The Other Side of the Tracks...

#5 Every city has another side to it. For those Trainspotting fans, Edinburgh’s Leith neighborhood, a dockland cum loft space for urban fauna sipping pretty on spritzers, this area is no longer a haven for needles.

Back in Glasgow, though, there remains a skid row. This would be Glasgow’s East End, where some of the more alarming statistics come from. In that corner of the city, one would hardly mistake it for a First World. If the papers were consistent in coverage of one area, it is the poverty and rampant abuse stories in rural areas and in unidentified parts of Glasgow.

One such brief, sealed the fate of six unlucky Phillipino teenagers who were going to do a cultural exchange and live in the East End. Their chaperones have warned them for a life unlike what they imagine the West to be. In fact, they will only relive their Third World in a different kind of climate where people talk funny. They will be lucky if they make it out of there unscathed.

These stories start to desynthesise a person, day in and day out, six'incher "SCANDAL," "PERV," ETC. But more gratifying, sinkers like " PONY DOPING SCANDAL!" "SHEEP IMPERSONATOR ALMOST FOUND," were delectable. British media is of a different penmanship indeed, smart and pestulant. And people do in fact read, even if it is cheeky like this one.

In some alleys and street markets, I have come across this poverty, and have walked away unprepared. People who have no teeth and prattle in some language of the hillside selling lids of casserole wares and mismatched socks. It is of another world, this kind of poverty—not one easy to romanticise. But allow me to broach the subject of romance…