Last Saturday, I went for a night walk in Glasgow’s southside. It was Battlefield’s Window Wanderland weekend, so, in theory, my head was tilted skywards in appreciation of the movie-themed artworks gracing the sandstone tenements and townhouses. In one, Elliott and ET were silhouetted against a cratered moonscape. In another, the house from Up rose from the ground floor, as, above, a bespectacled Carl Fredricksen dangled from a flock of balloons.

But the cut-outs only enhanced what was already there. It was a cold, bright-ish evening. The real moon outshone the paper one, and, from a distance, it was hard to distinguish the light flooding through the film scenes from the light flooding through stained glass. Atop his Corinthian column, the Battlefield lion cast a watchful eye over the wanderlanders, who headed off oohing and aahing along Victorian streets, where chimney pots stood like pegs in a cribbage board.

It was thrilling and salutary to be reminded of the joys Glasgow still has to offer. We can become so consumed with mourning all the city has lost — to time, to the wrecking ball, to austerity — that we forget to celebrate what remains.

I’ve been reading Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and thinking about how the places we inhabit are built as much from memory and desire as bricks and mortar. If all the urban dreamscapes Calvino’s Marco Polo conjures up for the Kublai Khan are (as he insists) really Venice, then every city I have visited is filtered through the lens of Glasgow: the metropolis to which, growing up on the Ayrshire coast, all roads led.

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Maybe that’s true for you, too. Even so, my Glasgow will not be your Glasgow because cities are not objective entities, they are an accretion of all we experience within their boundaries. Almost every step on every pavement carries the echo of a love or a loss or an epiphany. As we tread old routes, we glimpse vanished faces, or smell the scent of bread from a long-gone bakery.

All of which is to say that nostalgia is a powerful and disingenuous thing. It makes us long for things that cannot be retrieved, but it can also blind us to the present. In one of Calvino’s cities........

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