Glasgow (50 page)

The atmosphere was one of welcome rather than politically charged, though the singing of ‘Freedom Come All Ye' could be interpreted to suit a variety of purposes, including one of Scottish independence. The song has been described as a Scottish national anthem but, crucially, it
also anticipates a nation free of a past where it played a significant role in imperialism.

In 2014, the athletes of a Commonwealth once seized and shaped by the forces of a small island danced, cavorted and swayed to a series of tunes, having been welcomed from afar by the astronauts of the International Space Station. They were also greeted in a more down-to-earth manner by the words of Burns, which proclaim: ‘Wi' joy unfeign'd, brothers and sisters meet'. But Henderson's words, too, had an import: ‘Broken families in lands we've herriet, will curse Scotland the Brave nae mair, nae mair'.

The Queen spoke of ‘shared ideals and ambitions'. She said: ‘The baton relay represents a calling together of people from every part of the Commonwealth and serves as a reminder of our shared ideals and ambitions as a diverse and resourceful family. And now, that baton has arrived here in Glasgow, a city renowned for its dynamic culture and for the warmth of its people, for this opening ceremony of this Friendly Games . . . It now gives me great pleasure to declare the 20th Commonwealth Games open.'

THE GLASGOW EFFECT, 26 JULY 2015
Kevin McKenna

How long you can expect to live in Glasgow depends very much on your postcode. Glaswegian men ought on average to make it to 73 while women can look forward to a further five and half years. If you live in an affluent part of the city, your survival rates rise considerably; if you live in one of the poorer parts there's a fair chance you won't see out your sixties. Such statistics show that Glasgow has the lowest life expectancy rates in Scotland. The reasons for this are generally rather obvious: lack of exercise, poor diet, excessive drinking, dodgy genes, addiction to cigarettes, stress, poverty. Here journalist Kevin McKenna, who is as Glaswegian as a tattie scone, describes his own close encounter with the Grim Reaper
.

Somewhere over the Indian Ocean at 30,000 feet a couple of weeks ago, I had an encounter with the Glasgow Effect and almost added another number to my city's grim mortality index. The Glasgow Effect is the curious phenomenon that sends the city's dwellers to their grave earlier than their brothers and sisters in those other major UK cities with large, working-class communities.

Not that I was aware of the physiological drama that had begun to
unfold around my heart on Etihad flight No. 88888 from Abu Dhabi to Perth, the second leg of three in a 23-hour trip to visit my daughter in Melbourne.

You become aware of a slight tightening around the chest and the breaths that had previously emerged cleanly from the back of your lungs were now coming up a wee bit jaggy.

You immediately put it down to a bit of delayed anxiety rooted in the long haul between continents and a lifelong aversion to flying. And you resolve to locate the smoking shelter at Perth airport and fire up a couple of Bennies for the purposes of settling everything down again and regaining your cardio-composure. Throw in a couple of swift Bacardis in the airport lounge and everything would surely be tickety.

By the time I met Clare in Melbourne three hours later though, things were most definitely untickety in the ticker vicinity and I was struggling to walk the length of myself.

Being Glaswegian, though, you feel you have to deploy insouciance in the face of adversity and so, safely ensconced in my friend David's apartment in the Collingwood area an hour or so later, I had convinced myself it was just a touch of that deep-vein thrombotulism malarkey and resolved to get something for it the next morning from a chemist. I just needed to pull myself together and get a decent night's sleep fortified by another Benson's and a chilly sauvignon. That, I felt certain, would see off the collywobbles rapidamente. Instead, the collywobbles proceeded to give me a right good kicking for my folly and so, somewhat shamefaced, I shuffled the next day into the nearby St Vincent's hospital.

You've had a minor heart attack, they said, and so we'll need to look after you for a few days. Thus my first holiday in years, during which I was to offer some paternal consolation to a daughter who'd recently encountered some emotional unpleasantness, had ended as soon as it had begun 10,000 miles from home on a critical-care ward hooked up to the sort of machinery you had previously only seen in ER.

Never having been treated for anything in hospital, I had imagined it to be a crucible of stainless-steel terror and old men shuffling about in slippers and those bare-arse smocks they insist on everyone wearing.

Yet the only aspect of St Vincent's hospital to which I struggled to become accustomed was the unremitting kindness, compassion and good cheer of the nursing and medical staff. I had seen this phenomenon on many Scottish NHS wards while visiting stricken friends and relations; to encounter it at first hand, though, is a truly humbling experience. It may only have been a minor heart attack which I felt sure was at the infinitesimal end of the scale but in the medics' lexicon the word ‘angiogram' started to recur with some frequency.

I had initially heard this as ‘anziogram' and wondered if it was some kind of strippogram wearing the Aussie flag whom the Australians, in that direct way of theirs, would send on to the ward to keep everyone's pecker up. Instead, though, it was that queasy procedure by which they light up your heart to determine whether you need the full hacksaw and staples treatment or simply some medication.

Fortunately, they determined that a few tablets and a couple of wee lifestyle tweaks would be the best way of dealing with this. Of course, everyone says that an event like this is a ‘warning' and that the ramifications can be ‘life-changing'. So the consultant cardiologist decided to have a wee chat with me.

‘The thing I don't understand,' I said, ‘is that I was beginning to train for the Glasgow 3.5k in October and was taking lots of citrus fruit with my Bacardis and vodkas. I was even down to fewer than 10 Bennies a day. My temple may not exactly be a body but I was heading in the right direction. And this is the result. It's all a bit dispiriting.'

