Eternal Glasgow

Glasgow has a modern vibe but an ancient core. It was the core that impressed me most during our wanderings yesterday, especially the cathedral, which dates back to the 13th century. It was the only great Scottish church to survive the Reformation, the guidebook told us.

To see it, even just from the outside (we arrived after it closed for the day), was to be reminded of the stark cold stones of the past, a time when life was more likely to be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short," in the words of Thomas Hobbes, who I thought for a moment might have been Scottish but was actually British.

Behind the cathedral is the Glasgow necropolis, a romantic burial ground in the Victorian style, with paths meandering among the monuments and a"bridge of sighs" that carries the living to the dead. 

Like the cathedral, the necropolis has a whiff of the eternal about it.