“The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.”

C.S. Lewis must have loathed school: comparing heaven to school holidays (in The Last Battle) is fairly typical of his apologetic approach, but I usually wouldn’t subscribe to such a negative image of school – at least not in front of the children. In any case, Lewis was hardly an unbiased observer, as he was taken out of school – which somewhere he describes as “Belsen” – and studied with a private tutor. However, I understand the analogy from the end of term days where I would wait outside the boarding house until mum or dad could pick me up for the holidays. Because of the complex travel arrangements, boys leave from dinner time the night before – international airlines, domestic, – with many leaving after an early lunch for various mail trains, all sadly now defunct. A sad few would be left waiting for later flights and parents, me among them. The holidays never seemed to come.

Something of that feeling has persisted over the last couple of weeks as Paula and I wrestled our various agendas into some kind of submission, and even on the flight over, the sense of anticipation didn’t lift; so waking up on Sunday morning in Glasgow felt like real life after an extraordinarily stressful term.

From the beginning, we’ve liked Glasgow. It’s no longer a grimy industrial city, although you can see the remains of the shipbuilding industry up and down the Clyde, and it doesn’t have the sense of desertion that we sensed in Wallsend on the Tyne. Perched beside the Hilton was a massive hammerhead crane (apparently used for lifting locomotives onto ships), and walking along the Clyde towards Buchanan Street showed lots of renewal. The city itself is a Victorian masterpiece and we found ourselves a city tour and set of for a couple of hours of site-seeing and commentary.

I’d recommend the “Glasgow Gander” to any visitor, and we were charmed by Johnny’s passion and his sense of humour. It was very nice to be shown a sculpture of “Jesus the Homeless” in Nelson Mandela Square, and to be provided with a can of Iron Bru, Scotland’s liquid response to dental hygiene (quite possible the sweetest soft drink ever and apparently worth mixing with vodka, but mind you vodka mixes with anything).

We now feel properly on holiday and, apart from a lingering worry about the weight of our bags as usual, we are heading to Fort William for some acclimatisation before the start of the walk. I finally have a North Face jacket in which I can face a flood and the apocalypse and mum can stop worrying about my wellbeing in Cornwall. Not quite heaven, but a promise of holidays.