West Nile Street... Alfredo's...

Alfredo's, when I knew it.

Alfredo's pub on West Nile Street sits next door to Amalfi's restaurant. I once spent a very pleasant morning inside. I had just arrived in Glasgow by night-train from London and as I left the station I bumped into an old friend. It was just before eight in the morning and I assumed he was on his way to work but he wasn’t. He asked me if I wanted to go for a pint - they say you know a man’s character by the company he keeps. Well, although I hadn’t slept much on the train and I was feeling tired and dishevelled, I hadn’t seen my friend for a while and he was very good company so we went into Alfredo’s.

My favourite time to be in a pub is around 3 in the afternoon. At that time, during the week, the pubs are not busy. It’s best to find a pub that’s not empty either – somewhere neither full nor empty. It’s pleasant to sit and watch people come and go while having a drink with a friend. If your time is your own, is ours was, no one is in a rush and you have the whole day ahead of you. The drinking is leisurely and the conversation convivial. Alfredo’s is like that at eight in the morning.

The pub is deceptive from the front. The street-entrance and window looks no bigger than a newsagent’s but, when you walk past the front tables to the bar, the building opens up. That morning, there was about a dozen customers; a group of four who looked like they had been at it all night, a few old men having their first of the day and a couple of hardened drinkers, in for a steadier. We were joined by some students, looking very young, very innocent and with a nervous gleam in their eye as if this was a great adventure for them. They had their ID cards at the ready and they needed them. One of the hardened drinkers was an old acquaintance. He had a leathered and weathered face, lined by scars, lumps and bumps from numerous falls and fights. He was the same age as my friend but looked ten years older... at least. It was the kind of face that I imagine you’d like to photograph if you were a photographer. It spoke eloquently of his life. Strangely enough, there was a handsomeness to it, or rather, it was divinely-ugly, like the wood of gnarly and knotted old trees. It brought to mind the film-director John Huston and the Swiss-French writer Blaise Cendrars, whose faces, which were ugly in their youth, never looked better than when they were old.

John Huston

Blaise Cendrars

I caught up with my friend, talking of where we had been and what we had done. By the time we left it was early afternoon and I was ready for the sleep I’d missed the night before.

Alfredo’s sits at the base of a very typical – and typically non-descript – Victorian red-sandstone building, sturdy but unremarkable. Further down West Nile Street is a building by Alexander Thompson but enough has been said and written about Thompson for me to add anything here. At the corner of West Nile Street and West George Street is a Category B listed building designed by Frank Burnet and his assistant who became his partner, William James Boston. I mentioned Burnet’s work earlier. He designed St. George’s Mansions at Charing Cross. The building on West Nile Street was originally known as the Royal Exchange Assurance Building and was begun and completed in 1911 - 1913. The entrance is on 93 West George Street. The Royal Exchange Assurance Company was founded in 1720 and took its name from the Royal Exchange in London and lasted until 1968 when it merged with the Guardian Assurance Company which was then acquired by Axa of France in 1999. 

The former Royal Exchange Assurance Building at the corner of West Nile Street and West George Street,

Speaking of France, West Nile Street takes its name, like many British streets incorporating the name of the famous river, from the Battle of the Nile fought between the British Royal Navy and Napoleon’s Navy of the French Republic in 1798. The battle was the culmination of a three-month campaign across the Mediterranean. The British fleet was led by Nelson and decisively defeated the French. Napoleon had planned the invasion of Egypt as a first step towards invading India. Nelson trapped the French in a crossfire and only two damaged ships of the line and two frigates escaped from the total French force of 17 ships leaving the Royal Navy as the dominant force in the Mediterranean, a position they then held throughout the war. Bonaparte’s army was trapped in Egypt and other European countries which had vacillated in their support turned against France. Nelson became a national hero and the victory entered popular consciousness with numerous poems, plays, paintings, songs, public memorials (Cleopatra’s Needle in London is one) and the naming of streets commemorating the event. It is true to say, as it has been said, that this victory changed the course of history.

