Spurn the Dust to Win the Prize
The journey to East Kilbride last Saturday did not go as expected. Quite aside from the smelly old bloke who boarded the bus trailing clouds of stale urine in his wake and plonked himself down next to me, problems on the M8 meant the bus was redirected on the old road through Shotts. Man was it bleak.
I hadn’t noticed the diversion at first: I was trying to tune out the odour of the old bloke and concentrate on Stevie Smith’s The Holiday, of which more some other day maybe. I looked up to see a monotone landscape dominated by stunted trees with split trunks, one of them stretching a single long bough above a sea of tall grass, groping for light from the uncompromising horizon.
In some ways it reminded me of the high road to Annfield Plain where my dad was born, a hard landscape contrasting against the soft light on distant hills. The view through the grimy bus windows was of rubbish littering the roadside verges, brightened by the occasional clumps of daffodils. Every so often we passed some forsaken housing scheme where even the bedraggled starlings looked marginalised and oppressed.
As we pulled into Buchanan Street Bus Station 40 minutes late, two bus spotters photographed the bus, a new one for me.
I mentioned the church service that I attended for Mum; outside of Mum’s piece and a rededication of the church building seventy years after the laying of its foundation stone, it was a conventional Sunday Eucharist. I was struck, as usual, by the dreadful tone of so much of the words, the focus on humanity’s fallen state wrapped up with misery and guilt. It is one of the many things that I find off-putting about Christian orthodoxy, the theological equivalent of a late-running bus through Shotts on a miserable day.
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