This article is taken from the May 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
Skin deep
Walking through Bristol airport, I had an attack of uncanny valley. Usually, uncanny valley refers to the shudder you get when a digital simulation is almost — but not quite — good enough to completely fool you. In this case, though, I was having it because of the flesh-and-blood faces I was seeing.
Or rather, mostly flesh and blood. Everywhere I looked, there were huddles of young women with severely aesthetically enhanced features: bloated lips with blown-out edges where the hyaluronic acid had been overdone, weirdly lumpy chins and cheeks engineered with fillers.
“This is just what people look like now,” shrugged my husband, who gets out the house more than I do. “Not in Soho!” I gasped and then had to accept a thoroughly deserved teasing for being the kind of media wanker who thinks Soho is the world.
The strange results created by clumsy high street aesthetics remind me of Michel Faber’s science fiction novel Under the Skin. The main character of that book, Isserley, is an alien who’s been surgically altered to look like a human, the better to hunt the human males her species likes to eat. The result, she knows, is monstrous — but it’s close enough to the men’s idea of “hot” to fool them in the right light.
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Or maybe I was thinking about Under the Skin because we were going to visit our daughter at university in Glasgow (the film adaptation of the novel is partly set in the city). That might have pleased another novelist, Alasdair Gray, who once considered that Glasgow was the most artistically neglected of all the great cities.
“Nobody imagines living here,” he wrote in Lanark in 1981. “Think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he’s already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn’t been used by an artist, not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.” That’s not true anymore — or at least, not for me, and the reason for that is largely Gray himself.
I read Lanark at university and fell intensely in love, racing immediately through as many of his novels as I could, all of which make heavy use of Glasgow as a setting. Eventually, I felt I knew Glasgow like a hometown, without ever having been there. Yet, apart from dropping off our daughter last year (an in-and-out mission with no time for sightseeing), this was my first trip to Glasgow.
Deli belly
The itinerary my daughter had devised was simple but inspirational: hit up all the restaurants she’d got her eye on but couldn’t afford on a student budget. Night one was generous, companionable bowls of pasta at Sugo; night two we crossed the M8 where it scythes through the city to get to a fantastic sushi place called Don Ya, which I was sure had to be a Scottish accent gag name (“down yer”) but apparently is not.
The most memorable meal, though, was a sandwich order from a deli in the West End called Mootz. At the counter, the server asked if I wanted the full size or the slightly smaller portion for my Reuben. I was slightly offended. Do I look like a woman who can’t handle a sandwich?
Then I saw the monster she was assembling: huge slabs of focaccia, wrapped around a gigantic wad of sliced meat. The finished article was, without exaggeration, as big as my face. Maybe I really couldn’t handle it. We perched on a low wall and, with some trepidation, got stuck in. I shouldn’t have worried: in the battle of me vs sandwich, I remain undefeated.
Glasgow’s haunted house
The National Trust-run tenement house looks, from the outside, like any of Glasgow’s Victorian redbrick terraces. But when you’ve mounted the entry steps and walked inside, you find it’s a time capsule: preserved more or less exactly as it was in the early 20th century, right down to the vanilla essence in the pantry.
Until 1965, the tenement was owned by Agnes Toward — the daughter of a seamstress, who inherited the property after her seamstress mother died. Under Agnes’ tenancy, almost nothing about the house was changed. She had electric lights fitted, but otherwise this was a household that an Edwardian or (even, in many regards, a Victorian) might have felt at ease in, down to the coals in the kitchen and the china in the parlour.
There’s something eerily intimate about being a tourist in someone else’s personal possessions. In the tenement house, you’re not just learning how people lived in the past: you’re learning how one particular woman lived, her pleasures and hopes and ambitions all present in the objects she chose to surround herself with. To move amongst these things is to feel disarmingly like a ghost, haunting backwards from the future.
A week or so later and I was back in the South, but this time Scotland came to me. Glaswegian band Belle and Sebastian were playing their album If You’re Feeling Sinister at the Royal Albert Hall, and I was there with my husband to celebrate a double anniversary: 18 years of marriage for us, 30 years for the album. B&S are one of the bands that we first bonded over back when we met in 2000, but we’ve never seen them together, so this gig felt like a homecoming. When the band screened a map of Glasgow as the backdrop for one song, it felt even more like one: our adult daughter, the same age we were then, studying in the city that made the music we fell in love to, where a bit of us has always lived in our imaginations.
