Glasgow is not London but it’s like a smaller, earlier version of London. How do we think of it? Strangely: like John Knox’s passionate, puritanical spirit leavened London’s wilder culture … reformed it (all puns intended) … but gave it a core of righteous freedom and tolerance that infects Glasgow’s atmosphere. Difficult to describe.

We wake and walk to the tube, where we must buy tickets — no tapping of credit cards as permitted in the London underground — and hie ourselves to the National Piping Center where a young man who looks just out of his teens, wearing a kilt and the whole megillah, plays tunes out on the street for 15 minutes before taking us inside and through the small but quite nicely done museum. He plays outside, he tells us, because … duh … his pipes would bust our ear drums if he played it inside under a low ceiling.

Afterwards, we walk to center city’s George Square, named for III but originally used to slaughter horses, where we walk about, gawking at the statues of Queen Victoria with a 19-inch waist riding a horse, Albert, and high above everyone else on an 80-foot column: Sir Walter Scott. We also duck into the large City Chambers on the east side of the square: impressive doors, impressive stonework, impressive staircases, impressive ceilings … in all, quite a grand place.

From the square, we meander downtown, past one of the first ticket houses for the Glasgow tube (tiny house with turrets), Princes Square shopping mall (the dizzying array of escalators) inside the art drecko exterior, and wind up to tour the Mackintosh Willow Tea Rooms, where we’ve scheduled ourselves for a high tea from 2 to 4. The Art Nouveau rooms Charles Ronnie Mackintosh (née McIntosh but he changed his surname because he thought it gave him that je ne sais quoi) designed for the establishment’s owner (and one of his devoted benefactors, Catherine Cranston) are truly unusual and stunning in their austere way. We partake in the Salon du Luxe, the joint’s crown jewel of a room, but, after the opening glass of champers, the food proves to be distinctly lackluster. That said, you can order about 30 different pots of tea. You don’t have to finish a pot before ordering another, and the wait staff will bring you as many as you want. And just being in the room for an extended time, so we can appreciate the many subtleties of its design, is a great memory.

We float out of the Willow and return to our hotel in a sugar daze.