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It was sunny when Lulu made her decorous entrance to the back garden and decided that yes, she remembered what this white stuff was, deep down in her genetic make-up…but it’s dark now (15.40) windy and freezing, as well as much more snowy. Susan didn’t make it into Lerwick – she gave up in a…
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…here’s the official announcement: Tom Morton to advise Council on communications HILLSWICK-based broadcaster and journalist Tom Morton is to advise Shetland Islands Council on its communications, as part of the Council’s ongoing improvement programme. The former Shetland Times and Scotsman reporter, who now hosts a weekday afternoon show on BBC Radio Scotland, will spend three…
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Taken from my 4th floor room at the old Caley hotel in Inverness, looking due west. I was in Inverness to be the after dinner entertainment at the Crofters Commission Assessors Conference. Jokes about Brian Taylor, Inverness food, Fred Macaulay, seasick vikings and Bob Bird, erstwhile News of the World editor and infamous wearer of…
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Aberdeen at night. What is this monstrosity, you may well ask, if you’re not au fait with shopping in the granite city? A car park? An alien spaceship of the most implacably warlike mien? Perhaps it’s one of those nanotech buildings described by William Gibson in the Bridge trilogy, or a nuke-proof governmental bunker? Wrong…
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I was in Eskdalemuir to see the writer Colin Betts about a possible publishing project. He lives, it’s safe it say, in the most isolated house I’ve ever visited, three miles from the nearest proper road, in the heart of Scottish Welsh Celtdom. To get there, you have to ford the Esk, right at its…
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It’s late, too late in the year to be on the peat hill at all. If I say that these peats are actually last year’s, belatedly bagged and howked home after a 12 month or more weathering on the moor, many will look askance at my right to wield a tushkar at all. As it…
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Susan is threatening to put my red sofa in the newly-converted-to-holiday-accommodation barn. I am, of course, fighting a rearguard action! Literally, as I have worn a depression in this settee which perfectly suits me. Though it is….rather difficult to extricate myself from… The red sofa has become my office, my bookshelf, my occasional dining room.…
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Alan Furst’s novels of WW2 and the years preceding are, on the whole, truly excellent. I thought I’d read them all, but for some reason missed Night Soldiers, which is unlike the rest of his books, being much bigger in scale: it covers Bulgarian fascism, Soviet NKVD recruitment and training (in too much detail) the…
