A Wee Trip to Glasgow

Here we are on a quick visit to Glasgow with my neighbour, Anna. She doesn’t really speak English but displayed great powers of receptivity and a sense of adventure throughout the trip. First day out, we come across a busking piper:  a photo definite op.!

                             

 

We head for the University of Glasgow, this year basking in the laurels of being 65^th in world ranking of universities, 10^th place in the United Kingdom and second only to Edinburgh in the Scottish ranking. Anna meets her nephew, Vasilis, who’s following postgraduate studies there and we also meet Angeliki, currently a tutor on  pre-sessional courses at the university. When I say that the night before her first lesson, she learned that Mati, outside Athens, where their permanent home is, was up in flames, you can guess the kind of emotional turmoil she had been going through. By some miracle, if that word can be deemed appropriate for such a tragic inferno, their house was saved and relatively unscathed. Unfortunately, some of their friends and neighbours were lost to the conflagration.

That day as she admired our national costume, Anna had happened to say how much she would like to see a traditional Scottish wedding. And, as we were strolling round the campus, we turned a corner leading into a quadrangle and behold, in the church courtyard, a beautiful line-up of gorgeous girls and braw, braw lads, completely kilted up, wearing  our national garb with style and dignity.

                               

                

                     

              

After that, we wander to Kelvin Grove, described as:

‘a picturesque and richly wooded dell a short distance north west of Glasgow and was a favourite place for young people to meet on summer afternoons’

 alongside the lyrics of the famous song written by the Paisley-born Thomas Lyle (1792-1859) about it:

Let us haste to Kelvin Grove, bonnie lassie o
Through its mazes let us rove, bonnie lassie o
Where the roses in their pride
Deck the bonnie dingle side
Where the midnight fairies glide, bonnie lassie o

Oh Kelvin banks are fair, bonnie lassie o
When the summer we are there, bonnie lassie o
There the May-pink crimson plume
Grows a soft but sweet perfume
Round the yellow banks of broom, bonnie lassie o

Now two problems presented themselves to me:

• When we talk of Glasgow, is ‘the green’ a noun - as a flat area where the washing was traditionally laid out to dry or an adjective, describing the greenery around the place.
• And why is the Gaelic word ‘glas’ here rendered ‘green’ when I have learned it as the word for the colour ‘gray’?

Apparently this word can apply to both:

Omniglot.com has  glasto as a Proto-Celtic term for ‘green’ whereas Narratives of Place, Belonging and Language by Mairead Nic Craith, Macmillan, 2012, cites examples of glas being used to describe ‘an assortment of shadings in Gaelic’ : green for vegetation and in madainn glas - a gray morning , described as a raw, chilly one.

                              

 

We briefly visited the Kelvin Grove Art Gallery and Museum, lack of time and aching feet preventing a visit to the Charles Rennie Mackintosh Exhibition – I now regret that decision!

But we had places to go – our hotel – and people to meet – Marina and John, who had driven up from Durham. Below Marina is presented with her loukoumi, Greek delight, fresh from Macedonia.

                                

We round off our day with a fine, relaxed meal at a nearby restaurant.  But our evening unexpectedly ends with a frantic rush to the hotel in torrential rain. Despite our umbrellas – drenched or droukit!