The Last Post? (Or, A Change of Tack)

Hello.

It is vastly enjoyable writing all this rubbish down time and again, and it has been wonderful to expound utter gibberish on anything that pops into my tedious head over the last 4 months.

But there are a vast number of flaws with this blog as a blog.

a) Entries too long.
b) No continuous subject.
c) Not enough links.
d) No multi-media: pictures, YouTube snippets etc.
e) Plenty else, though if I knew all of these I would be able to rectify them and improve the thing.

Anyway, it has been really heartening to find that going too long without writing something down (even if it happens to be about reading on the toilet, mouth ulcers, conflict in Kosovo or a different take on the Nativity) makes me itch to get back to it. For this reason I know it is an interest and not just a chore. But this is probably not the medium to do it and it should never have been intended as such.

Therefore the point of this blog is changing. Rather than being a distraction from what I really want to write about (as in the past), I am purely going to use it as a testing or dumping ground for entries not necessarily meant to be read, or for the public domain, but which do no harm by being there. If war is the continuation of politics by other means, then perhaps blogging is the continuation of writing by other means. I need to get back to the point of the whole endeavour. I intend to set up another blog based on more rigid subject matter inspired by the happy popularity of one post in particular. Perhaps, if that goes well, I'll link it to this blog. But for now I look forward to the far warmer cloak of true anonymity.

Cheers for reading,
Kiran

Demons of the Mouth

I’ve been away. Not really Away, you understand, just away. But all calm now. I guess you have to change your perspective a little. Rather than standing in the fire, just use it to toast that marshmallow. And yes, I know they’re carcinogenic. Anyway, this thankfully leaves me free to think again about the more trivial things in life. Like mouth ulcers.

Mouth ulcers are like thorny stowaways, lying in wait in the cargo hold with a bomb in their shoe, fondling your belongings as they rustle up a comforting pocket away from all that nasty bunker-cold before lighting the ignition and blowing you out the sky. Or perhaps I am overstepping a little. Ulcers are more like simple hijackers, steering you away from all that meaty food that you love, forcing you to mouth over soft, supple foods as if you had prematurely lost your teeth or receded in time to become some infant, bibbed and spitting wretched ready-chewed peas and carrots onto the moulded plastic tray locked in front of you. The horror.

There are a number of ways to get one. You can order them from Argos, because you can order everything from Argos, or you can eat something unexpectedly hot that irritates a patch of your gums like cosmetics in a rabbit’s eye. You may summon one on an adversary through incantation of course. This normally involves finding a suitably heavy stick, a piece of driftwood is ideal, and then waving it theatrically at some roadkill until you invoke the Spirit of Suffering, and from there, using said wood as a receptacle, transport the Spirit into the gums of your victims, ideally while they are asleep and their lips are rippling from the snoring like loose flaps on a marquee at a windswept beach resort for retired junkies.

From personal experience though, the best way to get a mouth ulcer is undoubtedly to smack your gums with your toothbrush. This incident has all the best hallmarks of the perfect accident. It happens, of course, by surprise. It happens while you are doing something routine and mundane, a bit like how that serial killer will get you while you have your back-turned to the door while microwaving up some popcorn that you and your girlfriend can pick idly at while watching some sordid rom-com starring an affable Englishman with the charm of neutered snake. Cheap skates. That’ll learn you for shunning Odeon. People hardly ever get killed there. Also, toothbrush-ulcers are more likely to happen locally, much like minor road accidents. Though admittedly few road accidents actually happen in your bathroom. And lastly, they always happen when you take your eye off the ball for just a second.

The bastard toothbrush, in all its existence, has only a few minutes a day to really shine. It is itching to, storing up all that energy through the night waiting for that moment when it can justify itself to its owner again, and then there it is, greeting you like a happy dog. Just like a happy dog though, you can’t face it early in the morning, you just want to get after it with the rolling pin. And unlike a happy dog, you put this weapon of bristly vice into your mouth and try and manhandle it round what is really your fundamental access-point, in a half-witted state of dreamery. For perhaps a hundred consecutive times, all goes according to plan. You avoid your own reflection bleary eyed while idly gobbing a mouthful of foaming spit into the basin. You muse as it slips toward the plug hole, pulled in by the inexorable forces of Newton, emulating the lava flow from some volcano that had been used to dispose of all the detergent that had failed the Daz doorstep challenge, and then think about whether to jump from your third-floor window and risk being crippled rather than certain death, or just go to work and carry on as before because, let’s face it, no one likes change.

But then, just that one time, the toothbrush slips. Time slows down. Your dreary malaise is lifted into a heightened state of awareness, your eyes widen to detect untoward motion under some kind of predatorial instinct that kept your cave-wife Linda safe from sabre-toothed chipmunks in the prehistoric era. And then, before you even have time to regret wrong decisions and lost opportunities, collision. A numbing pain echoes through your face, and even as the neurones arc the blinding sensation across, you realise that this is nothing compared with what you will endure over the next two weeks. You retire to your room, tonguing the embryonic wound in a self-piteous manner, and then, if you are like me, set up an ad hoc schedule, cramming your favourite foods into the next two days of meals before the young ash-mound turns into a full-blown Vesuvius.

The pattern then unfolds over the next fortnight. After the heady glut of rich and sumptuous foods which you can now readily afford since your daily food spend is about to dwindle to the low double-digits of pence when the bastard really kicks in (honestly, it’s worth getting a loan to get through the first few days of opportunity, you will have no trouble paying it back having saved in the days of food-poverty that follow), you start to feel the monster glowing inside you. You tenuously peel your lip down and gaze at it in the mirror. It does not look like the hideous tent-like lump of cling-film portrayed in the adverts. If you touch it, you find it has more the texture of under-cooked sausage, lightly pink on the inside, taunting with its moist beauty yet harbouring demonically in the same breath. Of course you appreciate this more after the forty minute bout of crying in the foetal position from the shot of pain that touching the ulcer gives you is over. It does not resemble an outgrowth, like a teenage pluke, but instead looks as if some miniscule creature like a Fraggle has taken a circular saw and gouged a small, grey crater into the back of your lip. It reminds me of the disc-shaped gouge left in ceilings when drilling in roof-lights during my days helping renovate pubs as a summer job.

Today, which happens to be midway through the ulcer-fortnight, I tried the new tack of scalding it out. At hourly intervals (and in constant risk of losing my job – they do not handcuff you to the desk as they wish to betray the image of an ‘open company’, but they are always watching, WATCHING, I tell you…), I would fetch some boiling water in a mug, and force myself to drink it, bulging my bottom lip out as it cascaded its steamy torture around the vile, craterous skin-terrorist. Actually I did well not to scream out loud. The entire gum around that area is wracked with pain now, and I may well have killed the parts of my tongue that taste salt, mauve-coloured foods, and things from Korea (my tongue is more ghettoised than 1930’s Chicago). Going on the principle that it is like an unwelcome lodger, I would try throwing its belongings out the window, but unfortunately it is a Marxist mouth ulcer and has none to speak off. So instead I am going to draft it a strongly-worded legal document and use it to paper-cut it to death. If someone could pick me up from A&E in a couple of weeks time it would be much appreciated.

Anyway, after the original grief of inheriting the mouth ulcer, you start to learn to live with it. You stop tonguing it, knowing that the throbbing agony it induces down one side of your face has lost its novelty. You tilt your head to one side as you chew, summoning the food to the ‘good side’. You do not open your mouth as wide, lest you stretch the be-ulcered section with hideous consequences. You even sleep differently, trying to place your head so that the jaw lies slack off the side of your pillow. This has two results in the morning: either you have drooled an inexplicably large volume of sputum onto your mattress, it soaking it up sponge-like so that you feel as if you have been cut adrift in the North Atlantic on a punctured hovercraft; or you roll about in a state of unconsciousness, banging your ulcer gaily off your teeth so that as you rouse to consciousness in the morning your mouth is in such severe pain that you feel as if a rodent is burrowing through it on a long and convoluted trip to the secret trapdoor in your colon that leads to Narnia. Those darn rodents miss Narnia.

Eventually, it subsides. You start tonguing it again. It mutates from a grey crater back into a burgundy gentle lump, with the barely-raised geometry of those useless painted white discs on mini-roundabouts. You note with glee that you can use both sides of your mouth. You feast again, and repay the gluttony debt. The bastard, like a flea infestation, a violent pet or a suddenly unstuck baked-beans tin previously wedged under your brake pedal as you hurtled towards the back of a traffic queue, is gone in the most welcome manner possible.

I like food. I practically live for it. Getting a mouth ulcer for me is like cutting off a marathon runner’s leg and then still forcing the marathon runner to run anyway. So why, you ask – if you have got this far, which you haven’t – don’t you take some sensible precautions? Perhaps I could set aside a more awakened time of day to indulge in tooth-brushing, like during lunch perhaps, or while performing some full-attention activity like manoeuvring a light aircraft around the Outer Hebrides? Or perhaps I should avoid traditional ‘manual’ toothbrushes altogether.

Electric toothbrushes. They seem a little like overkill to me. Like using a jack-hammer to get through pie crust, a cannon to scare pigeons off your porch roof, or using a bus to run over your piggy bank to scab enough money to buy a Twix that you don’t really want, only it breaks up the boredom of a night of watching repeats of CSI and swearing at your laptop because it will not run Channel 4 On-Demand due to some trifling error that is written in hexadecimal and requires special glasses to read, and knowledge of a manual the weight of a small asteroid which nevertheless harbours lichen that could have yielded the fruit of life, to solve.

