I took three photographs in Glasgow last Friday. I didn’t plan to. I rarely plan these things. You walk, you look up and something stops you.
The first was a notice board outside the Metropolitan Cathedral of St Andrew on Clyde Street. Founded 1816. Mass times listed in gold lettering on dark wood the same information posted in some form for two hundred years. Confessions before weekday masses. As announced. The permanence of it sitting there in the middle of a city that tears itself down and rebuilds every generation with no apparent guilt about either.
The second was a glass office block directly across from the cathedral. In its curtain wall perfectly composed by accident the spires of St Andrew’s rose up and floated. Gothic pinnacles in corporate glass the clouds behind them white and moving. Not a painting. Not a postcard. Just the city doing what the city does old and new occupying the same square metre of light completely indifferent to the symbolism and achieving it anyway.
The third was a derelict building I know better than I’d like to admit. Fury Murrys. For anyone who spent their student years in Glasgow in the late eighties that name does something to the chest. Noise and bad decisions. I drank pints in there and danced badly and kissed people I probably shouldn’t have and made friends I still have. It’s boarded up now windows patched with blue plastic sheet gig posters still plastered across the shuttered frontage as though the whole thing is just between bookings. It isn’t. It’s gone in everything that matters.
Further along the Clyde there was Panama Jax on Custom House Quay. Smoked mirrors and a walkway outside where you took your chances at closing time with the river a short stumble away in the dark. I went occasionally though if I’m honest it was never really my scene. A bit too much Old Firm glamour for a boy from Airdrie. More interested in the music than the mirrors.
I have been thinking lately about what it means to carry the past through the present without being crushed by it. Not nostalgia exactly. Nostalgia is passive. This is something more active and more deliberate. The question isn’t whether the past shaped you because it obviously did. The question is what you do with the shaping.
Fury Murrys is gone but the people who met there and laughed there and found their voices in all senses of the phrase carried something out with them that the boarded windows can’t touch. St Andrews Cathedral has been announcing mass times in gold lettering since the city was mostly fields and that continuity isn’t stubbornness. It’s confidence in what endures.
The glass building the modern intruder the thing that should have nothing to say about spires and stone accidentally became the most honest account of the relationship between old and new. It didn’t replace the church. It reflected it. Made it visible from an angle that hadn’t existed before.
That feels right to me. The Third Half isn’t about erasing what came before. The career the title the institutional identity the version of yourself that existed inside all of that. You don’t pretend it wasn’t real. You hold it up to something new and see what it looks like from here.
I grew up thirty minutes east of those streets by train. I know the light. I know the stone. I know what it feels like to walk through a place that shaped you and find that it has moved on without you and that you have moved on too and that neither of those facts cancels the other out.
Progress doesn’t require forgetting. It just requires the courage to keep walking.
When I took those photographs on Friday St Andrews Cathedral was full.