As Jason Bourne hits 95kph on the M10 from Sheremetyevo Airport to Central Moscow, I’m on the back seat of his VW Passat wondering if I’ll reach my destination in one piece. This is stunt driving like I’ve never known in a city that already feels familiar. Under heavy skies, wide highways are fringed with tower blocks, toothstumps in the mouth of the Moscow suburbs, all the more prominent on this vast, flat terrain. This is cityscape on a scale hard to fathom, in spite of the taxi driver’s efforts to compress time and space as he swerves and weaves across lanes onto the M9, the main drag into town. Any faster and I’ll either be dead or by some process of divine will and magic, find myself back on the M8 and home in time for dinner.
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As someone who got early release from Edinburgh - *rubs wrists* - after four years – I knew immediately I was firmly back on terra cognito when I spotted a few familiar signs, typically screenprinted on corrugated plastic. These signs are a prominent fixture in any city, but in Edinburgh – at least in the genteel district I was privileged enough to live in – they were invisible. Stepping off the bus, train or car within a mile or two radius of Glasgow City Centre, the most casual observer can’t fail to notice the security sign. Or rather, the name and phone number – rarely a website address – of a host of companies announcing themselves as the guardians of vacant and occupied properties or shiny developments yet to be populated, a tough proposition in these doomiest of days.
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