Peter Ross: A walk on the dark side

I wasn’t tired, but I couldn’t think straight. My mind felt calloused and scabrous. I wanted to smooth those edges against the streets.

I had a notion to go and see the statue of John Knox, high on its pillar above the Necropolis, the great Victorian graveyard sprawling over a hill behind the cathedral. It would take about two hours to get there on foot. So I set off.

Do you ever walk through the city at night? I don’t mean jogging, which seems to me a hermitic, hermetic activity in which environment is unimportant; and I certainly don’t mean the kebabbed stoat home from the pub. I’m talking about night-walking, noctambulism, actively going out there without any particular route in mind, and being open to the whole eldritch atmosphere of the darkened streets.

One can walk at night in the country, of course, especially when moonlight gives the world the quality of an old silver bromide print, but there is something special about walking after midnight in a big city. This has to do, I think, with the street lighting.

It was in the news recently that light pollution in the UK means Orion’s Belt is becoming invisible to most of us. This has been reported as a great lamentation, and it is a sadness, certainly, that we are blinding ourselves to so much beauty. I remember, last year, pulling over at the side of the road that crosses Lewis’s vast peat bog, and getting out of the car to stare at stars so dense yet ethereal that they looked like a wedding veil floating on an oil spill.

But there is, I believe, a beauty in artificial light. Have you ever looked up at a white street-lamp through the bare branches of a tree? There is a splendidly creepy optical illusion in which the twigs seem to become talons, curling around the glow. There is, too, something deliciously illicit about being out in darkness for its own sake; the word curfew, after all, comes from the French couvre-feu, meaning ‘cover the fire’.

I was thinking of this as I walked through the streets. In the suburbs I had them, mostly, to myself. I could hear my own footsteps. It was the hour of foxes. Their eyes glowed green in taxi beams. There were, here and there, lights on in tenement windows or way up in the multi-storeys. Probably just insomniacs and shift-workers, but there was something about those few bright rectangles that spoke of loneliness. Edward Hopper, had he been living in Glasgow, might have painted them in lieu of diners.

On the Victoria Road there were more signs of life: Polish bus drivers starting their shift; boy-racers gunning engines; from a half-closed doorway came the smell of strong coffee, foreign voices, and the sound of dice rattling across a table. Smells seemed to carry further than during the day – night blooms and rotting rubbish.

In the city centre there were police and ambulances. There had been a big fight outside Central Station, in the area taxi drivers call the verandah. Crying girls stood around in bare feet. Herring gulls, raucous wraiths, floated through the dark, strobe-lit from below by the flashing blue lights.

Walk long enough and late enough and a sort of mania can seize you. If I keep going, I think, I’ll be in the Campsies by dawn. But then, remembering John Knox, I cut through George Square and up the hill to the cathedral. There he was at last, a dark figure holding a Bible, sterner than ever, silhouetted against clouds stained orange with street light, staring down through stone eyes at the sleeping city and those of us poor sinners still awake.

I took the bus home.