A smiling girl, six or seven, gets onto the subway with her mum. The toe tips of her boots are covered in red sequins. She sits down, smiles at Central Belt Shuffler, and gets a notebook and pen out of her bag.
She starts to draw flowers.
Central Belt Shuffler has headed out to the South Side for some contemporary art. (See travel notes below*).
It’s the Glasgow International Festival and Central Belt Shuffler is over at the Tramway. There’s fibre in the tracks, softening the industrial vestiges of the former tram works into a riot of colour. Trams are going nowhere. Trolleys sit in the tracks, too.
Monkeys climb the crumbling, arch-modernist buildings of Chandigarh. Its furniture is shipped round the world, restored and sold at high cost in auction houses. On the other side of the screen, a film shows the film being sold at Christie’s.
The industrial production of iceberg lettuce and pearls are surreally looped.
The QE2, built on industrial Clydebank, has been digitally returned from Dubai (where in reality it still awaits its transformation into a luxury hotel) from Glasgow. On the journey back, it picks up some refugees. Broken in two and reconstituted as the QE3, it arches across the M8 motorway. It’s an art school, with one side for student accommodation. All the students are on full grants. The shipyards are no longer. The old Glasgow School of Art still burns. The crucible of industry has turned into one of creativity.
A woman sits and looks at her phone, to all intents at a bus stop.
*Central Belt Shuffler mistakenly bought a ticket for Pollokshaws East rather than Pollokshields East.
The ticket inspector comment, ‘It’ll have cost you more.’
I nod, regretfully.
He adds, ‘As long as you know where you’re going.’
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