And then, say the omnipresent boffins who have the same mentality as those who stand over your shoulder, casting a shadow onto your desk, and give you tips while you play ‘Solitaire’ (it’s called ‘Solitaire’ for a reason. Now fuck off before I thrust a second javelin through your right testicle and then you can use the javelins to bollock-ski off to casualty and possibly appear in some local news item about ‘the jovial impacts of office-rage’), “Why not use Bonjela?” I’ll tell you why. While I freely admit that is has a lovely anaesthetising effect, and that indeed I would happily bathe in it and then, even as a man, give birth afterwards free from the slightest twinge of pain, the agony that results when it wears off is excruciating. And it is tasty, and you are more likely to eat it when your normal access to food has been inhibited for so long anyway. If you are trapped in a room with a bear, you should leave it alone. You should not cover it in jelly, chuck a net over it and then taunt it with a stick because it will eventually get out and then tear its way through you that makes a dark-hatted Austrian doctor performing a live autopsy seem mild-mannered.

Anyway, brush carefully. And remember to lock all your doors. (Well you ought to learn at least one good practice from reading these pages).

A Wee Nanostory

At his shoulder tugged a hand, gently at first, then gaining in toughness until it roughly grabbed him away from his squatted stance. The soldering iron clattered clumsily to the floor. He turned a shade, gave a glimpse half-behind him. Reaching into infinity, a solid arm bulging with vein and muscle tugged him further round until his neck was wrung to the point of pain. He rose to his feet, joints snapping, the squat unravelling to a stoop and then to a full stand, and he walked slowly forward, following the pulling hand, following the arm as it receded into the sky. He looked left and right. Others about him were following the same, a medusa’s head of arms coaxing them forwards, their origin unknown, masked in the industrial fog above. None of them felt fear, only an underhand obedience, unqualified but binding.

He didn’t look back at the cranes with their seemingly unguided mechanics, lowering and tugging at the metallic forms strewn across the ground. They were behind him now. Slowly, the hand released him but his slow momentum carried him terrifically forward. The hands parted with a final beckoning gesture. He continued through the wrought-iron gate as the suffocating fog gathered the hands up into an unseen bundle. Into the cobblestone street now, but the cobbles seemed to lose firmness. Under his soles they appeared to crumble until they resembled foam. His boots glided slowly through this unsure footing. He looked up for something of security, but the buildings seemed to lose their form also. The blackened brick melted, caramel-like, until it snaked in viscous flows about him, melding with the foamed cobbles, pooling about his feet.

The fog descended lower, it had lost its blackness now. A grey infusion whirled inside the fog, whipped up by thrusting winds into vortex formations around, obscuring all solidity. Then he was grabbed by a sudden urgency to hold on. He fed his fingers quickly through a gap in the rails. They encased him but for the deathly gap. His feet had at last found a solid platform, but beyond this platform lay a thirty-storey drop through still air and stranded mist. The ground lay beneath him but he chanced only a glance below before levelling his eyes at the rectangular forms ahead. They loomed, monster-like, never revealing themselves as if they must remain as silhouettes. He squinted and strained, keeping his firm grip on the rails preventing his fall. The monsters remained shrouded in their secure cloak.

Dejected, he turned away, walking off the balcony and into the room behind. He drew his hand down over his cheeks. The skin felt gaunt now. His arms were speckled and grey, aged, starved. He pinched at the skin and drew it away from the bone, dragging it with ease before releasing it and watching it shrink back to enwrap loosely again. The room had a damp nature, the wallpaper peeled away from the ceiling corners while dark, rusty stains cried downwards in streaks, narrowing as they reached downwards. Aimless, he eyed the photographs aligned along the mantelpiece, combing them idly with his hand. The people looked familiar, children with his features, himself in various states of age, surrounded by strangers.

A sense of unease gripped at his throat and he lunged for the door, into the cold corridor, running into clouds of his own breath’s freezing steam. Finally he reached the lift. An apparition of a gangly boy stood in the corner with dead eyes. He did not regard the boy as human. Instead he became a mere fixture pinned to a wall, inanimate. He was present only momentarily and then gone, replaced with rusting tools locked with impossible density. He climbed in among the tools as the doors noisily closed. With the clatter of ageing cogs and chains and the whine of belts he presently reached the foot of the block. The doors thrust half-open, and with a grunt he shouldered them aside.

Staggering into the field, his breathlessness drew sharp pains into his torso, into his left arm. He had aged once more. From his scalp he pulled a clump of whitened hair. The mist thickened around him, soup-like, and he outstretched his arms, listening to the grim overture of his ever-growing wheeze as the mist constricted still tighter. As he crimped his eyebrows to gain sight of the distance, he saw again the monsters looming upwards, standing stock-still. Other, more dinosaur-like beasts rolled slowly about them, picking at their sides. Their heavy presence sent tremors through the ground, quivering the blades of grass and climbing the bones of his legs, clamouring at his eardrums. A low, mournful wailing of scant-oiled metal against metal. Then, with awful suddenness, and with a staggering silence that was betrayed only by the sounds of his lungs, the monsters disappeared.

The city was gone. The pain in his arm soared, inducing a tunnelling of his vision. Around the dimming periphery of his sight lay only the white fog, the approaching night stealthily stealing its brilliance shade by shade. He collapsed onto the ground and let the dewy, wet grass brush against his cheek. He tried to grieve for his dead city. He hoped he would make it to the morning. Perhaps it would brighten up.

Eavesdropping Part 1

Overheard in the office:

First Person: Did you hear about that body they found in that hotel in town?
Second Person: Naw.
First Person: They found this body in wannae the rooms in the ### Hotel, had been there fur days.
Second Person: What the fuck? How did naebody find it before then?
First Person: Dirty bastards never clean the rooms that's why. D'ye know how they punished the hotel owners?
Second Person: Naw.
First Person: Took away its drinks licence!
Second Person: What the hell? Why, did the guy die of alcohol poisoning or something?
First Person: Naw, I 'hink it wuz just natural causes.
Third Person (Overhearing the conversation): I thought it was a heroin overdose actually.
First Person: Aye, well in Glasgow, a heroin overdose is natural causes.

Ahh, good to see the black humour hasn't died yet...

All Kneel to the Big Numbers

Northern Rock. Yes, stifle that yawn for just a moment. If that news story could just go away now that would be fan-dabbie-dozey. We know that it involves an inordinate amount of cash of the type that us non-financial types can never understand. Someone said something like £55 billion. There is just no way to comprehend 'a billion'. Other, more helpful types, say that it is equivalent to 69 Millenium Domes. All well and good, 69 is well within our cranial radars, until you realise that one Millenium Dome is £800 million. Again, a number far beyond our reach.

Actually this is part of a trend to blow us down with numbers too big to comprehend. Over the despatch box of a Wednesday, the suffix 'million' or 'billion' is used by the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition in turn as a kind of beating stick. The fact is, we don't know whether this figure was bigger than the last figure, or whether the number being talked about, in context, is even that much. I mean there are 60 million people for these services to go around, so you would hope that any kind of investment that was not of an extraordinarily specialised nature would at least be in the millions. Even if the government wanted to grant every taxpayer a mere one bag of Salt and Vinegar (take it or leave it) crisps in lieu of a tax rebate, a minister could still hammer down on the despatch box and holler about the millions being given back to the Great British Public.

But back to the point. The Northern Rock story, though important to account holders and shareholders alike, seems to have been 'solved' for now. Account holders have their money safeguarded, and it may have mightily pissed off the shareholders, but you could argue the whole solution down to the concept of Utilitarianism I suppose. Whether it is the right solution remains to be seen. I seem to remember how, for the last few weeks, people harped on about the catastrophic decision-making of Alastair Darling and how they should nationalise the bank. I don't understand enough to know why this seemed like the best option, so I took it at face value. Now that the bank has been nationalised, people are again winding themselves into a twisted frenzy, spurred on by the column-furlongs devoted to the subject, wheeling out every cobweb-ridden financial commentator from the past in a sordid circus of dart-throwing. Poor Mr Darling rotates on the wheel while knives anchor themselves by, and occasionally into, his limbs. It may be that the government is guilty of incompetence, as is alleged, but I didn't see the Opposition come up with a better solution. Only the Liberal Democrats mooted nationalisation as the answer from the off. For this reason I reserve any defence or support of anyone on the matter, the issue is simply too cloudy.

The main point though, is please can we hand over the news to something else now? There is plenty else happening. The independence of Kosovo, new strife in Afghanistan, elections in Pakistan to name but three. The 'temporary' arrangement surrounding Northern Rock is temporary as in the 'few years' meaning of the word, therefore we don't really need to hear about it again for a few years.

I propose that there be a blanket ban on reporting on this story until something genuinely newsworthy happens, like an endangered species of dolphin is found in the bank's main vault in Newcastle and is elevated to the status of CEO. Perhaps Flipper could sort out the bank's troubles.

Sinbad, Arrr!

Possilpark Town Hall, 14th February 2008
Sinbad IV, The Final Scene

The cast, ensconced in a cave made dutifully by the peasant folk from papier mache and fibre-glass, are being attacked by a fearsome beast, played by an obese Scottish woman in a dragon costume. Sinbad, cutlass between his teeth, swings in on a specially adapted grape vine, smashing through an inexplicable stained-glass window that is totally out of keeping with ancient Arabic times. Meanwhile two luscious wenches are screaming like damsels, and one of them takes a theatrical swipe at the enraged beast, tearing a shallow wound in the cheek of the beast. In keeping with scenes of such reverence, an ageing man with a hallowed beard that has done the rounds of vessels throughout the ages, imbuing with a salty essence of adventures past. He weeps quietly, wondering how he has lowered himself to performing in plays with little merit and even less universal appeal.

Beast: Raaar!
Wench #1: Why, why is he doing this to us?
Beast: Raaaar!
Wench #2: I think he must be hungry.
The wenches scream and shield their faces from the hideousness that is the beast.

Sinbad: Don’t worry, my wenches, I shall save you. Here, take this sword!

