£ 6 million to help art bloom on the streets

More than £6 million of Scottish government emergency Covid funds will be awarded to 26 projects across Scotland with the aim of supporting creativity in the community.

The grants range from £100,000 to £300,000 and are going to organisations including Street Level Photoworks in Glasgow and Intercultural Youth Scotland.

Govanhill Baths Community Trust are one of the lucky recipients and have been granted £227,000 from the fund.

Partnering with Tramway and the Work Room in Glasgow’s southside, the money will be used by the Govanhill trust to recruit five artists for a year.

Fatima Uygun, manager of the trust, says their work will enhance a renewed community spirit which has been bolstered by lockdown.

She said: “We want to empower and celebrate our community.”

This year marks the start of the long-awaited refurbishment of the Edwardian baths into a well-being centre, as well as the 20th anniversary of the community campaign to save the pool.

To celebrate, the trust is planning to stage a year-long programme of events.

Even ardent fans of mind-melting sci-fi blockbusters would not say it is the world’s most famous scientist’s greatest claim to fame but Einstein’s Theory of Relativity runs through Interstellar like a stick of rock.

It is not a movie to be tackled after a glass of wine, although possibly after three or four its brain-tangling complexities might be easier to grasp. Basically, after nipping through a black hole, our intrepid far-flung heroes end up on a planet where one hour equals seven years on earth.

Time dilation, they call it, and, it must be said, lockdown time has felt a little dilated too as our clocks and calendars started doing their own thing.

Minutes drag and hours jerk, as The Clash had it, days feel like weeks while weeks flash past, a day can feel like eternity and a month seems to pass in the blink of an eye. As the world stopped, time bent.

The disorienting 12 months since Covid arrived in Scotland have been, by any measure, a long, hard year. A year when we

Our leaders endured and made hard calls

burned through all the usual adjectives, leaving words like unprecedented, unbelievable and unimaginable smouldering in a heap.

As the months passed and restrictions ebbed and flowed, most of us, at one time or another, have felt hope and fear, trepidation and relief. Many, many families, a heartbreakingly huge number, have, of course, felt loss and grief most of all.

This time last year our politicians and public services were faced with a situation like nothing anyone, them or us, had ever imagined, never mind experienced. Yes, our planning and our preparations were inadequate, as we learned again last week, but very few countries had oven-ready catastrophe plans in a bottom drawer.

Hindsight is easy. Demanding action without responsibility for the consequences is even easier and our leaders should be commended for, above all, enduring and then, in the clamour and heat, taking action and making hard calls.

Would they do things differently now? Absolutely. Were mistakes made? Undoubtedly. The UK’S apparently unique achievement of suffering one of the world’s worst death rates while enduring some of the worst economic damage remains a dreadful indictment of our state of readiness and of the decisions taken and strategies pursued by our leaders.

But, as more than one of the experts we talk to today points out, the absolute priority now is to learn from those mistakes and ensure none are repeated in the months to come.

And, as we ease out of our homes, it is worth remembering Albert Einstein not only revealed how time might warp in lockdown but also suggested how we might endure it: “Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.”

So here’s to imagination, hope and a happier year ahead.