Going Downhill

The Times (sort of) Scotland edition is having a great week. Here Magnus Linklater lauds Fergus Ewing and reading the room with the sort of shrewd knowing gaze that you’d expect denounces the Short Term Let legislation as another epic blow to Scotland. The entire tourism industry is going to collapse if regulated. Poor Magnus […] Source

‘Jack’s Back’

‘Jack’s Back’ the Times tells us, with strong accidental Shining vibes … After more than a decade out of government, Jack McConnell is being touted for a return to the corridors of power as Sir Keir Starmer and the team around him start to map the structure of a future Labour administration at Westminster https://t.co/u9XnBKfpC7 […] Source

The Blade Runners

If you want a snapshot at just how crazy this society is, and just how polluted English political culture is, you’d do no better than to study the new phenomenon of the ‘Blade Runners’. The war on the environment has a new champion, masked vigilantes the so-called “blade runners”, who have been disabling Ulez cameras […] Source

Is the booming global appeal of whisky diluting its local traditions?

WANT some hard-nosed facts about Scottish success? The only UK export sector in manufactured goods that performed better than Scotch whisky in 2022 – which increased sales by 25% last year – is aircraft parts (27%). Whisky exports swelled from £4.51 billion in 2021 to more than £6bn in 2022. Source

Health update

I thought I should keep you all posted about what’s going on and why I’ve not been blogging this week. As regular readers may recall, my mother has been battling ocular cancer which resulted in her losing her left eye. Unfortunately, the cancer has now spread to her liver and we…

Seasons of the Witch/the Revolutionary Road

“Once Folk was dangerous – and still is.” ‘Folks Not Dead’ argues Grant McPhee as he opens our new TOP 20 series exploring Scottish Folk’s heyday and radical counter-culture roots and tendrils … At some point in the relatively short history of popular music, Folk became unfathomably unfashionable. This wasn’t proportional to other genres, such […] Source