Glasgow, 5 March 1971

Just a quick extra post to note that I happened to realise that it is 50 years today since the events referred to in Edwin Morgan’s Instamatic poem “Glasgow 5 March 1971”. It captures the moment that two opportunistic thieves push a couple through a plate glass window in order to steal the jewellery inside the shop. It captures a single moment in time, as the couple are falling in a shower of shards of glass. 

I like the poem (although there are others I like better), and have always found it very striking and memorable, as well as cold and bleak. 

Edwin Morgan would be 100 years old now (he died when he was 90) and I once saw him in John Smiths book shop in the 1990s. He was still a professor at Glasgow University when I started there, although in my youthful ignorance I didn’t realise it, and he retired shortly thereafter. He wrote about the Glasgow I knew in the late 20th century and about feelings and history and love and death and politics. I feel a fondness and an admiration for him.