Glasgow - A Celebration

Published: 1984 Edinburgh, Mainstream
It doesn’t take a starry-eyed romantic to detect in Glasgow of the Eighties an urge to celebrate. Celebrate what is not entirely clear, in the way the old industries were right there to be weighed and measured. But the reality of Glasgow, once entwined with those industries, was something of its own, and not just a by-product of furnaces and forges. More than most cities, Glasgow was to its people a sensation, a twist of the mind, a quirky view of the universe and a cheerful tolerance of human failings.In recent times Billy Connolly’s outrageous, subversive attitude to the conventional solidities of life has been the archetypal Glasgow, more than the measured, or blinkered analyses of politicians and academics, though they are not all to be ignored. Whatever it is Michael Kelly has done (and it’s not easy to pin it down) he has contributed dramatically to the sheer pleasure of the city. And Edwin Morgan is no dusty academic. His philosophic tussle with the Underground was nearly as funny as the poems he wrote for it and saw rejected.The impossible Alisdair Gray – the word is used in open-mouthed admiration – has startled the London critical industry and practically everybody else with his recent writings. Liz Lochhead is obviously going to convert the place in a reasonably bloodless feminist revolution. Jack House, who fortunately goes on forever, started decades ago on his real life work, which is to demonstrate the identity of Glasgow to its citizens, as Burns restored the identity of Scotland, and although there are differences, Burns would be the last to be offended by the comparison.But Glasgow is not only composed of its own, by the tough new wave of poets, the Leonards, the Mulrines, the McDougalls, by its own writers and pundits. It has a dangerously seductive effect on incomers who can’t find what native Glaswegians can ever have to complain about. People coming in from the East, from Germany and France get quickly dazzled and conquered.Glasgow may not be infinitely varied – in some ways it is curiously consistent – but everybody sees his or her own Glasgow, and in this cheerful, sometimes narky, collection a variety of Glasgow addicts bare feeling and fantasies in celebration of its eccentric wonders.
Cliff Hanley
Copyright 2025 The Estate of Clifford Hanley