Category: Glasgow

Remnants of a former glory – 22 January 2017

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Drove in to Glasgow because Scamp wanted to get a new travel bag.  She found one in Debenhams and while she was there, I perused Cass Art, but there were no great bargains to be had.

Coffee in Cafe Nero and then we were done, well almost.  I spotted a Remnant Kings  on the first floor across the road and we went in to have a browse.  I found a piece of cloth printed with bow ties to make a bow tie.  Should look good.  When we came out I was amazed at the decoration on the landing outside the shop.  That’s where the photos came from.  It never ceases to amaze me, the decoration that’s in closes and stair wells in Glasgow.

Came home and the sky hadn’t changed at all.  Still milky white with no shadows.  Felt hemmed in, so went out for a walk around St Mo’s but saw nothing interesting and therefore photographed nothing.

Added a photo of the new bow tie cloth.

It appears that the screamers AKA Gems will be having a debrief tomorrow after their gig last week.  It seems that a recording contract may be in the offing.  I’ll be elsewhere, whatever the weather.

“Excuse me …” – 20 January 2017

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Earlier today:
I’m sitting alone watching and listening to the films of the people’s stories in the Disappearing Glasgow exhibition in the Lighthouse. I’ve just had to shut up a couple of wahoos who were pontificating loudly about the photography round the walls.  I just got madder and madder with them and eventually turned round and called across the room “Excuse me. Do you mind if I listen to this?” That did the trick.  My seven days beard growth and my old battered and torn Bergy jacket probably helped.  They shut up then left … quietly.  They were english, so they didn’t know how to behave.

Later today:
When I eventually rose to leave, about twenty minutes later, there were six other people sitting around me.  I hadn’t noticed them arriving.  They hadn’t said a word throughout the films.  They were Scottish.  Brought up properly.
Definitely an exhibition worth seeing and hearing if you get the chance.

Glasgow was dull today with one of those milky white skies that simply drag you further down.  A January Sky.  No directional light, so no shadows.  I couldn’t see anything I wanted to photograph, so I got the train back home.

Stepped off the train at Croy and realised that it was only just coming up to 2pm.  It seemed a shame to just drive home and stare at a glowing screen for an hour or two, so I decided to travel east in the hope of finding some brighter skies in Stirling and also hoping that Tiso would still be in business there and would have a pair of the excellent Bergy gloves in a small size to fit Scamp, and that is what I did.

I didn’t get the brighter skies, but I did get a couple of photos.  One of the Wallace Monument through the mist and another of a closed down pub.  I also got the gloves.  I considered stopping for a coffee, but then decided I’d rather be on my way home before rush hour, because rush hour on the M9/M80 is a nightmare of drivers changing lanes, changing back, cutting in, cutting out. Just a situation to be avoided, and that is what I did.

I don’t know what we’re doing tomorrow.  The weather fairies say it will be fine with sunshine.

There’s been a Murder! – 19 January 2017

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Not a real one, or at least not one I’ve had anything to do with … honest!

After completing my initial roadie’s duties for Scamp and Gems today I had a couple of hours free to do as I wanted.  I wanted to drive in to Glasgow to get some sketching done before my Sunday cut-off.  That’s what I wanted to do, but I didn’t achieve it.  I got in to Glasgow without any problem, but when I got there, the two parking places I was heading for were full and I found my third, and realistically my last option given my time constraints, being taken away by a white BMW as I was driving towards it.  Nae luck.  The parking gods were against me, so I turned around and headed back home.  I stopped off to get ice cream at Soave’s in Muirhead so it wouldn’t have been a totally wasted journey.  Scamp has tempted me into joining her in her passion for Scottish Tablet Ice Cream.  It really is lovely.

