10 of the best '10 things that changed my life' answers

MY library card was absolutely crucial. I loved visiting Irvine Library. Books have given me so much. They give you a sense of perspective, they give you a sense of escapism, relaxation. But they are a window to the world.

They take you to countries you have never been to, to periods of history that you have never experienced, they open your eyes to backgrounds and lives that you have never had yourself.

There is joy and education too. Everything. There were always books around when I grew up. Enid Blyton was probably one of the most formative figures of my early life. She gave me my love of reading. She was my first experience of being engrossed in a story, of being taken away from whatever reality was going on around me.

Favourite authors or books? I struggle to name one in terms of authors but I always say when asked that Sunset Song is my favourite book.

I very, very rarely re-read books because I feel there are so many books out there. I have a pile of books the height of me to read. And any time I go online or open a newspaper I see more books I want to read so I am making an exception and I am re-reading all the Muriel Spark books in that lovely Polygon series.

When Philip Roth died, I realised I had not read much of his work so I have been reading him, which I have mixed views on.

I am not a connoisseur of music but I sometimes stick it on to clear my head. Duran Duran and Wham, that kind of stuff. I picked them for Desert Island Discs, for goodness sake.

Jackie Kay - Being Adopted

THAT changed my life literally. You could say it in a glib way but I mean it in a deadly serious way, because if I had been brought up in an orphanage I don’t know if I would have been a writer. I don’t know what I would have been like. I could have been brought up by my birth mother or birth father or in any number of adopted families, or been adopted by Tories!

Even though I am not a believer in God I believe in fate to some extent. I believe I was meant to be adopted by John and Helen Kay (pictured above) and brought up by them. My experience of being adopted and the love that I was given, and gave back, has been life-defining.

I think that what defines us most is love. We talk about the different ways of people getting their identity but one of the most crucial ways is feeling loved.

My mum is now 88 and told me recently that she is closer to me than if she had given birth to me herself. When you are adopted and have that kind of closeness, it’s like having double the riches. We are aware all the time that we were thrown together by chance.

It was a chance remark that changed my life: as she was leaving the adoption agency, my mum happened to say: “By the way, we don’t mind what colour the child is.”

Liz Lochhead - Glasgow School of Art

FROM the age of 15 I was so desperate to go there I thought I would never get in, and indeed the first time I applied, at 17, was turned down. Wept in my bedroom in the huff with life for three days, refusing food or to go back to school for a sixth year. Eventually was accepted for a one-year pre-diploma course. So the seeming catastrophe of rejection in the end gave me an extra year. I was there from 1965 to 1970.

Art school in the 60s was the place to be for all sorts of creative people, some of whom maybe arrived passionately wanting, as I did, to be a painter but ended up in a band, or acting. It was the place I started to write poems. Being an awkward bizzum, all too soon I would be writing things down the side of the drawings in my sketch book, finding the words were making better pictures.

It was also the place where I first had male friends. It was so brilliant to have real pals of both sexes. Equals. Interested in exactly the same things. A core of three or four of these contemporaries are still among my lifelong closest friends. There’s nothing like folk you’ve known that long. Well, they know where the bodies are buried … The physical building that is – it would break my heart to say was -- the Glasgow School of Art, at the time I took it for granted. A beautiful place to work in that really worked. Only after I left did I fully appreciated its revolutionary iconic status.

Ah well, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. Tragic for Glasgow and for the world, that second utterly devastating fire last year, just when the restoration of the library was almost complete. We need to know how the hell it could possibly have burned down twice in four years.

Professor Sue Black - Kosovo

THIS was a huge change because up until that point every case I had done was a single case. When I went out I did not know what I was going out to. I had watched the news and knew there were mass fatalities and I knew the UN was out there to recover remains and needed forensic teams to collect evidence so they could take cases to court, but until I experienced it I did not know what it meant to go out and work in that environment. The first crime scene was an outhouse where 44 men, aged 14-85, had been shot. The outhouse had then been burned and the bodies had been used as a food source for packs of dogs. So there were badly burnt, decomposing remains all piled on top of each other and we first had to identify what was a person, then who that person might have been.

This was to show that those being murdered were not combatants and that this was genocide.

At the first scene there were no women but later we came across women and children assassinated by Serbian militia. We worked in blistering heat in plastic wellies and suits for 12 hours a day.

It was exhausting but we were determined to do the work with integrity and the standards we would use at home.

It was a life changing experience I would not trade as it reminded me of what is important in life.

Who cares if your car has a scratch when these people lost everything – their families, homes, possessions and dignity. It was a real moment of humanitarian awakening and definitely changed my perspective of how I live my life.

