The Chronicles of St Mungo Square

The Chronicles of St Mungo’s Square are written by Aileen Paterson, a member of one of our Hub groups, The Scribble Creative Writers. Aileen has been working on them since the group started meeting in the Clarice Pears.  She has been following the work and changes outside the building.  We are very grateful to Aileen for allowing us to share her writings.  They provide a social history of the Western Campus development from May 2023 until May 2024 and we will publish them in instalments. They remind me of Glasgow artist, Mitch Miller’s ‘pigeon’s eye’ drawings he terms ‘Dialectograms’  which are ‘illustrations drawn not from on high, but as those at ground level see and live it’. The Chronicles describe the new campus and Clarice Pears becoming part of the West End community.

 

Wednesday 12th July 2023
Dark clouds have come over St Mungo Square, though there is still a scattering of blue sky. The red cherry picker has gone but I can still hear a van reversing somewhere and sounds of activity. A clock chimes twelve.
In the flower beds, garlic plants have opened and have turned their scraggy heads towards the sun that is now peeking out from behind a cloud. Buttercups and pink willowherb and thistles are all opening.
A man in a high vis jacket sits quietly in the square, his jacket upended beside him. He sits hunched over his mobile phone, as if in prayer. Cones lie redundant and the pace of change feels a little slower. But even as I write this, things are growing deep in the earth, waiting for the right moment to emerge. Shadows from the tree reach across my page. My hair blows in the wind. A man in a suit emerges from a nearby building, papers in hand, then disappears into the Clarice Pears building. Two students walk past, carrying badminton rackets, she carries a black bag which reads ‘Unthank’.

Wednesday 6th September 2023
Sunlight filters through the small trees on St Mungo Square, warming my skin. A clock chimes two. I hear a man talking on a mobile phone and far off, the sounds of hammering. This feels nourishing, being part of this life, the university and the bustle of Byres Road. The poems that pass through us like a river on its way to the sea. The words we find to heal and to soothe, to say the things we struggle to express. We learn from the travellers who have passed this way before us, poets, healers and visionaries and those on the spiritual path. We find nuggets of truth held in the pages of books, we mine for jewels and hold them up to the light.

Wednesday 13th September 2023
Today is cooler and a blanket of grey covers the sky. This coolness is welcome after a week of overpowering heat, all the windows in my flat open to try to invite in cooler air which does not arrive, only a multitude of flies which need to be chased out again.
In St Mungo’s Square it feels more peaceful, the Clarice Pears building has been officially opened and the crowds have departed. The buildings seem to have exhaled and relaxed. No longer feeling on show, they can get on with their business. Crates of materials surround the square and a cement mixer lazily circulates but there is less hustle, less sense of urgency. Things will evolve in their own good time, everything has its season, a time for planting and a time for harvesting. We do not always see what happens in the in-between times, when things appear frozen and still. We often lack patience and long to see new shoots emerging from the earth and bursting into bloom: snowdrops, daffodils and bluebells are surely the most welcomed flowers.
In the square, there are already a few leaves on the young trees that are turning bronze and gold. An aeroplane sounds from somewhere overhead, unseen, and far off there is a siren, an emergency happening somewhere else.

Wednesday 11th October 2023
My head full of poetry, I go and sit in the square which is feeling cooler and more autumnal and I am realising a hat might have been wise. A solitary burgundy trainer sits on a wall and a woman exclaims to her companion, ‘A shoe!! I like this area, it’s not going to be a weird area, is it?’
The square refuses to answer any questions as to its future possibilities. It is only concerned with the here and now, the yellow digger that is mostly hidden behind a grey corrugated iron fence, but that squeaks horribly whenever it moves. Which of us can really speculate on our future weirdness anyway? Or even our current weirdness? What’s one person’s weird is another person’s normal.
Teenagers are skateboarding next to the ARC building, slithering from side to side like snakes. From behind the grey fence something hidden crashes to the ground like thunder. The Pride flag is nowhere to be seen. Students walk, head down, staring into screens.

Wednesday 18th October 2023
The burgundy trainer is still in the square, exactly where it was before. Not a care in the world, completely lowering the tone of the entire square, shameless. The buildings do not even acknowledge its presence, such is its insignificance to them, in their worlds of mathematics and statistics, advanced research, health and wellbeing. It is not significant enough even to be moved on, escorted off the premises like an unruly gatecrasher in this world of academia.
The building works continue in the square amidst much beeping and hissing of vehicles screened off by corrugated iron. A man in a high vis jacket gestures through a gate to some unseen people. He is someone to be reckoned with, not like the shoe. A woman in a neon pink scarf tends to a child in a pram.
The sky is almost entirely grey but the sun is just visible through the clouds. Two old men are talking and laughing nearby as they perambulate through the square with a happy golden retriever. It stops to sniff the air, then moves on, as if something important has been affirmed. A white truck turns in circles at one end of the square, for no apparent reason. Signs proclaim slogans: ‘One Life, One Team’, ‘Built to Outperform’, ‘Tarmac: the UKs First Choice in Construction Materials and Services’. The white truck is now moving leisurely through the square towards me, then stops in front of the ARC building, for no apparent purpose. A woman with red check trousers, pink hair and headphones walks across the square.

Wednesday 25th October 2023
The shoe has finally disappeared, possibly having been escorted off the premises to seek refuge in some other less prestigious quarter, or possibly reclaimed by a rather inattentive owner (you would think you would notice that you had lost a shoe). Or perhaps claimed by a prince seeking his bride, the delightful yet elusive owner of the shoe, who needed to flee St Mungo Square at midnight before her taxi turned into a pumpkin. I imagine her distraught companion standing, burgundy trainer in hand, gazing off into the distance after the departing taxi. Instead of undertaking the cumbersome and somewhat dangerous task of buzzing on every flat door in Glasgow, he has place the shoe in St Mungo Square and awaited her return. Whatever the fate of the shoe, the nearby buildings can now breathe a sigh of relief, their reputation restored.
My thoughts are disturbed by the arrival of a protest march – a banner declares ‘End the Siege of Gaza’ and people chant ‘We are all Palestinians. One two three four, occupation no more. Five six seven eight, Israel is a terror state.’
It’s hard to think about what’s happening in the world, and I just want to weep for all those caught up in war and acts of terrorism, which in a way is all of us, even me as I sit here in the square, just writing down everything that goes on.
The march moves on, their shouts mingling with the drilling from the nearby building works and the men who are digging up Byres Road. Behind a grey fence, a yellow digger is hard at work and I can just see the tops of yellow trees starkly contrasted by the drab building behind them. The young tree in front of me has lost most of its leaves, as if already anticipating winter, as if it too has lost hope of any light.
I am told that next year things will start to turn, that feminine energy will start to prevail, that the stars will finally align in the right way. That those in power who are destroying our planet and its people will no longer prevail. I can only hope, and bear witness to what I see. Like a builder of standing stones, I hope there will be something left that says ‘I was here’.

 

To be continued.....

First published: 27 March 2024

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