A green man falls into a brown study

everyone looks that way to me before opening time -- but the fact that

he was wearing Highland dress of antique style with a string vest

underneath, plus a bandage around his head and a Paw Broon bunnet on top

of it. ''I have been studying Sir Walter Scott and the Sunday Post'',

said Zzyzzy, ''and watching Rab C. Nesbitt on the interplanetary

telly.''

''Apparently'', said I.

Zzyzzy Zzyzzyrx comes from Mars but works mostly down here, where he

acts as a freelance alienation device for desperate journalists looking

for a fresh angle on the familiar. He expresses curiosity about some

terrestrial phenomenon, we take him for a carefully stage-managed look

at it, and he sends a bemused postcard home. ''What would you like me to

express curiosity about today, Earthling?'', he said politely. ''The

famous Glasgow culture,'' I said, gently detaching him from a passionate

embrace with the traffic lights.* ''Get in the cab.''

The driver turned around and looked at Zzyzzy and then at me. ''Who's

your friend, pal?''

''A freelance alienation device from Mars'', I said. ''Thought so'',

he said. ''You'll be wanting the Tramway, then.''

''Ah,'' said Zzyzzy, ''that's a Glasgow cultural joke, yes?''

''Depends on your level of culture,'' I said. ''Anyway, that gets the

cheap jibe at the avant-garde out of the way. To the Scotia Bar, cabby,

and make it speedy.''

Zzyzzy checked his step as I was about to drag him into the home of

Workers' City, pointing to the sign that says Real ale and real people

served here. I told him being real was a relative concept in these

parts, even for Martians. Just try to look as if you were a

lumpen-proletarian Martian, I told him.

''There are no class distinctions on Mars'', he said. ''Then you're in

trouble'', I said. I passed him off as a member of Mars's oppressed

Gaelic minority until he leapt upon an itinerant musician and made

passionate love to his bagpipes.* Then we got thrown out for laughing in

the wrong places at the verse anthology the barman sold us, called

Twenty Years Without An Inside Toilet.

''What do you think of it so far?'' I asked him. ''Interesting'', he

replied. So we swung out east to the People's Palace, and just for fun I

told Zzyzzy it was actually a church, dedicated to the adoration of

Little Saint Elspeth and the Sisters of Vitamin Deficiency. ''You

worship poverty and degradation here, then?'' he asked me, tearing

himself away from the mock-up of a dosshouse cubicle. ''Only from a safe

distance'', I replied. ''But you're catching on.''

Next stop was the St Mungo Museum in the High Street, where Zzyzzy

enjoyed himself massively over a read at the catalogue. He told me he'd

seen something similar during a Freelance Alienation Device job in the

old Soviet Union, being escorted around a State-sponsored Museum of

Atheism designed to entertain the infidel and ridicule believers of

every possible denomination. Reader, I encouraged him.

After that we went to the Art Galleries at Kelvingrove, which Zzyzzy

obligingly mistook for an art storage warehouse because he couldn't

figure out the hanging policy, and after I'd shaken him off the nice old

1930s Art Deco radiogram** in the modernist room we broke for dinner

before going to the theatre.

Over a couple of jugs of the nearest thing available to purple groak

juice in the interval bar at the Glasgow Citizens', Zzyzzy told me he

thought he'd worked out why the theatre was called that: it was because

both the repertoire and the audience were drawn largely from the

citizens of any place but Glasgow. The evening closed in merriment at a

ceilidh club, where my friend correctly deduced that the purpose of the

entertainment was to demonstrate Newton's laws of motion by forming a

circle and spinning around as fast as possible until centrifugal force

threw somebody out of the window.

I cabbed Zzyzzy out to his flying saucer in the Botanic Gardens,

cunningly disguised as the Kibble Palace lit up from the inside. ''Ciao,

Zyz,'' I said. ''What'll you write for your postcard home?''

''I'm going to tell them it was miles better, apart from the

journalists who don't know when they're lucky,'' he said. ''Nothing

personal. We'll be back. Keep watching the skies . . .''

* There is a professional-writer by-law that says visiting Martians

have to do this sort of thing. We'll try to keep it down.

* Sorry.

** Sorrier still.