Wheels Around Glasgow

I came across this little book in Partick Library yesterday, Wheels Around Glasgow, about Glasgow's 'heyday' of smoke, smog, and slums.

Have things changed? I found myself asking.

Well, the smoke is more undetectable, but it's still there with the massive increase in private transport since those days. When I see old photos of car-less streets I smile. Nowadays, our streets are full of cars, parked and moving, and little else. Indeed, as I walked down to Partick from Byres Road I zig-zagged through the streets of Dowanhill, and came across a street that exemplified this car-scenario. It was the western end of Fordyce Street, a dark and narrow corridor replete with more cars than you can shake a clamp at. A desperate situation in terms of town planning and healthy living.

I always find myself comparing this dark hole of a situation to the airy lightness of a carless society, where there is no pollution, no noisy engines, no roads per se but paths and waterways, where the wheels around 'the city' are emphatically powered by one's own steam, and if you have no steam, then tough, you'll have to take a backy. Or perhaps inhale the fundamental truth, that if you cannot get somewhere by your own energy, then you cannot get there. To concoct some conveyance device that not only deprives you of your own vital energies (and the synergies that erupt from these) but which literally poisons the air you breathe and kills the distance between here and there, is not only a form of cheating and self-delusion, but it is also a kind of madness that disembodies the human from itself. Cars may well be the most convenient of transportations, but there are also, existentially speaking, the most lethal.

Now dismembered and disembodied from space itself, the human becomes something of a construct, a package that can be decorated, -bubble-wrapped, and flat-packed. Great for capitalism and commerce, but not so good for health and wholeness, and the planet as a whole.

I then find myself asking if things have really 'improved' since the slums, and the smogs of old Glasgow.... 

A Burlingham-bodied Leyland Royal Tiger Coach outside the offices of Lowland Motorways in Glasgow, bound for 'The Three Lochs' (Lomond, Long, and Gareloch). It certainly beats the 62 to Faifley!

Smooth Operator

As I am now without bike (it got liberated two weeks ago from outside my flat) I am obviously looking for some kind of replacement. My old Cannondale which now sits atop my kitchen cupboards, stripped to its beautiful svelte chassis, stands as an example of a bike that rolls, and which was perfectly suited to my own five foot nine inch medium frame. The Trek that replaced it was a 29" wheel version compared with the 26" of the Cannon. Just too big. Another scam in my mind to upset the cycling market (in then same way that supermarkets shift their products about every so often) so that people will be jump-started into buying. I was convinced by the nice guys at Alpine Bikes (now no longer) that the 29" was the future. 

It's not.

26" has always been the present. 

But it seems that they are phasing these wheels out in favour of larger ones. Doesn't surprise me really, in a world beset by size...

So, in memory of the Cannon, and of wheels that fit.... a small memento of a blue gold dream...

Small is beautiful!

 

Wheely

It takes great courage and faith to follow your own way.... the organic way, the living way of the alive and the universal... of the cyclical and the natural...

Just remember - the universe isn't expanding or contracting....

It's breathing.........

Transfiguration on the B818 & Other Sketches

Learning to drawn faces (in permanent ink) is a tricky thing....

...Sometimes you get it....

...Sometimes you require facial reconstruction surgery...

...And sometimes you just get real lucky...

Atop Tinto, 2010

This is Glasgow

After a year of beautiful cycling around the shires that perforate and encircle Glasgow, I thought I would put a few of my most evocative photos into a slideshow... especially now that I am without bike.

I am always amazed when I look at my folder of photographs taken when out and about at how utterly bucolic and peaceful this land is, and at how few cyclists I meet on these quiet unbeaten roads and paths. It is this spaciousness and peacefulness, not to mention the views from the rim of the valley, that inspire and inspirit, and allow genuine contact to occur.

Glasgow ripples out from where you are, beneath your own steam. This way, by energizing yourself and finding your own way, a place and one's consciousness are not apart.

Locus and cosmos are not separate.

The map is not the territory...

I am.

Ride it LikeYou Stole it...

The other morning, I got a text from my brother (who lives in the flat across the landing from me, and who cycles too) telling me, and I quote: Give us a chap, our bikes have just been knocked.

Man!

Apparently, two young hooded characters had been up here on the top landing around 7.30am hacksawing away as we both lay in our respective beds dead to the world. One of the railings had been sawn right through leaving half of it (as a memento, presumably) on the stair. My lock which was not as sturdy as my brother's kryptonite lock had been taken along with my bike (no memento for me).

At any rate, what alarmed me was not so much the stealing of the bike, as the chutzpa of these young chaps, coming up here to the fourth floor at 7.30am in the morning (when many people are getting ready to go to work) and spending the best part of twenty minutes dismembering locks, railings and bikes. I am kinda glad I wasn't awake. God knows what I would have done had I found some youngster relieving me of my most prized possession. I would have probably just stood there in awe at the gall.

Whatever the case, the bike was insured, and after 18 months cycling it, I found it and its ultra-large 29" wheels just too big for me. In fact, I was talking to my brother just the other day about looking to buy another smaller wheeled bike. Maybe, then, in the Great Mystery of the Cosmos, I caused it to happen....

The other side of the coin is that for a brief moment, those two young men, would have been the most elated in all Glasgow that morning, cycling off into the sunrise (hidden behind clouds), and feeling like a million dollars (I had just washed my bike a few days earlier, for only the second time since I bought it! and my brother's Scott was a tailor-made beauty!). So maybe, the world's happiness increased that day. Without their devious little hands, I would never have met up with my father and brother yesterday morning and taken a trip up to Dales just like old times (when my father took me there as a teenager to get my first bike)....

What is crime after all, so says a character in The Asphalt Jungle, but the left-handed form of endeavour.

It's a strange world no doubt.

 My brother cleansing his Scott...

We had some great times together... So long old friend!