COP26 is asking Glasgow the hardest questions. Not just “Is the city ready for a global invasion, will the trains run on time and will the refuse collectors take the rubbish away?” To which the answers seem to be no. Instead, there are questions that have no precedent in Glasgow life. Questions such as “Where in Scotland can I find 52 volcanic rocks shaped like footballs?”
A friend who has volunteered to help a delegation of indigenous peoples is currently searching for deposits of said rocks, which are needed for a sweat lodge that is part of the unofficial UN Climate Change Conference.
Inside a timber cocoon erected in a public garden, the hot rocks will mingle with sage and drumming to create the environment of a traditional healing ceremony. Enter the lodge as a bedraggled survivor of a pandemic, facing climate catastrophe, and exit into the Glasgow air as — who knows what? Just as Covid-19 did, so COP26 arrives as if it’s an experiment, suffixed with lab numbers, testing our morphability.
The messy civic prelude to the UN gathering has done much to achieve the impression that it will be a festival of uncertainty. Outside Glasgow’s modestly sized centre, the streets are empty of public messages about the important global discussion that Scotland’s largest, most diverse city is about to host. No one really seems to know anything about what’s going to happen, except that there isn’t quite room for it in Glasgow.
A Chilean veteran of the COP circuit arrived earlier this year to scout out resources for the tribal fringe programme. We ended up watching the Scotland vs Moldova football match together at Hampden Park stadium, where he ate a Scotch pie with a shawl over his knees (it was raining) and told me that Glasgow was not equipped to host an event like COP.
Since then, the city has hit as many crossbars as the national team did in that game — a threatened rail strike, a shortage of hotel rooms and another potential strike by the rubbish collectors, who are supposedly being frisked on their rounds by hungry rats.
Any conversation here on the subject of COP26 usually generates acerbic merriment about its madness, amid a more sober frustration that Glaswegians have not been better informed about the whole affair. Road closures will also cut off some of the habitual cross-city routes for Glasgow’s scarce population of cyclists. This is an unfortunate subplot given the importance that the city council recently ascribed to active travel, declaring a new multimillion-pound fund to lay more cycling and walking paths.
Of course, the chewiest question of them all is: will COP26 make a difference? Beyond political pledges, it’s a shame that the practical frailties around this edition of the conference have obscured the greener colours of Glasgow living. The younger population of the city are very sensitive to the environment, willing to tread carefully in their consumer habits in order to make a Greta Thunberg-esque “small difference”.
To this cohort, the heart of COP26 is not the official programme at the Scottish Event Campus, but the protest march on November 5 from Kelvingrove Park to George Square, where Thunberg is due to address the crowds.
A pillar in my bookshop, on Glasgow’s Southside, has gradually been pinned up over the past few weeks with flyers and posters for climate change events and call-outs for volunteers. Day to day, the bookshop life is never as quiet or as uneventful as I think it’s going to be. The conversational range, for a start, is huge and surreal.
Before I ran a bookshop, I assumed that all those bookseller stories of customers asking for “the book with a blue cover” were exaggerated for effect. I was wrong. “It was sort of about nature” and “I think it was by a man” are sample gambits from a recent customer who wanted to repeat-buy a book she’d bought from the shop a few months ago. (The title in question, after some investigation, turned out to be Limbo by Dan Fox, which is an appreciation of the in-between states that provide definition to emotional and geographical territories.)
And then the other day, a customer asked for “a book like Stoner”. When I asked if she meant an American novel with a similar tone or setting to John Williams’, she looked at me disapprovingly. “No,” she replied, “I meant a book as good as Stoner.”
Books are memory-logged with their feelings rather than their details, and the more I see this the more I realise that bookshops are places people come to in search of new and old feelings. Authors’ names are vulnerable to melt off the experience of reading sooner or later, which makes a phenomenon such as “Sally Rooney Day” interesting to process.
Rooney’s new novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, is in its own way a book about limbo, asking if the late-twenties generation are caught in the worst kind, the limbo that comes before an unknown. “We are standing in the last lighted room before the darkness. There is no chance for the planet, and no chance for us,” says one of her protagonists. I imagine that Greta Thunberg might have something of this theme in her words at George Square. Limbo is dead; the time is now, or yesterday.
Months after the football match at Hampden, my volunteer friend calls and asks if I’d host the Chilean’s mother, a tribal elder and healer who has also arrived ahead of COP26. She is in her sixties, and back home travels around Chile “aligning” her patients’ ailments spiritually. She doesn’t speak English, and I don’t speak Spanish, so information is minimal. I gather, however, that she bases her practice around one key ingredient. “Water is medicine,” she says.
She is the last of her tribe, since the line is passed on through daughters not sons, and she has no daughters. Apart from her enthusiasm for Earl Grey tea and her gratitude for a warm home (she arrived in Scotland armed only with a cardigan), she is something of a mystery to me. Even her most serious declarations are delivered cheerfully, including her response to my question of what she has come to Glasgow to say. “Don’t let our human belonging to the Earth be proved only in the last act of our death” is the gist of it.
After such a long lockdown in Glasgow, I have been enjoying all the more how the bookshop appears to be like a concave place that things fall into. A few weeks ago, a man wearing a pair of tan leather shoes that looked out of place for the neighbourhood stood outside the shop. He turned out to be Nicola Sturgeon’s bodyguard, securing the area for an ambush visit by the First Minister to buy some books on her lunch break. (Sturgeon’s MSP constituency office is a few streets away.)
And I’ve discovered another novelty of being a bookseller, alongside the occasional VIP browser. In a sugared tone quite unlike any that one would receive as a journalist, novelists (rather than their publicists) write notes to accompany the first proof copies of their book that are as earnest as love letters. “Dear Bookseller,” they write, before pouring out heartfelt accounts of the book’s creation.
One such letter arrived with an advance copy of Hanya Yanagihara’s To Paradise, a loose trilogy of stories that ends in the 2090s with a society that has been racked by successive pandemics and stripped of its freedoms. (The story was dreamt up before Covid-19.) When I picture people trying to describe the novel to a bookseller in a few years’ time, I imagine they’ll say, “That book about our future.”
Natalie Whittle is the founder of Outwith Books, Glasgow. Her book, ‘The 15-Minute City’ is published by Luath Press on Nov 18
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COP26: a Glasgow bookseller’s tale
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