Until recent times the Glasgow Fair Fortnight meant an enforced two-week break in mid-July, when most of the city’s workforce departed to points south and west, known colloquially as going doon the watter. Rothesay on the Isle of Bute was the resort of choice within our family, having rejected Dunoon after a miserable holiday spent in quarantine when my siblings and me went down with rubella and when on another occasion I almost drowned, fully clothed, in the town’s outdoor swimming pool. Oh, happy days…
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Unlike other diehard urbexers in this burg – risking life, limb and liberty in pursuit of derelict buildings, tunnels and mysterious corners – I stick to the highway. Which on the main artery to southside Glasgow gets all the harder. Hour by hour, shift by shift, the most visible new track in the city, the M74 Extension, ploughs over Eglinton Street, the old A77 - through entire communities whose names – Polmadie, Oatlands, Dalmarnock – may be lost forever in the span of a generation. So obtrusive is this road, such is the alienation it promotes, the government might as well put up a Border Control and reinstate the old Gorbals Leprosy Hospital while they’re at it.
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Last summer I was contacted by a freelance journalist, Gordon Cairns, who claimed to have found my blog ‘by chance’ - the best way, I reckon. His pitch: that 2009 was the 25th anniversary of the first publication of Glasgow’s Secret Geometry, so he asked if I would contribute to an article about Harry Bell. Sure, be glad to, I replied. That I never heard from him again came as no surprise since he had to sell the idea to the national broadsheets first, a tall order and - sadly - a missed opportunity since plainly the papers didn’t buy, presumably because the idea sprang from beyond the M25, with no name talent attached. Surely Harry Bell deserves some recognition?
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