The sword is thrown by Sinbad but tragically remains uncaught, thrusting itself right through the bosom of Wench #2, the lesser wench who up until now has had little point in the play but to make muted expressions of horror, and show off the glamour of her legs while needlessly rock-climbing over the amateur set.
The death is expertly conveyed to the adoring fans through liberal use of tomato puree mixed with Tabasco sauce, and a dashing and charismatic smile flashed by Sinbad to cover his error. Wench #1 wipes a tear from her eye at the demise of her wenching companion, but moves swiftly on.

Old Man With Beard: Here, Sinbad, joust it from behind! It is the only manner by which this beast will be killed!
Sinbad: I will do no such thing, Sir! I am a man of honesty, dignity and…
At this point, the beast makes a lunging moment towards the orating Sinbad, biting a large chunk out of his left leg, which is a prosthetic one for this purpose. His real leg is tucked up behind his arse. Sinbad screams and staggers slowly towards the audience to deliver a tearful soliloquy.

Sinbad: Why do such things happen? I have toiled across Arabia, through desert storms and icy winds of the night, beneath the screeching vultures, those vampires of the sky, and above the piranha-filled pools of black water so deep that it were as if staring into the gates of hell, the bowels of treachery through which one might follow the avenue of vanity. I have defrauded my way through checkpoints, and seared my name with bloodied arm into the rocks strewn across my path. All that I might seek the end, the glorious and justified happy end for my wenches… Looks around at dead Wench #2, her hand outstretched as if beckoning for a last dance… Err, my wench. And now, you see before you this hideous beast, this abomination before the eyes of you, the faithful watchers. Can the clouds of terror be lifted from this ropey scene by a single swing of the scythe, or will the fight have to continue, long into the night, excreting casualties like a diarrhoea-infested viper, venomous and frothing? Will I have to continue this speech before you, so that I might blind my eyes from the terror unfolding behind me, yet knowing, that in the expounding of my awesome theories, the dissemination from the joyous caverns of my heart that in my education of my trusting listeners, I do the wench behind me yet more service that could ever be gained by the risking of my fragile, yet supple body to the causes of victory?

Behind Sinbad, the beast continues mauling the remaining wench. The beast recoils in shock occasionally, as the wench swings a handbag with astonishing force, almost ripping part of the beast’s mask. A papier mache dragon’s tongue lies on the ground being trampled by both wench and beast. In the background, the Old Man With The Beard hums softly while reading excerpts from the Oxford English Dictionary in his characteristic West Country drawl.

Sinbad (continuing): But no, I must do right by my wench, I shall lure the monster with this!
Sinbad pulls a Findus Crispy Pancake from his jodhpurs and bites the end off before tossing it in the direction of the beast like a grenade. There is a flash of purple smoke and the beast, riled with anger, bounds towards Sinbad. Wench #1, exhausted, collapses to the ground, one hand idly scurrying about her handbag looking in vain for her Lipsil.

Sinbad: Ahh, now we must do battle! What say you in your defence?
The beast growls inquisitively, and spits out several litres of watermelon seeds onto the stage.
Sinbad: So it is like this is it?
The Old Man, having finished the dictionary, for it is the abridged version, lights his pipe and puffs away nonchalantly, crossing his legs and draping his robe up over the knee lest there be any undignified insights. Noticing that Sinbad is coming off worse in the tussle, he suddenly leaps down from his rock, leaving a dangerously sagging crack in the ‘rock’ which an underpaid stage-hand, skin drawn over her bones by the onslaught of poverty, sets at repairing with industrial solvent and glue.

Old Man With Beard: Here Sinbad, this fearsome potion should take the edge of him!
Sinbad: What doth it do?
Old Man With Beard: What?
Sinbad: I mean, what does it do?
Old Man: It will sedate the beast! Then we may joust it from behind!
Sinbad: Again, I shall sedate him, but you may joust in your own time, your sordid displays of affection have no place in this cavern.
The potion, contained in a vial that is clearly a halved Coke bottle with cling-film over the sawn-off end, and containing a Radox-style substance bubbling, is thrown to Sinbad, and he grabs the beast about the neck and jars its mouth open, filling it from the vial.

Beast: Gnaaarrrll!
The beast expires, and on cue, the stage-hand and Wench #1, who are now both trying to fix the crack with a sweaty haste, fall through the set and land beneath the hollow stage-rocks with a dull ‘wumph’. A geyser-like wisp of dust erupts through the hole in the rocks through which they have fallen. Sinbad and the Old Man, previously joyous at the beast slaying turn round and look anxiously. The Old Man clutches his hands at his own face and drops to his knees in howling anguish.

Old Man With Beard: Oh, my career! I wanted to emulate Gielgud, I wanted to premiere with the Royal Shakespeare Company, debuting as Hamlet, affixing my name to he, that character of masterful speech. And now look upon my pitiful crumpled body, condemned forever to act out this bloody farce. My mother would be so disappointed!
He sobs convulsively as the audience rise to their feet in raucous applause. Roses are thrown onto the stage which the dead beast, struggling to feign death, snatches at with claws and stuffs into her mouth. Petals drop from her lips and she turns her head away. Sinbad, thinking that the applause is for him, bows deeply, his straggly hair tumbling forward from his shoulders. The crowd erupt onto the stage in a spontaneous display of appreciative violence. Sinbad is levelled with a folding chair wrapped around his head.

Review - By the late Monsieur Launder Ette:

I found this play deeply moving. The casting was exquisite, with latter-day Hollywood hunk-hero Salty Gonadson forming a believable likeness to Sinbad. His hair, even his perfume, seemed to exude the triumphant confidence with which this brave play was executed. The introduction of members of the crew, so often left to languish starving in the sidelines, into a pivotal scene near the end of the play was inspired. There were lesser moments of course. The attempted lynching of Sinbad by members of the audience seemed a trifle unfair, and though I have every faith that the chicken feathers will be plucked and the tar brushed from his overtly-masculine skin, I fear the emotional scars will be harder to overcome. The ceremonially crossing of the fourth wall occurred of course with the nervous breakdown of Old Man With Beard – his name has never been disclosed. On further investigation, it was found that the Old Man was in fact a vagrant plucked from the streets of the Tenth Arrondisement in Paris, and had been shunted from institution to institution before finding his calling in the North Glasgow Community Theatre. He has been a welcome addition to the cast, and for those of us that have had the opportunity to watch his downward spiral into madness night-after-night, it has been a richly rewarding experience of the type rivalled only by settling down in a red upholstered armchair with a freshly-rolled Cuban cigar and a manuscript by Harold Pinter.

My main complaint would be the odious script, clearly written by a fornicating crouton-ingester. I imagine him there, quill in hand, lines of dried breadcrumbs assorted by debt-ridden credit card into tidy lines upon the see-through glass table, feverishly concocting obese beasts in his decrepit mind. That the cast were able to turn such dour fayre into an entertaining spectacle that was both emotional and slapstick is a miracle. It warms my heart that such acting talent still exists. The stage-hand has since retired, I am well informed, and is now making a new living as a greyhound racing commentator following extensive spinal surgery after her fall on-stage.

Monsieur Ette died in a snow-boarding incident in the Mojave Desert in Nevada last week, following diagnosis of acute sand-burn caused by prolonged abrasion. His book, already the source of rioting across the Christian world, will be published in the UK posthumously next month, entitled “Christ’s Second Monkey”.

The World’s Newest Country

Today, a new country may well be born. Kosovo. I was wrong before in my prediction that the simmering disputes in the Balkans might explode back in December with the non-resolution of this place’s status. It remains to be seen what an actual declaration of independence will bring, and how the aggrieved parties, namely Serbia and Russia, will react. An eye needs to remain firmly fixed on the region through this tumultuous time.

Putin laughably stated that all such disputes over the independence of territories should be treated identically. They must all be treated as independent, or not. Of course, even the slightest injection of common sense would lead to the conclusion that regions must be looked at on a case-by-case basis. Every region is different in its history and make-up. Putin also compares Kosovo to its own claims for territories from Moldova and Georgia: Trans Dniester, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, but has said that he will not stoop down to the West’s games and recognise their rights to independence in similar fashion. Although this was wonderfully ambiguously reported in the news sites on Friday. Several claimed that Kosovo’s independence would result in Russia’s recognition of three other ‘countries’, while then going on to contradict themselves by quoting that Putin had in fact, stated he would not do this.

Others ranted about the likelihood of violence should Kosovan Albanians attempt to move into the Serb-dominated north of the new country. Serb policemen had made brusque remarks to such effect to journalists, and they felt duty-bound to report them. The Serbian government has ruled out using force to state its territorial claim, however.

If there has been a rollercoaster in reporting of this strange event, nine years in the making, it can only be mimicking the equally stomach-churning progression of politics in this long-suffering region. I hope it goes right this time, the penalty for wrong-footing is gravely etched into the annals of recent history.

Excrapy, The Theory Explained

I’m no physicist, but I suspect that I have concocted a grand new theory of how the universe operates. It is not a theory based on equilibrium, like many others, but perhaps lends more to the concept of Entropy. Entropy is a number representing chaos and it is always increasing. Even if you hoover your flat, you are re-arranging all the filth and objects in a way which is technically further away from its previous configuration, thus increasing the amount of disorder in the universe. As I said, I’m no physicist, and am sure the scrappy definition above will be happily dissected and burned (in a bin of sufficient size).

My theory is The Theory of Excrapy. It describes the fact that everything, over time, becomes slowly and incrementally crapper. For example, the pasta tub that I buy from Tesco for lunch in the misguided belief that it is much better for you than, say, a haggis supper, went up in price by 12 pence last week. One more increment of crapulation right there. The Council Tax freeze sounded good, until I learned that council workers would be laid off as a result. No belt-tightening or elimination of waste there then, just a simple cull. Many more increments of crap. A light bulb blows, a cable snaps off the ‘Squinty Bridge’ across the Clyde, my father has a minor car accident, a motorways gets given the go-ahead in seriously dubious circumstances, Bush tightens controls on tourists entering America, Putin delivers another snipe at the West, a birthday comes and goes, the McDonalds 2-for-1 vouchers expire. You see, the world is full of small increments of crap that accumulate into a tidal wave of sewage being surfed by the top-hatted fat-cat capitalists that turn our globe with the arms of industry. I’ll put your complaint letter by my bust of Lenin, don’t worry.

