Month: August 2025

Glasgow

Glasgow – going back last weekend to see the city remembered of auld lang syne. After all I have said about the city, with trepidation I stepped out at Glasgow Central – but as long as I was not recognised, it should be all right.

The city’s modern local sage once said that a difference between Edinburgh and Glasgow, is that in Edinburgh if you hear a gunshot, it means it’s one o’clock. By reputation, Glasgow – ye hae yersel’ gey wrang.

The train journey is  good one. I stood a while in Carlisle; Cumberland’s fortress city, where the army still guards the castle fortified by Good Queen Bess. It is a historical relic – the threat of war and invasion ended when Nicola Sturgeon was arrested.  From there the train surges north through a verdant dale, that stutters into rough moorland as it climbs. Then over the top a wee, sparkling burn joins, fresh from haunts of coot and hern, toying with the railway line, to left and then to right and back again. It swells slowly as the heather-clad muirland softens to green pasture until disappearing in the anonymous townscapes that besiege lower Lanarkshire.  Then slowly you draw into the city, and here that same stream is a fat, full-throated river – the Clyde – laced up with bridges as if to stop it getting away.

It is a pity that George Square is currently barred with hoardings, as it as it is the city’s heart. The Square as was had the City Chambers glowering over it disapprovingly, and  receiving a defiant gesture in return. We are promised a gleaming new George Square, which promises to be exactly the same as the old.

The Green meanwhile was fenced off last weekend for the climax of the International Piping Festival. It shows how Glasgow has changed: in the 1950s, Lord Carmont would hand out brutally long sentences for carrying an offensive weapon, but now the city welcomes bagpipes. Never have so many miles of tartan been seen together, nor so many men in skirts. The air was rent with skirling from competing bands. One American band had not quite got the message, and were playing in denim; the young women drumming and the young men piping, and doing ot very well for colonials. (You can see the occasional woman playing the pipes, if her lung capacity is enough to fill the bag – and a fearsome sight she is.)

There is a real city, away from the costumes and invented history. I strolled a long time down Buchanan Street – the city’s broad central shopping street. It is quite unlike London’s Oxford Street, because in Glasgow there are practical shops where you can buy real-life things. It is alive with activity, and much is out of the very joy of life, there in the sunshine, or so it seems. Then a short walk across to Nisbets – a head-spinning emporium for new kitchen equipment to help or puzzle our cook.

Even the City Chambers, behind boarded-up George Street, despite the foul dealings which go on behind the doors, can stand in Victorian grandeur, exuberant in a Gothic reading of the neo-Classical, as a promise of what Glasgow can be.

The Glorious Twelfth had recently been and gone when I arrived in the city.  For some, the date is a chance to to rise early in a guesthouse on a wind-scoured moor, to eat the first shot grouse of the season, warm from the dog’s mouth – vanity. Grouse is better when it has hung for a few days, and served hot in the comfort of a Glasgow restaurant, with no need to shiver on Rannoch.

The light fades. The city is still lit and never quite slumbering, even if I do. Soon enough it is time to rise and head for the station again. I have stayed all in the respectable part of Glasgow, thriving despite the best efforts of its Council and the Playtime Parliament, and I have an embarrassing confession – I actually love the ‘Dear Green Place’.

And Criffel sink in Solway

The end of the War, eighty years ago, and I look at how peace has changed us as a nation. Peace is a state earnestly to be desired, but is not the natural state of mankind, leastwise our vigorous nation, when we were a vigorous nation. We have for many centuries faced threats with a solid wall of force. Could we now though?

When Burns wrote a song for the Dumfries Volunteers in 1795, he was in no doubt: every man would stand and defend Britain. The French Revolutionary War was bursting with flame, soon to become the Napoleonic Wars that would last until another twenty winters had passed. In the face of the threat of invasion, volunteer units formed themselves, and Burns was instrumental in raising a unit in his home town.

Does haughty Gaul invasion threat ?
Then let the louns beware Sir;
There’s Wooden Walls upon our seas,
And Volunteers on shore, Sir:
The Nith shall run to Corsincon,
And Criffel sink in Solway,
Ere we permit a Foreign Foe
On British ground to rally !
We’ll ne’er permit a Foreign Foe
On British ground to rally !

The Volunteers on shore were fit, armed and ready – in Dumfries and across the land.  Burns realised the local and the national. (The Nith runs from Corsencon Hill, and Criffel stands solidly looming over the Solway Firth, as the local men would have known; reliable, eternal truths.) The national defence was unquestioned, against a foe who might have seemed distant to Dumfries, but a danger to one and to all.

Be Britain still to Britain true,
Amang oursels united;
For never but by British hands
Maun British wrangs be righted!

Can we be as sure of ourselves today?  Do we even have a single nation “amang oursels united”? The Army’s Scottish regiments were amalgamated because they were unable to recruit, and all across the land a similar tale is told. An Army consisting only of Geordies, Ulstermen and Gurkhas might be formidable in ferocity, but it is no sure defence alone.

Patriotism is derided in high circles by sluggards and cowards, for little reason than asserting an imagined, false intellectual superiority. They have an impact, creating shame in those who should be solid. The attachment to the nation cannot be relied upon when there is no nation, by any understood definition, left. There are solid men left, but if a foreign foe were to tread the shore, are they, we, enough? Would there be more bayonets to our backs, from our own, than facing us?

(Of those who are solid, many alas are too solid physically – watching YouTube videos on the audacious exploits of the Second World War from the sofa, without the muscle to them that made their forefathers the unbreakable wall they were. It is curable, but needs work and commitment.

