MIDWAY through viewing the BBC Two documentary The Trial of Alex Salmond,
WHO knows what the future holds. As I write the news suggests we are in a proper pickle. Towns are flooded and many homes and businesses are ruined beyond repair. Coronavirus is sweeping the globe, infecting tens of thousands, killing hundreds and bringing travel to a standstill.
As an indication of how well Liam Boyce has transitioned from Burton Albion to Hearts, the striker has acknowledged finding temporary accommodation that allow dogs had been his biggest challenge.
THE past, as we are regularly reminded, is a foreign country where things are done differently. Meanwhile, the distant past, the past far beyond living memory, is not so much foreign as ungraspable. This is how Scotland of 700 ago seems to me.
A FEW months ago Bob Dylan celebrated his 78th birthday. For anyone who has followed his career from its efflorescence in the 1960s that should come as no revelation, but it surely does to those of us who heard Forever Young when it was first released in 1974 and were deluded into believing that would be our destiny.
ONE of the most endearing traits of the English is their tolerance – celebration is perhaps a more accurate word – of eccentrics. This goes a long way to explain the inexorable, ineffable rise of Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson in the face of odds that would daunt even the most optimistic punter.
"WHERE the hell have you been?” Joseph Heller sounded tetchy, like a man whose date has turned up a couple of hours late.
GORDON Brown and I are near contemporaries. He was born in 1951; I came along a year later. We share similar upbringings and backgrounds. We were both raised in the east of Scotland — he in Fife, me in the Lothians – at a time when coal mining was still a viable and dominant industry. Our education was state-based and the role of the Church of Scotland was formative. Brown’s father was a minister while mine was a kirk elder and a leader in the Life Boys, membership of which I tend now to think was of critical importance in my formation.
PLOUGHING my way through this, the 600-page, sixth volume of Alasdair Campbell’s diaries, I fell to wondering how, half a century hence, the story it tells will be viewed by historians. Certainly, for the Labour Party, which had been in government eight years when Campbell makes his first entry, it was the worst of times.
WHEN I was in my teens and didn’t know any better I dreamed of writing crime novels. I started one. The sleuth was a middle-aged milkman who as he did his early morning round stumbled across a body, as dog walkers tend to do nowadays. My milkman, let’s call him Ernie, was as smart as Poirot and as hardbitten as Marlowe. Through the litter-free streets of leafy suburbia Ernie – the creme de la creme of his profession – would trundle in his cart, telling witnesses and suspects they’d better not bottle things or else. He had his eye on a housewife called Ethel who, in her floral Terylene apron and fuscia-coloured brothel creepers, was the local femme fatale. I could go on but even I could see that having a milkman as a hero was stretching credulity. It was at that point I decided to become the new Dylan Thomas.