Shirley Manson - Goodbye Mr Mackenzie

OBVIOUSLY being a part of Goodbye Mr Mackenzie was monumental for me, but I happened to join a band that was so interesting in the way it approached the world. Martin Metcalfe, and all the members actually, were really irreverent and rebellious, but they had a lot of moral courage and moral conviction.

That taught me so much about how to hold myself together when I was under a lot of duress. With a level of success there comes a lot of attention. That might have been harder to handle without the lessons learned from everyone in the band.

Also, travel was something introduced into my life by being in my band. The members of Goodbye Mr Mackenzie were the first people I had actually travelled with and it became this enormous adventure. I learned so much and continue to learn so much from travel.

Seeing other philosophies, different ways of thinking and other ways of life, has been the greatest privilege of my entire life.

I still refer back to lessons that I learned with Goodbye Mr Mackenzie today. Also, it was a proper band. It functioned as a complete unit and that’s something that a lot of young bands don’t seem to understand. If you don’t function as a unit, you’re f*****.

Donald MacLeod – The Cathouse

AROUND 1989 things were going badly with the band.After the show the promoter, Tam Coyle, who was booking the bands, suggested I should start my own rock club. He then introduced me to the owner and we did a deal then and there - I would start a rock club in two weeks’ time and I would keep the door money and he would keep the bar take. Afterwards when we driving back in the van and the band laughed and said ‘what do you know about doing something like that?’. Truth was I didn’t know too much about running a club, but what I did know was to be enough.

The first thing was to give it a name and I liked the name of a rock club in LA called the Cathouse, so I thought I would start a Bathgate version. I then designed a logo, printed the posters and went around in my Skoda sticking up posters in every wee town in West Lothian.

Two weeks later I turned up with the band, shitting myself, and couldn’t believe my eyes as there was a queue right up the street. Happy Days!

After eight successful months I started looking for venues in Glasgow.

We eventually found a skanky three floored dive called Hollywood Studios on the Clydeside, known then as The Fight Club, due to the amount of gang battles and violence that would erupt every weekend.

We agreed terms with the shady owners and a Thursday night Cathouse was started. Within three years we had the lease and were operating on three levels, the success of which was to lead to opening The Garage, the Shed, the Cube, Underworld and reviving The Tunnel.

Jane McGarry – Still Game at the Hydro

SOME of the stuff in the show was just genius. We were on a cruise ship, me and Navid had a lovely story line where we ended up like the famous Titanic film scene. At that point everybody was screaming and we could not speak for 10 minutes because of the noise. The energy that gives you is like nothing I’ve ever experienced before in my entire life. I was as high as a kite. I could not sleep and used to go out running when the show finished as I was so high.

I remember looking out at all the people and thinking I would start to live my life properly. I decided I was going to do all the things I had always said I was going to do and I have. I started saying no to things I never said no to before and that has given me space to say yes to the things I want to do.

Looking out at that audience of 12,000 people changed my life. I don’t really know why – I think it was all the energy I got back. I looked out and thought ‘what am I waiting on?’

Denise Mina – Mishearing a nun

I WAS on a retreat in the 1970s and we had to write down something you liked about another person and then talk about it. I thought the nun said I was very graceful and I could not believe it as I was a fat wee girl and thought I was very clumsy. She said when I walked into a room I just lit it up and went on at some length like that and it just blew me away. It changed my view of myself and opened up worlds that I didn’t think were open to a fat wee lassie. At the end of that retreat we took the sheets of paper away with us. I found mine years later and saw that she had written that I was cheerful so I can’t thank her enough for having poor diction.

AL Kennedy – Being aware of media agendas

THERE’S a point where you discover there is a mismatch between reality and what you read in the papers. You go on a demonstration with lots of people but in the media there are suddenly only eight and they’re actually queuing for chips.

I spoke at the G20 protests and there was a point where we were all squeezed in and there was a field on the left and a fence. All the TV cameras were set up to film there because if there was a riot that would be where. Then we were suddenly seeing cops who had no numbers. There was a riot. And I encountered Guardian journalist who described it gleefully as tasty – weird. It was a distraction from why we were there which was to draw attention to the poor of the world.

While you have to avoid being paranoid, you do have to think ‘what is the agenda here in this paper or this TV channel?’ If it is making you emotional, constantly nudging you towards addictive outrage, you have to think about why it is doing that.

Emeli Sande – My piano

UNIVERSITY meant leaving home for the first time and living in student halls. One thing I was really missing was playing piano every day.

When I was visiting home, I told my parents how much I was missing it, so they and my boyfriend at the time got together and bought me a MIDI keyboard. In my rooms at the halls of residence, I could put on the headphones on, play the keyboard and almost feel like I was at home again. The keyboard was amazing of course, but what was more important was the fact that they had all put their money together – and these things aren’t cheap – to get it for me. That’s what meant so much.