Last summer I was contacted by a freelance journalist, Gordon Cairns, who claimed to have found my blog ‘by chance’ – the best way, I reckon. His pitch: that 2009 was the 25th anniversary of the first publication of Glasgow’s Secret Geometry, so he asked if I would contribute to an article about Harry Bell. Sure, be glad to, I replied. That I never heard from him again came as no surprise since he had to sell the idea…

Unlike other diehard urbexers in this burg – risking life, limb and liberty in pursuit of derelict buildings, tunnels and mysterious corners – I stick to the highway. Which on the main artery to southside Glasgow gets all the harder. Hour by hour, shift by shift, the most visible new track in the city, the M74 Extension, ploughs over Eglinton Street, the old A77 – through entire communities whose names – Polmadie, Oatlands, Dalmarnock – may be lost forever…

Until recent times the Glasgow Fair Fortnight meant an enforced two-week break in mid-July, when most of the city’s workforce departed to points south and west, known colloquially as going doon the watter. Rothesay on the Isle of Bute was the resort of choice within our family, having rejected Dunoon after a miserable holiday spent in quarantine when my siblings and me went down with rubella and when on another occasion I almost drowned, fully clothed, in the town’s…

Democracy is a lie reads the graffito. As the peoples of North African and Middle Eastern nations voice dissent against their autocratic leaders, I’m caught short by the message sprayed on a wall on a Gorbals side street round the corner from the Citizen’s Theatre. On a biting cold day I pick over the remains of the blowdown of one of the Norfolk Court high-rises and wonder, what would the peoples of Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain and Libya think if…

Once upon a time – fifty years or so ago – I went to the movies for the first time. The cinema, a converted cork factory known as the Korky (aka The Ardgowan) was situated on Weir Street, Tradeston. Closed in 1963, it was demolished in 1965. Enchanted by this early experience, ever since I’ve conflated cinema with memory and reality and myth – and the bizarre idea it was somehow connected to me. The film I saw that…