Scotland
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Those were the days of miracles and wonder… Glasgow 1985, and it’s the Rock Garden in Queen Street, sometimes the Halt in Woodlands Road, the Fixx in Miller Street. All kinds of London record company characters are blowing in via the Holiday Inn to check out the action. The haircuts, the clothes, the drugs and…
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The fury of culturally-fleeced Shetland knitters. And two songs, loosely woven around the subject. Channel Four’s horrible attempt to turn knitting into a televisual bloodsport, Game of Wool, is subtitled ‘Britain’s best Knitter’. I can unequivocally say that there are technically better and more creative knitters than anyone on the show, including the judges, within…
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The rotting of whisky Out for an (excellent, but teetotal) meal the other week I looked speculatively at the hotel’s vast collection of single malt whiskies, many bottles nearly empty or half-empty. As many had been last time I visited two years ago. And I thought about how whisky is like petrol. There are different…
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Hmm…activities or substances that would be frowned upon, if not ruled completely lawless in Glasgow… …whence I have just travelled, if not travailed, arriving in the isles just as Storm Amy cancels all ferries and sends the supermarkets into bare-shelf meltdown. Not a sun-dried tomato to be had. Never mind. I have scoured Tesco for…
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A long stay in Glasgow, the Covid comeback that began it finally receding. It’s the curse that keeps on giving, this plague, isn’t it? Malevolent in its ever-changing variety of symptoms, this time including desperate wheezing and excruciating toothache, every morning a different molar. Inhaling Sensodyne didn’t help. And no free jags for pensioners under…
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I was thrilled to be asked by Cliff Hanley’s family to write an introduction to the republished Dancing in the Streets, which had an enormous influence on my life and career. And on many others I think, including the great Ian Jack. My foreword follows below. You can order the book (published by Birlinn) in…
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The three freemasons got on the Glasgow train at Reading, sat in front of us and immediately began talking, loudly about their Lodge and how one of them (young, frisky, wearing, of all things a Freemasonry sweat shirt) could progress through the various hierarchies of masonhood from Junior Deacon to Senior Deacon, Warden and everything…
