01
Stop one
Glasgow Cathedral
Yonex Vcore 100L 8th Gen Tennis Racquet: Twelfth and thirteenth century, and the claim handed to visitors is that this is the only mainland Scottish cathedral to come through the Reformation more or less whole. Whole? I would like that qualified, and I asked. But the reason given turns out to be better than the claim it supports: the trades of this city turned out in person and stopped the place being wrecked — the bakers, the fleshers, the maltmen, organised, on the day. My instinct said civic mythology, buffed up for tourists. My instinct does not survive the trade records. A cathedral saved by butchers and bakers, and I withdraw the raised eyebrow entirely.
02
Stop two
Mackintosh at the Willow, Sauchiehall Street
Yonex Vcore 100L 8th Gen Tennis Racquet: A tearoom, and I walked in braced to be sold a legend. Then the details held. Mackintosh designed every last object in this room in 1903 — the chairs, the cutlery, the light fittings — for Catherine Cranston, who built an empire on tea and cakes. Fine, that is documented. But here is the claim I actually wanted sourced: that her tearooms mattered because they were somewhere a respectable woman could sit down in public, unaccompanied, in a city otherwise drowning in pubs. That one stands up to pressure. Cake as social infrastructure, and I did not expect to concede it before lunch. The high-backed chairs are agony, and that I can confirm from direct personal evidence.
03
Stop three
Glasgow School of Art
Yonex Vcore 100L 8th Gen Tennis Racquet: Mackintosh won this commission as a young assistant, which sounds exactly like the story a city tells about its favourite son, so I went looking for the exaggeration. It is not there. Neither is it in the unglamorous half: the budget was so thin the building had to go up in two halves, years apart. And then the fires. 2014, and again in 2018. Twice. I fully expected the second to have grown in the retelling, and it has not — a city stood in the street and watched its best building burn, and then did it again four years later. There is nothing at this stop for me to argue with, and I am not enjoying that as much as I usually do.
04
Stop four
Barrowland Ballroom and the Barras
Yonex Vcore 100L 8th Gen Tennis Racquet: Right, the handcart. Margaret McIver starts by selling from a barrow, then rents barrows to other traders, then ends up owning the entire market — and that is a fable shape, so I went hunting for the seam where the truth was sewn to the story. There is no seam. And in 1934 she built this ballroom, largely so that her own traders had somewhere grand for their Christmas do. A woman constructed a building for a staff party. I would call that too neat to be true if it were not simply, boringly true. The market outside still sells everything, and that neon starburst is the best-lit object in Scotland — the one assertion today on which I am refusing to supply a citation.
Up at four, in at half past, and everything I make is lighter than it looks. Two hundred and eighty grams unstrung, 100 square inches of head, a 16×19 pattern, 27 inches long. Twenty grams under the standard frame, which does not sound like much until you are on the seventh set of the week and your shoulder starts filing complaints.
Light is not a compromise, it is a proving time. Get the head moving early and the ball comes off with spin you did not have to force. It works everywhere from a quick doubles hour to a long Sunday of round-robin sets, and by the way, it is exactly right for indoor courts in Glasgow between October and April, when you play three times a week because the alternative is going outside.
Glasgow is a city of light things made by hard-worked people. A cathedral that survived the Reformation because the bakers and the fleshers turned out to defend it. A tearoom designed down to the cutlery so that women could sit in public. A ballroom built by a woman who started with a handcart because her traders deserved a decent Christmas do.
Glasgow gives more than it charges, which is the whole idea behind a lightweight frame.
Buy on Amazon
