Uncategorized

All tracks from CD, vinyl or tape. Stuff I actually own. The full-length Bought, Begged and Stolen show goes out on Friday nights, on 60north.radio 7-9pm, available on the Shetland Webcams, through Radio Garden, the 60 North Radio smartphone app and various other high-tech facilities. It’s also streaming on Mixcloud now (link follows) and will…

Retrieving a stranded, ledge-bound lamb may come at too high a cost Sheep. There are a lot of them about here in Shetland. Around 150,000, it’s said, which makes six woolly gods per human inhabitant. Shetland is a rocky archipelago, Atlantic on one side, North Sea on the other, with over 1600 miles of indented,…

(Bruce Don’t Go) Darkness on the Edge of Morningside (Bruce Don’t Go) (Audio/video on YouTube here) Me and Stacey drank, Colin said he’d drive St James Park 1985 Furstenberg, Tennents, we thought we walked the darkness of Candy’s Hall Red wine and whisky Burgers, flags and tears One of those gigs that get you through…

Eight days and still it goes on. Restrictions beckon. A third of Scots have Covid, but that’s a guess, really. It’s hard to escape the feeling that getting tested is being made deliberately difficult, so that Governments can pretend normality has returned. If you have symptoms, stay at home and shut up and thole it.…

40 years ago, in a Whiteinch railway arch, we made a record… You can blame Liz Truss. I certainly do.  Her speech about the UK possibly sending warplanes to Ukraine threw a switch somewhere in my dodgily-wired head, and suddenly I was humming the elderly song that appears, with haphazard recent video, on YouTube if…

How can you provide invisible, practical help for those in need? “It’s 10 to eight; time now for Thought for the Day…” ALEXA! OFF! I detest the patronising, often glutinous, stale religious croissant that is Thought for the Day on BBC Radio Four’s otherwise unmissable Today Programme. As smartspeakers proliferate, there will eventually come a…

In which I finally fold and buy a Brompton I am 16 stones and 13 pounds in old money. Call it 107 kilogrammes. Oh, all right, 107 and a half kilogrammes. Yes, I am loosely (very casually) trying to lose weight, in imitation of my wife who has managed to shed three stones just by…

From Nevil Shute’s post-apocalypse novel to Alex Salmond on Russia Today There are childhood books that leave a mark, and books that scar you forever. Wolf Mankowitz’s novella Make me An Offer, encountered at the age of 12, left me obsessed with the Portland Vase and the seamier side of the antiques trade. Alistair MacLean’s…

Why I won’t risk falling over while conducting funerals or marriages It’s coming up for six years since I first began conducting funerals, mostly here in the Shetland Islands. Somewhere between 80 and 90, I think, the last in Unst, Shetland’s northernmost island, at the start of the year. These were mostly secular funerals, but…

“On the plane, you think you’re going to die; on the boat…you wish you were dead…” I’ve been remembering the old ships, the P&O vessels that used to sail between Aberdeen and Shetland come hell or the highest of winds. Battered old third or fourth-hand ro-ro ferries, rusty and rolling like buckets in the surf.…