Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

This comment, and some of
the more appetising components of the smell, reminded us that we
were ravenous, so we bought sandwiches and bottles of beer from a
stall in the station and carried them out to George Square.
    We sat down on a bench by a grassy knoll under the statue of
the Deliverer.
    ‘Shee that,’ Menial said, pointing upwards as she
munched. ‘It’sh mean.’
    ‘What?’
    She swallowed. ‘The statue. The old city fathers must
have been a bit stingy.’
    I looked up. ‘No argument about the city fathers,’
I said. They’re still tight-fisted. But that statue looks
fine to me.’
    ‘The horse is black,’ Menial pointed out. She
tapped the handle of her knife on a fetlock. ‘And cast in
bronze. The lady herself is green -just copper. They got out the
oxy-acetylene torches and hacked off the original rider, a king
or general or whatever, and stuck the Deliverer in his
place!’
    I stood up and paced around it, peering.
    ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘You can see
the joins. I must have looked at that statue a hundred times, and
not noticed anything wrong with it.’ I looked up at the
lady’s head. ‘And she has a different face from the
one in Canon Town, and they’re both different from any
pictures I’ve seen of the Deliverer.’
    ‘Well, there you go, colha Gree,’ she said.
‘Some things a tinker can teach a scholar, eh?’
    ‘Oh aye,’ I said. I sat down again. ‘Mind
you, it could hardly be just parsimony – it’s a fine
piece of work after all, and they’ve done her hair in
gold.’
    Ton’s gold paint,’ she said scornfully.
‘And as for artistry, the breed and the trappings of the
horse are all wrong for the time and the
circumstances.’
    She was right there, too, when I looked. This was no steppe
horse, bare-back broken, roughly saddled, such as was shown quite
authentically in CanonSquare. Instead, it was a hussar’s
mount, in elaborate caparison. But I thought then, and still
think, that the representation of the Deliverer herself was well
done. A fine example of the Glasgow style; which, perhaps, makes
the equine bodge appropriate, and part of the artist’s
point.
    We binned our litter and headed for the nearest tramway stop,
in Buchanan Street. The transport system is one of Glasgow City
Council’s proudest public works, a more than adequate
replacement for the great Underground circle, which was –
it’s said -one of the wonders of the ancient world. Judging
by the remnants of it that here and there have outlasted
centuries of flooding and subsidence, it is quite possible to
agree that such it must have been.
    The tram came along, bell clanging, and we jumped on and paid
our groats and clattered like children up the spiral steps to the
upper deck. The bell rang again and the tram lurched forward,
creaking up Buchanan Street and swaying as it turned the corner
into Sauchiehall.
    Glasgow’s main drag looked clogged with traffic, but
everything – steam-engine and motor-car and horse-cart and
bicycle alike – made way for the tram’s implacable
progress. The pedestrians, at this time of the day, were mosdy
women shopping. But all of them, whether young lasses just out of
school or mothers with young children or retired ladies at their
leisure, had to pick up their skirts, their pokes or their weans
and run for their lives when the tram bore down on a crossing.
The shops and offices from recent centuries are built of logs and
planks, and rarely go higher than two storeys. The older,
pre-Deliverance buildings are of stone; some have as many as five
floors. In ancient times there were much higher buildings, but
most of them weremade of concrete, which doesn’t last well,
and -agonising though it may be for archaeology – almost
all of their structures have long since been plundered for steel
and glass. Their foundations give rectangular patterns to the
growth of trees in the forests around Glasgow: Pollock Fields,
Possil Wood, Partick Thorn.
    Farther away, to the west, we could just make out the haze and
smoke from the Glydeside shipyards, on which most of
Glasgow’s prosperity depended. The shipyards were the
seedbed of the skills which – along with Kishorn’s
deep-water dock, almost unique on this side of the Atlantic
– had made Scotland the logical site for the
launch-platform’s construction.
    At the top of Sauchiehall there’s a new stone bridge, to
replace the original concrete