The research into this theory will involve mice undergoing the daily tribulations of life and measurement of the anxiety that follows:

Experiment 1: A mouse is put into a small vehicle that can be operated by whisker. It is made to merge into a stream of traffic generated by other mice, and is viciously cut up by the other rodentmobiles. Anxiety from the crapness of life results and is measured by cranial probing.

Experiment 2: A mouse is put through an interview by a specially-trained authoritarian cat. The reward for success is a life-time in the grind of a spirit-sapping company run by said cat. Failure is rewarded by instant death by consumption. Anxiety measured in both eventualities.

Experiment 3: A mouse is made to iron 400 shirts and then subjected to candle-wax dripping on its chest as is common in some of the more interesting brothels in my dear home city. Anxiety measured and a value of crapness attributed.

Experiment 4: An innocent mouse has an ear grown on its back and is then interviewed by Jeremy Paxman about his role in the alleged bribery of a High Court Judge in the infamous Kitten-Bugging Scandal of ’04. A value of crapness is assigned to the mouse’s broken heart at the injustice of it all.

Experiment 5: A mouse is brought up from birth to believe that it is a beautiful swan and then, in old age, is invited to swim across a pond. Anxiety measured as it drowns and level of crapness decided accordingly, once again.

Experiment 6: A male mouse is induced to fall in love with another mouse. This other mouse has been trained in the art of deception, and they are treated to many nights out together, eating spaghetti on a moonlit porch in the French Riviera, sampling delectable wines with the 'he mouse' climbing the ivy of a night to reach the balcony of his love, so as to indulge in the heady passion of gaining the merest glimpse of the beautiful visage of his mirthful companion. At a predestined date, the wig and mask disguising the ‘female’ mouse is removed to reveal a horrid boil-ridden monster mouse, and the original mouse feels only self-loathing and disgust. Cranial probing commences.

At the end, all surviving mice will have their level of excrapy measured, just to prove that is has grown incrementally as the days in captivity and grievous human-life-mimicking torture proceeds.

Every physical constant of course needs a unit of measurement and an object of calibration. The unit of measurement is to be called ‘the feltz’. A kilofeltz, therefore, is defined as equal to your favourite pub burning down. A feltz, perhaps, would be missing a bus, or taking a pie out the oven, placing it on your plate while you salivate with anticipation, only to stick your knife in and discover the deceptive filling is still cool on the inside. Creamy chicken stirred with asparagus can outwit a human being like no other, lesser, filling, you see.
But, I hear you scream, just audible above the sounds of those voices telling me to murder kittens to appease Freedbot, the Liberty God, there are many beautiful and wonderful things happening in the world. Indeed, a friend of mine has just had a baby. That must be a life-affirming situation of a scale and intensity that I cannot yet hope to understand. My point is though, that the positive events are normally glitches. Small spikes on an otherwise steady descent into depravity. I need to believe this piece of delusion if I am to have a hope in hell’s chance of getting that research grant for my copious embezzlement needs.

Gentrifuckation

Maryhill is a very large district in the North West of Glasgow, home to a large community that still suffers from the fall-out of the collapse of heavy industry in this city. Developers have eyed-it up, almost in its entirety, as ripe for social-cleansing, blessed (or condemned) as it is with proximity to the City Centre, easy access to the M8 motorway and its links to the rest of Scotland, the River Kelvin on its southern flank and the Forth and Clyde Canal and the exciting ‘opportunities’ that it represents. It follows a trend being echoed in cities across Britain. Oh dear.

Being four hundred miles from London puts you well outside the radar of government. Up here we are far beyond the rim of the Westminster magnifying glass. Sometimes it is almost as if a different, more pliable, set of rules exists up here. Scottish politicians have an uncanny ability to be an unlikeable and muddy bunch, even by the judiciously high-standards of unlikeability set by their profession. I am often reminded of the cunning quote used in a book about the Troubles in Northern Ireland which describes the honour involved in assuming power, however small – “trumped up to the level of village Napoleons” – when thinking about politics in this tiny country.

There seems to be a level of intransigence and lack of transparency here that can only be compared with the deep-seated aloofness of some American city governments of old. Unfortunately the by-product of that situation does not seem to have transplanted across the pond. The "Take It To City Hall" mentality does not appear to exist within the apathetic confines of Glasgow, and the movement to resist the irrepressible forces of developers rises barely to a whimper above the deafening sounds of the bulldozer.

This city also appears to suffer from an unfortunate propensity to become star-struck - "All fur coat and nae knickers" - as some would put it. If Ken Livingstone is alleged by some to be a ‘Zone 1’ Mayor for an apparent lack of concern for problems that do not afflict Central London, then their counterparts Glasgow similarly appear to some, whether in truth or not, to lack much concern outside of the cosmetic clean-ups of the West End and the City Centre and the glamour of things like Architecture awards, City of Culture status and the Commonwealth Games. Except, of course, when it comes to social-cleansing, a tradition that has been forged to perfection after decades of practice and one that is not at all unique to this city.

Social Cleansing (Soh-shill Klen-Ziiing)(n.):1. The art of displacing people of a perceived lower social-order from an area in order to gentrify said area and construct garaged suburban-style housing, Singapore-style condominiums, contorted cul-de-sacs and Tapas Bars. 2. The alternative to regenerating an area to help eliminate the social problems faced by the local population. Often motivated by the fact that is makes far more money, results in a more apparent aesthetic change in the character of the area, relegates the previous ‘troublesome’ inhabitants elsewhere, often beyond the scope of the city* and puts smiles on the faces of developers which is heart-warming in a slimy, wrist-cutting kind of way.

* - Which, incidentally, is the en masse equivalent of the American sheriffs of yore ‘running criminals over the state line’ so that they will be outwith the jurisdiction of said sheriff and thus be no more of a headache to him. Flattening parts of Nitshill on the south-western edge of the city and precipitating an accidental transplant of its inhabitants into neighbouring Barrhead, under the jurisdiction of East Renfrewshire not Glasgow, merely seemed to have the effect of moving the social problems there. Far from an attempt to cure social problems then. Of course, the rush to confuse causality with correlation should be guarded against. It cannot be proven that displaced social problems were caused by these events, only hypothesised.

For Sale: One Maryhill

One carefree owner. Any offer invited provided it will inject millions into the city and result in wholescale transfusion of human population of the type that worked so wonderfully in the Le Corbusier-inspired Clearances of decades gone. See how they smile in those Soviet-style blocks. Must be able to take advice from architects who have identical ideas on residential ‘buildings of the future’, consisting as they do of wood-slatted balconies, steel framing and vast use of concrete judiciously covered over with colourful, panelled cladding to hide the resemblance and cheapness of their building technique from that of the hated council infrastructure** of the fifties and sixties.

** Anyone doubting the Utopian pretensions of the last wave of city planners to swing their wounding scythe should head for the Second Floor of the Mitchell Library and its wonderfully helpful staff, where there is a depth of material with artist's impressions of how tower blocks would transform the Gorbals, Anderston, Sighthill, and so on into heavenly dream-worlds of face-achingly happy citizens. The artist's impressions bear an eerily resemblance to those of contemporary images, albeit without the Photoshopping and computer-trickery available today. Why do these 'community walkways' not show desertion and newspapers blowing about in the corridored wind, I wonder? And why is the sun always shining?

Err, A Sermon, Delivered From The Steps Of the City Chambers, George Square

The problem is that this logic of displacement treats the district itself as the organism, and the people within it as parasitic, for good or bad. It is akin to flushing out perceived cancerous cells and allowing perceived healthy ones to breed. The definition of ‘healthy’ and ‘cancerous’ of course being fabrications in the minds of councillors and developers. The organism, being the district, at the end of this process, is of course much healthier-looking. It would be easy, with an injection of money, to level swathes of Maryhill and build luxury apartments. I dare say, there are enough of the professional classes living in the fringes outside the city boundaries to snap up such properties, look at the transformation near Ruchill, for example. That, to most people, would appear to be ‘The Saving of Maryhill’. The old cells are flushed out and the new ones substituted. But the district is not the organism. The people are the organism. A bloody obvious point, but it escapes many who drive around these new neighbourhoods and wonder at the awesome transformation. If you simply substitute the people of Maryhill with newly-found white-collar workers, you displace the original inhabitants, and you displace the social problems that were rife in those communities. The new neighbourhoods you see are not populated by the previous inhabitants, for they have been driven elsewhere. God knows where. A website proclaims that the high population density of the area presents a ‘barrier’ to would-be developers’ dream of wholesale demolition. I wonder whether this is the actual mentality of developers. I suppose rapid depopulation of a problem-afflicted area would represent a ‘win’ for the client.

