Why the whole world crosses oceans to stand in crowds, and why Glasgow is the city that understands it best.
There’s a feeling you can’t get on your own. You can be moved by a painting in an empty gallery, by a mountain with nobody else on it, by a song in the dark with headphones in. Those are real, and they’re yours alone. But there’s a different charge, a specific one, that only switches on when a large number of people fix on the same thing at the same moment, and it changes the air in the room. You’ve felt it. Almost everyone has. Hardly anyone can name it.
A French sociologist named Émile Durkheim spent his life trying to. His answer, set down more than a century ago, has held up about as well as anything in the social sciences: the feeling doesn’t come from the thing everyone is looking at. It comes from the looking together. When a crowd turns as one toward a single point, it generates something larger than the sum of the people standing in it, and every one of them feels lifted past their own edges into something they could not reach alone. He called it ‘collective effervescence’. He argued it was the engine underneath nearly everything humans build to feel part of something bigger than themselves. The crowd makes the energy. Then it pours that energy onto one thing, a flag, a song, a person, and agrees, without anyone saying a word, that this thing matters out of all proportion to its size.
We have spent the last few weeks thinking about almost nothing else.
What the crowd is for
This is why a stadium is not a large room with a lot of people in it. We have just come through a World Cup, watched whole nations pour into squares and arenas and become, for ninety minutes at a time, a single organism with one heartbeat and a very loud opinion. Back in May, before any of this trip began, we stood in an empty Lambeau Field in Wisconsin in the off-season, no game, no crowd, just the cold bowl of it, and tried to understand a small town that loves its football team so completely that the fans literally own it. Not as a figure of speech. The Green Bay Packers are owned by hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who bought shares that pay no dividend, cannot be sold for profit, will never rise in value, and grant almost no power. The stock does nothing. It exists so that you can say the team is partly yours and pass that on to your kids. It is belonging turned into paperwork, and people queue for it.
Most of the planet arranges its life around getting into rooms like that. They are not really there for the result. They are there for the air. For the lift you can only get standing shoulder to shoulder with strangers who, for the length of a race or a song or a final, want exactly the same thing you want.
The part that sounds like a sales pitch and isn’t
There’s something we don’t usually say out loud, because in our line of work it sounds like an advertisement. This is the job. A wedding is a slightly similar machine built at a much smaller scale: a room of people turning toward two of them and deciding, together, that today these two matter more than anything else in the world. We have spent our lives building that moment and then standing inside it while it happens. We know exactly how the air in a room changes when a gathering makes up its mind that someone is the point.
Which is why we spend so much breath asking people to put their phones down during it. The footage of the air is not the air. You cannot record the lift and replay it later, because the lift was made of everyone being present at once, and a person filming is the one person in the room who has stepped half outside it. You can have the moment or you can have the video of the moment. The people who learn this the hard way are usually holding up a screen at the exact second they meant to be alive.
Hold that thought. We are about to break our own rule for the best reason we have ever had, but that’s the next story.
The gallus city
We came to Glasgow for the Commonwealth Games, because our nephew Kai swims for Australia and his lane was the true north the whole map had been pointing at. He gets the next post to himself. This one is about the room he’s swimming into, because Glasgow turns out to be the most quietly perfect host a gathering could ask for.
But first, the road in, because even the last leg refused to be transit.
We watched our final Highland sunrise from the hotel window, which by then was policy, and drove out of the glen with the cameras zipped in the boot, as promised. Just our phones in hand. Loch Lomond unspooled alongside for the first hour, and at Luss we stopped at a small distillery for supplies and took the house tasting quiz, the one that assigns you your signature drink. Tracey drew Lady of the Loch. After three weeks of monster-adjacent lochs and drowned-maiden castles, it felt less like marketing and more like formal recognition.
