I SHOULD warn readers from the outset that this is a very different kind of column from that which they normally get from me. For you must understand that this veteran roving foreign correspondent has been living in strange times of late. No, I’m not talking about the pandemic but a bygone age here, 1969 to be exact. But before anyone thinks that strong drink has been taken let me explain.

I was all of 11 years old back then in that year when a certain Neil Armstrong uttered those immortal words “The Eagle has landed” and “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind”. It was that same year that the war in Vietnam raged at its height while back in the United States the country saw the largest anti-war protests in American history. What a shock to the senses it was then to roll out of bed and roll up the blind on my bedroom window yesterday morning to find myself living back in those heady days. For right there in the street beneath me were New York yellow cabs where once there were black Hackneys. Gone too were the Saltires on the Glasgow City Chambers opposite, where now instead fluttered rows of Stars and Stripes.

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Even Glasgow’s citizens it appeared had been miraculously replaced overnight with Americans dressed in flared jeans and mini-skirts, psychedelic shirts and Trilby hats. It almost felt like that moment from the old cult TV series The Prisoner when the character played by late actor Patrick McGoohan wakes from a drugged kidnapping to find himself not in his London flat but in some alternative, bizarre, enigmatic community. My own “awakening” all began last week when again one morning I rose to find a workman in a hard hat standing on a cherry picker at my living room window with a star-spangled banner in his hands.

“Alright mate,” he greeted me nonchalantly in a distinctly cockney accent as I gulped on my early cuppa before he strung another “Old Glory” beneath my window. Over the following few days other bigger banners began to appear. “No to war in Vietnam” and “Welcome Apollo 11 Astronauts – Armstrong ... Aldrin ... Collins”, read the words on giant signs draped across what was now evidently a street in the Big Apple. Happily, for a moment I was a boy again, thinking back to those crackly black and white television pictures that I sat transfixed in front of all those decades ago in 1969 when man first set foot on the moon.

You see readers, sometimes you don’t have to be a foreign correspondent journeying to far-flung places to find the exciting and exotic. For if you live in Glasgow’s Merchant City, then all so often Hollywood movie-makers bring action and adventure to your very doorstep. This week, not for the first time, a different kind of army from what I’m used to surrounded me. Riggers, diggers, technicians, props specialists and actors arrived in Glasgow to play out another chapter in the life of that fictional adventurer Indiana Jones. The last time my neighbourhood was subjected to such a transformation, it was all about car and motorcycle chases while for almost a week Fast And Furious was shot in the street below. But it was to be World War Z with Brad Pitt – back in 2011 while I was home hoping for some respite from the Arab Spring uprisings – that had me thinking I’d never left the war zone.

IN PICTURES: Indiana Jones stars Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Boyd Holbrook spotted in Glasgow

As any guerrilla strategist will attest, it is always best to fight your battles on territory you know. But here I was at home in Glasgow but lost in Americana. I was adrift in a place where the taxis and traffic lights were bright yellow, where Cochrane Street and John Street had become Broad Street and JF Kennedy Boulevard. Those of you who remember World War Z will recall that it was set in the time of an all-out global zombie onslaught. As a Glaswegian, zombies were nothing new to me. On more than one occasion I’ve come across the local variants as the city’s great undead tumble from bars on to the streets in the early hours of a Friday or Saturday morning.

Anyway, as zombie warriors go these were nothing compared to those I once encountered on the Caribbean island of Haiti, home to Voodoo and a genuine popular belief in zombies. It was back in 2004 in Haiti – a country currently in the news – while covering the rebellion that ousted Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide that I had my first brush with those who recognise the existence of “un corps cadavre”. For years in Haiti there has been evidence that premature sepulture, as it is known, really does exist. In the Haitian zombie experience people are taken for dead after being drugged by a witch doctor, who induces a state of catalepsy or apparent death.

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Boyd Holbrook on the Indiana Jones set

That was my first professional encounter with zombies. So, what then had I to fear of the movie make believe version stalking my Glasgow neighbourhood back in 2011? Likewise, these past days watching fascinated from my flat window it finally began to dawn on meet what is really meant by the saying that life imitates art.

I once wrote in a war dispatch from overseas that waiting for an explosion is the longest passage of time I know. But back then I hadn’t realised it was nothing compared to waiting for a movie star to make an appearance or what movie-cast extras must endure.

Like the long, lonely vigil of the sentry, the endless standing around undertaken by these incredibly loyal foot-soldiers gives new meaning to the expression “watching paint dry”. All I can say is that I’m glad I’m not in the movies business, but I’d be lying if I said that like countless Glaswegians, I haven’t enjoyed the surreal theatre in the heart of our city these past days. For now, though it’s back to the real world of war in Afghanistan and protests in Cuba and South Africa. Normal service from your foreign affairs columnist will resume next week.