Born into a single end in a Glasgow tenement with a shared toilet on the landing. Grew up in the country’s most ambitious New Town, part of a social experiment. Town for Tomorrow. A life lived in Scotland’s urban jungles, islands, caravans, crofts, villages, these in their own way as treacherous as any city. Ending up in another of our invented places, this one built by the British Fisheries Society for the exploitation of herring. And people. Raised, educated, worked, played and stayed, even with all its baggage of putting you, keeping you in your place. I kent your faither. I knew the man who knew the man who ate the biled ham raw. Mocked for seen to be trying. Shortbread and ginger cordial on Hogmanay. Mussels at the Barras and the stink of seaweed at low tide on a hot day. Poverty for the masses, riches for the few. Christ of St John of the Cross at Kelvingrove Art Gallery, winos in the park and the smell of the subway. Sunset over the Summer Isles and running over Ullapool Hill. Deer in the garden and dog shite in the street. A cold beer on the harbour wall on a blue sky afternoon and no doing what yer telt. It’s the ghost of Govan shipyards and Ivor Cutler and Tunnocks Caramel Wafers. It’s aw the art schools and the art students and the poets and musicians and a country that sanctioned and industrialised the beating of children with a leather tawse. It’s the ones who try to make it better and the ones that milk it. It’s Chic Murray and yer maw’s lentil soup. It’s Embra’s smug Georgian terraces. There’s shame here, in these streets and hills and islands, deservedly so but there’s Mother’s Pride too in a country with a long history that feels new. That feels like it’s trying to learn how to be itself.
Written in response to Scotland, You’re No Mine(this link will open in a new window) by Hannah Lavery.