I didn’t really want to go to Glasgow today. Looking out to a thick glowing mist, I had a fine excuse not to get on my bike and go but the mist cleared and so before lunch I rode off down the Lang Toon to Gleneagles. The mist cleared, slowly enough that the hills glowed beyond it and the sun bled through it. The sun was hot and cycling around the city in a black jumper, I was soon smelly.
I’ve been missing connection and selling something, even literature, doesn’t provide the terms I would choose to connect with. Writing is lonely and I’ve never had a problem with that, until now. How do you go into a shop and talk about it? Gift a personal thing, offer it up for judgement and leave. At points, I couldn’t – I hid the gift around to be found, a package left on the returns trolley at the Glasgow Woman’s Library.
The bakery in the Saltmarket always lures me in with the smell of fresh bread and cinnamon. I told the baker that I was very grateful to see a friendly face.
‘Oh. One of those days?’
‘Well, I’ve written a book…’
‘Well, it’s… thank you. I’m not very good at selling, I find it hard to foist what I do on people..not that I foist but...(See? I can’t even talk about a sales pitch far less can I deliver one).
I was not expecting the Brave Baker to offer to sell it, I was so touched I offered him a copy as a gift, but he wouldn’t hear it, then at a discount, still no, he paid £10 for it, wouldn’t even take change.
‘There. You’ve sold a book today. By the way, your bag’s still open.’
Then I needed to pedal off to a library on the southside but I didn’t get beyond the Gorbals. My rear tyre was flat and worse than flat, the tyre was coming off so I couldn’t even properly wheel the thing. A pannier of books is heavy. I staggered with it, like the old man who carries his donkey. Again to the Saltmarket Billy Bilsland Bikes and while I was waiting for those lovely people to sort me out, I stared into a gallery window until I was invited in. I didn’t know I was being welcomed by the editor of Sogo magazine, had I known that, I probably wouldn’t have offered up my amusing anecdote about the time I used the gents in Café Cossachok by mistake. This is what happens when I meet interesting people, I don’t try to get on the level, they politely put up with mine. Sogo Magazine features some beautiful photography by Niki Boon of the wild childhood we all wish we’d had or simply wish we could give. And brilliant writing – though I was reading a magazine from 2016, the year Cupid’s a Psycho is set and oh we didn’t know what was about to hit us. To Craig Wallace I expressed my frustration with Instagram, a platform that seems to be about posing suggestively. I don’t pose suggestively, not since that photo of me feeding a very small horse with a carrot held at waist height. I found in his lively, world-weary company, that I was not alone in my frustration. We see the polished product and assume the production is easy and effortless. It never is.
“He told me it (Sogo), was ‘a bit wordy’. Fuck off!”.
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