It is quite easy to allow an area to become abandoned in a generally low-density and slowly-depopulating city such as this one, and it is a practice that has possibly been purposefully taking place in Glasgow for many years. I hypothesise the process to be as follows (I am not saying that the Council or the Housing Association indulges or has ever actively indulged in this kind of activity, merely that it is a possible theory to explain the mysteriously rapid decline of such districts - again I have eight-year-old photos of every stage described below, predominantly from Drumchapel, Cranhill and Possilpark which I will post when my Luddite brain figures out how):

1 – You rehouse a couple of tenants, and do not fill up their properties again. Immediately, the presence of metal shutters on the windows of the vacant flats signals the area as an investment blackspot.
2 – Abandoned properties attract vandals and crime. More people move out, and their flats are left vacant. The lower densities of people increases the danger of the area, the limited self-policing-effect of the community becomes far more patchy. People set fire to some of the abandoned properties for shits and giggles and mainly because they can get away with it.
3 – Streets are intermittently bulldozed once all the properties on the street are empty. This can be expedited by offering small sums of cash to ‘will’ tenants into relocating. The tenants who remain in the area feel marginalised, the gentle hand of government flat against their backs, pushing.
4 – The effect of streets-without-buildings is a blight like no other. I have photos of this from 2000 which I hope to post in due course. They present opportunities for burning out stolen cars and organising 'gang' fights. The neighbourhood looks dilapidated, its days numbered.

What happens next is a fork in the road. One path, the venerable one, is the replacement of housing stock and an attempt to cure the ills of the district from the core. In many cases, Glasgow City Council has made sterling efforts to rehouse the displaced in a nearby (or even the same) area in far better-quality housing. Since the stock transfer to the Glasgow Housing Association, this has also been much in evidence, in places like Drumchapel for instance, and can only be applauded. Improvements including central-heating, double-glazing, lockable tenement closes with password protection and the like are seemingly small improvements that vastly improve quality of life. A step in the right direction at least. It is the noble and right way to continue improving the city and the lot of its inhabitants.

However, in the case of Maryhill in the next few years, I doubt many of the previous inhabitants will be welcome back to the area, as can be testified by even a cursory glance at the plans. This is the other path, private development. I mentioned before that our distance from central government’s watchful eye allows us to limbo under well-placed barriers. There is very little enforcement of principles that address the need for social or affordable housing. Even the parsimonious nod given to the concept in the London Boroughs seems luxurious when compared with here. The canalside apartments of steel and glass with their sun lounges will, I predict, not be aimed at the unfortunate souls who fell through the gap between the loss of heavy industry and its very partial and piecemeal replacement with services.

Glasgow Harbour, a development on the Clyde waterfront not two miles to the south is a case in point. There was a unique opportunity to wipe out the derelict industrial infrastructure (though this unfortunately included the enormous, beautiful and monolithic Granary, a building of incredible size which could surely have undergone a transformation similar if not larger in scale to the present Tate Modern in London) and give something back to the citizens of the area. It is now being filled with multi-storey blocks that will offer condominium-style luxury living on the banks of the Clyde, building what might possibly become a new wall of severance for the more traditional communities of the area to replace the old one. Even the BBC ran an article asking whether we had lost a golden opportunity to create something beautiful, and public, allowing existing residents access to the river.

Don’t get me wrong. Turning Maryhill into the Venice of Glasgow is a wonderful idea. Doing it at the expense of those who belong there is the issue. It would be wrong to let the championing of such causes remain purely in the hands of the Scottish Socialist Party (however genuinely selfless its aims may be) and a few self-interested hard-left fringe groups that breed personalities who hitch lifts with the nearest cause galloping by in order to hoist themselves into a position where they have a stab at leadership and glory. It is a fundamental concern that affects us all. For when the higher powers start selling swathes of our precious city into the hands of private developers, those acres will remain fenced off from the rest of us forever. Wrenching apart communities to inject the monied, and in so doing setting into motion enforced exoduses of population is what got this city into this mess in the first place.

I can’t actually lay the blame with the City Council, the Housing Association, politicians or developers. For the most part, the plans offered up are the result of a genuine attempt at well-meaning resolutions for the problems of districts, not of people. Only the reckless would point the finger entirely at organisations like the Housing Association that do not exist for profit, and that have been ensured by politicial process to have nothing to gain. The market economy will always dictate that money flows where it can be invested. Governments and organisations like the Council and the Housing Association can and should however use their powers to influence, tugging at the strings of the puppeteers (developers, and so forth) to legislate in favour of existing residents and thus safeguarding the character and, more importantly, the justice that city residents deserve. Adopting Ken Livingstone's strategy of a concrete (excuse the pun) commitment to affordable and social housing would be a good first, if small, step. Glasgow is an amazing city, and to now relegate the communities that have contibuted so much to the city's past to the sidelines, all to turn this place into the kind of faceless 'Clone City' satellite-town of the kind that are ten-a-penny throughout the developed world would be a terrible loss.

It is the lack of willingness to learn from mistakes, of our own city's and of others, and also a result of a general apathy and tendency to remain disunited, that means that Glaswegians will always be condemned to be pushed around like cold mashed potato around a child's plate. It is no puzzle where the phrase, “Glasgow cares more for the dead than it does for the living” comes from. Take a walk around the Necropolis at the stunning stone monuments for the departed, and then look down the slopes at the filing-cabinets in the sky filled with the living. Take a read of the plans past and present that have been stapled onto the city maps in the Mitchells Library and wonder at the carelessness of the treatment of the city and its inhabitants. Successions of short-sighted plans glued together haphazardly to masquerade as a unified solution for a long-term problem. In some cases it has worked marvellously, and has helped to lift poverty from long-afflicted districts, and for this we can only be thankful. But much of the time, it appears to be treated as if it were simply a cynical attempt to save a long-drowned man one finger at a time. It is not that the city deserves better, it is that its people do.

The Canine Revolution

I may offend some people here, more so than usual. Not because I am going to talk about religion, or about politics. Not because I am, like Rowan Williams, going to say something so utterly confounding and stupid, however genuinely well-meaning he may have been trying to be, that it turns the stomachs of the general population. No. It is because we are, first and foremost, a nation of animal lovers, and I am going to talk negatively about dogs. Indeed, it would be interesting to compare the donations received by the RSPCA and the NSPCC, which are for animals’ and children’s rights respectively. One glance at the hideously voice-overed animal home advertisements will show you what I mean. Don’t get me wrong, I like animals, so long as they are not dogs.

Dogs. The most useless organism to ever have risen from the malaise of the primordial soup. They should probably have remained in their aeons-past fish-state for ever, patrolling the oceans and keeping dolphins awake with their incessant yapping. They are the animal equivalent of cluster bombs, you never know when you will run into one, they exist only to fulfil the narrow, blinkered needs of their owners without regard for the dying around them, skin shorn from their ankles, groaning. The worst thing about them is that despite their supposed intelligence, they seem incredibly adept at doing stupid things. Maybe a golden retriever did design some software behind a tree in scrubland in the Russian steppe. But that doesn’t stop it shitting in the street with impunity. Perhaps, as may have been documented, a Chihuahua in Iceland was the first animal ever to navigate down a geyser shaft without breathing equipment. But that doesn’t stop it humping your leg. And just maybe, it is an American dog not a human that will be the first organism to steer a spacecraft to Mars, completing the two-year mission successfully much to the chagrin of our Chinese brethren, but that won’t stop the little bastard yapping all hours of the night because it suspects that the pizza-smell emanating from the shop below is actually a burglar.

Many millions of people have been duped by the creative affection with which they become enwrapped. It is all a ploy, however, the dog is trying to get to your wallet. They are like small gangs of thieves, using the most cynical means necessary, feigning of love, to worm their way into your lives. Once they are there, they earn a place in your most coveted bubble of security. From there, they are able to exercise the power which they most seek – to make other people’s lives a living hell. Bastards.

Let us look at the charge sheet for dogs:

Count 1: Rampant fouling of the street: No other animal is able to get away with this, apart from pigeons, and they are roundly discriminated against, being banned from Trafalgar Square by the good-intentioned, but horribly unpleasant person, the London Mayor, Ken Livingstone. I would like to lead a bear around Glasgow, but I doubt I will ever be allowed to lest it defecates on a taxi bonnet. A case of hypocrisy if ever I found one. Incidentally, the bear would signify the strong-arm politics that I would hope to sell should I ever become Overlord of the City of Glasgow, a new post that will be created above Lord Provost, free from political affiliation. In a similar vein, a friend of my sisters once lead a donkey around Drumchapel in the name of the church, and it wasn’t even killed once. I am sure that had the donkey shat in Kinfauns Drive it would have been shot by a police sniper.

Count 2: Extreme propensity to bark at nothing: Dogs are loud. They have been given vocal chords in order to whittle down the human population using a way of sonic attrition. While this is a laudable aim, it doesn’t mean that I can’t scream while I go down in flames. There are many ranges of barks. There is the endearing low ‘wulph’ of the Saint Bernard who, child-abductor Beethoven aside, are about the most stomachable of dogs. Then there is the familiar ‘ruff’ sound of medium-size but non-inquisitive dogs. They are vaguely tolerable, so long as there is enough of a degree of separation between you and it. Like a river or a motorway interchange, for example. The noise of these dogs is tolerable if they are barking for a reason, such as, because someone’s foot is on their head, they are trying to dissuade a helicopter gunship from nuking a Palestinian shop, or they are trying to save a child who is not an actor, from a mine-shaft. Finally, there is the high-pitched scratching ‘yap’ of smaller dogs like lap-dogs. One strike and you’re out for these I’m afraid. Death sentence by strimmer. It is the most humane way.

Count 3: Breeding with people’s legs: Legs are nice things. If you have two you can walk. If you have three, you can run up behind a member of the Cabinet and kick him up the arse without breaking step. If you have four, you can star in films such as Black Beauty, without even needing to put on an accent, perfect your grief-face or put yourself in the shoes of a nineteenth-century farmhand. But anyway, we like legs and we want to keep them. Both of them. We don’t want to have one humped right off by the hairy, knee-high, parcel-sized bundle of rapist that we lovingly label ‘a dog’. Also, if dogs are so intelligent, how do they mistake a person’s leg for a female dog? Do they get into such an ecstasy over being let out into the street after their justified incarceration that they get the canine-equivalent of beer goggles? How have they managed to breed and survive this far if they have been attempting to copulate with everything that has the slightest association with a female dog, i.e., that they both have skin, on the off-chance that one day they will happen on their natural partner? I think we should conduct an experiment. For example, will a dog attempt to copulate with a elephant’s leg? And will the elephant be so tolerant?