Battle of the Nile; Tomas Whitcombe 1799

And speaking of the Nile, when Nelson defeated Napoleon's Navy the source of the Nile was still unknown and remained unknown for a number of decades. More than a few famous names tried to discover the source – Sir Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke, Florence and Samuel Baker, James Grant, David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley. Journeying through unmapped territory, they discovered lake Tanganyika and lake Victoria, navigated the upper Nile and the Congo and suffered flesh-eating ulcers, malaria, attacks by natives and, out of an arguments that developed between Burton and Speke, Speke shot himself.

Sir Richard Burton

And while we’re speaking of that which we’re speaking, let’s speak of navigation. A number of methods of navigation have been employed over the millennia, most famously, of course, navigation by the stars, particularly the north star, fixed, as it appeared to be, in the firmament while the other stars circumnavigated around it. But anyone who has read the chronicles of the old navigators, particularly the Portuguese, will have noticed another form of navigation regularly employed, that of scent. The records of the travels of the great age of discovery are minutely detailed in particular scents noted at particular zones. All areas of the oceans, it seemed, had distinctive perfumes which informed the experienced mariner of where he was in relation to land and distance yet to be travelled. In the animal world there are other forms of navigation such as the bat’s sonar pulse, also known as echolocation, which infallibly informs them of obstacles in their path to be avoided despite the speed of their manoeuvrings. Jacques Cousteau was the first to suggest, in 1953, that porpoises had some sort of sonar ability to judge by their manoeuvrability. Dolphins, killer whales and sperm whales also have a form of sonar navigation. Compared to the sophisticated echolocation of bats and dolphins, oilbirds, a nocturnal fruit-eating bird, and some species of swifts have a crude form of echolocation. There is also evidence that blinded rats – laboratory rats, of course, blinded for the purpose of the experiment, or perhaps just for entertainment - can use echolocation to navigate through mazes. Blind people also use a form of echolocation to determine their environment, most commonly by tapping their canes, but also by snapping their fingers and, in some instances, making a clicking sound with their tongues. In certain individuals who have become particularly adept at this form of navigation, studies have discovered an activation of the primary visual cortex not normally present in sighted individuals. This mechanism of brain change, which is a region remapping phenomenon, is known as neuroplasticity – something Philip K. Dick almost certainly experienced after numerous minor strokes (see the entry on the Burrell and Borge Mogenosn’s chair). Radio navigation was also devised for finding direction to a radio source pulse, and the OMEGA Navigation System, operated by the United States and six partner countries, became the first global radio navigation system for aircraft. Then came radar navigation where the navigator can take distances and angular bearings to charted objects and use these to establish arcs of position and lines of position on a chart. Satellite navigation systems provide positioning with global coverage. A Global Navigational Satellite System allows small electronic receivers to determine their longitude, latitude, and altitude to within a few metres using time signals transmitted along a line of sight by radio from satellites. Receivers on the ground with a fixed position can also be used to calculate the precise time as a reference for scientific experiments. Research on magnetoreception has focused on the directional information that can be extracted from the Earth`s geomagnetic field. The field varies predictably across the surface of the globe, meaning that it also provides a potential source of positional information. This ability to use positional information derived from the Earth's geomagnetic field is known to be important in long distance migrations of a number of birds. The Pied flycatcher is one example of a migratory bird which potentially uses this information to change direction to avoid ecological barriers. Despite numerous efforts at detection and speculation on various navigational methods, a number of animals and birds still manage to find their way accurately over great distances by means unknown.

'Are you sure this is the way?'

'Aye. Ah can smell the chips!'

I bring this up because my friend – the one I had a drink with in Alfredo’s - had a method of navigation which I once thought unique but which I have since discovered is used by a number of people of my acquaintance. He could navigate his way around Glasgow by pubs. He was as infallible as a homing pigeon, and speaking of homing pigeons, there is at present a great deal of debate and argument – as only things of this sort can be argued about – that homing pigeons find their way home through their sense of smell. I’ll leave that to the experts to ponder.

