Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
temporary Scottish Parliament building to the castle and down the Royal Mile, then back
to Princes Street.
In the city centre, on this bright, fresh, sunny day - singularly inappropriate for my
mood, but there you go, that's the pathetic fallacy for you - a few people notice the
posters and some of them nod or give a thumbs up; the people who disapprove just tend
to look away. But most people don't look in the first place. Maybe I should have used col-
oured sheets of A4, or even just printed the words in something other than black, however
big the font and however starkly pointed the gesture seemed at the time. Maybe I should
have honked my damn horn.
I head west, out past the airport for the M8 through Glasgow, to cross the Clyde from
Gourock to Dunoon.
Looking down at the trucks and cars sitting on the open vehicle deck on the ferry, I
can't even see the poster on the Land Rover's sunroof; it's one of those stippled black
glass sunroofs that just hinges up a little rather than slides right back, and because of the
fine black mesh effect on the glass the writing on the poster is only visible from directly
above.
I stand in the sunlight, listening to the cries of the wheeling gulls as I drink a Styro-
foam cup of tea and munch on a soggy, microwaved shell pie. I watch the depressingly
decrepit remains of what used to be the modestly majestic Gourock Pier fall astern to
be replaced by the arse-out aspect of the old tenements whose more respectable fronts
face out into the main street on the far side. A glitter of windscreens in the seafront car
park where a few guys stand with fishing rods, then the outdoor swimming pool and the
rising slope of pleasant Victorian sandstone villas and early and late twentieth-century
bungalows. I look around, at the canted streets, budding trees and whin-covered slopes,
crowned by the folly on top of Tower Hill to the east, at the hills and mountains to the
north and west, at the broad river, disappearing to a bright horizon in the south.
I used to live here, in Gourock. I used to work there, on the pier.
When I was young, from the age of about ten into my mid-teens, I'd lie awake at
night in the summer in my bedroom high above the bay and the great curve of Gourock
pier. Each fair night, in those warm months, I'd hear, through a cracked open window,
the sound of a distant engine, puttering quietly away from the quayside a half-mile or so
away. It came from one of the dozen or so ferries and steamers which always tied up there
during the summer season.
It was the end of the Clyde's golden age, when not that many people had cars and a
lot of Glaswegians still took day trips and whole two-week holidays doon the watter, to
resorts like Largs, Dunoon and Rothesay. I worked on the pier - catching mooring ropes
and hoisting gangways, mostly - for a couple of summers while I was at University in the
early seventies, along with a couple of full-time pier porters and one or two old school
