GLASGOW’S Squinter’s kind of city. In a world full of hate, despair and danger, its baseline offer remains reassuringly unchanged every time you go back: It’s a city powered by a winning combination of absolutely sound human beings and weapons-grade weed.
Squinter’s from a city where sleggin’ (that’s slagging to readers from a different cultural background) has been refined to an art form. But there have been times in Glasgow where even a lifetime of experience has been unable to save Squinter from the bone-dry, lacerating wit of Glaswegians.
Regular readers with a half-decent memory will remember the time – narrated here some years ago – that Squinter was in a bar in Glasgow one evening wearing a natty new pair of boots. Not the familiar Doc Marten’s or Timberlands, rather a more dressy Chelsea-style boot, with elasticated sides. A kindly veil of silence will be drawn over the name of the bar, but those familiar with the city may be able to whittle the possibilities down to a manageable number in the knowledge that the stairs to the toilet were the steepest that Squinter has seen in a bar. Ever, out of all the bars he’s been in all the cities and towns he’s been in Ireland and across the world.
So precipitous were the stairs that as Squinter got halfway up, a patron near the bottom found the new boots not that far from his face. Loudly he enquired: “Hey, pal! Where’d yih get they frrrooty boots?”
The boots – not an inexpensive item, let it be known – didn’t get as much of an outing after that as Squinter had hoped when he purchased them, because when he informed his pals back at the table of the “frrrooty boots” incident, they dissolved into a collective and uproarious wrinkle and the boots henceforth became known as Squinter’s frrrooty boots.
Another bar, another street in Glasgow last Thursday night and Squinter’s at the bar ordering drinks for him and the missus. It’s the third anniversary – give or take a few weeks – of Squinter’s parting of the ways with the demon drink and so the order was a bottle of Heineken Zero and a gin and tonic with lemon.
Off goes the barman in search of the required beverages, and when he returns he has a brief and unadorned message.
“Nae limmin.”
Oh, well. Nil desperandum, as they say in the Gorbals. Squinter was introduced to the drinking life at a time when lemon was more noted in pubs by its absence than its presence, so it didn’t feel as though the night had been ruined. But then Squinter made a fateful, rookie mistake.
“Any lime?” he asked.
The barman looked at Squinter with the kind of flat, aggressively indifferent look that only the truly, deeply unimpressed can muster. With one side of his mouth minutely but definitely turned up he replied: “Nae frrroot.”
Squinter smiled a smile so bleak and wintry that it would have made Jim Allister gasp in admiration. Back at the table, after Squinter had regained a measure of social equilibrium after his barcounter battering, it occurred to him that on the last two visits to the real capital of Scotland, not only has he felt an icy Clydeside blast of Glasgow humour, but on both occasions the putdowns were frrroot-based.
There’s gotta be a message there somewhere.
Pal.
A single to Glasgow Airport via the Highlands, please
THE Airport Express to Glasgow city centre from the, ah, airport is only two quid now, down from about eight binoinkers up to quite recently. The good news comes via the Scottish government’s £2 bus fare cap, currently being rolled out across the country.
The new fare structure removes the inevitable Glasgow Airport discussion about whether to get a bus or a taxi for the 20-minute journey to the city. The trip costs £20 to £25 by taxi, and when you throw in the added bonus of being dropped off at the hotel door, the difference between that and the former bus fare of £16 for two people doesn’t seem that significant and the taxi always wins. But not any more.
ALL ABOARD: A magical mystery tour of greater Glasgow could have been avoided with a little help from the driver
Beware, though, if you, like Squinter, intend switching allegiance to the £2 bus. On the way home on Saturday, we made our way to stand 46 where the information kiosk at Buchanan Station had told us the bus for the airport could be found. On arrival, we found that stand 46 had two bays, just one of them containing a bus, destined, sure enough, for Glasgow Airport. As he strode forward to board, Squinter didn’t pay much attention the smaller writing underneath on the bus sign, which read ‘Via Braehead’. Big mistake. Or as Julia Roberts says in Pretty Woman, Huge.
Turned out Braeside is a massive shopping centre on the outskirts of the city, and while a stop-off there would not have been a massive imposition, Braehead, and later the airport, were reached by way of stops at every hole in the hedge in the county of Lanarkshire.
That we weren’t on the Airport Express became clear after around the 12th suburban residential stop. And that the journey to the airport was to take one and a half hours instead of the Express 20 minutes was made known to us by an elderly woman who had also boarded the wrong airport bus and was distressed when told her ETA by the driver as it mean she would almost certainly miss her flight. So distressed was she, in fact, that she got off at a hospital stop (yes, there was one of those) and made for the taxi rank.
Not being pushed for time, our only inconvenience was the bottomless confusion involved in the magical mystery tour up until we learned the truth about the Airport/Braehead bus.
As we did the mental maths and reassured ourselves that we wouldn’t be missing our flight, Squinter considered giving the driver a piece of his mind on disembarkation, but decided that it wasn’t really his fault. On further reflection, though, it has to be said that it absolutely was his fault. Why? Well, short of having ‘Aiport’ tattooed on our foreheads, we couldn’t have looked more like travellers. And while there's a chance that he thought our baggage was for a 52-inch smart TV and a week’s worth of groceries at Braehead shopping centre, the fact that Squinter asked for and got two tickets to the airport would have told him that a scenic tour of west central Scotland was not on our itinerary. And armed with that knowledge, a heads-up on boarding that this was not, in fact, the Airport Express would have been very helpful.
Particularly for a little old lady with a wheeled cabin bag, whose travel fate is a mystery to the driver and us, even if her destination wasn’t.
