travel
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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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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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We feared curry. My parents were more than nervous; I was terrified. Mum’s wee brother had become a curry convert and we were following in his experimental footsteps up an aromatic stair to the Kashmir in Sauchiehall Street. This would have been the late 1960s and the only two restaurants in Glasgow I remember Uncle…
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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…
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“In a progress up-stream, moreover, memory is not inseparable. Memories gather about us, but against the current memory can be let go, and the stream will carry it away.” Eric Linklater, The Dark of Summer You can listen to me reading Southside (Slight Return) by clicking on the player below, or the text follows the…
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All come to look for America: Del Amitri and me You know The Sopranos title sequence? Tony’s trip from Manhattan to Newark on the New Jersey Turnpike, soundtracked by The Alabama 3? Thirty-nine years ago I was driving a hired splitter van at the start of a journey initially to Florida, then California and back…
