There was this bloke in the front once...

Dominic Roskrow talks Scotland to a Glasgow taxi driver

If you use taxis a fair bit then from time to time you get lucky and you stumble across one who is less the moaning cynic and more part tour guide and part information centre.

It happened to me the other day in Glasgow. My journey was a short one – 10 minutes or so – but in that time my driver was a one man entertainment centre.

I should have suspected that the man was bit of a player from the cool shades and the way he was sprawling out his window like he was an LA cop in some heist film. And sure enough, from the moment my door was shut he was off.

He started predictably enough. Having found out that I'd travelled from Edinburgh he informed me that it was highly unlikely any driver in the capital would bother to hold a conversation with a passenger, before moving on to the relative merits of Glasgow.

His glasses weren't exactly rose-tinted, but let's just say his interpretation of the facts was wonderfully optimistic.

Now admittedly the sun was beating down and Glasgow did feel like a summer town. But I wasn't sure I totally agreed with the driver when he told me that the West coast city was bordering on tropical.

“Edinburgh,” he informed me, “is cold and dry. Glasgow is warm and a bit wetter.” And, he said, Glasgow's a better city because the Victorians made it, a better group of people altogether than the Georgians, who had been responsible for Edinburgh.

“The Victorians knew how to build a city and you can tell a Victorian city by all the gardens,”...

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• By : Dominic Roskrow
• In : Editor's View
• Issue : 27
• Page : 3
• Words : 563