Then the shortbread quest, which needs telling properly. The mission was to find Scotland’s best shortbread, and every enquiry kept whispering the same name: Crystal’s, a small bakery just near where we were at Loch Lomond. The address delivered us into an industrial estate, the kind of street where dreams go to quietly manufacture biscuits, and the factory was real but the shop was not. A lovely woman carrying armfuls of rubbish bags took pity on the obvious question: we make them here, but you’ll have to buy them next door. Next door looked identical, industrial, silent, suspiciously un-shop-like, and turned out to be a full kilt maker, wall-to-wall tartan, wedding kilts to dress kilts, at the far end of which the gentleman on the counter casually opened a cupboard holding three sizes of Crystal’s shortbread. Buried treasure, again. Twenty-six pounds and three boxes later, Dee practically skipped back past the shortbread factory itself, called out our success to a man stepping outside, and he vanished and returned holding a warm paper bag. That morning’s bake. Unboxed. Still hot. Shortbread offcuts! You cannot buy fresher shortbread in Scotland, and strictly speaking you can’t buy that at all.
Then he asked what we were in Scotland for, and we told him: Glasgow, the Games, Australian swimmers, and we told him we’d give them all shortbread as a gift after their races. He grinned and corrected the plan on the spot. Give it to them before they race. It’ll make them win. Scotland and Australia, in formal alliance, over biscuits. Diplomatic relations have rarely tasted better. By Glasgow the rental car was measurably part shortbread. We returned it anyway. Worth it.
At Glengoyne we kept the promise made over our last Highland beers and bought the good stuff for Tracey’s dad: a fifteen-year-old malt, chosen with enormous ceremony by two amateurs, after respectfully declining the four-thousand-pound bottle on the grounds that we like him a normal amount. And the distillery handed us a gear change we didn’t see coming: the Highland line runs through Glengoyne itself, the spirit made on the Highland side of the road and matured on the Lowland side. Three weeks of learning what that boundary has meant to this country, and we crossed back out of the Highlands across the width of one carriageway, holding gin, shortbread and somebody’s father’s whisky.
The little lanes beyond were full of walkers, all ages, all nations, poles and packs and one or two visibly mid-crisis, and it took us a while to solve them: day one of the West Highland Way, ninety-six miles from the edge of Glasgow to Fort William, everybody still deep in the this-is-lovely phase. We had just done their route backwards, by car, over three weeks. We wished them the weather we’d had, and better midges.
And then Glasgow. The car went back. Kai messaged before the bags were upstairs, asking if we’d arrived and whether we’d been to the Australian HQ yet. We hadn’t. We had, however, made a discovery about our own hotel: we are sharing it with Team Scotland. So for the next week we’d be eating breakfast inside the opposition, carrying Scottish-blessed shortbread under strict instructions to make Australians win. The Games start tomorrow. You can already feel the room assembling.
It is a leaner Games than usual, ten sports threaded through a single eight-mile corridor of the city, around three thousand athletes from seventy-four nations and territories, a mini-Olympics. And it suits the place, because Glasgow was a gathering long before the flame arrived. The city even has a word for its own character: gallus. Bold, cheeky, sure of itself to the point of style, the compliment Glasgow pays anyone who carries themselves like they own a street they happen to be standing on. The story goes that it started as an insult, gallows-bound, the word you threw at a rascal headed for the rope, and that Glasgow wore it until it turned into praise, the way the city has worn most things ever said against it.
We’ll walk you through that personality properly, King Tut’s and the old music hall and the duke in his crown, in the next post, because the city between the races earned pages of its own. For now, the short version: Glasgow is the UK’s first UNESCO City of Music, and this is a city that has always understood that the point of a room is the people in it.
The footage of the air is not the air. You can have the moment or you can have the video of the moment.
The room where everyone crossed the world
Before the ceremony, we made the pilgrimage that mattered most: Australian team HQ, set up for 10 days at the Argyle Hotel, to collect our Sideline Champions kit, along with our first Glasgow hug from Kai and a selfie for the family group chat. Sideline champions is a title we’d been using about ourselves since a Swiss lake result reached a Scottish lodge, and now it was official, and wearable.
