and trip down memory lane for me (and a little for Hillary).
Slept in! Till 7:30.
Total business of the day was ‘memories’ of being a uni student here 41 years ago.
First up a walk through Glasgow uni at Hill Head – postgraduate club building demolished, probably falling down after 150 years and too much student drinking,
Byres Road a thriving gentrified street of cafes and expensive shops, Ditto Great Western Road.
Ubiquitous Chip in Asher Lane still there but now an upmarket restaurant not an affordable place for professors to take their secretaries for lunch.
Bus out to the Bearsden labs, labs bulldozed and now a multi storey cancer research lab but the RHODODENDRON bush from which I took most of the samples foe my PhD sap cavitation work is still there! As is the maple/sycamore that JAC Smith used for his maple syrup research a couple of years earlier. The shop that we used to walk so far to to get the lab copies of The Times (Heather’s choice) and The Guardian (my choice) is still there as a hairdresser or something but instead of being the massive hike from the lab that I remembered is only 200 metres from the lab door. We were so unused to walking in those days.
Bus back to town via Hyndland Road where my first student shared flat was, then a crumbling relic, now a highly desirable des res. Into the day I shared a room with German Mateus and his pregnant French girlfriend while the lease was held by Laksman who went on to become THE world expert on oral candadiasis with over 750 publications and visiting Professorships all around the world. The lease was held by a refugee Kenyan Indian (Mohan), and Laksman’s friend was Mannosan, a Tamil to Laksman’s Sinhalese. Somewhere in there was a Palestinian refugee kicked out of his ancestral lands by the Jews. We all got on well.
The later student flats, one of which was growing mushrooms out of my bedroom wall and the last with ice on the inside of my bedroom window while lovers loved in the back lane below are now also highly valued renovated flats
Into town.
Sauchiehall has slid way downmarket from being a street of smart cafes to now a string of nightclubs, cheap boozers and hamburger joints. Covid and the St Enochs Square shopping centre at the far end of Buchannan Street did it in.
Rennie McIntosh’s Tea Rooms finally got my custom, very swank. I hope they survive until Sauchiehall recovers.
Then a complete loop on the Underground with all new carriages and stations. Still smells the same of sewerage and mould as before though.
Then a birthday dinner with the LEJOGers at the new Shish Mahal (the same owners but the original on Great Western Road fell into the Kelvin River while I was still at uni there. Bet you the young waiter then is now the old, fed up maitre’d now. Great food. Would have gone to the Koh I Noor that both Hillary and I independently frequented in the late ’70s but that has now closed. The name now goes to a take away burger and chips bar. Even the best businesses fall without interested operators.
And so to bed.
Overall impression is that Glasgow still feels comfortable and ‘my sort of place’ as it did in the 1970’s but it is enormously more busy, huge increase in traffic, major revitalisation of decrepit parts even out to the notorious Anniesland, Maryhill, Clydebank and Easterhouse flats that or being rebuilt or refurbished. Some parts surged early (Sauchihall) and need a second round while outer areas are now getting some love.
Life goes on. The young Melbourne Fine Arts graduate running the YHA we stayed at is trying to line up post graduate enrolment at Uni of Glasgow Fine Arts Faculty, a bit like me working on North Sea oil rigs while hoping for a PhD placement.
