Getting Lost.

One of the benefits of living in the south side of Glasgow is that there are plenty of parks nearby to wander about in. Queen’s Park, King’s Park, Newlands Park… the abundance of them makes Glasgow’s moniker of the ‘dear green place’ make a bit more sense.

On this occasion we headed out to Pollok Park with Lee, who was visiting for a long weekend. The park houses the Burrell Collection museum, which is somewhere I used to go as a kid with my grand and granda.

We always drove there though, and pretty quickly we found ourselves down some muddy back trails that snaked around the park, discovering that we really should have gone right instead of left.

All was not lost though (except us), as we eventually emerged through a hole in a wall from the unkempt, rugged bit of the park, into the pristine gardens of Pollok country house.

I once went to a wedding here, and managed to get off at the wrong train station on my way. It’s an endless source of confusion that there are stations named Pollokshaws, as well as Pollokshields East and West. Seems simple? It’s not. Just last week Grace ended up at the wrong one, and she’s been here for months now. I won’t tell you how long I lived here and still made the same mistake…

The Burrell collection is basically a big museum built to house all the various… stuff that a prolific collector picked up along the way throughout his life. When he died, the whole lot was given to the people of Glasgow. One of the conditions of the bequeathment was that the artefacts should never be loaned to different museums, but stay in the city itself. This has been causing a bit of a problem lately, as the place is badly in need of repairs, with the only way to raise the money coming from doing exactly that which was expressly forbidden.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that ol’ Burrell probably would rather have the items go on tour in this particular situation, rather than allowing the building that houses them crumble around about.

All of these pictures were shot on Fuji Provia 400, which is a slide film that’s been cross processed (developed in chemicals intended for regular C41 film).

Cross processing can be hit or miss, dependent on the idiosyncrasies of type of film, the exposure, and some other things. In truth, sometimes it can look pretty terrible, but it depends on how you like extreme contrast and heavy colour casts. I’m actually pretty pleased with how these look… so it may be making a re-appearance soon.