A Dear, Green Place

I wake up under the ridiculously high ceiling of my daughter’s flat in Govanhill (honestly, you could fit a whole other floor between me and that ceiling), and it’s that not unheard-of, but always slightly surprising thing: a Fine Day. In January. In Glasgow.

So I go down to Queen’s Park under the low sun, and join all the people, taking shortcuts to Shawlands or Battlefield, grimly jogging, exercising a cacophony of canines, or gathering to hold deep discussions on the slithery paths where the morning’s frost has turned to melting ice.

I look for wildlife. There’s plenty, but until you tune in, you’d think it was all rainbow-hued, pouting pigeons intent on fornication and the many opportunist members of the crow family. Magpies bustle under municipal shrubs and into rampant ivy (arguably the park’s most significant contribution to wildlife habitat), and busy themselves with piles of beech leaves, pretending to have a purpose.

Crows loiter in trees with intent, fingering – or beaking – sticks and twigs, considering their suitability for Lovenest 2020.

I skirt the wildlife pond, where coots, moorhens, mallard and the remaining cygnets of the Mute Swans entertain small children. Up a green slope, and a sunken track, so deep in mud and the soggy consequences of the previous weekend’s torrential rain that had some of us dancing in puddles, it could double as a Devonshire hollow road. Fallen trees accrue fungi and insects; Queen’s Park here has shed its Paxton municipality.

In the wilder, scarcely managed woodland, I hear birdsong – the noisy robin, the piping and sawing of blue and great tits. I know there are long-tailed tits – they visit my son’s bird feeders – but they taunt me shrilly, staying out of sight. A treecreeper works her way up a lime tree trunk. Dunnocks and wrens flit, silent and absorbed. Huddled among the trees on the Camp Hill slopes, the Queen’s Park Allotments make a city within a city, a shanty town of sheds and frames and variously glazed or translucent edifices where lush crops are started early by proper gardeners, and foxes – I can smell them -.find food and sanctuary.

Higher, and I reach the Iron Age fort that crowns the hill, where grey squirrels scamper among the beech-mast, and humans have lived for centuries. The big stones in the middle of the ramparts may be what’s left of the Camp that named the Hill – during the Battle of Langside in 1568, famously lost by Mary Queen of Scots’ army and which sent her to to seek, and not find, refuge in England. But Glasgow named the park for her.

A grove of young fruit trees just below the viewpoint with its flagpole are decorated with dark tartan ribbons, the remnants of last year’s wassailing. I wonder if they will get wassailed this year. The Philosophists of the Flagpole converse earnestly, perched on the backs of the frost-wet seats. Someone hands me a leaflet. It is from Extinction Rebellion.

The day before, Glasgow City Council had announced its intention to be carbon-neutral by 2030, despite the challenges of its transport system and heating those high-ceilinged, big-windowed tenements. That’s 15 years before the target set by the Scottish Government. Will they do it? They will give it their best shot, and count the benefits before the costs. XR will say there’s no choice.

We look out over this beautiful city, this dear, green place, bounded and made human-scale by its surrounding hills, dotted with parks and humming with energy that comes from its people. Smoke gushes from a single factory – I think its the brewery opposite Glasgow Green – and a motorway crashes through. They’ll need to sort that. I think, that if anywhere can do it, Glasgow will.