Count 4: Feigning Intelligence: Everything that is associated with a dog’s intelligence is down to conditioning. Whether it is getting a dog to salivate by ringing a bell, or simply telling the dog to ‘sit’. Also, all this intelligence is motivated by a selfish greed for food. You can make a dog do anything by willing it with the reward for food. In this respect not much separates them from me. You could probably make a dog play the piano with its foot by promising it a gnaw on a lamb’s bone afterwards. And the thick bastard still wouldn’t be able to sook the marrow out afterwards. There have been a few cases of ‘acting dogs’. But I contest that chimpanzees and parrots make far better actors, even when compared to many human soap-stars such from as the all round adolescent misery-fest that is Hollyoaks. I reckon no human, or dog, could shout down a parrot. They are skilled and adept at tactical manipulations. In fact, it will be one of my goals when I become Overlord to orchestrate chess-games between parrots, with perches hung from the ceiling so that the parrots can move the pieces with their beaks. I don’t understand chess, and am hoping that these versatile and conversational creatures can teach me without the condescension that a human master of the game would exhibit. But back on point. Dogs are not intelligent, they are just programmable, just like computers. And just like an accidental mis-association on your part on a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet could fuck up your finances, so a wrongly programmed dog can cause great harm.

Count 5: Duping their owners into become slave-bots: Don’t get me wrong. If you are a dog-owner then you are not in need of punishment, but rehabilitation. The dog’s only purpose is to subvert your intelligence and free thought so that you may come under its total jurisdiction for evermore. A suitable treatment would be to have your eyes held-open using a Clockwork Orange-style eye-brace (I will use this word for it from now on, it features highly among treatments for the many ills of the world), while watching videos of dogs tearing into rotten meat left on city pavements. In order to heighten the strange sense of such unpalatable events being at odds with the setting, rotten-meat-dogs could be put in front of Buckingham Palace, or in an elegant rose garden, or in a crèche, or in the Sainsburys salad counter. Only by conditioning dog-owners into seeing the foulness of the beasts can they be successfully rehabilitated, poor souls.

Count 6: Becoming a fashion accessory: Many self-confessed ‘hard men’ will walk vicious dogs about the streets which will eye-up and occasionally bite innocents. This gives a legitimate method for the bastard to get away with assault. It is far more difficult to pull up an animal for its behaviour than a human. If you want to portray an image of danger, why not just buy a car? You can cause far more mayhem and death with a car by, say, driving it down a pedestrian precinct than even the most genocidal dog would be capable of. Or if it must be an animal, how about a shark. Sharks are readily available, and free. Not two miles from my flat is the Forth and Clyde Canal which is festooned with sharks. Err, possibly. They are attracted to cheese and onion crisps, and if you glue them to a mannequin which is then dipped into the canal, you are bound to attract a fine specimen indeed. Then it is a simple matter of knocking up a wooden tank with wheels on it and filling it up with water. If you are kind, you will use Evian or some other kind of bottled water. Sharks are pretty picky and you don’t want to piss them off. Then wheel it down the precinct and watch in awe as people get out of your way. One sight of that dorsal fin peeking from above the wooden tank-walls will send that muppet with his rottweiler scampering for the safety of a greeting card shop awning. Also, some young women in places like Santa Monica have tiny dogs that they keep in their handbags. There are no words to describe how pitiful this act is, therefore please just shake your heads slowly in disbelief with me.

Count 7: Killing people: Dogs kill people. They do. Whenever cats kill people, they are the large wild things like leopards that people don’t normally keep in their houses unless they have the kind of adrenalin-seeking nature that downhill skiers possess combined with the propensity for masochism of ritual body-piercers. Dogs on the other hand, routinely kill people. Occasionally there will be a story about how some rottweiler or pit-bull has mauled the face off a toddler. Their jaws clamp tight, so that often the only way to get them to release their grip is to slam their head in a car door. Alternatively, apparently you should pull both their front legs outwards to the side which obviously breaks something pivotal in their bodies. Then, some minister will be invited onto the evening news and they will make grandiose promises about changing dog legislation and then literally nothing will happen. But anyway, why take the risk of having the dog in the first place? If there was a homicidal maniac who occasionally lashed out with a knife, but by and by, he was pretty good to have a round due to his witty banter, would you still keep him in your house? There should be some sort of licensing system, and the owners should be made to sit some kind of physical training test, much as they did on “Dog Borstal”, to prove they were not total half-wits that would let their chair-sized packages of violent death maul the nearest child. Or else they could make the dog sit a test. A simple multiple-choice test would suffice, they could hold the pens in their mouths.

Anyway, so that is my case against dogs. There are other things, like the way they just sniff around you for no reason as they pass you in the street, and the way they follow you for no reason. Today, while walking along the Kelvin towpath, a dog did just that. I should have shot it and thrown it in the river, but I don’t own a gun, and anyway since dogs are the devil incarnate it would just have leaped out the river, mended itself and then wrapped its jaws around my neck. And then there was that dog that, years ago, came out of nowhere and followed me along the West Highland Way as I returned to the city and then followed me through the streets until I lost it in the traffic (I was cycling). You may call me heartless, but I would say it was more Darwinian. As is the case when a dog chased after a jeep that a friend of mine was in. They were travelling relatively slowly and when the dog finally caught up it ran right under the back wheel and was run over. Muppet.

I recognise that people would miss their dogs so I propose the following solution to make the pain easier to bear. Take forty marshmallows and melt them into a saucepan. Take the mixture out and pour it into a semi-spherical mould. When it solidifies you will have half a sphere of marshmallow. Next, take some spaghetti, boil in a pan and flavour with salt. When suitably drapable, drape on top of the marshmallow semi-ball, and through the flat-side plunge a mop handle. Call this object Puppy and have it as your pet. It has a number of uses. You can still use it as a mop, and it won’t bark. You can use it to fend off burglars, they hate getting marshmallow on them, and it still will not bark. And when you get bored of it you can eat it, and even then it will not bark. If the giant marshmallow is still not good enough company for you - perhaps it is too intelligent and not docile and blindly affectionate like your exiled dog - then you could always have a child. Children rarely kill people, and most of them don’t bark. For authenticity you could give it a suitable dog-like name like Rover, if it’s a boy, or Wolverine, if it’s a girl. In fact if I ever have a daughter, she is going to be called Wolverine anyway, though for strictly and intensely personal reasons.

This being Britain, it will be difficult to dispose of all the dogs without journalistic scrutiny and uproar from the public. In my capacity as Overlord, it will not be my desire to cause undo cruelty to dogs. Therefore, I propose the following method. The dogs will all be shot with tranquilliser darts. The dose will be the same regardless of the particular dog, which has the advantage that it will probably induce an ever-lasting slumber in the smallest lap-dogs immediately. The other dogs will be laid out on bridges and docksides with strips of seasoned bacon draped on them so that seagulls, the evil flying carnivorous pterodactyls of the 21st century, can feast upon them. This has the advantage that it should satisfy their appetite for many years, thus delaying the inevitable day when they migrate inland and destroy civilisation.

Incidentally, and unrelated:

On the television is the strangest fusion I have ever seen. Someone is performing a rock number with a live band while models strut across the stage and perform some kind of jig with him before walking off. The rock bloke is prancing like a hallucinating ape and making it just as dangerous for the models in their tripping gowns as if they were cat-walking across a high-speed freight line. Still, models don’t get about much. It will be good for their immune system and sense of real life to put some danger in their paths once in a while. Perhaps making them walk around courses avoiding traffic cones chicane-style like in the “Lovely Girls Competition” in Father Ted would work. I’ll bear that in mind when I become Overlord. Oh fuck now Lily Allen’s on. I might have to throw this television contraption out of the window. If I’m really lucky it will take out a Number 9 bendy-bus on its way down. They like to make noise at the bus stop outside my bedroom window, though in a more intelligent manner than the dogs do.

Another Concrete Snake

One thing you normally don’t do to someone in the spirit of altruism is bring out a scythe and start scoring lines across his chest. Unfortunately, what we aren’t willing to do to an individual, we are willing to band together and execute upon a much larger scale, still in a distorted version of altruism. Upon, say, a city.

Glasgow has a motorway running through its heart, which is fairly odd for a European city, This is a phenomenon that is a natural occurrence in America, but is not much favoured here. Or not anymore, I should add. The thing snakes from the east of the city, navigates through the city centre, rubbing shoulders with the historic Mitchell Library and graceful mansion houses of Charing Cross before hurling over the River Clyde on what is almost universally accepted (Google it!) to be the busiest bridge in Europe – the ten-lane Kingston Bridge - and then snakes onwards through the western suburbs. Another motorway, the one from England, latches onto it in the eastern suburbs, and during my lifetime, two more motorways, one heading north-east, and one south-west, have been linked to it, winding their way through the inner city before breaking free into the countryside. Glasgow is utterly unique in Britain in being linked together in this way, but the ideas that brought this about do not belong to here alone. In the sixties, during that same gin-fuelled orgy that created our tower-block-streaked skylines, many cities, London and Newcastle among them, indulged in breath-taking schemes to plaster over all their slum-ridden areas with vast motorway networks, heralding an age when motorists in convertibles could speed California-style down the open highway, with the wind in their hair, and with only the slight drenching of rain otherwise detracting from their very own British Dream. London was going to have four concentric motorways among many others. The inner-most would have decimated some of the most culturally rich areas of the city such as Kilburn, Camden, Highbury, Hackney, Bow, Peckham, Brixton, Clapham, Battersea, Shepherds Bush and the like. One glance at the plans invites revulsion, and the ‘artist’s impressions’ of Utopian couples holding hands in apparently beautifully sculpted underpasses in the middle of places like Camden Town is laughable and sad at the same time. Have a look at the anticipated state of Kilburn afterwards, that tiny thin road running on stilts through the centre of the scene is all that is left of the busy shop-fronted High Road. Three very tiny portions got built, but the movement petered out before it ever got going, thankfully.

