Saturday 4 March 2023
I have hung the washing outdoors. I could tell this was overly optimistic as soon as I went out and realised the sun was deceptive; it’s quite chilly. Hmm, my laptop app says it’s one degree above freezing. Anyway, it looks sunny enough for clothes to be hanging outdoors.
Yesterday, taking advantage of the last day of a post-Covid-normal train service before three months of rail replacement buses, we drove to Lockerbie and caught the train to Glasgow. Third city visit in a week. What an amazing city. It seems unfair to compare Glasgow to Edinburgh but it amazes me how geographically close they are (less than fifty miles) and yet how massively different they are.
First thing you notice on arriving at the stations is that there are far fewer tourists and already Glasgow seems more culturally diverse than Edinburgh. I’m not going to go on about what I perceive to be the most widely divergent features of each, but something I particularly like about Glasgow is that it feels like a real, working city, where the vast majority of people you pass by work there, live there, study there (that is my assumption/feeling, not a fact).
We got home shortly before six. I was indoors, sorting some of the food we’d bought. After five or ten minutes, I wondered what Chris was doing outside – I’d thought he was just locking the car and coming in. I found him near the top of the garden, in awe about the stillness, the setting sun and the views. Chris used to turn his nose up about trips to the countryside, said he couldn’t imagine ever being happy living outside a city. He was, by Chris’s standards, giddy when he came back indoors, enthusing over the calming space, air and views around us, saying he hadn’t realised he felt a need to de-city. I know that he too had loved being in Glasgow, but it is a gift to be able to return home somewhere like this and feel contentment and happiness about where you live. I think it’s hard to switch cities off when you live in the midst of them, however much you love your city home. Sometimes, I think it is important to be able to switch a city off. Maybe that sounds a bit pretentious, it isn’t meant to, it’s just the very simple way I am beginning to perceive cities. I need an on/off button for city life because sometimes (talking about being at home rather than out and about) the sirens, the traffic, the trains, the people noises all around (particularly in flats or gardens) make it difficult to relax at home.
All that said, I am looking forward to returning to London for a week or so in two weeks’ time and I am also still feeling kind of unsettled here. There are a lot of factors that could be causing that, from my sense that the house is still a work-in-progress to my various work and income stresses. This morning, however, I am looking forward to a slow day, going to Selkirk for the first farmers’ market we’ve been here for and sitting around at home.
