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Includes Martin guitars, a Vauxhall Cresta and an Aston Martin DB5. Merry Christmas! I’m driving out to Heglibister in Weisdale to collect our Christmas Day oysters I’ve to be there at 2.30pm, by which time darkness will be creeping in round the edges, here beyond 60 degrees north. Even though the post-solstice light has already…

The Shetland Decapitations, episode one: Headfirst In the windswept Shetland Islands, people are losing their heads. A series of bizarre ritual murders sees eminent members of the community dismembered, their body parts left in embarrassing positions. While the energy company building the world’s biggest wind farm on the islands fights to stop the sabotage threatening…

Inhalation, exhalation and talking at the same time. Also: some Substack housekeeping. The Shetland decapitations are coming… If you’re looking for the first instalment of A Passing of Wind: The Shetland decapitations, a somewhat sidelong, fictional look at crime and detection in my home islands, that’ll arrive on Friday evening. Meanwhile, as I ponder the…

Spoilers, obviously. And on to space, the final frontier. Or possibly Unst Perhaps it wasn’t wise to come to Shetland fresh from binge-watching both The Day of the Jackal reboot (a pale shadow of the fantastic David Fincher/Michael Fassbender movie The Killer which it so obviously rips off) and the Netflix Santa’s-got-a-Kalashnikov series Black Doves…

An Ayrshire primary school in the 1960s. Miss MacNab (“M-A-C CAPITAL N”) had impressive arms, marbled and massive, like Popeye’s. Maybe she ate spinach every day. Dad had given me a spoonful once, dark green, almost black from a tin. It tasted of grass and earth. My biceps didn’t expand, as Popeye’s did in the…

It’s Shetland, Season 9, episode 5. Sort of. The red herrings are coming thick and fast now. So many I’m, uh, floundering. Actually, they’re not so much herrings as a mixture of anchovies, sardines and mildly magenta piltocks. The show has well and truly jumped the spoot, which I believe is a technical term within…

It’s Shetland, season 9, episode 4: Swede it and weep Here come the weepy Swedes! Oh yes, the Ingmar Bergman influence is writ large in this epic concerning the desperate search for dental care in an island community largely deprived thereof. But I’m getting ahead of myself here, and it’s time for yet another flashback,…

Sandy! Get the sassermaet clatch! Well, after a slick, streamlined and genuinely exciting opening, series nine of Death In Shetland has plummeted into complex daftness over the following two episodes like a gormless sheep falling down Calder’s Geo due to over indulgence in magic mushrooms; or a camera drone damaged by too-close a Bonxie encounter.…

…and lived in Scotland Rangers and Celtic meant nothing to him The choice here in Glasgow was stark He pretended to support Patrick Thistle He didn’t know Firhill from Fir Park He had no idea who managed Scotland No notion of the offside rule He thought David Beckham was a TV chef And that heading…

He doesn’t have the key and doesn’t know when to come in… I recently bought a banjo. A five-string, Countryman closed-back affair which for the last fortnight, I have been plunking and flailing on through the long dark night of the sofa, much to the consternation of Dec the dog. Well, I say ‘bought’. What…