Dani Garavelli

On​ a sunny afternoon last month Ryan arrived at the Thistle, a one-storey pebbledash building in the east end of Glasgow.* The Thistle is the UK’s first Safer Drug Consumption Facility (SDCF). Ryan is a regular there. He wasn’t its first customer – three men raced one another to the door on 13 January – but he comes often enough to have claimed injecting booth eight...

One afternoon​ last year I walked up a steep incline from Applecross Basin on the Forth and Clyde Canal, stopped under the second pylon I came to and looked out over the monochrome skyscape. I had been told that this was the spot where Duncan Thaw, the protagonist of Books One and Two of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, utters his most famous lines. ‘If a city hasn’t been used by an...

Iwas​ on the ferry to Islay in November 2018 when I got a message telling me that a 16-year-old boy had killed himself in Polmont Young Offender Institution, which lies between Glasgow and Edinburgh. My contact had seen a newspaper column I’d written about the suicide a few months earlier of another prisoner at Polmont, a young woman called Katie Allan. I was working on a story about...

Igrew up​ in the seaside town of Prestwick, on the West Coast of Scotland. In its heyday, Prestwick was a haven for workers from the shipyards and factories, who would travel ‘doon the watter’ by paddle steamer or train for the Glasgow Fair, the fortnight in July when all the city’s industries shut down. At one end of the promenade stood the bathing lake: an Olympic...