, and the shoppers and street-walkers look about as lugubrious as Max Wall.  I’m in Maryhill three days per week right through the winter, and I don’t really know how I’m going to get on.  Hotel life simply does not suit me, and I am not the type of person to frequent the bars and restaurants of Argyle Street searching in vain for learned conversation or what the Irish call ‘craic’.  If we’re in for another Siberian winter, as the papers have stated this week, and we know they always speak the truth, then I’m in for a thin time indeed. They filmed the television series ‘Taggart’ here, but no-one has, as yet, thought to open up a tourist trail highlighting the various multi-storey flats where the hundred or so ‘mur-r-r-r-ders’ occurred over the years. It’s a toss-up between Maryhill and Midsomer as to which area in the UK has the highest murder count. Only Bergerac truly knows the answer.

A group of lazy pigeons ‘fly up and flutter around’, like the ones in the Bob Dylan song/poem ‘Three Angels’.  I reflect for the millionth time on how I wish I could write poetry like him.  Cars rumble by, swerving to avoid the potholes in the third-world roads hereabouts. I’ve never seen anything like these roads.  Obviously, not one penny has been spent on their maintenance following two desperate snow-girt winters, and, for a city that is slashed through with motorways, expressways, flyovers and road tunnels, that’s not very clever.  It’s another reason why I am using my old friend the train to get back and forward, even though it takes three hours to get to and from Haddington, whereas it only takes two by car. I am spoiled for choice: there are now three rail routes that take the traveller from Edinburgh to Glasgow and back.  The line via Airdrie and Bathgate, a completely new permanent way linking those two towns, is my preferred option, being much less well populated.  This is despite the Strathclyde Passenger Transport rhubarb-and-custard class 170’s being de-trimmed to the point that they remind me of corporation buses.  At least they have opening windows.  Roll on Friday, when I can quit these shores and lumber back to Haddington with my case of dirty washing for another four days’ respite.