March 2025

  • Archie’s guitar, a leap of faith and a whole heap of folk songs

    For sale: a beautiful instrument with a heap of history. A leap of faith, an hour of folk songs to listen to, and some news of Dick Gaughan You can listen to me reading the text by clicking the wee arrow below. Spotify and Mixcloud music links, and the epic song Archie’s Leap, follow towards…

  • Here comes the light

    Equilux to Equinox, and the race to the simmer dim is on. Some thoughts and an appropriate playlist. Sometimes we prefer the darkness, though… (You can listen to me reading what follows, if you like, by clicking the wee arrow above…the full Spotify ‘Here comes the Light’ playlist is at the end of the text…

  • Dicing with dental decay

    It’s five years since the global pandemic was first declared. And dentistry basically stopped. The first Scottish lockdown was declared on 26 March 2020. I was freshly back in Shetland after a trip to the Granite Noir book festival in Aberdeen, and spent the first few days in isolation at our cottage in Heylor, Northmavine.…

  • La Ballade Du Ronflement (The Snoring Song)

    For all those in the battle for undisturbed slumber… She said it’s not that I don’t love you any more We’re eternally united at the core I still have romantic feelings But plaster’s falling from the ceiling I don’t find you boring It’s the snoring Your nasal passages are constricted My sleep is terribly restricted…

  • Writing the book on bleak

    March enters with some brutally blustery dreichness…but there’s music to rejoice in Shetland has been glowering at me this week, dreich and bleak and blustery, the tides high enough to bring the sea spluttering into the garden, rusting the cars ever more thoroughly, leaving seaweed in the porch and beach stones on bonnets. No smashed…