Alan Taylor's diary

PAISLEY has a tourist information office. I don't know why I found this surprising, but I did. In my perverted mind's eye, I'd always thought Paisley was the kind of place where people had dog fights in their living rooms and kept crocs in the bath should they fancy a spot of mud wrestling. For all I know they may do, and that's why niche tourists beat a path to it.

I was there was because of the Carbuncle Awards, organised by Prospect magazine, which include the coveted The Plook on the Plinth Award for the Most Dismal Town in Scotland, which on the past two occasions has been won by Cumbernauld, of which more anon.

Nominations are made via a website and Paisley garnered more than most, mostly from disgruntled Buddies, of which the following are but a few, not all of them, alas, written in English: "Possibly the worst place ever junkie whores neds and looks like someone thought lets just dump this here."

"Paisley town centre is a living tribute to East Germany. The bus depot' is a miserable row of stances under a parking garage where your only visual diversion is watching the netting under the railway bridge trapping thousands of pigeon feathers and dead pigeons."

"The planners responsible for modern day Paisley should be shot. There is potentially a very nice town trying to get out from under their lousy decisions. But as it is, it looks like somebody has dropped Paisley - and all the nice bits have been scattered asunder."

My first impression, which I believe was shared by my fellow judges - Penny Lewis, editor of Prospect, Gordon Young, its publisher, Colette Brodrick, its receptionist, Adrian Welch, an architect, and Tom Mower, the winklepicker-wearing author of Attention Please: A Walk Interrupted By Safety Signage - tended towards the favourable.

There was, for instance, the Abbey, a refurbished mill, an imposing municipal HQ and the gurgling river Cart. Was not this the town that had spawned my old amigo Andra Neil, meeja potentate, Fred Goodwin, recently described by one rag as perhaps the world's top banker, and - so says Wikipedia - Kelly Marie, "a singer famous for hit Feels Like I'm in Love"? Indeed it was.

Being a day to chill one's cockles we repaired to the Piazza, a shopping centre which "has forged links within the community". No Italian town I have ever visited has a piazza quite like the Piazza. One aggrieved Buddy described it as a "white elephant". A polar bear would have been closer to the mark. On the plus side, it apparently boasts one of the top 50 post office branches in the UK. If philately can get you anywhere, it may even entice you to go to Paisley.

What's the matter with Glasgow?

OUR journey started in Glasgow's east end, which the panjandrums swear will be unrecognisable by the time of the 2014 Commonwealth Games. All one can say is they can't come soon enough. Acre after acre of vacant land within spitting distance of Glesca's throbbing centre stretched before us. Why in the name of the wee man do we need to build on the green belt when there's so many brownfield sites available near to hand? Having said that, the general impression one gets is that Scotland is okay until anyone builds anything on it.

We went to Oatlands, next door to the Gorbals. Fans of The Wire, the best TV cop series ever, which is set in Baltimore, a dump, will recognise it instantly. Old, boarded-up council houses, which look solid enough, and in which a family or two are still living, await demolition while new two-storey homes designed on a fag packet have been built next to them. It was hard to decide which would have been worse to live in. Apparently, the developer is scheduled to build 1000 homes in total. I could do that.

Still, there is Springfield Quay on the banks of the silvery Clyde. It has a hotel called Etap, which would not look out of place in Guantanamo Bay, and a casino the like of which is unlikely to feature in the next remake of Ocean's Eleven. It is, however, handy for the new meeja complex where the Beeb and STV are situated. Handy that is, if you have a boat or don't mind getting your feet wet because there's still no public foot or cycle path along the banks of the river. As one of my unfailingly optimistic fellow judges said: "It could be Glasgow's answer to London's South Bank or even Las Vegas", before conceding: "instead it has all the charm of a failing retail park."

In the land that time forgot AND so to Coatbridge, where I spied the constituency office of Dr John Reid, aka The Nighttripper. Or was it in Airdrie? All these places were blurring into one. Coatbridge used to have a swimming pool slap bang in the centre of town. Now it disnae. A handsome building, it stands empty and decaying.

Meanwhile, there is the Time Capsule, which is where a lot of the best wee fat country on the planet should be sealed. According to a well-informed local person, the Time Capsule is "a multi-purpose leisure centre set in a prehistoric environment". You may say this is a pretty accurate description of Coatbridge: I would prefer not to comment.

I note, though, that Coatbridge boasts as many luminaries as Paisley, including Fran and Anna, the brothers Kane of Hue and Cry fame, and Rena Costello, "the first wife of mass murderer Fred West". Why, then, does Coatbridge have no tourist information office.

The royal squeal of disapproval LIGHT was fading fast as we approached Cumbernauld. As I may have mentioned earlier, Cumbernauld is to the Plook on the Plinth what Aberdeen used to be to Britain In Bloom.

To be fair - which I always strive to be - it will never be Florence. Or, for that matter, Falkirk. Or Fauldhouse, even. It does, however, have a humungous Tesco Extra, which is open 24 hours a day. Its slogan is "every little helps" and Mr Tesco solemnly promises to help us spend less every day. If you believe that you're a tube.

Compared to the rest of Cumbernauld, however, and in particular the Antonine Centre, Tesco is the Pitti Palace. The Antonine Centre, which is an insult to the Romans who knew how to build a perfectly good wall, was one of the main reasons why Cumbernauld won the Plook last time out. It has since doubled in size, making it twice as awful. You can walk for miles in it and never get anywhere, as I found to my cost. It was opened by Princess Anne, who was told it was either that or a tour of duty in Basra. Rumour has it that she screamed "I'm a member of a royal family get me out of here!"

We were accompanied by two delightful people from STV who wanted to film this excrescence for the edification of humankind but were forbidden by a gauleiter. I did, however, find a stall where one could buy a carrot, which is not as easy as you may think, especially in those places nominated as Plooks.