And so to Glasgow

Shaking off my lethargy when faced with deciding on and organising some sort of trip away, and bearing in mind the nagging awareness of how little of my own country I've visited, I plumped for a few days in Glasgow.

The sometimes rather gloomy-looking grandeur of the architecture of its commercial and industrial heyday is lightened outside the Gallery of Modern Art by the (decidedly unofficial, in the eyes of the powers that be) mascot for the city, the Duke of Wellington crowned with a traffic cone (as is his horse).

George Square and City Chambers

The Duke

The city centre has plenty of less imaginative and more mundane commercial contrasts to hefty Victorian tastes:

The former Athenaeum on Buchanan Street

Sauchiehall Street

But not all that wealth and prosperity went into imposing architecture. Plenty has gone into good works, like the Kelvingrove Gallery and Museum, whose building rather out-turrets London's Victoria and Albert, and whose collections are, well, eclectic: from art (the "Glasgow Boys" among much else), to pre-history to modern machinery. Not far away one is into the university area, eventually arriving at the Botanic Gardens, where grand Victorian greenhouses were on this occasion hosting an orchid show

 

The Kelvingrove

No, it's a bar

Orchid show at the Botanic Gardens

This pensive pose makes me want to caption it "Oh no, did I leave the gas on?"

I had time for a couple more museums: first, the Riverside Museum, primarily a museum of transport, with all the buses, cars and trams you could wish for, but it also includes a restored sailing ship, the Glenlee

The Riverside Museum and the Glenlee

We'll probably never have a definitive answer

And finally, the "Tenement House" (meaning, in Scotland, not a near-slum but just a different sort of housing and tenure - essentially a block of a smallish number of flats - though the flats would be a bit crowded for a family).  This is a fascinating slice of preserved history, having been left largely unmodernised by its last tenant, and lovingly brought back to life as an exhibit - and an opportunity for plenty of "Granny had one of those" moments.

Proper indoor plumbling - with "marbled" wash-basin

..and all the mod cons - of 1910 (the modern radiator is an afterthought for visitors)

How quickly one forgets. Months and months of first focussing, and then trying not to, on a persistent sciatica, both of which made it a first consideration most of the time - and now that all those stretching exercises and tentative experiments on exercise bikes and in the swimming pool have finally worked, it's as though it never was. Well, almost.

But at last there's a bit of mental energy and willpower to spare, so it's back to digitising old photos (nearly up to, ooh, about twenty years ago). Here are some from Scotland in 1997:

From the top of Ben Nevis, looking down Loch Linnhe to the sea:

The Ring of Brodgar on Orkney:

Somewhere near Durness, along the northern coast of Scotland:

And the obligatory hairy coos: