Thursday 22nd September 2022
Regular readers of this column might know that I love cemeteries. Yes, it's unusual but the more I say it, the more I hear that other people also love them. This morning my brother announced that we could go look for our family's graves in a cemetery across the city.
It had rained through the night so the ground was wet but we were fortunate that the big threatening clouds stayed intact. We parked at the one end of the really large St. Kentigern’s Cemetery. It was established, in 1882 and is named after the founder of Glasgow (also known as St Mungo). We walked through some wet thick grass and found our Dad's brother and wife's grave fairly quickly. But the others remained unfound. We spent well over an hour walking up and down and I was marveling at all the names for future fiction stories.
We met up again after having naturally split off and I was trying to follow the year of death sequence. We ventured further from the car to the older graves, with some beautiful headstones and sculptures but our relatives never appeared. My stomach started growling so we headed back to the car a little disappointed in our unsuccessful search.
My geography of the city of Glasgow is rather confused because of my different visuals in my head. I have the 5 year old me, with wide streets and big buildings, then my 20 year old self who spent a lot of time on the underground train into the city, to my 41 year old self driving my late sister's car from Paisley. My flow of the land is mixed up but as we drove away from the cemetery, I started remembering my first house and bits of the area. My brother drove around pointing out the remnants of my primary school which is now newly built housing, the church which my mum loved and the upstairs house of the end 'close' which had a Scots flag flying in the garden. It's amazing going back to the past in the present, it somehow sews little gaps in my psyche together and today, a nice little quilted bit was done.
Tonight we celebrated my nephew's graduation with a fancy dinner. We walked to our tasty restaurant with the best sunset light against the century old buildings. I'm becoming rather fond of haggis, and tonight I had Balmoral chicken which combines the Scottish dish with a tasty gravy. A great meal to end a lovely day.
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