Down Memory Lane

The Steeple, Kilbarchan

 
For 24 hours we hurtled through time and space from Melbourne to Glasgow arriving exactly 18 hours after we left. Autumn became Spring - ostensibly. We stepped from the plane at midday into bracing winds, rain and a not so balmy temperature of 7 degrees.Welcome home to Scotland.
The hire car was waitng for us but trying to work out windscreen wipers, lights, indicators and heaters at the same time as read a map with brains turned to mush by jet lag resulted in the inevitable. Right motorway, wrong direction, quick exit, lots of cursing and 3 circuits round a roundabout. Thank goodness it wasn't France or doubtlessly we'd have been going around that the wrong way. It's only 3 years since our last visit here but in the meantime someone's been busy rearranging the roads so what should have taken us about 20 minutes took us an hour (or two) and we saw more of Glasgow than we intended.
A lull in the rain yesterday encouraged us on an expedition into our past and we visited Kilbarchan, the village where we grew up. Nothing much has changed apart from the closure of many of the shops. As in France the main survivors are hairdressers (but no bakers).
Kilbarchan was a famed weaving village and once upon a time had many antique shops and tourists visiting both them and the Weavers Cottage museum. The museum still functions but neither antique shops nor tourists (other than us) were in evidence.The village inhabitants, Habbies (named after Habbie Simpson, a famous piper whose statue stands atop the steeple hall), were most welcoming though. Whilst we were admiring one of the handsome cottages in the square the owner came out to chat. On learning that one of us had spent many afternoons as a child surreptitiously playing in his enormous back gardens he insisted on taking us on tour of both the gardens and a couple of the adjoining historic properties he is in the process of renovating.
Later, we were once again to be impressed by the kindness of another complete stranger. As we stood reminiscing outside our first marital home, out came the current owner, doubtless wondering who these gawping stangers were. After introducing ourselves, the lady, seemingly reassured we weren't there for any nefarious purpose, very generously invited us on a tour of her house and garden.
And so, we stepped over her threshold and 30 years into our past.

Poet, Robert Allen's well, Kilbarchan