Finally, Christ­mas is close enough to start get­ting excited about! I’m not a Christ­mas loon but I do enjoy a little bit of fest­iv­ity once Decem­ber rolls around and it’s get­ting harder to tell when an inno­cent com­ment about the impend­ing hol­i­day will eli­cit groans rather than cheer from any­one in the vicin­ity.  Assum­ing the very thought of Christ­mas doesn’t offend you, please carry on…

I have a real tree again this year and, for once, it isn’t the last sad, tired look­ing one from B&Q I usu­ally end up with. A bit of for­ward plan­ning and one excel­lent sup­plier recom­mend­a­tion later and I have a very pretty little (well, nearly 6 foot) Nord­man Fir. I man­aged to get this one for a bar­gain price of £25 but I think I may have been very lucky with a sym­path­etic and very help­ful tree sales­man — after break­ing my wash­ing machine yes­ter­day morn­ing the sav­ing was very wel­come. If you’re in Glas­gow and look­ing for a tree I’d def­in­itely recom­mend them — they’re on Algie Street, just across from the Church on the Hill. I don’t know them, their trees are just some of the nicest I’ve seen in Glas­gow — if I had a big­ger house and a big­ger budget I’d have got­ten one of the beau­ti­ful spruces with a log base.

Pic via @TintoHill

See that wee fact I shared a few weeks ago about a col­lec­tion of High­land cows being known as a fold? Came in handy this week­end: a fold of High­land cows escaped from Pol­lok Park on Sat­urday morn­ing, with one end­ing up cornered in the Bat­tle­field branch of National Tyre Centre and the rest wan­der­ing around out­side the Vic­toria Infirm­ary pre­sum­ably try­ing to con­vince patients their doses were too high.

Clearly this was dis­tress­ing for the anim­als, and indeed for those that crossed the path of the fierce yet cuddly look­ing creatures, but there’s still some­thing quite amus­ing about the whole débâcle. My mother’s quite ser­i­ous con­cern for which route they took (Haggs Road then Tit­wood Road, appar­ently),  @Sunniestbunny’s amus­ingly dry descrip­tion of events:  “Not often you see High­land cows run­ning through Shaw­lands fol­lowed by 2 fire engines”, and the pre­dict­able “udder chaos” head­line from local news out­lets has kept me chuck­ling about it all weekend.

Amus­ing as it all was, though, I do hope they find the idiot whose dog star­ted the whole thing by run­ning into the field and start­ling the cows — dugs on leashes people!

(Bonus rock points for you if you recog­nise the title.)

Image via Schools Wikipedia

Glas­gow from above isn’t much pret­tier or cohes­ive than it is from the ground, but this pan­or­ama is a good rep­res­ent­a­tion of the city’s con­stant evolution.

Glas­gow isn’t a par­tic­u­larly sen­ti­mental city when it comes to archi­tec­ture. Need a new motor­way? We’ll just knock down those pretty build­ings in your way. Build­ing a six star hotel but there are some pesky old build­ings and busi­nesses on the site you want? We’ll make trad­ing con­di­tions impossible  until they have to give up. A velo­drome you say? Sure thing, we’ll just evict some gran­nies and level their tene­ments for you.

All over the city you’ll see old build­ings jux­ta­posed with new and huge gaps where build­ings have been lev­elled and their replace­ment devel­op­ments for­got­ten, but the fluid­ity is part of what I love about Glas­gow — you can have grown up here and still be sur­prised at what you encounter around the corner.

There are a few build­ings I’m sorry I never had the chance to see. The St Enoch Hotel back in 1879 is a little more impress­ive than the St Enoch Centre on the site today:

Glas­gow Uni­ver­sity would have been some­thing to see in its ori­ginal home on the High Street, espe­cially when you see bits you recog­nise from the cur­rent cam­pus in these old pictures:

Outer court at the Old College, via Glasgow University Library

(The Lion and Uni­corn stair­case and the arch­way below it were moved brick by brick to the university’s cur­rent home.)

The city’s Park dis­trict is one of the least changed areas and makes for an enjoy­able stroll. There’s very little dif­fer­ence betwen this view of Wood­side Cres­cent from 1839 and the one I saw every day when I worked in the area 168 years later:

Woodside Crescent 1839, via The Glasgow Story

It’s easy to for­get what a grand past Glas­gow had when the rem­nants are tucked away in places like Park and Blythes­wood Square, but it’s always nice to stumble into a little enclave the bull­dozers have missed.