![]() My father-in-law, a man not usually given to flights of fancy, swears she was a ghost. They glanced away and looked back again to find she was gone. ![]() Near the bottom, they saw a shadowy old woman attired in black. They crept past writers (including the author of Wee Willie Winkie) and sculptors, rich industrialists, sea merchants and esteemed churchmen and a towering John Knox. They crept through Celtic crosses, obelisks, toppled urns, headless statues and mausoleums. Once they dared each other to enter the cemetery after dark. Hardly a deterrent, the street kids scaled the railings and crept in regardless, sometimes tearing their clothes on the railings. The gates of the Necropolis were kept locked, no doubt to keep young scallywags like him out. The cathedral area was Alan’s stamping ground. He lived in the shadows of the Cathedral and the atmospheric Victorian cemetery, a child of poverty among Glasgow’s great and good. I went there as a tourist and unwittingly returned my father-in-law to the place of his birth, finding myself touching a personal past. Nowhere is this more evident than at the Necropolis in the Cathedral Quarter. It’s easy to forget it was once called the ‘Empire’s second city,’ it was a thriving industrial city full of sea merchants, shipbuilders, tradesmen, entrepreneurs, inventors, ground-breaking scientists, artists and intellects. It’s smart, gritty, witty, vibrant and alive. Glasgow is down-to-earth, has real character. There’s nothing twee, contrived, touristy or pretty-pretty about Glasgow. You might think of bad, bad food: iron brew, a nuclear-orange sugar-fueled drink, the deep-fried Mars bars (surely an urban myth?), bloody black pudding, haggis consisting of the parts most butchers throw away, flat sausages, 90% fat and 10% meat, and sugar-packed cakes. You might think of a sprawling urban mess, notoriously dysfunctional high-rise flats, 70s concrete monstrosities and dark, forbidding sandstone Victorian tenement buildings and other utilities blackened by decades of pollution. Think of Glasgow and what do you think of: the Glasgow kiss (a greeting with a head butt), alcohol-fueled street brawls, sectarian violence between Celtic and Rangers supporters and thick, threatening, indecipherable accents. A Tree, The Bird, The Fish And The Bell: A Boy, A Church And A Cemetery
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