09.12 Toyah is filming her series with the BBC in a wildlife park this morning, my first of several days in Glasgow with her. We arrived here late afternoon yesterday after visiting her parents' riverside cottage near Pershore on Friday, Manchester Saturday (for "Heaven & Earth" live tv Sunday morning), Southampton Sunday (voice-over for Meridien Monday morning) & then back to the riverside Monday night.
Glasgow is abuzz. Very much a sense of juice here. The hotel is 2 miles from the city centre, & surrounding architecture impressive. Also impressive are the utterly inappropriate concrete horrors & brutalisms dumped on sites without any reference or concern for their surrounding buildings. Like, clearly viewed from our hotel window is a concrete public library c. 1970-75. I have seen this design elsewhere in the UK. It was not designed for this city by the architect (term used loosely) but appears to be a uni-fit design. Inappropriate wherever you dump it. Central planning? Bureacracy? Arbitrary decision making? Lack of personal responsibility for the design?
On high streets throughout the UK, buildings of public bodies, along with those of banks & building societies, shout of brute & uncivilised power, a lack of interest in design & aethetics, and of counter-intuitive living & working patterns. But all of these constructional blemishes are significantly less-worse than any post-war construction I've seen in East Germany or the former Soviet satellites. But to be inside these constructions & experience how the feelings are shaped by buildings which don't take people into account ... terror! A hotel in Chemnitz & a concert hall in Warsaw spring effortlessly to mind.
And much as I loathe muzak, in restaurants I prefer the blandness of anonymous string sections to drum-driven pop. Eating under / over a pounding rhythm section disturbs my digestive processes. This does not imply that, in my mature years, I have become an advocate for Mantovani. Please, please give me a Haydn string quartet for breakfast. Even a chestnut of the baroque!
Your Diarist as whiner.
"Suffering is our experience of the distance between what we are and who we wish to become."
