At length, I found my way over the river and back into the gleaming centre. I had a look at George Square, which is to my mind the handsomest in Britain, and then trudged uphill to Sauchiehall Street, where I remembered my favourite Glasgow joke. (Also my only Glasgow joke.) It's not a very good one, but I like it. A policeman collars a thief at the corner of Sauchiehall and Dalhousie, then drags him by the hair for a hundred yards to Rose Street to book him.
'Oi, why'd ye do tha'?' asks the aggrieved culprit, rubbing his head.
'Because I can spell Rose Street, ye thieving cunt,' says the policeman.
That's the thing about Glasgow. It has all this newfound prosperity and polish, but right at the very edge of things there is always this sense of grit and menace, which I find oddly exhilarating. You can wander through the streets on a Friday night, as I did now, and never know when you turn a corner whether you are going to bump into a group of tony revellers in dinner jackets or a passle of idle young yobboes who might decide to fall upon you and carve their initials in your forehead for purposes of passing amusement. Gives the place a certain tang.
CHAPTER TWENTYNINE
I SPENT ANOTHER DAY IN GLASGOW POKING ABOUT, NOT SO MUCH because I wanted to be there, but because it was a Sunday and I couldn't get a train home beyond Carlisle. (The SettletoCarlisle service doesn't run on Sundays in winter because there is no demand for its services. That there may be no demand for its services because it doesn't run appears not to have occurred to British Rail.) So I wandered far and wide through the wintry streets, and had a respectful look round the museums, Botanic Gardens and Necropolis, but really all I wanted to do was go home, which was understandable, I think, because I missed my family and my own bed and, besides, when I walk around my home I don't have to watch out for dog shit and vomit slicks with every step I take.
And so the following morning, in a state of giddy excitement, I boarded the 8.10 from Glasgow Central to Carlisle and there, after a refreshing cup of coffee in the station buffet, caught the 11.40 train to Settle.
The SettletoCarlisle line is the most celebrated obscure line in the world. British Rail has been wanting to close it down for years on the grounds that it doesn't pay its way, which is the most mad and preposterous line of argument imaginable.
We've been hearing this warped reasoning for so long about so many things that it has become received wisdom, but when you think about it for even a nanosecond it is perfectly obvious that most worthwhile things don't begin to pay for themselves. If you followed this absurd logic any distance at all, you would have to get rid of traffic lights, laybys, schools, drains, national parks, museums, universities, old people and much else besides. So why on earth should something as useful as a railway line, which is generally much more agreeable than old people, and certainly less inclined to bitch and twitter, have to demonstrate even the tiniest measure of economic viability to ensure its continued existence? This is a line of thinking that must be abandoned at once.
Having said that, it can't be denied that the SettletoCarlisle line has always had something of the air of folly about it. In 1870, when James Allport, general manager of the Midland Railway, took it into his head to build a main line north, there was already an east coast line and a west coast line, so he decided to drive one up the middle, even though it went from nowhere much to nowhere much by way of nothing at all. The whole thing cost .3.5 million, which doesn't sound much now, but translates to some fantastic sum like .487 trillion billion or something. Anyway, it was enough to convince everyone who knew anything about railways that Allport was totally off his head as in fact he was.
Because the line went through an insanely bleak and forbidding stretch of the Pennines, Allport's engineers had to come up with all kinds of contrivances to make it work, including twenty viaducts and twelve tunnels. This wasn't some eccentric, pootling narrowgauge line, you understand; this was the nineteenth century's bullet train, something that would allow passengers to fly across the Yorkshire Dales if, that is, anyone had wanted to, and hardly anyone did.
So from the very beginning it lost money. But who cares? It is a wonderful line, gorgeous in every respect, and I intended to enjoy every minute of my onehourandfortyminute, 71%mile journey. Even when you live near Settle, it isn't often you find a reason to use the line, so I sat with my face close to the glass and waited eagerly for the line's famous landmarks Blea Moor Tunnel, almost 2,300 yards long; Dent Station, the highest in the country; the glorious Ribblehead Viaduct, a quarter of a mile long, 104 feet high and with twentyfour graceful arches and in between I enjoyed the scenery, which is not just spectacular and unrivalled but speaks to me with a particular siren voice.
I suppose everybody has a piece of landscape somewhere that he finds captivating beyond words and mine is the Yorkshire Dales. I can't altogether account for it because you can easily find more dramatic landscapes elsewhere, even in Britain. All I can say is thatthe Dales seized me like a helpless infatuation when I first saw them and will not let me go. Partly, I suppose, it is the exhilarating contrast between the high fells, with their endless views, and the relative lushness of the valley floors, with their clustered villages and green farms. To drive almost anywhere in the Dales is to make a constant transition between these two hypnotic zones. It is wonderful beyond words. And partly it is the snug air of selfcontainment that the enclosing hills give, a sense that the rest of the world is far away and unnecessary, which is something you come to appreciate very much when you live there.
Every dale is a little world of its own to an extraordinary degree. I remember one sunny afternoon when we were new to our dale a car overturned in the road outside our gate with a frightful bang and a noise of scraping metal. The driver, it turned out, had clipped a grass bank and run up against a field wall, which had flipped the car onto its roof. I rushed out to find a local woman hanging upside down by her seatbelt, bleeding gently from a scalp wound and muttering dazed sentiments along the lines of having to get to the dentist and that this wouldn't do at all. While I was hopping around and making hyperventilating noises, two farmers arrived in a LandRover and climbed out. They gently hauled the lady from the car and sat her down on a rock. Then they righted the car and manoeuvred it out of the way. While one of them led the lady off to have a cup of tea and get her head seen to by his wife, the other scattered sawdust on an oil slick, directed traffic for a minute till the road was clear, then winked at me and climbed into his LandRover and drove off. The whole thing was over in less than five minutes and never involved the police or ambulance services or even a doctor. An hour or so later someone came along with a tractor and hauled the car away and it was as if it had never happened.
They do things differently in the Dales, you see. For one thing, people who know you come right in your house. Sometimes they knock once and shout 'Hullo!' before sticking their head in, but often they don't even do that. It's an unusual experience to be standing at the kitchen sink talking to yourself animatedly and doing lavish, raisedleg farts and then turning around to find a fresh pile of mail lying on the kitchen table. And I can't tell you the number of times I've had to dart into the pantry in my underpants at the sound of someone's approach and cowered breathless while they've shouted, 'Hullo! Hullo! Anyone t'home?' For a couple of minutes you can hear them clumping around in the kitchen, examining the messages on the fridge and holding the mail to the light. Then they come over to the pantry door and in a quiet voice they say, 'Just taking six eggs, Bill all right?'