Between Toronto and Glasgow, the air travel takes roughly seven hours, or 5,300 kilometres, or 275,600 litres of fuel. Times two for return. For the ensuing five months at Glasgow School of Art I’d buy a student pass for First Bus as I was living out of town and commuted every day. Twenty weeks, six days a week, seventeen and half kilometres both ways, it’s additional 4,200 kilometres. Some buses were electric, some not. I flew to London once, visited my family in Prague twice – because how often can I afford to fly there, living in Toronto? That’s a lot of miles. I’m conscious of it and so is my wallet.
My time spent on the ground, however, was intensely pedestrian. I bought a pair of hiking boots and spent my days discovering the town. I’d take the train to Edinburgh, Dundee, Oban, even inner city. On Kerrera, an island off the West Scottish coast and just a five-minute ferry hop from Oban, I was completing a circular island walk with friends and got chatting with an islander. When I asked what she’d do every day, she answered, ‘I’ve been planting the trees in the bay’ and her arm swept over a long stretch of barren coastal area. ‘I’d lived for a long time in a caravan and saved a wee bit of money, now I’m lucky to live here.” (www.reforestingscotland.org; www.islandsrevival.org/2019/07/)
My research into all things Scottish relatively quickly turned out a particularly quirky and community-oriented side of the people, and their head-strong organizing for change. I’ve seen it on small scale when a studio colleague of mine, Emma, single mother of four, almost single-handedly stomped out of the ground the GSA Green Space Society. (www.gsasustainability.org.uk/projects/gsa-green-space-society) Every time I joined in and got my hands dirty, there’s tea and food and a small community. The last event that I helped to organize was a natural dye workshop, with the textile artist Laura Spring from the Sculpture House in Paisley, an artist collective that successfully lobbied local authorities for affordable community creative space. (www.sculpturehousecollective.com/) I met Laura on my first foray out of Glasgow, on a rainy day, over a cup of tea.
Just around the block from the burned-down historical building of Mackintosh library and the current GSA library is the Garnethill Multicultural Centre, a Friday lunch community place that I stumbled on in my early ramblings on Garnethill. (www.garnethillmc.co.uk) Even though they were fully staffed for volunteers, I kept coming back for conversations and the ever-present cup of tea. Mental and physical well-being, short in supply in the city as everywhere, seemed to have been on everybody’s mind in the time I spent at Glasgow School of Art. Most of all, it’s that people were eager to take action on others’ behalf. Returning home has been bittersweet, but a piece of Scotland has latched onto my heart and will remind me to do the right thing, to act, organize and be actively mindful living on the land.
