I am now a landlord, and also, having moved into our new flat in Edinburgh (RFHQ VI?), a tenant again. I think—I hope!—that these cancel out, and that this makes me a normal person rather than a society-destroying property developer.

Rather than move in one go, we’ve sort of dribbled in fits and starts over the past fortnight, bringing a carload of stuff to Edinburgh and storing it in Austen & Maria’s flat whenever we had the chance. Driving back to Glasgow on one of those nights, I was sitting at a red light on a typical Glasgow street, tenement blocks on either side and a smir of rain making the pavements reflect the streetlights, and I realised that I’d left my sense of “home” in Edinburgh. Before some eastbound journey along the M8 I’d loaded it into the car along with a box of clothes or CDs and unloaded it along with them at the other end.

This was a shock: not only could I pinpoint the exact time when I no longer considered Glasgow to be my home, I hadn’t ever been sure I’d thought of it as my home in the first place! Edinburgh’s been the setting for so much of my life over the past decade that I’ve “mythologised” it to a degree (five years of navel-gazing will do that to one’s perception of a time and place) and at some point over the last year or so I’ve started to do the same to Glasgow. (Bear with me on this next bit, because I am about to go quite misty-eyed and pretentious. Also, apologies are due to my man Plato.)

In some ideal way, Sauchiehall Street is a cosmopolitan boulevard; the GFT with its art deco lines and cramped seats is the archetypal cinema; the Art School is the nexus where Mackintosh’s Glasgow meets Grey’s Unthank; the Langside Café by the Victoria Infirmary, where builders and surgeons and families alike squeeze into the tiny seats, is the place to eat Sunday breakfast on the south side. This is not to say that I haven’t squirmed uncomfortably through interminable films at the GFT, or gagged on the limpest rasher of greasy bacon in the Langside Café, but my imperfect experiences of these places are just the shadows cast by their true selves, by the kind of idea behind each one; and that I remember them as their ideals and not as their shadows is how I know that Glasgow sneaked up on me and became my home for a year.

You can wipe away that tear now.

* * *

Jeff, Devon, Neil & Vanessa gave Ash & I a hand to move our stuff from its temporary resting place into the new flat last weekend, and so I hired a van in which to do it. I can report that the driving experience of the 6-speed diesel Vauxhall Vivaro is very much like a crack high*: incredibly addictive and frustratingly short-lived. The turbo spools up with an audible whooshing noise and the revs leap skyward; the tyres break loose in a slur of wheelspin and the van catapults itself forward. The white van mania evaporates just 500 rpm later, but hey, this thing has six gears so you just grab another one and start all over.

* Possibly the best line ever uttered on TV: “This crack is really moreish,” — Super Hans, Peep Show.