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The death of Danny Federici, keyboard player with the E Street Band, was announced last night. More details on the official Springsteen website. Malignant melanoma, which is rather too close to home for comfort. Not that any of them are likely to read this blog, but my thoughts are with his family and associates.

Only in Edinburgh: being woken at 2.00 am by the sound of someone playing tuned bongo drums outside the window. Well, it was Marchmont I suppose. The stem cell research event went well, I think. But it was only afterwards, in the marbled and oaken grandeur of the Scotsman Hotel, that the real science fiction…

Found myself having dinnner last night at The Grain Store in Edinburgh’s Victoria Street – very good, but it wasn’t until we adjourned to the Bow Bar opposite that we realised what all the paparazzi kerfuffle in the street had been about. Seems Kate Moss had been in town with her boyfriend, who is the…

I had the privilege on Sunday to be the first performer at The Stables, part of the Inn at Lathones in Fife (near St Andrews on the Kirkcaldy road). David Mundell, formerly of the Beinn Inn at Glenfarg, is now booking acts for the Inn and he has some great people coming. Have a look…

Much discussion today about comic freebies…my thanks to David Livingstone for this illustration, and to Sandy Taylor for instructions on how to make a Thunderbang: “Tom. For goodness sake (as you would say). You cut a square of card. Cut a triangle of brown paper to cover half of the card from opposite corners and…

Renting a holiday flat in Glasgow for a week, sight unseen, over the internet, has proved mostly successful – it’s comfortable, clean, plenty of room for Martha and Susan (James is, ahem, ski-ing in Italy with the school; beats a week at Abington Army Camp in my young day). But there’s no broadband, and despite…

“No-one loves a seagull”. So said Doug Johnstone the other day on the Radio Cafe, describing a scene in his latest, excellent book, The Ossians. The scene in question is set on the North Pier of Aberdeen. Here are three that escaped. The other two pictures show two churches, immediately opposite one another. One, like…

Last week on the show I asked listeners to send in their synonyms for ‘being drunk’. The idea was to turn the various terms into a poem which will feature in the Malt and Barley Revue (premieres on April 12th and 13th at the Glenfarg Hotel and the Inn at Lathones). So, here we have…

James, Martha and myself took advantage of the breezy brightness to go and check the Geocache we look after – Another Fine Ness, it’s called, if you’re into Global Positioning as it relates to treasure hunting.Imagine our astonishment to find that the cache had been visited in the dreadful weather of last Sunday (it’s an…

Took Lulu the St Bernard out for a walk this morning up at the Eshaness cliffs. Ronnie was out checking his creels – that’s his boat – and while it was glorious to the west (Foula can be seen, glinting in the distance) more snow showers were coming in from the north, and Ronnie was…