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  • Forgetting, remembering…and fighting the cuts, one bottle of long-life milk at a time

    As spring starts to wink knowingly at us, I’m heading south for a bit Here’s my weekly newsletter/audioletter. Read it, listen on Mixcloud or hear it as a show on 60 North Radio, 7-8pm on Fridays. The playlist and Mixcloud link are at the end of the text . Spring has been tentatively peeking through…

  • Samuel Pepys and the Massacre of Ronas Voe

    A ruined house, a Shetland holiday cottage and the grave of 300 Dutch sailors and soldiers. British war crimes in Shetland 350 years ago. And 12 songs to go. The audioletter for 10 February 2022. Listen to it read with 12 half-decent intervening tunes (Big Dish, PJ Moore, Richard Thompson, Jenny Lewis, Beth Orton, Sharon…

  • Burnin' love: Up Helly Aa returns and embraces its feminine side

    Shetland’s biggest viking fire festival is back after three years It’s Up Helly Aa day, and here’s this week’s viking-themed newsletter – the (highly recommended) audio version (link here and with playlist at the end) contains an hour’s worth of tracks specially chosen for Up Helly Aa, including Michael Marra’s tribute to the late Thomas…

  • After Eight: mints or…mince?

    Those aspirational slivers of minty luxury conjure up some memories. And music! You can read the newsletter or listen to it, interspersed with 15 tracks (playlist below, and link to the Mixcloud stream) plus some vintage adverts. From Lola in Slacks to Lindsey Black via the Roches, Yvonne Lyon, Linda Thomson and more. After Eight…

  • It's gym, life, but not as we know it…

    The awfulness of exercise, past and present, with 15 tracks of noisy music to go The audio column. Music with words. A diary with optional noise. This week, it’s mostly to do with gym. As in gymnasiums. With a sonic bias towards garage rock. 15 tracks, some louder than others. Have a read. Or take…

  • The long and short of shorts

    Winter male legs are being unwisely displayed It’s Bad January in Ayrshire, cold and brutal blasts of Arctic near-gale are gusting through my triple-fleeced Swedish Goretex jacket, Shetland wool gansie, insulated gloves, jeans and Patagonia long johns. In front of me on the prom is a middle aged man wearing shorts. The only notable thing…

  • Troon, my rock-'n'-roll city of South Ayrshire…sort of…

    The bands I never saw. And some I did. As an experiment, I read the following text in what I hope is a convincing and meaningful manner on the hour-long Mixcloud show you can stream from the link at the end. Songs by most of the artists mentioned are played: Dean Ford and the Gaylords,…

  • Mayflies

    On screen or in print, it’s a work of tremendous power I read Andrew O’Hagan’s Mayflies when it was first published, and wrote the piece reproduced below. It and much else is at http://www.thebeatcroft.com. Oddly enough, I now find myself in our wee Ayrshire flat, round the corner from where chunks of the BBC’s TV…

  • Christmas: the birth of humanism?

    O Come, All Ye Unfaithful… Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.) Walt Whitman, Song of Myself 51 A humanist funeral in Christmas week, and we are singing hymns and praying.  Not capital H Humanist, approved by the official societies of stern secularism. We humans are…

  • Snow, Mr Tumnus, Leon Trotsky, a Toyota Hilux. And more snow.

    On day four without power: a reflection on snow, Shetland and survival I have always loved snow, and as a child I longed to be stranded by it, preferably somewhere warm and fully equipped with crispy bacon sandwiches and chocolate. At Christmas. This was the fault of two writers, CS Lewis and Arthur Ransome. In…