O how unfit! )

The world is not peaceful, and the implication of facing it with a dead national spirit is a horror to think of.

See also

 

Books

Fantastic? For first steps

Reviewing the new Fantastic Four film I do with trepidation. It has been rocking the media and news. By all accounts, it is a brilliant film. It also makes philosophical and human points pretty well. If so, it might show Hollywood at a turning point.

I have not seen the film, nor do I intending to, so this review is like ones first steps – wobbly but worth it.

There is a long history behind the Fantastic Four characters. I never read the comics, but a huge fanbase of comic-book obsessives will be watching this. I did see an animated television series in my wee years, so it is all familiar. We loved that show, in all its silliness. I remember nothing of the stories, but the four characters, they were what we wanted to be. They were just what every little boy dreams of being able to do – stretch, smash, burn, vanish.

Mr Fantastic – odd name, but it does what it says on the tin. The patriarch, with the ability to stretch his body like rubber. A small boy unable to reach things behind the sofa dreams of that. All the getting into danger and saving the world stuff is all very good and heroic but what you want to be is taller, while still being able to get toys you dropped through a small hole.

Being flexible and rubberlike has drawbacks in a battle – you might rebound from blows, but you also cannot inflect them, and each time he stretches his extensible arm to seize an alien weapon (or whatever he does) his rubberlike fingers would be unable to grip it firmly.

In the real world, such a superpower would be a great thing to have, but you know what it would be like to have; Mr Fantastic would be worn out with people asking him to get things down off high shelves.

Susan Storm – She becomes invisible. Well, that happens to lots of women as they enter middle-age. She puts up an impenetrable invisible barrier: again….

Invisibility is the classic though, isn’t it? From Aeneas in his goddess-given cloak, through to the Fantastic Four, and Star Trek‘s Klingons. Who hasn’t wanted ot disappear? The spy creeping into the palace, or the assassin. Or just wanting to disappear and walk freely – it is the freedom of invisibility which makes it so attractive. It comes with a price: HG Wells’s Invisible Man was driven mad by the power it gave him. I hope Susan Storm is more restrained, and bound to her duties – which is the opposite of what invisibility gives.

The Human Torch – the most spectacular of those superpowers: able to transform himself into a mass of flame, and fly. That is one for spectacle. Now I have grown up, I can’t help but wonder how much actual use it is. Doesn’t he leave scorch marks everywhere?  The insurance premium for his house must be enormous.

The flying does not follow naturally:  the flames may be very hot indeed, but Empedocles proved that even the fires of Etna cannot lift the weight of a man. Now, if his mass were converted into energy, that is another matter. To convert half the mass of a 12-stone man, say 76 kg, using mc², that is over 1.5 Terajoules – somewhat excessive even for a superhero.

I do not recall from the cartoons what he did with all that fire – how long would he need to hold his chest to an enemy vessel to set it alight?  Or did he go for fuel tanks? Am I missing the point?

All this must be possible with guns and missiles, but perhaps it is considered cheaper to have a reusable superhero with a brain rather than AI and blowing up expensive equipment?

I do know that the man would be popular at barbecues (“Torchy, the fire’s going out – could you…?)

Ben; The Thing – He is a small boy’s dream of when we grow big. We all loved Ben, just as we loved Mr T as B.A. Baracus in later life:  the unstoppable one with muscles who did not have time to waste on fools: take no nonsense and punch through it. This was for small boys who did not worry about whether looking like a rubble-heap would be off-putting to girls. It is about raw power.

And yet – we have machines  for this sort of thing. What can Ben do that a machine cannot?  He cannot have unlimited strength, and it would be a poor story if he did: Jordan Peterson has analysed storytelling to show that the hero must have vulnerability or the story does not work.

In fact, what is there that the Fantastic Four can achieve that cannot be done better by machines? True, a machine will not stretch and bend like Mr Fantastic, or vanish like Susan, or burn without being consumed, but it will achieve what they do, and it is endlessly reproduceable. That makes it bizarre that in the Marvel Universe the world relies on four vulnerable people in one place instead of the machines we can build over and over again and export across the globe.

That is missing the point though. The story is not for our time. It is an ancient hero myth. Our machine age is a brief time in the long ages of mankind. The hero with special powers is from the Stone Age, that has been 95% of all human existence. Ben is Thor, the God of Thunder with a crushing hammer. Susan Storm is Diana the Huntress. Mister Fantastic is every trickster-god, and Johnny Storm the Human Torch is the ancient fear and reverence for fire. The comic-books tickle the threads of an ancient mythology.

However, the mythology is dealt with in a few minutes. The story using it in the film is what keeps us watching. In this the film, by all accounts, diverges dramatically from recent Hollywood. There is a baby, whom the family protect at all costs even at the risk of the world. That must have caused gasps in the studio:  Disney has been offering money to its female staff to help them kill their own children before birth.

This film though openly rejects treating a child as a disposable object, and celebrates the family’s protection of their child as uttermost duty, despite all the call of the universe. Every parent knows this is right. To risk the world to save your child? Of course you do. The child is the future, and your eternity. That has been understood since man first emerged upon the Earth, and remains so.

Now, I could praise the retro-futurist setting, the special effects and the visual feast served to the viewer, had I seen the film. Others can do that, and have. It is said to be the best superhero film of the year (albeit that is a low bar).  I am more struck by what it has achieved in terms of myth and truth reaching back to the prehistoric and to our own day. For that it deserves praise.

See also

Books