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Well, I call it work.Home, cook the tea, try to make Garageband work on the Mac. Very nearly succeed. Resolve to try again. Have glass of wine and resolve not to. Interesting observation from Gerry, one of Susan’s oldest friends. Why do people fae sooth, like us, come to live in Shetland? Because, he says,…

Exciting times on the Bookcroft front. After closing Britain’s Most Northerly Second-hand Bookshop in September, following a reasonably successful summer season, I moved The Radiocroft broadcasting operation into one of the main bookshop areas. Now people have been asking when the shop is opening again, and COPE, a local social enterprise company has asked me…

Nine o’clock on Saturday morning, and I’m Glasgow’s Trongate, waiting for Drum Central to open. Thus began a hell-for-leather day of shopping, visiting, eating and attempting to pack an ever-increasing amount of stuff into a Renault Kangoo van. All of this culminated at IKEA with a gut-wrenching moment when Magnus and I thought the red…

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…