Anyone who follows my social media will be familiar with my love of Glasgow. Did I mention I love Glasgow?

Let me take you back to the summer of 2010. I was in my 20s and not having the best time. A long-term relationship had recently ended but the ex in question was making moves to reconcile. I’d bitten the bullet and applied to the University of Bradford for their MA Social Work course, only to be told after my interview that they wouldn’t be able to accommodate me. I was easily working six and a half days a week.
Burnt out, confused, in a rut. On a whim, I booked a ticket to Glasgow.

I’d never been to Scotland before and didn’t know anyone there. It felt like the escape and the adventure I needed.

For the next few days, I wandered the streets of Glasgow and soaked it all up. I felt comfortably lost, just happy to meander through this fascinating labyrinth of old and new architecture. The people were friendly to a fault.

For all its beauty, there was also an edge to Glasgow; intriguing verging on dangerous, a sharpness that might cut like a stiletto knife.

I returned to Yorkshire refreshed, recharged and ready to take on whatever life wanted to throw at me. So began my love affair with Glasgow.

Fast forward to 2017. I’d been to Glasgow a few times in the interim, including with Chris. He has separate reasons for loving Glasgow, but we discovered that we’d both eaten at this amazing South Indian restaurant called Dakhin on our respective first visits. I’d had my leaving do the night before, my last day with Leeds City Council’s Children’s Social Work Service before I embarked on my initial police training a fortnight later. Full disclosure, I was a little hungover.

We ate at Dakhin then returned to the hotel room. He told me to close my eyes because he had something for me. I swear to this day he mumbled about it being something that would help me in my new career, so I was expecting an inappropriate mug or similar. When I opened my eyes, the man was down on one knee with a ring in his hand. Eleven years on (three of them married), Glasgow remains an important place to us both.

When I started writing ‘Care & Control’, I had no plans to include Glasgow in the book. After all, it was to be set in a northern city and I had no experience of the Scottish police or social care system. I wrote the first draft then set about making a myriad of revisions and edits. Much of these were about adding texture (to borrow a term from Liz Mistry) to the characters.

Damien was always going to be one of C&C’s bad boys. Tough, tattooed, brooding with the kind of dark-blue eyes and air of danger that just adds to his sex appeal. I added more texture to him as I got to know him better. I was nearing the finish line when, one day, it came to me: what if he hailed from Glasgow?

Finally, Damien made perfect sense.

He now had that toughness, that dark, dangerous edge; but also that core of generosity and dry humour. And a sexy accent to boot!
This time round, I took an early-morning stroll out to the Necropolis. Eerie and stunning at the same time, I soaked in the views for miles around. This was Damien’s world once. It may seem strange to talk like this about a fictional character but this is testament to how real some of my creations have become.

Damien’s history will be explored in future books. I like to think that having Glasgow at the core of his character will make him rich, complex and intriguing. Indeed, I anticipate that he and Louis will have more in common than meets the eye.
So there you have it, my love affair with Glasgow in a nutshell and its influence on my writing. If you haven’t been to this spectacular city, I urge you to go.

Fall in love with it.

Roshan

PS – after I returned from my first trip to Glasgow, there was a letter waiting for me to say that there was now a place for me on the MA Social Work course at UoB. The rest is history.