I hitchhiked (hitchhook?) through Glasgow in 1971. Now I’m back and just spent a few hours wandering around down town. I am thus quite the expert.

I do love having these found afternoons when I can walk around in a city I don’t know. I think 80% of what we learn of a place we learn in the first half hour, although a serious part of the next 20% is undoing what we thought we’d learned in the first 80%.

I went to the Cathedral and had my usual dumb reaction. The stacking of the stones that must have seemed as close as human effort gets to miracles strikes me as cold and dark. I have to think my way into cathedrals, and, as a Jew, I lack some (a lot?) of the supporting structure. My appreciation, which is real, is abstract.

Then I wandered around the city center for a couple of hours. I had a veggie burger that was a deepfried patty of corn, peas and batter. I bought some books. (I seem to have been in a 17th-18th century science/philosophy mood these days.) I went into an “Everything for a Pound” store and resisted asking “How much is this?” It rained, it stopped, it rained, it stopped.

Now I’m at the SECC, a conference center, where exhibitors are hot-gluing together booths that are in every way possible the opposite of cathedrals.

Tomorrow I keynote the Scottish Learning Festival — 150 sessions, 800 session attendees and 6,000 people walking through the exhibit hall.I’m on immediately after the minister of education. I’m going to talk about the changes in authority and knowledge in this crazy, mixed-up ol’ world. And, given how much trouble I’m having understanding the Scots, I’m going to try to speak slowly on the principle of Symmetrical Unintelligibility of Accents.

Categories: Uncategorized dw