Jean Cameron

THERE is a “very powerful relationship between empathy and proximity” observes award-winning theatre director Simon McBurney in his solo work The Encounter – which was one of the first theatre pieces broadcast online that I engaged with during lockdown.

GROWING up in Paisley, there were regular visits to Paisley Museum. On each visit I made a beeline to one particular display. Among the rich and varied collections, which included Paisley pattern shawls, fine art by leading Scottish and European artists and a moth-eaten but much-loved stuffed lion called Buddy, I was drawn, time and again, to a glass vitrine containing a pair of clog boots. Black with neat hand stitching, folds in the leather that would have cupped the shape of their owner’s ankles, six holes, no laces, studded all the way round their base with dulled brass tacks, wooden soles. These ordinary clogs were my way into an extraordinarily hollow moment in my hometown’s story. These boots had belonged to one of the 71 children who died as a result of the Glen Cinema Disaster in Paisley on Hogmanay 1929.

"YOU are in the midst of an indigenous renaissance. Are you ready to hear the truth that needs to be told? Are you ready to see the things that need to be seen?”

I HAVE always associated Paisley with strong, determined, principled women. How could I not? As a wee girl growing up in Paisley in the Seventies, it was my mum in our home (as it was in households across Scotland’s largest town) who kept the bread on the table using her “pin money” from her twilight shift as a doffer in Ferguslie Mill, whilst my dad endured repeated periods of being out on strike from Chryslers in Linwood. The town that thread built was powered by a formidable female workforce.