Glasgow, but not as I know it

(I must apologise up front this is a rubbish photo, I took a few shots from the pedestrian bridge over the Clyde next to the Science Museum, but none of them came out well at all and so in order to capture what I wanted to write, I had to use this one taken from inside the museum.)



I was brought up in the east end of the city of Glasgow, in an area known as Shettleston, which was recently rated in a report in the Observer newspaper as the only place in the United Kingdom where the life expectancy (already ranked lowest in Glasgow) is falling.

I had a wonderful, positive and happy childhood. While I was never a huge fan of school itself, my school days were on the whole a positive experience. The teachers were enthusiastic and encouraging and I, and many of my classmates, achieved both good exam results and enjoyed fantastic opportunities in music, drama, sport and outdoor activities.

Yes I have stories which would scare some; the classmate who was the first to discover a dead body in the back of a car while doing an early morning paper round, a family friend who was stabbed during a brawl in the local park, numerous break-ins (including one on Christmas Eve when two old style push button telephones were stolen), the 14 year old classmates who went hungry at lunchtime so they could save their dinner money to spend on a tablet of speed on Friday night, the local swimming baths which were pretty filthy and routinely plagued with human excrement; and yes looking back there were significant problems in the area with unemployment, alcoholism and domestic violence, but I often find it hard to marry up my childhood experiences and memories with the picture of Shettleston, or the east of Glasgow in general, which is painted in the media.

I guess perhaps the thing is that when somewhere is home to you, you don't just live in the place, you actually live the place and it is part of you. So, I don't think of my home place as an area deeply scarred by social deprivation, poverty and violence, despite what the statistics might tell you, I just think of it as my childhood home. The young men being beaten up or dying as a result of pub fights or drug deals are not just statistics, they are boys who used to be two years above you at school, the man who seems old beyond his years and is fighting lung cancer is not just proof that life expectancy in the west coast of Scotland is poorer than elsewhere in the UK, he is your friend's dad, who has been out of work for as long as she can remember, and the young girl who has left home is not just a reckless and selfish teenager who is wasting her education and running into problems, she is just a friend of a friend who needs a safe place to stay for a while.

I thought a lot about my memories of Glasgow while standing on the banks of the river Clyde at Pacific Quay today. My mother-in-law wanted to take the boys to the Glasgow Science Centre (which was incredible and enjoyed so much by all of us - we will be back (and will blip something to do with the exhibits next time I promise!)) and so we were in a part of Glasgow pretty much unfamiliar to me and a world apart from the Glasgow that I grew up in.

I think I have always known it really, but in recent years I have come to accept that I am not a city girl and I think I would be more likely to downsize to a village than go back to living in a city. Certainly I know I would struggle with many aspects of city life, with the increasing ghetto-isation of different areas by class being one of the most difficult I imagine. I thought a lot about the vast differences within a city as I stood there and looked in one direction at the BBC Scotland headquarters and studios, the Armadillo, the famous squinty bridge and construction site for Scotland's new national arena, The Hydro, and in the other direction towards Kelvingrove Art Galleries, the Riverside Museum, the Waverley (the world's last sea going paddle steamer) and the Science Museum.

This is Glasgow. But not as I knew it.



(It might look a bit bleak out there but it was actually not too bad a day weather wise, for a glimpse of what I remember the weather to be like in Glasgow about 9 months of the year, check out the blip from GOD's recent visit to the Science Museum here.)