Spitting Fire

Kelvingrove Art Gallery is one of the highlights of a trip to Glasgow. The collection is a good one - star pictures include Salvador Dali's masterpiece Christ of Saint John of the Cross. An image that is both memorable and astonishing and the crowning achievement of the Spaniard's career. Another stunning image is that of Sandro Botticelli's Annunciation. There are also a raft of French Impressionists and a good showing of Dutch Golden Age panels. The latter includes a dramatic essay in chiaroscuro in Rembrandt's A Man in Armour.

One enters the massive Victorian building through a grand and elaborately decorated hall. The grey stone walls rise up massively around you and lead the eye upwards to the balconies that overlook this ceremonial space. Taking the main gallery on the right you enter a display area for sculpture. A bust of Queen Victoria eyes you with barely concealed disdain, whilst around her a cast of disembodied bronze heads look on. To these sightless eyes are joined a host more - this time laughing, sneering charaters who hang from the rafters in silent mirth. These hanging jokers have become the leitmotif of the institution. You can see what they look like in my picture above.

Beyond the giggling heads is a room devoted to the Glasgow School. These Art Nouveau designers put the city firmly on the design map. Charles Rennie Mackintosh is, of course, world famous - his School of Art is a lodestone for those interested in this international movement. Here is the western entrance.

The gallery devoted to Mackintosh's work includes other work by his contemporaries which are well worth examining. When a comet flies through sometimes stars are unfairly dimmed. Being a big Victorian museum the atmosphere is dusty and there is a feeling of things being a little worn down. As one enters the Scottish picture galleries this feeling of a grey and dusty space grows stronger. Unfortunately this takes away from the paintings. Oddly your eye is, as a result, drawn to the texture of the canvases, the joints of the frames and the way that the light can sometimes hit a canvas obscuring the image. It must be some sort of psychological effect - in the same way that if someone tells you they think they have been bitten by fleas you immediately and subconsciously reach to scratch your calf! To see one blemish is to see all.

Upstairs one has a chance to view the French impressionist and expressionist paintings. Here the heavy hand of central government is strongly visible. The British Labour party government is all about access. They now target anything that moves with accessibility numbers. As a result poor old Kelvingrove has 'signage' helping visitors interpret the art. One victimised image has a plastic frame complete with arrows and interpretative text to 'allow' children to understand the picture! This completely negates the point that art has it's own language and what is important is not to dumb it down but to raise the understanding of the viewer to it's level. This is not an easy task but that, in it's own way, makes it a much more valuable one. No child will visit an art gallery on their own - they will do so with an adult who has a moral obligation to explain and inspire the student in a lifetime's passion. The kind of guidance that I was lucky enough to get from my parents.

The way to introduce young minds to art is amply demonstrated in another first floor room - one where the gallery's Botticelli is displayed in a custom built space with the feeling of a quatrocento side chapel in an Italian church. No child could fail to understand the spirituality of the image and the way it is presented - one hopes that proud Glaswegians will advise the gallery on the right path to take regarding access. Letting the imagination soar rather than allowing dull text to plod heavy footed makes all the difference.

Passing to the other side of the museum you wander past a statue of an indomitable Churchill to overlook the western atrium. You look over and your heart figuratively leaps when you espy a Spitfire, forever airborne. Here in this city where so many fought and died in the Second World War - it is a mighty talisman. You find yourself circling the balcony watching the machine, which hangs in space, from all angles and marvelling that the history of the world turned on such a simple craft. The inner workings of an iPod a million times more complex. The small bakelite rearview mirror perched on the windscreen bringing home the vulnerability of this airplane.

The greatness of this museum is in it's eclectic collection, the quality of some of the masterworks and that wartime legend. A 1940s fighter enshrined in this stone edifice is like the angry proud heart of this great city.

Glasgow

Scotland gets it's name from the ancient Scots. Confusingly in Early Medieval history the Irish were known as Scots. Thus when they decided to colonise South West Scotland they gave the North of Britain a new name. The Scots are great, warm, friendly, positive people with killer senses of humour. Scotland was one of the first places that I visited when I lived in Britain. The acres of resin perfumed pine forests, the craggy oaken slopes, the magnificent peaks moodily surveying mile after mile of landscape always attracted me - as did the medieval cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow.

