“I can’t quite place your accent. Where are you from?”
“Australia,” I replied, halting my breakfast preparations in the extra-small kitchenette.
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Then why are you so pale?”
I knew nothing especially concrete about Glasgow when I booked my accomodation. I had no knowledge of its constituent districts, no clue as to which areas would reveal the city’s character and which would thoroughly obscure it, only a hazy, indefinite conception of Glasgow as a whole. My principal considerations, in the dreary evening I spent surveying my options, were cost and proximity to the city. I eventually settled on one of the cheaper places that matched the brief, a shared flat about half an hour’s walk from the city centre, and forgot about it entirely until, a month or so later, the journey rolled around.
The morning after I settled in—by pushing my luggage into a corner and climbing under the supplied doona—I discovered I was fortuitously situated; so fortuitously situated, in fact, that for my second pass through Glasgow I tried (in vain) to book the same place. The flat turned out to be in Finnieston, the area which, according to The Sunday Times, was the hippest place to live in all of Britain. Whatever truth this assessment had at the time it was made—surely the true hippest place in Britain would never be recognised as such by The Sunday Times—the discoverer effect, not unlike the observer effect in physics, means that it is certainly no longer the case. Propinquity to a trending stretch of Scotland was not, however, the reason I was personally so pleased with the location. (Like any self-respecting hipster, I expend most of my energy trying to convince people I’m nothing of the sort.) The reason why my small carpeted room with the door that didn’t fully close, let alone lock, was so perfect was that it oriented me between the two parts of Glasgow I ended up sinking the most time into: my preferred café and the Mitchell Library.
The Mitchell Library was, by some distance, my favourite location in the city. A multi-level behemoth under a magnificent rain-faded dome, it was both an excellent destination in its own right and the ideal place to go before, between and after my engagements, when I wasn’t quite up to wandering through drizzle. You find, the longer you travel, that places in which you can sit, read and rest, with no pressure to buy a coffee you don’t really want, and no sense that your presence is impeding business, are truly worth their weight. Thanks to the cafeteria on the ground floor—serving up affordable, if not terribly edible, fare—it is actually possible to spend up to 11 consecutive hours inside the library without ever needing to leave. It is especially renowned for its ancestry and historical resources, though I confess I never really bothered to investigate them, opting instead to brush up on my Japanese and, I don’t know, write these ghastly things. But of all its qualities (soundproof music booths! Did I mention soundproof music booths?) perhaps the most commendable is the ease with which you are able to secure a library card and avail yourself of its services, even if you are, as I was, a mere visitor. It was the library, more than anything else, that convinced me to return to Glasgow for an extra week before I left Europe.
I sampled a fair handful of cafés during my stay, but the one right around the corner, on Argyle Street, was by far the best. Its food was decent and well-balanced—rarely a given—and it offered a choice of filter coffee distinguished by method and bean variety. It was, as should already be evident, on the hipster end of the spectrum, and it was a little odd that the staff had no counter to stand behind, necessitating a lot of conspicuous leaning, but it was laid-back enough that neither of these things was sufficiently off-putting to, well, put me off. When not too busy, it was a joy to read and write and while away the morning in, bested, at this point in my travels, only by a Dunedin joint whose write-up I have excised from the historical record.
Of course, I didn’t spend all my time in libraries and cafés—just the overwhelming majority of it. At the art school up the Scott Street slope I caught a gig by Spoon, supported ably by Adam Buxton. The former was tight, boring, undeniable; the latter, affable, impish, amusing. Nothing life-altering, but I did get to witness Spoon’s frontman, Britt Daniel, (accidentally) cut his pinkie during one of the recitations of “I turn my camera on/I cut my finger on the way” on ‘I Turn My Camera On’. And, after ducking into a pub to escape the weather, I did befriend, sort of, or was befriended by, sort of, a group of theatre folk, afterwards accompanying them to a performance-art piece in which a man dressed as a giant baby (an associate of theirs) balletically assaulted a pram.
It rained, of course, and more than once, but the weather was generally pleasant, in line with my grey tastes. According to a local, I had caught Glasgow on the one or two days a year in which it is habitable.