I first discovered my friend’s talent when I was lost one miserable morning. I had been in the Garage the night before – a nightclub on Sauchiehall Street, for the uninitiated. I woke the next morning with no idea where I was. For a moment I thought I was dead. If it wasn’t for the fact that I felt as if a cat had shit in my mouth, I might even have imagined that I was in heaven as there was an ethereal glow about everything. The glow was from the early morning sunlight being filtered through thin white curtains and reflected off white walls. Even the bare floorboards of the room I was in had been painted white. The only thing which wasn’t white was the fingernails on the hand that reached around my waist. The fingernails were long and black. I had no idea who was behind me and for a few minutes I was afraid to look. But, when I finally turned, I got a surprise. The face that squinted back at me was pretty, despite the fact that her hair was tangled and dishevelled from sleep and that she was still wearing make-up that had been smudged in places by the pillow. When I asked her how I’d got there she told me she’d met me outside the Garage. I told her I must have been very drunk. She said I was, but I could still talk coherently and wasn’t falling abut all over the place – it’s a talent I have. I had promised a relative from Germany that I would take them to the Burrell that day so I had to leave. I never did find out the name of the girl with the black nails If she ever reads this, which I doubt, I’d like to thank her for looking after me.

Once outside I had no idea where I was or how to get home, nor could I see a street name. What I did see was a pay-phone at the corner - this was in the mid-90s before I had a mobile. I phoned my friend and he asked me if I could see a pub anywhere. I stepped out of the phone-box and, just discernible in the distance, I could make out a pub. Land ho! I told him its name and he gave me directions to get home.

I have another friend who provided his own map for a relative. I’ve mentioned him already. He was the one who sat with me in the University café telling me of his madness and his suspicions concerning the general public. He handed me a sheet of paper one day.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘A map,’ he said.

‘A map of where?’

‘Here.’

He had drawn a map of Glasgow. It bore no resemblance to Glasgow.

‘What do you think?’ he asked.

‘Who’s it for?’ I wondered.

‘My cousin,’ he said. ‘He’s coming to visit. He wanted directions from the station.’

I told him the only person who’d be able to find their way with the map was himself.

He looked confused. ‘Why?’ he wondered.

‘Look at it,’ I said.

The map was mostly blank except for areas of interest to him - where he lived, where he shopped, pubs he knew, a health-centre he attended for his medication, my flat and those of a few other people he visited. The map followed the routes he took, ignoring main roads and major landmarks. He was in the habit of avoiding certain areas because he believed they had a malign influence over him due to some ethereal residue of their previous history, as though the areas, over the centuries, had developed a personality due to events which had taken place there. For instance, Blythswood Square had been a favourite haunt of prostitutes. Whenever he passed by or even near the area he felt his head about to explode with images of a sexual nature – a violent sexual nature. He feared that if he spent too much time in Blythswood Square he might lose his mind completely and, at best, resort to the services of a prostitute. At worst, he worried he might become a modern-day Jack the Ripper. (He also wondered if particular rooms in particular buildings might have the same influence. If you lived in the room of a former pickpocket might you suddenly find your hand wandering on a crowded train or bus?) His map was designed to avoid such eventualities.

‘I think you’d better meet your cousin at the station,’ I told him.

I once had a map of an island, an island of the mind. It had been drawn by the Mercator of madmen. He had been a patient in the same ward at Gartnavel as my friend. The man endlessly drew maps of imaginary islands, detailed to every contour, road, river, and field demarcation. These schizo-maps had a compelling beauty about them as well as a strange fascination. They had every detail that an actual terrain might present. For a man familiar with maps he might even imagine himself walking these islands, tasting the sea-spray on his lips and feeling himself buffeted by the coastal winds. I wonder what happened to the man who drew it? He might very well still be there, still drawing his endless succession of maps of imaginary islands. I wished I had collected more of the maps. It would have been a great delight to have put on an exhibition of them in some gallery.