SWEEPY WATCHING THE KIDS PLAY
The Gorbals engendered a community that was largely able to overcome the gloominess of the slum dwellings . As seen so often in the impecunious universality of life, people were inordinately happy with their lot. The place, having belonged to the Lennoxes and subsequently the Elphinstones, it eventually grew to be a parish in 1771: a dense population comprising of tradesmen and mendicants, eased into 28 acres; and from abroad where the mines failed and the population dwindled in the villages and the towns of eastern Europe, economic migrants and refugees fleeing from barbarism escaped for an uncertain future into what was to become the cabbage patch of Europe. The result was a peculiar mix of nationalities, not unlike New York
Hospital Street, to further my adumbration, is formed upon the site of St. Ninian's Leper Hospital , founded by Lady Lochow in 1350, her name suspiciously congruent with the Indian Lucknow
Leprosy. I last saw the results of this disease in Pharphing in Nepal. Visiting a leper colony there were the families of the lepers, disfigured terribly with their vestigial limbs and suppurating eruptions. Further added to this was the complete castigation from society who saw this affliction as a punishment for sins committed in the past. This is kismet? Karma? Destiny? There but for the grace of whoever go I or you I thought.
And it was in Hospital Street where the ghosts came kicking and screaming out in the streets and I came, kicking a screaming (I hope) into the world at around 6.30 am, I am told, my aunt Rosie, a qualified midwife, no doubt wiping away the mucous and inevitable blood of childbirth from my body.
