update 6: no primary destination
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…
update 7: devil’s work
Tonight it was announced that my love-labour, The Devil’s Plantation is nominated in the Interactive Category for the 2010 BAFTA New Talent Awards. Needless to say I’m delighted. But I’m also very pleased for my only competitor, a wonderful woman, Helen Jackson, from Binary Fiction whose website The Lost Book, I actually stumbled on last year. And a very good site it is too. I reckon she’ll win, and I mean it sincerely because her work is…
update 8: ‘greek’ thomson
Anyone entering by the front door may have noticed that The Devil’s Plantation recently won the BAFTA New Talent Award in the Interactive category, an unexpected but very welcome prize. But unlike the previous awards given that evening and prior to the announcement, this category prompted a long speech referring to new media and young talent. In a mix of elation and rare confidence I mounted the stage where during my fleeting moment of glory I delivered thank-yous and…
drift one: red road
After a long cold winter, I return to my shedquarters. On the desk sits a forlorn catalogue – Witness to Mortality, published in 1997 to coincide with an exhibition by Joseph McKenzie, a photographer famed for his iconic Gorbals Children. On the cover is a bleak landscape titled The New Lifestyle 2 (Red Road Flats Newly Opened). Shot in 1968, the black and white image shows a long, empty road, slick with rain, where a solitary vehicle drives towards…
drift two: moscow
As Jason Bourne hits 95kph on the M10 from Sheremetyevo Airport to Central Moscow, I’m on the back seat of his VW Passat wondering if I’ll reach my destination in one piece. This is stunt driving like I’ve never known in a city that already feels familiar. Under heavy skies, wide highways are fringed with tower blocks, toothstumps in the mouth of the Moscow suburbs, all the more prominent on this vast, flat terrain. This is cityscape on a…
drift three: watter
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…
drift four: murderrr
Taggart, STV’s perennial cop show, returned to our screens a few weeks ago. For those who’ve never seen it, Taggart endures as a popular example of the crime procedural, despite its spell-it-out dialogue and declamatory acting. To promote this latest outing the show’s legendary strapline – there’s been a murder – features in an ambitious trailer displaying jaundiced shots of Glasgow where police tape spans every corner and crevice; the entire city posing as crimescene. Even the local branch…
drift five: blowdown
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…
drift six: duck soup
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…
making the movie: rainspotting
2012 – the year predicted to herald the end of the world proved instead to be a season of false starts, false flags and false promises, which for me – and many others, I suspect – could not have ended sooner.
Since posting my last piece, I’ve struggled to find a way to close the circle. When the project began in 2007 little did I know I’d still be writing this blog six years later. To coin the cliché –…