A LONE voice breaks the silence.
“I think it should be working by now,” barks a middle-aged man down his phone under the watchful eye of Glasgow University’s cloisters.
With that, he’s quiet again.
It’s 10.45am and the height of term time.
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It’s also the day after the night before and in less than 24 hours the institution has become the epicentre of arguably the city’s most serious outbreak of Covid-19.
Hundreds of students, the life and soul of the campus, have been placed under lock and key, while many others have taken their learning online.
Instead of laughter between new friends and debates about authors, most 500 years dead, there’s hardly a sound.
On a strikingly sunny morning in the West End, builders in high vis jackets outnumber students some four to one.
It’s the reason why, having left the cloisters and now walking up Hillhead Street, I don’t even need one hand to count the number of people around.
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For four years, I walked this road every day and, glancing from the brow of the hill down to the main gate, it’s hard to believe this would normally be packed with hundreds of students, many out in the world for the first time.
It really was a ghost town at Glasgow University.
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