The difference with Glasgow is that we actually went through with it. Well that’s not quite accurate. The actual plans were mind-blowing, and possibly only a fifth of them actually got built. The swathes of concrete winding their way through this city today are a fraction of what was intended. The thinking, in the case of the main motorway running through the centre, the M8, was that to stop the dense street traffic travelling through the city detracting from the quality of life in the centre of the city, they would simply plunge a motorway through the middle. To anyone alive who was responsible for this decision, I would like to say that driving a motorway through the centre of a city to make it less appealing to traffic is like burning your house down to make it less appealing to burglars. Even Billy Connolly has remarked that only this city would attempt to a build a ring-road right through the centre of town. At the time, a delegation was even dispatched to the Eastern coast of the United States to study the freeway networks there before formulating their plans. The conspicuous lack of giant roundabouts and the proliferation of spaghetti-like slip roads feeding into city centre streets betray the American principles behind the designs. Not to mention those unnerving entrances and exits that enter and leave from the fast lane. The scheme was pushed through disguised as simple slum clearance even though many other areas of slums were simply bulldozed to form slightly more publicly-amenable parks.

I can just imagine the council meeting in the City Chambers to sell this marvel of infrastructure:

Lord Butcher of Dennistoun: I call this meeting to order. On today’s agenda, the matter of accommodating the motor vehicles of our city. On behalf of the Scottish Road-Builders and Future Ages Society, I call Lord Asphalt.

Lord Asphalt: Thank you, your grace. I stand before you here to plead our case. For hundreds of years, Glasgow has endured the shame of the horse and cart. Now, we have the automobile, and yet Glasgow, looking upon its post-industrial future, stands shamefully still. The only course of action is to embrace our American brethren, and build motorways of our own.

Lady Swampy of the Heath: How many trees will it destroy? And will my daughter in Kinning Park be forever safeguarded?
Breaks down into tears, blowing her nose in an incredibly unlady-like fashion on a silken handkerchief with a small pony in the corner.

Lord Asphalt: I assure you, m’lady. No harm will come to your daughter, though her house will be bulldozed.
Raises voice to be heard by all assembled.
I must stress, citizens, that this is in the name of progress! Soon, we will be able to put man on the Moon. Is it too much to ask that we can drive at 50 mph through the centre of this nation’s largest city? I think not. Those that would hinder us in this battle are heathens and Luddites. I suppose you would have me conduct my affairs on a penny farthing? You know who I mean!

Skag Boy, The Wonder Midget: Haw! Where yeez gonnae pit it but? If yer gawny save the centre?

Lord Asphalt: I’m glad you asked that, young boy. And may I compliment you on your esteemed midgetry.
Lord Asphalt, who, it should be explained, has a very severe twitch in his right arm, takes a pen that is handed to him by a servant boy averting his eyes and draws a jagged line roughly east-west across a wall-map of the city, only just missing Central Station.
This is the proposed route. As you can see, ladies and gentlemen, we can kill two birds with one stone. Not only can we accommodate all those who wish to drive to the centre at great speed by building this road, but by actually routing it through the centre, we also destroy the centre as a destination, thereby diminishing the traffic on our streets still further!

Bystander Who I Can’t Be Arsed Inventing A Name For: But, you mean that…?

Lord Asphalt: Yes, by removing the very streets that we are worried about and building in their place this rather large motorway, we can eliminate the problem of having to worry about the effect of automobiles on those same streets, for they will no longer exist. For this reason, I propose that some of our most historic streets be eliminated, or at the very least, severed.
Rapturous applause from the crowd.

Lord Asphalt: To those of you who are yet to be convinced, and for the sake of brevity I shall deem those people, “Communists”, let me show you some exhibits to illustrate the point.
Pulls out one of the aforementioned ‘artist’s impressions’.
Here, we have a drawing of the city with the motorway built and as you can see, the people in the picture are tastefully clothed, and smiling, for the sun as out. This will be a more common occurrence as the smog caused by the lack of motorway will have been forever lifted, giving Glasgow a more cosmopolitan, Floridaesque feeling. On the motorway overpass, which will be coated in rose petals, you can see that swings made of ivy have been attached, and children who have been lifted out of poverty by the demolishing and non-replacement of their homes are swinging on it laughing with that giddy innocent laughter of youth. Ahh, look at them there. Such warmth! On the top is a car driver, whooping with excitement and throwing bouquets of flowers to the people emerging from the underpass below. And in the tunnel further back down the underpass, we see a Rangers and a Celtic fan locked in a conciliatory embrace.
The crowd break down and weep joyfully, while a small carefully-installed orphan-boy in the back of the room starts singing ‘Hallelujah’ in the style of the not-yet-born Jeff Buckley.

Lord Butcher: Bravo, bravo!

Lord Asphalt: Suddenly lowers his voice and issues a more threatening tone.
Now. Here is an image of Glasgow in a mere five years time if we do not build the motorway.
A projection of a black and white photograph showing the aftermath of a bloody battle in the Korean War is flashed briefly onto the scene.
Look at the carnage, you see, there really is no contest.
The crowd once again break down into wails of joy.

Lord Asphalt: AND, might I add, we wish to build seven more motorways through the city just like it!
All round fainting with admiration, while the ‘Communists’, mute with shock throughout the proceedings are dragged out the back and set upon by the Secret Police.

A fairly accurate representation of a council planning meeting I’m sure you’ll agree. See, I could have done government.

The sacrifice that Glasgow unwillingly made was, in the event, a God-send for towns and cities up and down the country. On surveying the brutality of the destruction of elegant townhouses, Victorian mansions and untold square miles of historic tenements, central government in Westminster declared that such vandalism would not be visited on any other city. Urban highway schemes up and down the land had the plug pulled. Stubs of some of those extra motorways were lengthened throughout the nineties in the name of ‘completion’, but it remained a curiously local glitch of the, “Well, we’ve come so far” variety. The new motorway to the south-west justifiably sold itself on safety grounds – it replaced the most dangerous road in Scotland - but it also sacrificed areas of one of Glasgow’s most beautiful parks, Pollok Park, by doing so. Then, by the time of the New Labour cull on new road schemes, it seemed that at last the simmering longing to plunge more motorways through the city had cooled to a rippled calm.

And that should be the end of the story. But it is not.
Something a little perplexing is happening now, taken in the context of what central government wishes to achieve, and in terms of the prevailing mood. Mention the M74 to anyone in the south-east of the city, and you are likely to illicit a fairly violent reaction one way or the other. Indeed, they are building another motorway through the urban landscape. Construction begins later in the year. Already old warehouses and businesses have been flattened. Venture down Cathcart Road or Polmadie Road or around the strange grid-of-streets-without-used-buildings that is Tradeston, and you will see that large signs have appeared proclaiming archaeological digs and preparation works. These are in the middle of heavily urbanised areas. I might stick some photos up when it gets dry enough to actually leave the flat. Plunging motorways through built-up areas being a universal sin in developed countries these days, this one anomaly does give a fascinating insight into the amount of destruction required.

In a master-stroke of branding, the project is called the “M74 Completion”, not, as campaigners will contend, The M74 Extension. A plethora of studies have been undertaken to justify this road, and they have lent towards the imperative for completion lest the West of Scotland fall behind (did they mean ‘fall further behind?’) the rest of the UK. A staggering viewpoint when put in the context of Edinburgh, a hellishly successful city despite having a pisspoor road network that consists of little more than narrow surface streets. A Geography teacher of mine once made the point that, “If you want to make poor people richer, give them the money. Don’t spend it on building roads around them. People without cars don’t need motorways.” A fair point. Glaswegians have among the lowest car-ownership levels in Europe. There are surely more direct ways to help the local economy.

One of the strangest things about the arguments for this road, though it is absolutely futile to discuss it now that all argument is at an end and the spades and diggers are even now churning the soil, is the amount of inconsistency and contradiction involved. This seems to have wormed its way into the arguments of erstwhile intelligent and well-informed people by means of an avenue of desperation. There is the argument that the congestion on the ‘old motorway’ (that which I described in the first-half of this entry) will be relieved, and thus help the economy of Glasgow. True, the Kingston Bridge will almost certainly lose its mantle as busiest bridge in Europe once the motorway is completed. The M8 is one of the most congested roads in the UK, rivalling the M25 and the M6 (not that you would know it from the national media). The bottleneck not only paralyses the trunk road network, but jams up the slip roads and into every city centre street and various other parts of the city. Trying to get out of the city at peak times is often an exercise in bypassing the ‘bypass’. But, this is contrasted with the argument that increasing road provision drags more drivers onto the roads. Ultimately, this gunges up the city as it was before, only now there are more vehicles causing the chaos, and thus more problems when they slip off the motorway onto the surface streets. I love it when people contradict this argument. There are a finite number of people and vehicles, so it goes, and therefore you can build your way out of congestion. Build enough roads, and you will finally satisfy demand.