I’d just got home and stashed the ice cream in the freezer when she phoned to tell me that ’George her faithful Roadie’ 1 was once again required to drive the stars home.  Got home and remembered that I didn’t have a PoD and it was too dark by then to get anything at all, let alone anything with a decent ISO rating.  Then I remembered seeing a framed photo in the Design Fair in Merchant Square before Christmas.  It was of a group of tiny wee 1/72 scale figures dressed as a forensic team photographing a dictionary open at the word ‘Murder’.  I don’t have any of these really expensive figures that would do for the project, but I do have plenty of minifigs, the notorious Weemen and so I got to work setting it up.  I used the Oly 10 because you can remote control it with an iPhone through a private WiFi connection.  No, I don’t understand it either, but it works.  After a couple of dummy runs I had the PoD you see above.

That’s about it for the day.  Tomorrow I’m hoping to park at the station and let the train take the strain in to Glasgow.  A much better idea, because they can park it for me too.

  1. “George my faithful Roadie” is a track on Billy Connolly’s 1974 album, “Cop Yer Whack For This”  Listen to the track HERE ↩

In The Wild – 18 January 2017

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Today we drove to The Fort in what used to be Provanhall in Easterhouse.  Where Scamp was brought up.  It certainly doesn’t look like it now.  It’s a Retail Park.  We were just getting out of the house for a while because it was depressingly dull and the howling dogs next door were doing my head in.  People who want dogs as a status symbol and who go out to work leaving neighbours to put up with their howling should be prevented from keeping pets.  They obviously don’t care about them and leave others to suffer from their noise pollution.  Maybe NLC will be visiting them soon.

While Scamp wandered round the shops, she left me in the creche that is Waterstones book shop.  It’s just a small book shop, but has some interesting new drawing books and it was one of them I tried to enter into my new app, Airtable.  That’s when the honeymoon ended.  I couldn’t get a signal on my iPhone.  Unusual in a shop these days when everywhere seems to offer ’free’ WiFi.  Yes, it is free, but you have to ask for the password and obtaining it is sometimes like pulling teeth or stone exsanguination.  Today was different, no 3G or 4G and no WiFi and therefore, no Airtable because it needs to download your database from ‘the cloud’.  I opened Bento and it obligingly added my book to the database I’ve been using for about five years.  When I returned home and Googled “No offline access Airtable” I found that over 40 people had registered the same complaint and the desire for that offline access.  I filled in the questionnaire and became number 44 in the list.  I don’t expect much will be done in the short term to fix this, but what is the point of making an app for a portable device that demand internet access.  In a perfect world, 24/7 internet would be the norm, but I live in Scotland where even the trains don’t run on New Year’s Day.  We’re one step away from horses pulling carts along the street.  What surprised me most though was the number of complaints from users in the US.  It appears that away from the cities, they are as bereft of trustworthy internet access as we are here.
So…. The search for a replacement for Bento continues.

When we came back from The Fort and I’d taken the wrong turn coming out of the carpark for the 100th time, there was just enough light to grab some shots of Mr Grey at St Mo’s.  Then the light mysteriously disappeared and I headed home for mince and tatties with ‘roop’  (AKA Beetroot).  But I didn’t do a treasure hunt, JIC 😉

I was a helper at Shan’s beginners salsa tonight.  Oh dear, I wonder why these poor beginners keep coming back.  This is not entertainment or education, this is purgatory.  Badly explained, badly demonstrated dance moves with as little humour as Marcus Wareing.  I felt embarrassed to be helping in this class and I don’t think I’ll be back again.  Jamie G’s class by comparison was a bundle of laughs as it always is.  Unlike normal classes, all the moves tonight had ‘real’ names, and mostly Spanish names too.  Great fun.  Nobody ridiculed or made to feel small.  He always denegrates himself rather than pour scorn on others.  A great teacher.  Many could learn from him.

Being a roadie for tomorrow Gems tomorrow when they head the bill at the Link on Cumbersheugh.

Cauld day in the Toon – 13 January 2017

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We went in to Glasgow, drove into Glasgow.  The ring road was still being dug up and we weren’t sure the buses were running normally and besides, we didn’t want to be sitting in a bus whose heater was pumping out cold air for 45minutes.  That’s one of the reasons we bought a car.

