Train to Glasgow

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I’ve never been to Glasgow before, especially not during the dark, white depths of winter. In fact, the only time I’ve visited Scotland was a few years ago, in the spring, for a friend’s wedding which took place beside her grandmother’s small garden lake in the Highland foothills. The country’s cities are frankly a novelty to me, an unknown beyond the limits of hardened caricatures that make it down to London via books, films and folklore.

I recently discovered that my mum’s maiden name, Johnston – which came via my great-grandfather, David, who grew up on a farm in Northern Ireland and later refused to meet me as a baby because my father was not white (I know little else about him) — originates in the Anglo-Scottish borderlands, and the warring Reiver families who ravaged them across the 16^th century. So my current journey, sat in front of a man in a shirt-and-tie who looks stressed and won’t sit still, above a heater on excessively full blast, is timely, I suppose. It’s a learning to break my southern ignorance, and a belated return past lost, dilute, distant roots.