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 1st November 2023

After the deluge of rain this morning, the square is damp and glistening and scattered with wet yellow leaves. The sky is a uniform grey but it is not actually raining. As I wrote that, it started to rain, I should have known better. The weather gods are mocking me, yet again.

Some men in high vis jackets are doing something intricate on a lifting platform. Some others appear to be having a tug of war with a length of black rubber pipe and are yelling at each other. It all looks tremendous fun. I am realising that some of the men in high vis jackets are in fact women, or possibly non-binary people, and I feel bad for my mistake.

A little girl in a bright pink pom-pom hat wanders across the square with her mum, clambering onto the concrete seating then jumping off again. The people in high vis jackets are yelling at each other again, even though they are standing right next to each other. An Uber delivery man whizzes across the square on an electric bike. From inside the Advanced Research Centre, fairy lights glisten, and I think I must explore inside sometime if I can think of a pretext, or try to look like I am an advanced researcher.

Looking in the windows, I can see the fairy lights are in fact part of a café, and I resolve when I have more time to explore it further. I notice a poster nearby which reads ‘Are we all f*cked?’ I must admit I have been asking myself similar questions of late. Not just in relation to the climate, but in the way we treat each other and the unspeakable things that have somehow become normal. Much of life now feels like learning how to tolerate the intolerable, to accept the unacceptable.

I feel we must sometime soon reach the point when we say collectively ‘this needs to stop’. When war gives way to talking, to finding a way forward, for the sake of all of us. When mindless consumption gives way to kindness and fairness. When we realise the true cost of our behaviour. When we realise that other choices are possible, indeed necessary. Change is everywhere, all the time. We are capable of so much more than we think we are.

 

Wednesday 8th November 2023

The wind is blowing fallen leaves all over St Mungo Square, whilst a digger rumbles away behind a fence, yellow light flashing. The blue welcome banners outside the Advanced Research Centre are getting blown about. Tow women in beige coats enter via the revolving doors of the centre. A man stands vaping at the door and checking his phone. A cyclist has paused for a rest next to three small grey portacabins that have appeared in the square, for an uncertain purpose. Someone in a high vis jacket leans against a closed gate that reads STOP VEHICLE CROSSING POINT in red and black.

The digger starts beeping away and approaching the fence before pausing for a rest. A man wearing a beanie and a black jacket trundles a suitcase across the square, eyeing the nearby buildings. The sky is mostly blue with just a few wispy clouds, but it is cold enough to numb my hands as I write. One must suffer sometimes for ones art.

A man emerges from the ARC building carrying a large cardboard fish and gesticulating wildly to a woman with red dreadlocks, before wandering off, fish in hand. A toddler with a yellow jacket and green hat runs after his mother with his teddy bear, calling to her. She encourages him to run faster. Another digger has started to tear down a building at the bottom of the square. I admire the building’s glass-paned column, which will no doubt soon be gone, after being here who knows how long. The old must make way for the new, the way our old habitual thinking must make way for different ideas. The old ways are not always the

best, and not even all that old, when one reflects on the whole history of the planet. Transformation and destruction has happened in the blink of an eye.

 

Wednesday 15th November 2023

The square is looking rather bedraggled today, as if a storm has just swept through it and left. The building they were demolishing last week has shrunk, but the column with its small paned green windows is still there, just. Probably next week it will be gone. A staircase is oddly exposed, with stairs leading to nowhere. It looks sad to be in this state of collapse, as if it would rather just get the thing over with and be put out of its misery, than to be left for all to see in this state of half-destruction.

A woman in a brown raincoat has stopped near me and is staring into her phone and pressing it with one finger. Another woman in a red puffer jacket has similarly been ground to a halt by her phone, whatever information it is communicating to her cannot wait for a response. Two other people are walking and talking on their phones, but managing to make progress across the square. A third person on their phone walks in the other direction. Almost no one is able to refuse the demands of an electronic device that must be attended to at all times.

We have become accustomed to this way of living. Many people know nothing else, and even those of us who remember pre-mobile phone days are not immune to its demands. Yet somehow for millennia we managed to get where we were going and go about our business without its assistance. If we were late, people would just need to wait for us. We did not need to upload a photo of our meal before eating it or take a selfie in every new place we visited. Were we more peaceful back then, or just lacking information and connection? Or has it become a bit too much, we have far more information now than we can ever hope to process, and much of it is conflicting. There is too much fakery to rely on anything. Social media obscures the truth of people’s lives and leaves us trying to live up to an impossible ideal, more disconnected and dissatisfied than ever.

A digger has begun work on the half-demolished building again, and I hope it finishes soon. Two people in high vis jackets wander across the square with an orange wheelbarrow, somehow managing to resist the pull of their devices. A siren is sounding from somewhere else, possibly travelling along Byres Road. A car sounds its horn. The trees are looking as desolate as the half-demolished building, just clinging on to the last of their leaves before the final letting go, the admittance of winter. Everything is in flux, tearing itself apart in the knowledge that better things will come. Grief is the pathway to renewal.

 

To be continued.....

First published: 18 April 2024

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