In this Archive on 4 Glenn traces the responses to Gloria through time and place and the imagination.
"Wednesday afternoon and I am caught one more time up on, up on Cyprus Avenue… Or at least I am parked there, waiting for my ten year-old daughter to get out of school, on the North Road, a couple of hundred yards away. I drive with her, down the Beersbridge Road, past Hyndford Street, where at number 125 there is a small brass plaque indicating that Van Morrison used to live here, to pick up her younger sister from ballet on the Cregagh Road, then turn around and retrace our route: Beersbridge, Cyprus, North Road. There is music playing. Always, always there is music playing, most often the genre I refer to as ‘boys with guitars’ (although my current favourites are the perversely named ‘Girls’), but sometimes I will play Astral Weeks, ‘Cyprus Avenue’ itself, for the strangeness of being in two places at once, the space that our car is moving through and the ‘avenue of trees’ openi...
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