Into the Wilderness

Glasgow is fortunate in many respects in being a valley. This means of course that there are hills on all sides, hills that due to their awkward misshapen nature are difficult to build on. And where there is an absence of buildings there is generally a profusion of Nature and of wilderness. Take this morning for example, jumping with bike onto the 11.14 to Milngavie from Partick. Arriving at Milngavie at 11.30 I head up to Mugdock village a couple of miles away (and, more importantly, a couple of hundred metres up). It's a great start that opens up the valves so by the time you're up in Mugdock you might as well be flying for that ecstatic release that hill-cycing enables. And we are flying because it's all downhill along the Old Mugdock Road down to Strathblane. Here, we avoid the main road and take the path that leads round behind the road beside the Blane Water. To the left we have the precipitous Cuilt Brae and its woods and to the right we have the great mesa of the Campsie Fells and the Strathblane Hills. We are within a valley within a valley. In short, we are in the wilderness if you can excuse the odd visual of Blanefield's housing. Exiting onto the Blanefield Road, we rise with the land up again towards Carbeth where we join the WHW and head towards Mugdock Wood. Down and through the wood we are ejected onto the road we started on. Another five minutes and we're back at the train station. I haven't rushed or hurried at all during my cycle, quite the opposite, I got off two or three times to walk. I feel as if I have been injected with a serum that immunizes me against the horseshit down there in the city. I almost float as I get onto the train. The journey took 70 minutes, the train both ways half an hour. So, there you have it, in the space of a shit film, a trip into the wilderness and back. There ain't many major cities that can boast such sanctifying and savage proximity.

 

 

 

The red dotted path near coffee stain at top of map is the one to take instead of the main roadto Blanefield. When you come down the Old Mugdock Road you will see the Co-op at the bottom. Turn left (not right) at the junction and this will take you onto the red dotted path which will deposit you onto the Blanefield Road without so much as a car in sight.

Buzzkill

I stumbled upon Sylvester Stallone the other day working out isometrically. This means at the age of seventy five he has finally come round to the idea that lifting weights is not entirely a good thing for the bones and joints. Things start seizing up when you get old he says as if we didn't know. At any rate, the Italian stallion is a figure to behold midway through his eighth decade here on Earth. He now works out with rubber bands (by the looks of it on the coast in front of the ocean), stretching his way to fitness and health. 'Boredom is a buzzkill' he says when referring to gyms and the repetitive act of weightlifting or treadmilling. Which is why I cycle round the strath, and gave up gyms about ten years ago. Because when you're out in the open naturally, the exercise never seems like exercise, it never imposes itself upon you like it does in a gym. Wild cycling means you're fluid and always going somewhere in the open which means you never focus on the exercise itself. There are other things that require your attention other than  the size of your biceps. Nature enters the fray, whether it be the spray off the ocean, or that kestrel over there that thinks it can outfly me. The wind, the rain, the cloud cover, the sun, are all also present. Naturally. The variety of topography is also felt as one cycles through it. There is real diversity in the open. The buzzkill thus never enters. Boredom has never reared its head in the forty odd years that I've been on my bicycle. Which means my buzz has never been killed. And the buzz, as all wild animals will tell you, is everything.  

 

 

Ecstasy in the Snow

It doesn't take long to get up into the beyond. About half an hour from where I live in Cessnock with bike and train (to Kilpatrick). And that train is simply wonderful for its emptiness, its comfort, and its rapidity. This morning it was the 11.19 Helensburgh Express which deposited me at Dalmuir some ten minutes later having bulleted through the suburbs without me even noticing them. Ten minutes on a train is just enough to get the flask out and enjoy some of that hot lava java. Passing Clydebank I see a couple of rooftop pigeons flying and fluttering, and I realise (as I do every time I see wild animals) that ecstasy is your natural aboriginal condition. Man, having closetted his consciousness, has relieved his self of that natural ecstasy and has to go in search for it instead. The pigeons by contrast have never sold their selves out therefore they inhabit ecstasy. Man no longer moves but is carried (by machines and ideologies) and is thus de-ecstasized. His consciouness becomes removed from its natural condition, that of ecstasy, because he himself (his body and mind) has been re-moved. The pigeons on the other hand have not been removed from anything least of all their own aboriginal operating system. And so they inhabit ecstasy. And it was this fleeting ecstasy that I saw when I saw these two pigeons at Clydebank. Moreover, about half an hour later, having braved the 'hard to kill hill', I myself became a pigeon.