I bought myself some interfacing for stiffening the cloth I’m going to make a bow tie with.  Got it in JL (didn’t get it delivered!) for £1.50!  The bowtie itself, the prototype, will be made from an old pillow case.  That’s the essentials bought.  This weekend I’ll try to put it into practice.

After JL we walked down Bucky Street and on to Argyle Street, then up Miller Street to Paesano.  For the first time ever, we had to wait for a table.  When we got one five minutes later the food was just as good as ever.

After being fed, we went for a coffee in Café Nero in St Enoch’s.  Scamp went to wander round the St Enoch’s Centre and I went to do a quick sketch of the suspension bridge over the Clyde.  It’s rough, but it’s done and it’s on time.

When we got home, Scamp realised that she had fogotten to post a card in town, so I volunteered to post it in Condorrat.  I took my camera of course and that’s where the sunset shot came from.  It’s more a gloaming shot really.  Gloaming means more than sunset.  It’s that golden hour before the sun sets and it’s also the afterglow from the set sun.

Gloaming.  Make it a word you use some time today, in its correct context.

Frosty Morning – 5 January 2017

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Cold and frosty morning to be more precise.  I got up around half past eight and after making Scamp’s breakfast, I went out for an early morning photographic foray into St Mo’s.  The light wasn’t quite as good as I’d hoped, because the sun hadn’t risen above the pine trees and the frost wasn’t as thick as I’d have liked.  Probably not enough dampness in the air for a change.  However, I did get a few shots worth posting.  I was just taking my boots off when I got back and there was a knock at the door.  My sewing machine had arrived, delivered by Parcel Force.  Why couldn’t JL have told me they were delivering it?  Why must everything be a mystery with them?

After breakfast and a dive into today’s sudoku, I had a go at loading a bobbin with thread and doing a couple of trial runs.  It’s so smooth and quiet compared to Scamp’s old Jones machine.  You even get an instructional DVD with it, showing you the basics of threading it and starting the first few stitches.  Heavens, when we first got the Jones machine over 40 years ago, we didn’t have a TV far less a DVD player.  They were as unimaginable as the science fiction of 2001!

I needed to get this ‘pure affro’ of a hairstyle of mine cut, so we drove in to Glasgow to get it done.  Before that, Scamp bought herself a new Samsung tablet from, of all places, John Lewis!  The price was right and we weren’t getting it delivered so I forgave her.  After the haircut, lunch was in McPhee’s fish and chip shop and although it was a bit greasy which I knew I’d suffer for later, I enjoyed every mouthful.

That about summed up the day.  Cold but bright with the temperature not rising above zero until the late afternoon when cloud rolled in

Goodbye 2016 – 31 December 2016

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Today we didn’t want to be bumbling around the house all day, so made a frail excuse and headed in to Glasgow on the bus.  From there we got the subway to the west end, to be more exact Kelvin Hall station and went for lunch at Usha’s where food is served in tapas style.  It used to be totally vegetarian, but now it feeds the carnivore too.  I’m not going to have you salivating by repeating all our choices, but Scamp’s favourite was Aloo Gobi and mine was Patina Ghosht.

By the time we came out, it was bucketing down.  It was teeming.  We walked up Byres Road and while Scamp went to Waitrose – our frail reason for coming – I wandered round Waterstones.  It was there I found my PoD.  Hazy and I have been following Chris Riddell on Facebook for some time and this looked like an original.  After getting the shot, I met up with Scamp and we walked across the road to Oran Mor and had a drink and a chance to get warm.  Oran Mor is an old church that has been converted into a pub.  It’s pretty old-fashioned inside with sanded floor boards and dark furnishings and it suited us perfectly today because it was warm with good beer and wine.  Unfortunately, we had to get home today, so we restricted our drinking to one pint of Deuchars for Scamp and a large glass of Shiraz for me 😉

Outside the rain was still falling, so we decided to cut our west end visit short and get the subway home.  When we got to the platform and the train arrived, it was absolutely ram-jam-full of Rangers supporters, all of them with very long faces.  Today was the annual Old Firm match between bitter rivals Rangers and Celtic, and it didn’t take a genius to work out who had won.  It must have been the quietest subway journey I’ve had.  Every single one of the supporters was locked into his or her own little world, and it was colder in that world than the weather outside.

