After a difficult morning with Fat Mac on Tuesday, things went smoothly…but not for long.
Mac had told me that he was finally going to do some serious training for the Sikkim trip by walking to Porty, but in the event he arrived on the 42 bus.
“Kin yeez prunt oot ma e-tayket Roadz?”
“Of course Mac, but why not print it out yourself?”
“Ah cannae get ma prunter tae wurk”
“Have you connected it to your home network?”
“The prunter’s fecked. Ah’m nae goanna waste onymair time on it. Why the feck Ah hiv tae print oot ma ain tayket, Ah dunny ken. Yeez dinnae used to hiv tae dae that.”
“In the seventies you didn’t.”
“Dinnae start a’ that again, Roadz, aboot ra sivinties. Ah hiv tae gang tae ra bunk noo.”
“Why not bank online?”
“Roadz – life is enough o’ a war against machines wi’oot online bunking. Ah cannae be ersed wi a’ they computery thungs ”
I gave Mac my copy of Third-class Ticket, by Heather Wood, which I’d not been able to get into at all, and after I’d pointed out that a surprising number of women with strong mothering instincts were following his training progress on Facebook, he left to go to the bank. I then packed my overnight bag for Glasgow, where Lindsey and I had booked a room in the Campanile Hotel. This is bang next to the SSE Hydro, where we were to see Jeff Lynne’s ELO that evening.

At least, we thought we’d booked a room. It turned out that someone-who-shall-not-be-named-because-I-got-into-trouble-when-mentioning-this-elsewhere had booked it for the previous night, and then we found out that the hotel was completely full for Tuesday.
I was expecting a lot of flapping around whilst looking for somewhere to stay, but the girl on the Campanile reception desk, whom I could see from her name-tag was called Margaret, could not have been more helpful. She went out of her way to find some alternatives, looked up Trivago and other websites, marked places on a map she gave us, and even let Lindsey book a room using her computer. When I despaired of getting somewhere nearby with a car park, she said we could leave our car at the Campanile, and gave us the code for the barrier. Thank you, Margaret! I’ll definitely try to stay at the Campanile next time the need arises. You deserve a medal!
We eventually stayed at a hotel in Royal Crescent, not too far a walk from the Hydro. The room was fine. I noticed that the vertical bits of carpet on the stairs (not the horizontal bits) were quite worn, which I couldn’t understand until I figured that they’d probably at some stage turned each bit round 90 degrees.
We enjoyed a tasty meal at Villa Toscana in Argyle Street, where within ten seconds of arriving we were twice referred to as ‘yous’, as in:
“A table for two?”
“Uf yous wait jes a sec..aye, yous kin sit rair [pointing].”

The Hydro is a very large auditorium, holding about 13,000 people. It was full for the Jeff Lynne’s ELO concert, which was absolutely great. They have such a wonderful back catalogue of songs, and the light show was fantastic.

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