When two people meet, the folds can fall
where they may. Leaves say it’s OK.
- John Ashbury, ‘The Love Scenes’
Summer, 2011. The group of us meet around Grey’s Monument, greeted by a short man in a broad brimmed hat smoking rollies. His smile shows yellowing teeth through a black beard and, honestly, he wears a tweed jacket.
He introduces his equipment: a guitar amp on a luggage trolly with an antenna plugged in; white chalk; dowsing rods formed from the wires of coat hangers; and a GPS patched into a laptop. He explains the antenna will pick up electro-magnetic disturbances in the environment left by the black plague. Once an area is sonically flagged, the dowsing rods will be used to pick up spectral buboes we’re to mark in chalk. The GPS will track our route through the city over a digital map.
It’s the hottest day of the year, and the city is as busy as central London. The amp picks up buboes in a back alley behind Chinatown. Air vents make the heated skips smell worse as the group of us dowse. He tells us, in the coming days, another group will return to these sites with papier-mâché. They will press it onto the marked surfaces and, once dried, wear it on their skin.
We walk for over eight hours. Some of the group have fallen away. An older Geordie walks pass the amp, which either screeches plague or has defaulted to its harsh low frequency drone, and shakes his head in disappointment.
Our host laughs as the signals lead us into a graveyard.
…
Summer, 2023. Me and my colleagues decide to stay at the pub and tell the other group they won, tired of the app’s piratical riddles leading us through the city. I worry they thought I didn’t enjoy the team bonding exercise. I mean, I didn’t. But I still don’t want to come across as ungrateful. It had added emotional heft for me, revisiting the sites for the first time since 2011. The app led us through Chinatown, multiple shopping arcades and landmarks (although, I should note, no graveyard).
I wake with a Yoko Ono piece playing in my head. I check my emails and, through correspondence with JP Seabright, find the Tate have a major Ono retrospective next year. I check Twitter and learn Peter Brötzmann has passed away, a musician I got into during that first visit to Newcastle.
I’m writing this on a train from Newcastle to Edinburgh to change for Glasgow, the city becoming fields becoming towns becoming fields. I’ve never been further north than this.
…
I’m dragging over £1000 worth of books in a luggage trolly bag. Caught leaves jam one of the wheels until they tear and return to the pavement. When I reach the Airbnb the key is not beneath the mat, where I was told it would be. I ring a number given to me by the owner. The guy on the other end of the phone sounds like he’s spent his life flustered. He tells me he’ll be there in ten minutes.
He arrives twenty minutes later and says, while I wait for flat 5, I must stay in flat 7. I tell him I’ve organised an event in Glasgow and I’m running late, in need of a shower. He enters flat 7 and tells the occupant she must leave. She doesn’t, but he then tells me flat 7 has wet paint and I can’t have a shower. Instead, he walks me to the main site so I can wash. He promises the key to flat 5 will be under the mat by the time I return from my event. I ask him to text me when it is.
Thankfully, Byers Road is near the site. I drag the books down to The Alchemy Experiment. I am tired and grumpy, which makes Amanda’s presence at The Alchemy Experiment all the more miraculous. She gives me a pot of tea and a chat, which is all I need.
An artist with paintings on display at The Alchemy Experiment, she tells me how she went from a theology to a printmaking degree. Her (non-religious) images have the composition not of icons or stained glass windows but Catholic Worker Movement woodcuts. Her painting has been used as this Substack’s thumbnail. She’s also produced text-based stickers I endeavour to include in Hem Press orders. I am grateful for her patience and multitasking, allowing me to ask questions about the event as she serves other customers.
Maria Sledmere is the first to arrive. She takes me to get a doner kabab I’m too hungry to finish: having not eaten all day, it’s too much a shock to my digestive system. I don’t realise how late in the evening it is, with the event starting in an hour. My Airbnb contact texts me to say the key is under the mat.
The event itself tends to be the least stressful thing about running an event. I meet Isaac Harris and Ivy Allsop for the first time; I get to see Briony Hughes, as well as Maria, again. It’s great, fitting for Maria and Briony’s new books. Amanda lets me leave the Hem Press stock to collect the day after.
Me and the readers go to the pub. I’ve aggressively cut down my alcohol and caffeine intake this year. Tonight is an exception. I stay out with Briony, K. and S., talking poetry, academia, and the fraught but generative territory between the two.
I return to the Airbnb at 3AM. A couple wait outside the front door. They tell me they’re staying in the building, that the code lock isn’t working. We both try ringing the same contact, who doesn’t answer the phone. The three of us bang on ground floor windows until someone answers the door.
The key to flat 5 is under the mat.
…
I return to the Alchemy Experiment to pick up the books. I’m so hungover all I can see is the purple of Amanda’s dress: startlingly purple, purple beyond purple. I drink a juice and do my best to socialise but admit to myself that I can’t, exhausted and without breakfast. I eat pancakes at a cafe on Byers Road and take the books back to the Airbnb.
The code lock still isn’t working. I call the Airbnb contact, who tells me he can’t come right away because he’s on lunch. I shout at him for a bit and his colleague takes the phone, tells me to use the backdoor which isn’t locked.
…
I assume I’d be terrible to go on holiday with. I rarely plan. I walk. While this means a lack of tourist activities, it opens up the internal logic of a city.
Southside had been commended to me multiple times, but the rain is on and off and it would take forty minutes on a subway I’ve never used. And Westside seems worthy of exploration.
I walk around the Glasgow Botanic Gardens, admire the plants alien to me while harbouring resentments about their Latin naming and the history that signifies.
I eat Korean street food on Great Western Road. Maria meets me there. We walk along the River Kelvin and up the nearby slopes. I think I see chamomile, a plant I’m fond of, but they’re oxeye daisies (“why not? are not / oxeye daisies a chrysanthemum?”).
I think about the stories King James was told about witches as a child. This is a land that would produce such narratives. I used to joke, I don’t know what the Uni of Glasgow are putting in their water to produce so many amazing poets. Now I realise it’s the place itself.
Maria goes home and I go to a pub to continue rereading And the Stars Were Shining, my favourite Ashbury collection outside of his classic books (Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, Rivers and Mountains, Three Poems…) The barmaid mutes The Dixie Chicks at Glastonbury so a student folk group can sit at a table and play.
I’ve never felt happy in a place before.
…
A circle consists of points equidistant from a centre. It’s, understandably, easy to get anxious about what the point between the axes is, if anything propels all this life, but I can’t help but feel that if it was known it might break. Or, following negative theology, it’s not a zero but a minus: a thing defined not by its non-existence so much as its lack of presence. That, the closer someone gets to It, the more It is Not: a less jaded apprehension of Beckett’s Watt/Knott dialectic. As Christine Wertheim described it in interview, “The closer he gets to Watt he is Knott.”
In four and a half hours, I leave to go back to Birmingham. I think back to the spiky regularity of a jig’s rhythm. I realise, by being in Glasgow for the first time, I’m caught in another circle. It just hasn’t repeated itself yet.