Paisley. Still not a city.

Paisley is the biggest town in Scotland and will tell you so, because what it really wants is to be a city. It's bid. It's lost. It lost City of Culture to Coventry, which takes some doing. The Abbey and the town hall are magnificent. The High Street between them is vape shops and To Let signs, and the banks have mostly cleared off.

It's wet, even for the west. It rains on 174 days a year. Anti-social behaviour runs at 1.7 times the typical Scottish town's rate and shot up again last year, and the sewage spills come in at more than twice the typical town's. It's the crappest town in Renfrewshire, and Renfrew is right next door.

Paisley's gift to the world is the snail in the bottle of ginger beer in a café in 1928, which ended up in every law book going. A dead snail. That's the legacy. The locals are Buddies, not Glaswegians, thank you, and Greenock have other words for them.

The editor, who checked his ginger beer for snails