Whoever designed that HQ understood homesickness at a professional level. The coffee had come from Melbourne, under a sign that said, more or less: we couldn’t host the Games, so we sent the coffee. Small consolation, Melbourne. Though on the bright side, because you couldn’t, everybody got Scotland. That, plus a full UK-style pub under the same roof, is our national cultural position expressed as a floor plan.
And the buzz in that building deserves its own sentence. Everyone in it had crossed the world for somebody. Green and gold at every table, nerves and pride in the same cups, and the particular ease of being among your people: nobody explaining, everybody understanding. We walked out wearing the kit and feeling like part of a team, because truly, we all were.
The flame
The opening ceremony was held indoors, at the Hydro, for the first time in the Games’ history, and honestly, fair enough. Scotland had already given us several weeks of horizontal rain, fast-moving fog and wind capable of changing a person’s direction. Glasgow put a roof over the whole operation and got on with it.
Inside: athletes and families and volunteers, tartan in every direction, and a healthy number of people wearing traffic cones on their heads, which every local understood and nobody explained until the lovely Scottish couple beside us appointed themselves our cultural translators for the evening. They decoded the jokes, the references, the things the whole arena knew in its bones. This is how we have learned Scotland, in the end. Not from plaques or guidebooks. From whoever happens to be sitting beside us.
The ceremony opened with Glasgow treating its own icons with exactly the correct amount of disrespect. Traffic cones. Tunnock’s Tea Cakes at ceremonial scale. Nessie. Enough local in-jokes that the rest of the Commonwealth understood it had wandered into somebody else’s very specific fever dream. And then a TARDIS materialised in the middle of the arena, the doors opened, and out stepped the King and Queen. Some countries deliver their monarchs by gold carriage. Scotland sends them through time and space in a police box. The arena loved it, and so, visibly, did the King. Sir Chris Hoy set the arrival up, the soundtrack ran from KT Tunstall to Nathan Evans, and the whole thing was knowingly homemade in places and completely uninterested in pretending that a bigger budget makes a better party. These are the Games Glasgow stepped in to rescue, and the rescue is the personality: smaller, closer, near enough to touch.
Then the athletes came in, and when Australia appeared, the crowd roared. Not politely. Not diplomatically. Properly. We were half a planet from home, surrounded by Scots, and an entire Glasgow arena stood up for our team.
Kai wasn’t there. The swimmers don’t march; their program starts the next morning, so they rest, and it’s sensible, and it’s right, and none of that stopped it from being his moment anyway. His first Commonwealth Games. His opening ceremony. That was the second the night stopped being a spectacle for us and became the thing underneath one: when that flag came in, all the years behind it came into the room with it. He wasn’t in the arena. But he was in everything the arena was for.
Then Scotland entered and the building lifted again, and for all the evening’s jokes there was nothing ironic left in the room. This was their city, their team, their welcome home. The King opened the Games, and then came Flower of Scotland, pipes and drums and the kind of collective singing that starts somewhere around the ribcage. We’d learned some of the words in Assynt, the way you do. That night we found out what they’re for.
The whole arena did the thing arenas do, became briefly one creature, generous and deafening and entirely outside itself. We walked home afterward in the slow river of the crowd, which is not the part after the ceremony. It is part of the ceremony. Durkheim would have recognised every second of it. We arrived as two Australians in the crowd. We walked home as family, at Kai’s first Commonwealth Games, on the eve of the swimming.
The last opening ceremony we sat inside was a long time ago and a long way south of here, and there is one particular person it belongs to, and a reason we know exactly what that walk home feels like with your face wet and your voice gone.
We love the gathering the way the whole world loves it, for the air and the belonging and the lift you cannot manufacture alone. But there is a rarer version of it, one we have only stood inside a handful of times in our lives, where the single thing a whole crowd turns toward and charges with meaning beyond all reason is your own. That is the room we actually crossed the world for. It has a pool in it, and a boy in lane four, and we will take you all the way inside it next.
Read more Greenland/Scotland travel stories here:
The Night the Fjord Disappeared
Midnight Gold on the Ilulissat Icefjord
