Hill Street blues

Standing at the police cordon at Hill Street, a small group watch the faint fumes of the beast drift out of the upper window of the Mack. Each police cordon had its own huddle of grief, nosiness, news cameras or photographers all staring at the final exhalation of the fire's devastation.
Standing there I reflected on my relationship with the building. Why had I come to see ? Which one of the crowd gathered was I?
Well, I do love Mackintosh and have many many photographs of this and his other buildings. However, it is the Art School that this building is such an iconic part of that I make my connections. They are not direct connections, as I have never been there as a student, but a connection to my Ex, a friend and a flatmate who all went there.

The friend is the one who drew this . He only lasted a year and yet it was a year where I inhabited his world of student life there. I have to say that I loved the eclectic mix of international eccentrics and people I instinctively identified with. They reminded me of a lot of the great people I met in Backpackers and Youth Hostels around the world that I had not long returned from. I liked that I found these kind of people in Glasgow, I just didn't know where to find them before.

The second connection was with an old flatmate I'll call Frank. He had been through Art school and was a Fine Art painter who specialised in giant oil paintings. There was always some palaver with Frank and one day he told me of the time he stole the MacIntosh clock from the Art School while walking home drunk one night.
He said that, in his mind, he felt bitter about his experience there and came to the conclusion that as he'd had his precious time stolen from him he would eh... steal time from them.
He was woken up late the next day by a flatmate who told him that the clock that was sitting at the bottom of his bed was currently on Reporting Scotland with Jackie Bird detailing how the iconic clock had been stolen. If he didn't feel sick enough from his hangover he suddenly felt a whole lot sicker.
So, he phoned the police up and told them the close where he'd planked it and all seemed well and he breathed a sigh of relief. Until ... he woke up a couple of weeks later to find that he'd nicked it AGAIN after another drunken night !

The final connection, and maybe most important one, was with my Ex. She studied Architecture there before deciding to travel a bit and, ultimately, reject Architecture and become an Occupational Therapist.
She still had all her friends there, and this was when I was just starting to go out with her and feeling vulnerable that such a wee honey would want to go out with the likes of myself. There was an ex of my Ex there. An arty Architect who looked and talked the way my fantasy of myself would do. He was still into my Ex. I felt doubt, and really this doubt never left me, that I had mistakenly fallen into a world where I didn't belong. The Art School then represented all I would never be. The limits of my abilities against the triumph of others. I remember writing a poem at that time about this feeling that I would never be able to "fully light" her life up. Well, it took 18 years but proved correct.

And so, as these memories smoulder through time I am left in the crowd staring at the loss of such an important building to Glasgow. But 'People Make Glasgow', isn't that the new slogan? And disasters such as these always bring out the best in us. They make us see what is or is not important to us. Clearly this institution and historical building is important in the creative life of our city and how we see ourselves. We'll get it back.