But the real situation is more like this:
You live several miles from the city, out in the leafy periphery. You have a nice house with its own driveway. You have a privet hedge. Your wife can look at her neighbours and indulge in the sordid horse-play of one-up-man-ship. You daughter’s life is so utterly banal and driven by the cosmetic needs and materialistic nature of everyday life that she has descended to hell and become a goth (by the way they are generally really nice people actually from experience), wearing black lipstick to shock you into actually saying something to her, into betraying that you are actually a feeling, sentient being. You are – in a word – suburban. But, there is one real thorn in your side. Gosh, the commute down that motorway every day is hell. It takes you nearly an hour to get into town, and then another hour to get back, and by that time you are in a foul mood and you come crashing through the door giving the cat a huge kick out the way causing yet more of its hair is shed from its arse – I mean Christ, it already looks like some kind of snarling bald-arsed baboon. You eat your dinner in silence and don’t give a fuck about your equally mute daughter. You head upstairs dejected and don’t even bother getting through seven minutes of the Tantric Sex Manual by Sting that you bought your wife as a “Sorry I forgot our fucking anniversary” present because in your head is just the seething memory of stop-start vegetable-driving behind a thousand other pricks in their metal boxes with their CD players and their fragrant trees spinning from the rear-view mirror. You just wish they would widen that motorway and then you would get to work and back faster.

And then one day, Lord Asphalt, now a stately 105 years of age, presents his widening proposal to The Board, and the gap-toothed ubermuppets who run the city grin and nod in approval and then five years later it is finished, coming in at a parsimonious £1000 per inch, and hey presto, your commute takes 35 minutes. For a year, it is wonderful. Your daughter enrols at a prestigious college. You come home early and help your wife with the cooking, eagerly promoting Oyster Thursday when you gulp down the aphrodisiac and then settle down for the evening and then all through the night, with “Fields of Gold” in the background, you make earth-moving motions, having committed the Tantric book to memory in all your spare time. Great! Then, one day, while you are bending over putting away the dried plates into the bottom drawer, you hear subtle shaking. The surface of your coffee ever so slightly ripples. What is this? Some kind of velociraptor unleashed from a prehistoric theme park?

No, you run to the window, and that leafy tree-covered hill behind your house is being rampaged upon by a bulldozer. You read in the press the advertisements for a new development called Heavenly Rise, now within easy commuting distance of the city. A few months later, some horrendous Gingerbread cottage development of identical clone-houses built by a multi-national company has festooned the slopes with cheap brick-imitation prefabricated piles of wafer-thin-walled twat-housing and they have other families in them with other children. But God, don’t they look just like you? Just like your family? Yes, they are just like you. And those parents work in the city too. And guess what? They’re going to use your motorway. And then it all clogs up again, except now there is one more lane of blinking lights to gaze at while you chew your own tongue in frustration, and it is back to the hour long commute, only now when you get to the city, you are competing with even more traffic for those city streets, and those parking places, and trying to beat that amber light, or sitting stewing in your own flatulence while pedestrians cross between the bonnet of your car and the boot of the one in front, and Oh Christ what is the fucking point, I might as well get this car back into my garage and run the engine with a hosepipe from the exhaust coming straight into the car until I croak. Hmm, if only they would just widen the motorway again…

So that is one contradiction. The other is that they are falling over each other and pulling each other’s knickers down about the actual purpose of the motorway. It is variously seen as a way of helping Glasgow, or of helping bypass Glasgow. If it is the former, then why have they taken great pains to omit local junctions that would allow local traffic to get around the city more easily. And also why have they barred people from connecting from the new motorway to the Kingston Bridge and into the city and the western districts, which was part of the original plan in Day One? Whatever the ideology behind the construction, people will end up rat-running around surface streets to get between the new motorway and the bridge of the old motorway to get into the city centre, and wasn’t the point of all this to reduce surface traffic? And if it is to bypass Glasgow, then why the hell build it through Glasgow? That was the mistake they made with the old motorway. This one will pass half a mile from the city centre, albeit on the other side of the river from it. It will pass through inner city areas that do not benefit from it (due to lack of access), like Govanhill and The Gorbals.

The final contradiction can be found in two competing sources of official information. One document, on the M74 Completion website – head to the last frequently-asked question here holds that there will be a decrease in traffic everywhere, but perhaps a very small increase in traffic on the existing motorway network where the new motorway joins back in. The official site claims a tootling increase of 0.2% in ‘the study area’. This kind of traffic prediction is such an imperfect, black art though, based as it is on notoriously whimsical human behaviour, that the margin of error is probably several times this figure. I cannot claim that the figure is wrong, but I can contrast it with the findings below, from a source so indelibly linked to the first that you wonder how the chasm was leaped.

This other document, from the Scottish Government itself who are trying to promote the project, paints a very different picture. It forecasts queues, even on the new motorway, and it forecasts large increases in traffic on the existing motorway network west of the joining point. It even details the case for widening the existing motorways in these areas. This is being done. The hard shoulders, usually for stopping in emergencies, will become running lanes deep into the south-west of the city on two different motorways. It also makes a lacklustre attempt to argue its way out of the blunder of not connecting to the bridge, using deeply contradictory arguments. The main objectioner, a retired traffic engineer called George Baillie, was rail-roaded over by self-conflicting nonsense – from paragraph 4.23 onwards here, though I admit this will be of purely very local interest.

And one final, if overlapping, contradiction. The motorway project is hailed as a harbinger of regeneration to the run-down and derelict areas along its proposed route. Take a look on Google maps here and you will see a swathe of abandonment and ridiculously low-quality land uses such as warehouses (bear in mind that you are only a mile or two from the centre of a large city, the centre lies just to the north) with more dense areas of buildings to the south, further from the city centre. Many of the factories in the south-east and north-west of the picture have been demolished in the last year. It is no coincidence that this corridor of blight exists. It was cleared and largely prevented from being put to higher-quality uses by the very fact that this project has hanged in the air for decades. To say that building a road will be good at removing a blight that has been caused by speculation that a road will be built there is a circuitous feedback argument that should be deafeningly pointless to anyone. And I won’t even go into the contradiction behind the right-hand forwarding a new motorway as a transport option when left-hand (presumably using shadow puppetry) is rightly ranting about the benefits of dragging people out their cars and onto public transport.

So shall I end by hugging a tree then? Well, no. Amazingly, given the above, I am not actually utterly against this project. I have not yet made up my mind. For all the errors and bumbling in the presented arguments which would require a thick-spectacled corporate lawyer to even attempt to make sense of, there are undoubtedly advantages to going through with it. It may damage the city, but it will help the region. Areas west and east of the city, such as Renfrewshire, Inverclyde and Lanarkshire will be helped by the direct linking. The entire west of Scotland is still trying to find its feet in a lingering and destructive post-Industrial present. Any potential for lift needs to be seized upon. The problem for councillors is that they have to sell the project to the city that it partially demolishes. There is no problem in selling it to the districts listed above which are outside the city, which will feel more direct benefit, and with the added bonus that they lose nothing (a small part of Rutherglen in South Lanarkshire aside). Glasgow, which takes the damage, also sees scant benefit relative to these areas. It has long been a paradox that the infrastructure of this city seems generous for its size, but that it is gridlocked because it is used by folk from wealthy surrounding suburbs and satellite towns that contribute nothing to the city’s upkeep due to the cynical gerrymandering of the nineties that tightly bound the boundaries of the city, effectively shutting out commuters' tax money. This is another big issue that is an abomination of political manipulation and which I will need to deal with more fully sometime.

The fact that I feel it easier to argue against it probably stems from a lingering despair about our lack of ability to change of our way of thinking. A few years ago, Private Eye observed that Glasgow is still locked in the car-crazy 1950’s, and much of that is in evidence. It also is to do with the fact that it's easier to pick a fight with those that have laid their feelings and arguments bare, able to be picked off by conversational vultures like myself whenever we choose. It would be nice for the councillors to bury their heads in books by Jane Jacobs, of the excellent (if viciously flawed by attempting to compare Venice and Los Angeles) book, Car Free Cities by JH Crawford. The campaigners have mainly wailed about the horror of motorways and cars in general, or about the need to preserve communities in Oatlands, Govanhill and the like, or about other such things that it is difficult to argue against. Perhaps the root of being objective about something is about appreciating the sum of all others’ subjective opinions. In that case, I would have to put myself in the shoes of someone whose business was being knocked down, or whose view from their window will be blighted by another concrete snake, or whose son’s primary school will now be subjected to the constant cacophony of roaring traffic. Or perhaps I should put myself in the shoes of the delivery company owner who loses thousands of pounds a day from traffic congestion and that factory-worker whose wages are squeezed because the boss’s costs sky-rocket every time a consignment of raw materials is delayed as it moves at walking pace through countless underpasses, or maybe just into the shoes of that man in Motherwell who really just wants to get home in time to squeeze in some tantric action with his wife in before CSI:Miami starts.

In the end, we are stuck with the outcome we have. And if it can be done here, it can be done anywhere. In Britain, a supposed bastion of the new environmental movement, we are sending the message that we still allow such things to happen. The most shameful thing is the cynical and condescending way that it is being sold by the powers of government and by other interested parties. It may be that the project, looked at as a whole, may turn out to be a marginally more good than bad thing, though I would guess not. I do not claim to have an authoritative answer on this - nobody can - but it has been such a fuck-up of public-relations, such a sham of a public consultation and general standard white-wash of a case, that any actual benefits that could be claimed were long ago lost in a fog of oratory bollocks. Everyone has rightly stopped listening. It will take decades to find out whether the new road will have brought about the benefits it is supposed to bring, or to see whether the old and new motorways pack up to the legendary levels of gridlock that the former faces now. Is it really the case, that up here in this sometimes narrow-minded city, the terrible lessons of urban-planning-gone-wrong will have to be taught anew by actual implementation to each new generation, even while the monuments to the last generation's still stand?

What will be seen more quickly though, is the effect of the great swinging scythe on our city. Glasgow's ruinous past makes it the ideal tapestry for generation after generation of politicians and city planners to place their stamp upon it. This is not a historic-looking 'finished' city like Edinburgh or Paris. Its dereliction and its poverty make it an ideal guinea-pig for people bent on erasing the mistakes of the past with single-minded plans that in turn produce more mistakes, all in the name of misguided altruism. The effect of that scythe that has again broken free after decades of restraint will shortly become all too clear.