Got the bus home and that was the end of the Glasgow trips for 2016.

Now to the questions:

Best thing I’ve done this year?
Without doubt, it must be completing Inktober  Not only did it make me sketch, but it made me sketch outside and that was a big challenge for me.

Best ‘Toy off the Rack’.
It must be the Linx 10.1″ 2-in-1 tablet/laptop.  Very portable but very powerful too.

Worst thing I’ve done?
Technology again, but it’s installing El Capitan on the Mac.  It’s the ‘Windows Vista’ of the Mac OS.  The operating system that just didn’t operate.  Wish I’d stuck to Mountain Lion.

Challenges for next year

  • Sketch more.
  • Paint again.
  • Gym and Swim at least once a week.
  • Talk to more people.
  • Smile more!

Let’s see how it pans out.

A Thursday that feels like Friday – 29 December 2016

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Because Christmas fell on a Sunday this year, the entire week has been one day out.  Well, that’s my excuse anyway.  Today was Thursday but it felt like Friday.

Scamp was away in the morning taking her sister to a Costa for a coffee.  I got the sewing machine out and swore at it for a while then repaired the pocket of an old pair of jeans, then swore at it a bit more before patching the pockets of another two pairs of jeans.  I finished off the process by swearing at it a bit more.  It doesn’t really owe us anything as it was bought over 40 years ago.  It cost about £25 in those pre-millennium times.

In the afternoon we drove in to Glasgow.  For a change we thought we’d park in the Concert Hall carpark.  We always get parked there in the basement.  Not today.  Basement was full and we had to go all the way to the roof to get a space.  It’s ages since we had to go all the way up there.  Brilliant view.  That’s where today’s PoD came from.

I was in Glasgow to get my hair cut and Scamp was going shopping.  However, it was standing room only in the barbers, so I decided to wait until next year to get my hair cut.  We wandered round John Lewis looking for bargains – there were none.  Then through Buchanan Galleries but there were no bargains there either, or if there were, they were well hidden, so we went for lunch in JL.  Had another look at new sewing machines, but they didn’t have the one I wanted – out of stock, but in stock in Embra.  Apparently this one just works, you don’t have to swear at it.  I wasn’t sure I’d like that.  It’s the swearing that makes it interesting you see.

Back home I made the decision and bought the machine from the Embra store.  It will come in five working days, but with New Year a few days away, there’s no telling how far that ’five working days’ will extend to.  Now I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve made the right decision.  Will I like a sewing machine that you don’t have to swear at?  I’ll find out in ’five working days’, and I’ll let you know.  Effin’ sewing machines!

Scamp was out again tonight to a ‘Gems’ meeting (For ’meeting’ read ’drinking session’) and she had not actually been to the house before, which made it interesting for me as I was doing the driving.  We got to the street and then she admitted that she wasn’t absolutely sure of the house number either.  Honestly, you couldn’t write this stuff, although, I suppose you could.  Well, I could because I’m writing it now, but you know what I mean.  Eventually after a couple of dead ends, we found the house and the car was decanted.

Not sure what we’re doing tomorrow.

An Old Friend Returns – 28 December 2016

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Today we drove in to Glasgow, but not for shopping.  We went down Glasgow Green for a walk.  A walk down The Green is usually a Sunday pursuit, but today was dry and open, so we chose to do our Sunday walk on a Wednesday – just for a change.

There were a few folk out walking off the Xmas excesses.  Some folk had even taken to the water to do some serious rowing.  There were even some like me who were out taking photos.  It was a fine day for it with low sun and some clouds to make the sky that bit more interesting.  A most enjoyable walk, but the best was yet to come.