‘Well, it could have been a lot worse if you hadn't been making those lifestyle changes,' he said.

‘I take it the smokes are completely out now?'

‘Yes; if you do nothing else but stop smoking you'll be rocking and rolling. How many units of alcohol do you drink per week?'

‘It's actually only about 12–16 units.'

‘That's not bad.'

‘Occasionally, though, I might do them all in a single sitting; you know, like at a wedding.'

‘That's binge drinking and puts your heart under enormous pressure.'

He also told me that the angiogram had also revealed something quite startling: there was evidence of a heart attack many years ago at a time in my life when I was jouking up Munros and doing three-peak challenges and ‘Tough-Mudder' assault courses all over the shop. Looking back, I can now say with some certainty that this cardiac event seems to have occurred at some point during Celtic's Anton Rogan period.

When I returned home, I was startled to discover that the males on the McKenna side of the clan have been going down like skittles with heart failure for centuries. And you wonder if 30 years of a smoke-free, low-alcohol, high-broccoli, Munro-bagging, flower-arranging existence instead of 10 years ripping the arse out of it is actually a fair swap. And will it matter a jot if your heart already has the black spot on it?

END OF AN ERA, 15 OCTOBER, 2015
Alison Irvine

The Red Road flats were finally demolished, or at least partly demolished, some fifty years after the first residents moved in. It had been suggested that they might be reduced to rubble as part of the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony a year earlier but this was eventually, and wisely, rejected as insensitive and tasteless. Glasgow writer Alison Irvine, author of
This Road is Red (2014),
marked their passing
.

The morning after the demolition of the Red Road flats, children trotted past the rubble to the nursery, and pensioners waited at the doors of the Alive & Kicking day centre. It was at this day centre in 2009 that I interviewed John McNally, 89, a former shop steward at the Provan Gas works. He had been a widower for more than twenty years and had lived in the same home in Red Road since 1969, 27 floors up, with views west to the Isle of Arran. He remembered seeing men at work on the former cabbage fields: ‘I watched them getting built every day as I was passing. Steel, steel, steel.'

Here, too, I interviewed Jean McGeogh, who put her hand in a ballot box to get the keys to her flat in 1966. Like others whose former homes were inspected by the Corporation before a flat was allocated, she moved from a tenement. She did cleaning and bar work: Red Road rent was high. The flats were ‘immaculate' and a welcome solution to the city's overcrowded and squalid housing. Designed by Sam Bunton, and built between 1964 and 1969, the two 28-storey ‘slab' blocks and the six 31-storey ‘point' blocks were once the tallest residential structures in Europe.

For the children of the Red Road in the 1960s and 1970s, the concrete walls were climbing frames, the surrounding fields football pitches. Games of chap door, run away, giant headers (a football thrown from a tower window and headed at the bottom), den making and squash matches were popular. Kids messed about in the lifts and rode bikes to the nearby Campsie Fells. Inspired by the Ken Loach film
Kes
, one of my interviewees, Matt Barr, kept a kestrel on a homemade perch on his veranda. For the adults, there was the underground pub – the Brig Bar – and the adjacent bingo hall, the electric heating, floor-cleaning rotas, grocery vans and community spirit.

But even in the 1970s, the flats' reputation was going downhill. Concerns about asbestos, antisocial neighbours, vandalism and lifts that broke down led many families to seek accommodation elsewhere.
A fire in 1977 at 10 Red Road Court, in which a boy died, was a catalyst for change. Many residents refused to return to their homes.

From the 1980s, two of the blocks housed students. Louise Christie moved into Red Road in 1987 and stayed for five years. She remembered students arriving from the Western Isles, India and Indonesia. She was a student Labour Party activist and gave talks at residents' meetings, advising new students on Red Road life. ‘You didn't use the ice-cream van, you didn't buy drugs from anyone in the area, you stayed out of the pubs, and you stayed out of the bookies,' she said.

In 1999, the first asylum seekers, from Kosovo, arrived and a new chapter in Red Road's history began. Locals, horrified at the destitution of the arrivals, donated clothes, toys and furniture. In 2009, I interviewed a Zimbabwean teenager who had stayed for two weeks while her application was processed. I also met a 17-year-old Iranian who had lived at Red Road much longer. Unable to study medicine because she did not have leave to remain, she raged against the asylum system, seeing its effects on the physical and mental health of her parents. I interviewed boys who played the same games as their counterparts in the 1960s and 1970s. ‘Blacks v Scottish' became a popular football match.

In 2007 Didier Pasquette attempted to walk a high wire between two point blocks but had to abandon the effort because of high winds. Residents told me their bath water would slosh about in windy weather.

As many tenants were being rehoused from 2005, the last Red Road block remained home to asylum seekers. In 2014, when it was announced that the flats would be demolished live during the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony, asylum seekers were still living there – just one of the reasons the idea was dropped.

Before he was due to be uprooted from his home of forty years, McNally passed away. He would have hated the demolition. The feelings of others are more contradictory.

The woman who was afraid for her young children when they encountered drunk men in the lifts reminisced about the days on the grass with other families, playing music and having picnics while the kids played. The man in his forties who left Red Road in order to stay out of trouble had happy childhood memories and lifelong friends. The 74-year-old who couldn't wait to move to a ‘front and back door' said she missed the ‘neighbourliness' of her high rise.