Or, me on about memory again, and not really football. First, a bit of football history context. In the late 70s and early 80s, the so-called "New Firm" of Aberdeen and Dundee United briefly upset the traditional domination of the Scottish game by the Glasgow "Old Firm" of Rangers and Celtic. The reasons for this … Continue reading The boy in the crowd
Alasdair Gray lived - and wrote and drew and painted - in the hope of seeing Scotland once again become an independent nation. There's a grim symmetry in that he died at the very end of a decade which had come so close to seeing just that, and on the cusp of a new one … Continue reading Alasdair Gray 1934 – 2019
The river is tidal for many miles upstream, and the current strong. To an observer on the southern shore the island midway across the estuary’s breadth is deceptively close. You might think you could swim to it, and explore undisturbed its unpeopled expanse. But whatever anecdote your reaching the island inspired, the journey back would … Continue reading Firth of Tay
Something a bit different. I go for cycles more than I do walks, and the back roads of East- and Midlothian are my usual haunts. I've explored some of the old coal mining region in a previous post. A ride on a road bike is necessarily restricted to roads, because you can't branch off onto … Continue reading Esk Valley & Moorfoots: a ride
"The landscape matters first and last for its own sake. It owes us nothing, yet it offers immeasurable rewards to those who revere it." April saw the publication of the third of Jim Crumley's seasonal nature studies. Following Autumn and Winter, we now have The Nature of Spring. Crumley is a well-established name in nature … Continue reading The Nature Writing of Jim Crumley
I once made a mixtape for Kathleen Jamie. Two, in fact. In my first year at University, Kathleen Jamie was the writer-in-residence. For the weekly writers' group meetings, her and three students (I was one) decamped from her office on Dundee's Nethergate to a nearby café or pub to rant about the Tory government of … Continue reading ‘How the world sustains’: Kathleen Jamie
"No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe" wrote Donne. Well, Mike Tomkies tried his damnedest. Tomkies's books sold in their thousands in the 1980s, but in today's Nature Writing Revival he is nowhere to be found. Both my Dad and cousin Colin (with whom I went birdwatching in my teens, chugging around Fife … Continue reading Mike Tomkies: Wilderness(e) man
"Collieries where a thousand men had laboured for a hundred years became silent fields around a concrete shaft-cap." Neal Ascherson, Stone Voices I've lived in Midlothian for 13 years. The visual signifiers of the county's industrial heritage are largely gone: demolished or overgrown. It wasn't just coal: shorelines on either bank of the Forth once … Continue reading King Coal’s Graveyard: a walk in Midlothian mining country
They're building houses on the field. Not in the field: the field has gone. On it, on the site that it once occupied. For a hundred years, it was a field. Before that, common land perhaps, before the village spread up the hill to encompass it. I don't know. The developers haven't grubbed up hedges … Continue reading A blank space filled
Visitors flocking to the sleek new V&A in Dundee who opt to explore the city further may, depending on the childhood they had, be bemused by the statues in the city centre. A stout cowboy, striding along the Nethergate and hauling a recalcitrant bulldog, is about to be ambushed by a catapult-wielding adolescent girl. A … Continue reading Here Comes A’body
Into the Gyre 