A stroll with my mum shows what the real Glasgow has to offer

A garland of big, golden balloons at the entrance proclaims that a joint birthday celebration is taking place. 

Massimo, the maître d’ tells me that it’s in honour of a mother and son (she’s 70; he’s 39). 

I’m curiously delighted by this and I think it’s because, rather than hire a venue or annexe a restaurant, this family has chosen to share their big day with the rest of us, their gaiety lighting up the entire space and spreading out to the rest of seated around them. 

Just beyond them, beside the wall with the Dolce Vita print, a young couple are negotiating the treacherous foothills of a potential romance: him stiff-backed and solicitous; she smiling self-consciously and looking down shyly as she reveals another snippet from her back-story. 

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They pick distractedly at the pasta on their small plates, but their second glasses of wine are larger than their first ones. They’ll be seeing each other again. 

I’m here with my mum, Maureen, at a table situated directly underneath the kitchen, which faces into the font of the restaurant, thus providing a dash of live theatre for the diners. 

Here, I must crave your indulgence. My original assignment for this week had fallen through and, casting around for something else at short notice, I’d happened on the announcement that Glasgow had been included in a list of the world’s top 100 cities. 

Let’s speak frankly here. In any given year – on an almost monthly basis – Glasgow neighbourhoods pop up in best-of travel lists.

Last week. it was the West End, which appears so often it should be getting to keep the cup. 

Not long ago, it was Shawlands, and before that, Dennistoun. In the midst of this, a new district called Hipster Finnieston seems to have replaced plain old Finnieston. 

Kevin McKenna pictured with his mother Maureen on a walk around Glasgow (Image: Colin Mearns)

The city’s wellbeing index seems to rise and fall on delicatessens and patisseries.

And so, I resolved to spend Saturday joking about a few of those timeless Glasgow jewels that have entranced generations and get bequeathed to us.

Maureen’s here because we’d originally planned to have lunch today. And, well … you can’t be cancelling your mum just because of a work assignment. It wouldn’t be a good look for the paper. So bear with us for a moment. 

Maureen’s 84, but within 10 minutes, I’m 3-0 down. She’s wearing a poppy. “Bit early for a poppy, is it not?” I say. “It’s still October.”

“There’s never a wrong time to wear a poppy,” she replies. 

I tell her I’m heading down to George Square for the Palestine demo. “There’s a lot of hurt on both sides,” she says. “Just be careful what you write and say a prayer for them all.” 

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I tell her about the survey placing our city among the world’s top places to visit. 
“I find that condescending. You’d think they’d just discovered Glasgow,” she says. “There’s always been lovely places to visit.”

And then she takes me on a virtual tour of the places of her youth: dancing at the
St Andrews Hall’s on Charing Cross and the Highlander Club or the Italian Club at Park Circus. 

And she takes me on a parkland peregrination. “Our parks are a natural, free gift that too many of us overlook. And what about all the Mackintosh buildings?

“Glasgow is teeming with culture and it’s for everyone. 

“Edinburgh’s fine, but it’s nowhere near as real as here. I mean if we had a castle like that do you think we’d stick a department store across the road from it? Glasgow’s main attractions are built first and foremost for the enjoyment of its own citizens. Nothing was too grand for us either, and nor should it have been.”

Later, as planned, it’s George Square and another large pro-Palestine demo, and that’s not all. 

There’s to be a march from Glasgow Green organised by – and I kid you not – owners of XL Bully dogs, protesting about tighter regulations. That could be an interesting match-up, but there’s room in this city for both groups.  

At the north-east corner, there’s a little garden of remembrance full of poppies and crosses representing the British regiments. A sign bears the legend: “They gave their today for our tomorrow.” I’m tempted to say something trite about the juxtaposition of this with some of the anti-Israel slogans that get yelled later on. 

But right now it seems facile amidst so much hurt. 

Like many others, I’ve previously been quick to denigrate the clumsy maintenance of Glasgow’s best-loved public space. Yet, George Square is a working resource which forms the DNA of a day in the life of Glasgow’s citizens. 

It should look good, but it’s not an ornament. 

Earlier the same morning, a 20-minute walk over the new Sighthill Bridge on Glasgow’s northern approaches takes me into the heart of the city. 

The bridge and the landscaped pathways around it have breathed new life into a wizened neighbourhood which the M8 motorway had – quite literally – marginalised. Some of my family had been reared here and mourned the levelling of neighbourhoods and their replacement by concrete tower-blocks, the better perhaps to keep their residents well out of sight. 

In the last few years, The New York Times seems to have been seduced by Glasgow. 

The latest in a series of billet-doux appeared last week. “Glasgow, Scotland’s largest city, crackles with character. 

“It’s a hub of grass-roots energy, where art shows and film screenings pop up in tenement flats, railway waiting-rooms and disused buildings.”

Like most of these glitzy encomiums, it will go on to salute the Burrell Collection and I reproach myself for not having visited it since its recent refurb. 

And so I walk through Pollok Park, looking its best in its autumn raiment. 

Is there a place like this in any other city in Europe, where 6,000 years of human ingenuity and creativity from every corner of the world has been collected under one roof? And where you’re still transfixed by families trooping freely in and out, as though it were a seaside funfair? 

And where there’s a swing-park just across the road? And an ice-cream van parked outside, just to provide a sugar rush before you go into see Degas and his ballerinas and the ceramics; archways and embroideries of the ages?

Many of them come from the Middle East, whose culture, artistry and education pre-date ours by millennia. 

And you’re glad perhaps that this city still provides space for their descendants – Jews, Muslims and all those other displaced and harried peoples – to settle here; to gift us their cultures and to grieve their dead.

Then, via Pollokshaws West, it’s back to Central Station. And in the last few minutes of daylight, you realise that this is a living museum. 

Like many of Glasgow’s other star attractions, it lives and breathes among us and lets us pass freely in and out.