Haunting Memories

Tonight I heard a spooky piece of music on Radio 3 about a telephone. I wondered if I should compose a partner piece about a telephone box. Where do the ghosts of dead telephone kiosks hang out? While we’re on the subject of museums; what happened to the phone-boxes that were mercilessly ripped from our city streets, historic towns, quant villages greens and country-side verges for reasons that I struggle to accept?  Some have ended up in private gardens, cafés and pubs; others, made into cocktail cabinets, shower-cubicals and, in what you might call post-modern irony, domestic phone-booths.

But saddest of all is that, in the newly re-opened National Museum of Scotland there are three old phone-boxes, only one of which is officially defunct. Strange it is to see how, as I wander around the exhibits on a reasonably frequent basis, the phone-booths that attract the most attention are the two that are still yet extant (just) on our streets: the original K2, and the more common K6 (please excuse the geeky jargon: here’s the K6, to illustrate)

Stranger still, in the museum section dedicated to the peculiar world of ‘communication’ the historical device that children and adults alike enjoy is the one that largely resembles two baked bean tins and a piece of string; a couple of funnels and a piece of garden hosepipe; an ear pressed against a glass against a wall. Maybe one day, communication as we know it will be a thing of the past…. Am I repeating, or getting ahead of myself?

Who cares – nobody’s listening, are they.
There's a ghostly silence at the end of this line

Paradise, Paved

We’re over half-way through October and I have realised, in my neglect of the Window, if not the Turret itself that we are behind with the Glasgow Schooldays calendar. To rectify this: a picture of another window, or at least, another view.  With Autumn presenting as it does to some death and decay, others may prefer to think of a deepening of roots, or perhaps, new vistas. Here then is a juxtaposition of the old and the new.

Through the charming art deco window of the Scotland Street School Museum a grim and ugly multi-storey car-park. On one side of a busy road, a parking lot, on the other… well, not quite paradise. Maybe one day, schooling as we know it will be a thing of the past, and they’ll turn every school into a museum (and charge all the kids a dollar and-a-half just to see ’em?) Some schools, of course, charge the kids (or the parents) more than a dollar and half to attend. But I’ll leave that paved paradise for another pro-utopian rant.