Iain Heggie’s Glasgow is one man’s view of day-to-day life in the city. Just like the city, sometimes his short observations are a bit rough around the edges.
BUS stop at Trongate Tesco. Glass breaking. Behind me, a comedy angry fat drunk has let go of a bottle of vodka. Shop staff stand in the street smoking, ignore all this and carry on talking. The drunk disappears round the corner. Two seconds later he's back, tries to pick up the glass, fails, puts down his carrier bag with two cans of beer on the pavement, picks up two bits of glass and goes back in the shop. Drunk puts the glass in Tesco's bin and goes to the back of shop. People outside are crunching the glass on the pavement.
A small, discreetly pissed little man nonchalantly picks up the fat drunk's carrier bag with the beer and slips round the corner. Fat drunk reappears in the middle of the shop counting coins. I am guessing he didn’t have enough for another bottle… Fat drunk emerges and heads for carrier bag. He seems quite nonchalant at first about it not being there. Heads to corner, checking in all the doorways.
He comes back, asks if the staff saw his carry out. They didn’t see anything. He goes back in the shop again. I think he thought he left it there. I tell the staff I saw the little man take it and disappear round the corner, lying that I thought nothing of it… Fat drunk emerges AGAIN.
The staff tell him that 'someone at the bus stop' saw a little man go round the corner with his carry out. He heads off that way. The staff go back in the shop. A minute later, the fat drunk appears again. He goes round everyone at the bus stop asking them if they saw who took his carry out, cursing the Tesco staff because they ‘saw who it was’. The bus comes before he reaches me.
READ the signs ya f***in prick,' as a car turns hard left in front of him. He's thickset, tracksuited, eyes bulging in synch with his raging. Behind him, two knee-high twin daughters, with curly hair, school uniforms, holding hands, heads rotating like periscopes, mouths opening and closing like goldfish, eyes groping through big strong glasses. Crazy dad is all they have. They blindly echo his outrage in high-pitched quacks. They're practising to be grannies
AND they all have that SCOTTISH thing, don’t they?’ says an immaculately groomed English lady as though Scotland is an exotic, tiny planet millions of miles away and ‘Scottish things’ are extremely unusual and that the last place we could be is the middle of Edinburgh leaving the Lyceum auditorium at the interval of the GUID SISTERS.
More About Iain Heggie's Glasgow Life
- Iain Heggie's Glasgow: having a ball in prison
- Iain Heggie's Glasgow: routine banter
- Iain Heggie's Glasgow: Argyle Street
- Iain Heggie's Glasgow: small victories
- Iain Heggie's Glasgow: enforced intimacy
- Iain Heggie's Glasgow: a game of cat and mouse
- Iain Heggie's Glasgow: from posh voices to stiletto warfare
