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Cars, boats, coffee, golf, music and more boats This week: Car problems Caffeine starvation The horrid moneyed elitism of tournament golf Full blow-by-blow account of my tortured night aboard ship from Aberdeen to Lerwick (unedited version of the Shetland Times column) News of the Tall Ships Race coverage Playlist and Mixcloud link for the Beatcrofting…

Troon, Banksy, a song about banjos, A bargain lunch and the Beatcrofting show as usual It’s my last day in Troon on a visit constrained by travel and locum issues. Susan has had to go back home early to sort out medical cover for her GP practice, and we had limited time in That Scotland…

Eating your way through loss Bereavement removes appetite, and yet provokes condolences in the form of gifted food. Friends and neighbours murmur their sorrow, and bring soup, bannocks, stews. Nothing frivolous, sustaining fuel for the empty days and often nights. Oatcakes. Flapjacks. Everyone needs something sweet. Rhubarb and custard pie, as made by Sue Lawrence…

…and the latest Beatcrofting music show on Mixcloud In 1969, Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, a Swiss psychiatrist, published her book On Death and Dying, which introduced the concept of The Five Stages of Grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. There has since been a lot of debate over the accuracy and limitations of her diagnosis.…

Music from The Bible to The Tumbling Souls, via Aztec Camera As heard on 60 North Radio, 7-8pm Fridays. Archived there but streaming too on Mixcloud now. Of all the tracks played here, it’s Neil Finn’s She Will Have Her Way that I keep coming back to. That and Roddy Frame’s We Could Send Letters.…

…and let’s face it, hardly anyone’s interested in. Stuff I’ve been consuming this week After less than the first chapter, I realised I couldn’t bear to re-read Derek Raymond’s influential and epically murky crime novel I Was Dora Suarez. The repulsion it evokes – which apparently made Raymond’s publisher vomit at his desk and drop…

Shetland simmers in the simmer dim  Cool tunes for a boiling day on the Old Rock. On 60 North Radio between 7 and 8 on Friday, archived thereafter and streaming now on Mixcloud: https://www.mixcloud.com/tom-morton2/beatcrofting-with-tom-morton/ It’s been hot in Shetland this week. Hotter than ever before, with temperatures in Unst apparently reaching over 27 degrees on…

Pylons to wind turbines. From joy and awe to fear and horror Pylons. When I was a wee boy, bouncing unsecured in the back of my dad’s old Wolseley (those endless holiday journeys, baby Ruth sleeping on the rear parcel shelf) we would sometimes play spot-the-pylon. Extra points for especially gigantic ones, soaring Meccano-istic structures…

…and oh, how the girls flocked to hear those Wishbone Ash, Uriah Heep and Groundhogs albums… Marr College, Troon, early 1970s: if you were into music, the thing was to ostentatiously (yet also somehow displaying a certain coolness) bring an album to school, holding it with one hand under your shoulder as a kind of…

(In fact, sociably reclusive or reclusively sociable) As usual, the playlist below is available to listen to as a show on 60 North Radio (Fridays, 7-8pm) and on Mixcloud (link follows). The choice of songs this week has a sneaky tip of the hat to one Bruce Springsteen, who performed in Edinburgh to 50,000 or…