Uncategorized

Phew! Safely in Glasgow, after last night’s BBC Music Department (Popular Rock And Accordion Dept, Aberdeen HQ)party at Bistro Verde on the Green, one of my favourite Castle Greyskull eateries. Truly fantastic food, though the chilli prawns almost blew the top of my head off. Alas, I had to behave in a fairly abstemious manner,…

…Good grief, that was a bad one. Twelve hours of violent pitching, rolling, slamming, crunching and clanging on the way from Lerwick to Aberdeen aboard the good ship Hjaltland. It could have been a lot worse, and frankly, I expected it to be, what with all the warnings about taking care when moving about, switching…

Not a good forecast for tonight’s sailing to Aberdeen. Force seven, eight and occasionally nine, eight metre seas…and there’s no chickening out. I am Seasick Santa, ready to head south on a mission to IKEA, Drum Central, Sainsbury’s and to extract son Magnus from his student enclave, Yule celebrations for the purpose of. To which…

“No such thing as bad weather,” goes the Russian proverb (well, according to Mike Skinner it does)”only bad clothes.” I beg to differ. There are no clothes extant capable of making bearable some of the climactic conditions pertaining to Shetland over the past weeks. As I write it is 12.40 pm, and 40 minutes ago,…

I’ve been with the Bank of Scotland (Shetland outpost) ever since moving to the Neck of the Bog (for the first time – in 1987) and the Byres Road branch (Glasgow) of the Royal Bank bounced a cheque I’d made payable to a Lerwick clothes shop. In a small community like this, bounced cheques are…

All kinds of problems loading pictures to this blog, so the best thing to do is click on the TITLE of this post, and you will be taken to my FLICKR page of Belfast pictures. I’m back in Scotland (at the Speedbird Inn, Aberdeen Airport, which not only has free wifi but HDTV flatscreen tellies!)and…

Well, the ones at The Lemon Tree (not the arts centre and venue, the cafe at Aberdeen station) certainly aren’t. And I had a most peculiar bacon baguette, which I swear shrank by at least 25 per cent during its sojourn in some form of microwave oven. Still, they do reasonable coffee, which is the…

…and quite literally. The Starbucks in Aberdeen’s Bon Accord Centre is looking a bit down-at-heel these days, but one surely doesn’t expect large, aluminium-framed pictures to come thundering down on top of one’s cranberry-and-orange muffin? It crossed my mind that I could have staged something spectacular – bruising, stained trousers, ruined jumper, blood in the…

Phew, had trouble keeping the coffee in the cup on the flight from Sumburgh…then you get to Aberdeen and they make you walk approximately 12 miles from the aeroplane to the baggage carousel… Meanwhile, what’s your German name? I’m Holger Leonhard… Your German Name is: Holger Leonhard What’s Your German Name?

I was appalled by the way Jools Holland was given/provided himself with two spots to shamelessly plug his own new CD on ‘Later’ the other night. How much power does this man wield? Apparently sufficient to ride roughshod over every BBC producer’s guideline I know of. Allegedly, bands appearing on the show have begun insisting,…