I spent my childhood and adolescence squarely between two diametrically different environments, the poles of man and nature. Almost ten miles from my home lay the city of Glasgow, one of the most implacable test-aments to the city of toil in all of Christendom, a memorial to an inordinate capacity to create ugliness, a sandstone excretion cemented with smoke and grime. Each night its pall on the eastern horizon was lit by the flames of the blast furnaces, a Turner fantasy made real.