glasgow

  • True Romance

    I only discovered this morning that it was World Poetry Day. This is what I wrote for it. I started out wanting to write a poem about the Glasgow “scramble” when the father of the bride would release a fistful of coins onto the street for the waiting weans to scramble for as the bride’s…

  • A new start

    How fab does my new site look? I liked my old site but it was a bit…serious. I don’t think people who knew me would be look at it and say, “That’s so Nettie!” I wanted something light and fun and colourful, something that reflected me and what I write about.

  • Going Home

    We moved from our seaside cottage in Machrihanish to a flat on the fringes of Glasgow’s west end just two weeks before Christmas. It’s been a fraught couple of weeks. We still have boxes everywhere, at least 1/3 of our pictures have still to be hung and I have no idea where I put my…

  • No Looking Back

    I’ve been doing some research recently for a novel I’m beginning. It’s a crime fiction set in Glasgow and I’ve been using Google Maps to investigate the streets where the story takes place. I had two possible locations in mind: the Southside, where I lived last in Glasgow and where my more recent memories are…

  • Glasgow Empire: Where Comedians Went to Die

    I don’t know if any of you caught the BBC2 show about the Glasgow Theatre that was broadcast on Sunday evening? You can still catch it on BBC iPlayer (if you’re a non-UK bod, just install Hola or Cyber Ghost and you can access everything with no problems). Anyway, the show concentrated on two old…

  • Going Home – You can take the girl out of Glasgow…

    We’ve sold our house. In an area of the country where houses sit on the market for months, if not years, our house sold within three weeks of officially going on the market. I’m pleased, obviously, but I’m also…winded. The speed of the sale has totally taken my breath away and I feel like the…

  • See Ma Resolutions?

    This is written for the same narrator as See Ma Man? I hope you enjoy it. See Ma Resolutions? See me? See New Year’s resolutions? Ah hate them, so ah dae. Every year ah say ah’m no gonnae dae them ony mair, but as sure as a murder oan Eastenders Christmas edition, ah aye end…

  • Z is for ZZZZZzzzzzzzzz…

    I was going to write this final post in the A to Z Challenge about Glasgow Zoo and the various small ‘zoos’ which existed all over the city in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but I am totally sick of the sound of my own voice and by. now, I’m sure I have sent…

  • X is for Durty Fillums

    First of all, I hope you all appreciate the amount of research I had to do for this post. My poor innocent soul will never be the same again. During the Bum-chicka-wow-wow heyday of the 1970s and 1980s, there were several porn cinemas in Glasgow. The one I am most familiar with – because my…

  • T is for Train Stations

    Glasgow has two main train stations: Queens Street, which has trains to Edinburgh (spit!) and the North, and Central Station which has trains to the south. Central Station is the larger of the two. It opened in 1879 but by 1890 it was extended slightly only to be found to be inadequate again by the…