For my PhD I studied the ancient woodlands of the West Coast of Scotland and spent time doing research in Edinburgh at the National Library. It was a time that I really enjoyed and when I felt I was doing something important by ensuring that the last remnants of the ancient wildwood were recognised and protected. The people in the Scottish Forestry Authority as well as the Department of the Taoiseach were incredibly supportive. Due to that experience and visiting amazing beautiful landscapes, meeting friendly and helpful people and getting a chance to experience the rhythm of Scottish life has always tied me to the nation closest to Ireland and yet so different.

I went back for the first time in 12 years in May 2009 and had a really good time of it. It was my first trip since getting ill last summer and a great way to start travelling again.

Glasgow reminds me a lot of the Northside of Dublin. Buchanan seems like Henry Street, the Galleries like the Jervas and the ILAC like the St Enoch Centre. The best streets are the ones that fashion and time have forgotten that carry memories of older days - years when Glasgow was a workshop of the World, when she launched ships that patrolled the Empire, when Clydeside fought back against the Nazi's - when the metropolis burned. Here are a couple of images that I took that gave me that feeling.

London

London is one of the most interesting and ancient cities in Europe. It's home to a diverse collection of art galleries and museums, old buildings, threadworn monuments and landmarks - not to mention shopping, restaurants, pubs and clubs. This all adds up to ideal photo-hunting. My favourite part of the city, since my first visit in the early 90s, is the River Thames.

For Dubliner's the River is reminiscent of the Liffey in the way that it splits the capital in two - yet on a bigger scale. Nowadays the waterway is constantly busy with all manner of craft and activity. There are the large clippers that wend their way up and down stream, occasional sail boats lazily drifting along and motorboats that power noisly past the bridges. Occasionally you will see black clad soldiers in high speed inflatables in fast pursuit of unclear targets - the SAS practising. Further inland the grim head-quarters of MI5 oversees the river.

It's the bridges, though, that are most memorable. My picture, above, is of the Millennium Bridge that forms a path between Tate Modern and Saint Paul's. The bridge inspired much amusement in the British media when it first opened. Pedestrians who strode it in 2000 discovered that they were taking part in an impromptu trampoline event. The crossing was closed and reopened much later following the installation of shock absorbers. Below is another bridge, this time more elegant, and behind it some of the iconic buildings of the financial centre including the Gherkin and the Old NatWest Building (the tallest visible). I had a meeting in the latter ten years ago somewhere near the top floor. Oddly the meeting room had flock wall paper similar to that of my parent's sitting room when I was a kid. It didn't really feel like Master of the Universe stuff surrounded by my parent's idea of home comfort. No one was standing on the meeting room table shouting 'show me the money' either! It was pretty cool, though, standing in the clouds watching helicopters circle below and spotting Wren churches which punctuate the city grid.

Another trip to London with my sister over a year ago introduced me to the Thames Clippers. It was a rainy day (in Old London Town) and we decided to sail down the River - passing Parliament, H.M.S Belfast, Tower Bridge, Greenwich and ending up at the Thames Barrier. From the River the views are impressive and at times the trip feels like the Disney guide to London. Here is a picture from that trip showing the 1932 Cruiser which saw service in the second world war and later in the Korean war. The ship was made in Ireland in the dockyards of Belfast, capital of Northern Ireland, by Harland & Wolff and was launched on St. Patrick's Day by Mrs Neville Chamberlain. Given her husband's success with that 'piece of paper' it's just as well that Mrs Chamberlain launched the ship. Back then Belfast cost £2.1 million. She provided cover for the Arctic Convoys to Russia. The ship also figured in D-Day when the Allies landed on the beaches of France. She provided protection for the men who ran up those beaches into enemy fire.

I was once told by a 70 year old man how he had charged up the beaches of D-Day. He and his best friend were in the same boat that scrambled onto the beach. Once it berthed, they had orders to run like hell, not stop and to not look back. The boat hit the beach, the gate dropped and he and his mate ran. As he powered up the beach he could hear bullets whistling past him and all around - adrenalin took over. Even as he did he heard a smack and the sound of a dull thump. Later, when he reached shelter a little further inland, he realised that that was the sound of his friend's lifeless body hitting the sand. He told me that story as if it had happened earlier that morning - except that morning had been forty years before.