POINT OF VIEW The Nail Artist

By Becki Menzies The Client

“You’re the first person to hold my hand”. It’s a sentence that will stay with me forever.

My career in the nail industry started in March 2020, just as the country entered the first lockdown of the pandemic. Lucky me! For a few months, painting nails was my only real escape from the noise of the news and the lack of private space in my flatshare.

When I started working in a salon, we were one of the first and only places to reopen as the lockdown eased in summer 2020. I’d gone from my bubble of four, to seeing five or six different clients a day. That’s when someone told me I was the first person to hold their hand.

For some of the people I met in those first appointments, those who lived alone, I was quite literally the only person allowed to touch them. For others, coming from flatshares or busy families, their two hours with me was the only time they had to themselves. I felt privileged to be able to give people a space in which they could be comfortable and safe.

I’ve always found the process of doing someone’s nails an intimate one. There’s the trust that people give me to create a little piece of art on their hands, taking care of their nail health and their openness with me about their lives. What’s said to your nail artist, stays with your nail artist.

Us nail artists don’t just do nails. We’re there for our clients for the big and small life events – relationships, breakups, fallouts, new jobs, new homes, day-to-day stress, the good news, and the bad. I see some of my clients more than I see my own pals.

I’ve only ever been a nail artist in a crisis. First the pandemic, now the cost of living crisis. I share my clients' worries and anxieties, but we right the wrongs of the world at our appointments. They inspire me, and I look forward to our wee catch ups every month.

That’s not to say it doesn’t take its toll. People often joke about hairdressers and beauticians being therapists, but in many ways we are. Working in the pandemic was hard and taking on people’s anxieties whilst dealing with my own, was no easy task. It’s an emotionally and physically demanding job. Burnout is common, and we’re the worst at looking after ourselves – ironically. But I wouldn’t change it.

I didn’t expect to fall in love with being a nail artist the way that I have. I get to wake up and spend the day creating tiny pieces of art, and every day there’s a new story to tell. I’ll forever be grateful to my clients, past and present, for supporting this nail artist in a crisis.

By Helen Stewart

I’m sure that many people think paying to have your nails done once a month is a frivolous and unnecessary expense. Not to sound overdramatic, but I consider it a necessity. When money is tight, I’ll cut out everything superfluous to survive, but my nails don’t fit that category.

I have three young children, with only a 14 month gap between the two youngest. I’ve been on maternity leave back-to-back for two years – during and immediately after a pandemic. One of my children is disabled. For me, getting my nails done constitutes so much more than making them look nice – though I do love having pretty nails – and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.

When I sit in the chair in Becki’s nail studio I feel an instant sense of relief. It is escapism. Her studio is serene; there are no nursery rhymes on the TV or building blocks tripping me up on the floor. I can pause the continual mental to-do list that I internally refer to every 30 seconds.

She gifts me two hours, just for me. That probably sounds inconsequential, but without these little pockets of joy to look forward to, it can be hard to survive the monotonous days, weeks, and months. Sometimes Becki is the only other adult I’ve spoken to for some time. I’m sure that’s obvious to her, since I start offloading every single thought I’ve had in the past month as soon as she reaches for the hand sanitiser.

We talk about everything and anything, from the latest cute achievements of one of my babies to our current sources of existential dread courtesy of the news headlines. Becki is more than just a nail artist – she’s a great listener and friend. And my two-hour holiday to see her is often the reminder I so desperately need that I am more than just a mum.

I usually stumble out of the door in the mornings, laden with school bags and wriggling children, without even having the time to think about my own appearance. It might have been four days since I last washed my hair and weeks since I’ve worn any mascara, but at least my nails always look lovely. So, I can’t look entirely bedraggled, right?

Maybe it is selfish of me to spend the money on my nails, but it makes me happy, and I need and deserve that.

Have you ever noticed just how many bookies there are on Victoria Road –and how this compares to other areas of the city? In this multi-part feature, we explore what impact this may have on the health of our community.

By Jack Howse | Illustrations by Rachael Procter

ext time you walk down your local high street, count how many bookies you see. Once you start noticing them, you will see they are everywhere, particularly if you live in one of the less affluent neighbourhoods, like Govanhill.

In fact, the number of bookies nationally is huge. In 2020, the Gambling Commission reported that there were over 10,000 premises in Britain – more than the number of stores run by the eight largest supermarket chains in the country. The numbers are even starker here in Glasgow. It has more bookies per person than any city in the UK with one betting shop for every 3,200 people. As people shift their spending habits online, and shops close down, we frequently hear about the death of the high street, so why are there still such a large number of betting shops on our high streets, especially considering how easy it is to place a bet online these days?

Gerda Reith is a sociologist of gambling, addiction and consumption at the University of Glasgow and has considered this very question in her research. “Bookies have been a part of communities for a long time, and it’s a kind of cultural habit,” she told us. “There's not actually many community spaces where people can go, whereas a betting shop does offer that. It's somewhere to go in, to hang around to speak to people… when there's not very many public spaces where you can go, these venues are public spaces”.

However, the number of betting shops is only half the picture – the geography of betting shops is even starker when mapped against the Scottish Multiple Deprivation Index. Forty-two percent of Glasgow’s betting shops are in the most deprived fifth of the city. In contrast, just twoand-a-half percent can be found in the most affluent fifth. That’s nearly seventeen times less.

This, of course, has an impact on gambling addiction in these areas. According to Gerda’s research, those living in the most deprived areas are over five times more likely to experience gambling harms than those living in the least deprived. Gambling harms can be defined as ‘adverse impacts on the health and wellbeing of individuals, families, communities and society’.

Faced with these sobering statistics, we wanted to map the spread of gambling premises here in Govanhill. The results are pretty shocking. We found that in Govanhill, there are six bookmakers – four on Victoria Road, one on Cathcart Road and one on Aikenhead Road. If we take the population as approximately 15,000, this works out at about one bookmaker for every 2,500 residents. In contrast, Byres Road, a high street in the city’s more affluent West End that is the same length as Victoria Road, has only one betting shop.

The statistic that there are more betting shops than big-chain supermarkets also holds true on Victoria Road; Sainsburys, Lidl and Tesco are the three places on Victoria Road to wrangle with a self-service checkout compared to the four stops to spin a digital roulette wheel. In fact there are more betting places than there are newsagents (3), pubs (3), pharmacies (2), and banks (1).

But the number of places you can put a bet doesn’t end with the bookies. There are the fruit machines inside pubs, the arcades and the lottery tickets and scratchcards on supermarket counters. If we count all these places, the number of places you can place a bet on Victoria Road more than doubles to eleven, with five of these being dedicated gambling premises – the four bookies and an amusement arcade.

As Gerda highlights, these spaces have become a place for people who might not have anywhere else to go. They’re warm, it doesn’t matter if you don’t know much English, you don’t have to be buying drinks and you can keep a low profile. Yet the proliferation of these spaces can lead to real harm and reduce health and wellbeing for people affected by addiction.

Over the next few pages, we explore how deep the problem is, how it affects different communities and what the solutions might be.

This multi-part featured is made possible by the Glasgow Gambling Harms Small Grant Fund led and supported through the Glasgow Council of Voluntary Services as part of a pathfinder project to support the delivery of the National Strategy to Reduce Gambling Harms in Scotland.

By Zanib