To Liverpool to see my parents. They don’t live in Liverpool; I just didn’t want to go to Dudley and they didn’t want to come to Glasgow so we meet partway.
At the Walker Gallery, we see Glasgow Museums’ travelling exhibition about Charles Rennie Mackintosh. It feels a bit silly being there when Samara and I essentially live in a Mackintosh theme park, but we see plenty of archival items that aren’t typically on display in Glasgow. I think about my pals in Glasgow Museums boxing up these treasures up and loading them into the van.
I’m disappointed that Dad at no point says, “Ohhh Rennie!” with reference to ‘Allo ‘Allo. He spots a Blackadder in the list of names on a war memorial by the Mersey though so not all is lost.
In the exhibition, I’m taken with a Talwin Morris ex-libris bookplate. It reads, “There lyeth more in ye telling than in ye tale,” which I like. “Style over substance,” is a tedious criticism, isn’t it? It’s Sontag or bust for me.
We retire to a pub and talk about how Mum doesn’t like The Beatles. She keeps speaking with her mouth full. She used to tell me off for that.
Not for the first time, I feel bad that my mum saw her baby slowly transmogrified into a weird, awkward man who lives so far from home. But when I see the Kenn Dodd statue in Lime Street station, I realise it could have been worse.
Dad points out that the statue version of Doddy’s tickling stick looks like a revolving column of doner kebab meat. It does too.