We always use to complete our walk with a coffee and a roll ’n’ sausage (for me) and a peppermint tea and toast (Scamp) in the Wintergarden of the People’s Palace.  Until, that is, the day when a glass panel fell from the roof of the Wintergarden some time in July.  Since then the Wintergarden has been closed.  Today it was open again and it was quite full of families too.  Even better, they had fresh rolls, fresh bread and fresh sausages.  The coffee was real.  Not like yesterday’s brown water, this was coffee.  Brilliant!

After my Sunday lunch I usually go for a walk round the plants because these are plants you only get to see in a large, enormous glasshouse like this.  Today was no exception.  It looks like the gardens section of Glasgow Council has taken the opportunity to remodel the gardens while it was closed and the difference is quite dramatic.  It take it all back Glasgow Council.  You’ve done a great job here.

We needed some milk when we got back, so rather than drive to Tesco, Scamp decided to walk to the local M&S to get some and I came along for the walk.  On the way back, I carried on with my walk round St Mo’s while Scamp went home.  I managed to get my first decent shots of a couple of deer in a long while.  I could see the animals grazing quite contentedly upwind from me through the cover of some pine trees and I was able to get the camera set, focused and ready before I quietly broke cover and got the first few shots.  Then they sensed something and their heads came up.  I stayed stock still for a few minutes still taking a few more shots before they went back to grazing.  My next step broke a twig and that was all the warning they needed.  They were off, running and jumping.  I hammered off about 10 shots in motor-wind mode before they were lost in the bushes.  That was it for photography today.  Happy, I went home.

Tomorrow is booked solid for Scamp, so I’m free to do as I please.  I may get my hair cut, ‘cos it’s a ‘Pure Afro’ as we say in this house!

Golden Light – 19 December 2016

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Today dawned, like the rest with a dull, grey cloudy sky.  It didn’t look as if it was going to get any better and it lived up to that promise, in fact it got worse.  A heavy mist came down obliterating any view that had been there.

I decided to make the best of the day and print off a first copy of my 2017 calendar.  Unfortunately, El Capitan doesn’t want to work with my Canon ip4500 printer.  Canon don’t want to supply a driver and Apple don’t care about any hardware more than seven years old as I already know.  A quick search of the internet confirmed my suspicions that there is no workaround for the problem, apart from buying a new printer.  I did manage to get the calendar printed by converting my Pages file into a PDF and using this to print it off on my old Tosh laptop.  A laptop much more than seven years old.  Despite my disappointment, or maybe because of it, I drove in to Glasgow hoping that Staples could supply me with a magenta cartridge for my ancient printer.  They could at £16.95.  Rather expensive when you find that Amazon can supply a three cart set for £26.  So Stalples is going out of business?  I think I can see why.  I didn’t buy their overpriced cart.  One interesting thing I found out is that Epson sell a 3 in 1 printer for £189, complete with two years’ worth of ink  No more dinky ink cartridges, this thing works with bottles of ink.  It sounds like a good investment as long as Apple don’t make it obsolete halfway through my second or third bottle of ink.  I’m really beginning to become pissed off with Apple’s devotion to designed obsolescence.  I may bite the bullet and go back to Mickysoft.  It’s slow and sluggish, but at least the OS just works.  Something I used to say about Apple, but not any longer.

When I was driving home my mood was lifted by the golden light making everything glow.  Now, that’s more like it.  The clouds had blown away, the mist had lifted and the sun was setting with a beautiful glancing light.  Instead of heading straight home, I took the road less travelled and with better views of the landscape.  That’s where the photo of the trees came from.  Even the mist earlier in the day had produced the water beads on the car roof and gave me one shot in the bag before I left for Glasgow.

Salsa tonight was a Christmas Extravaganza, one of JamieGal’s specialities with dancing, games, glow-sticks, silly hats and prizes.  He’d previously issued an open invitation to dancers past and present, from our school and from any other and none and there was a great party spirit.  Fun for all, that’s just his way.  Brilliant.  One of the best teachers I’ve had the pleasure to meet.

Tomorrow?  Maybe a swim.