Blogs

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-handmaiden/on-demand/65950-001 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Handmaiden Park-Chan wook’s The Handmaiden won a couple of awards when it came out. Often I don’t watch films to the end. This grabbed me from the beginning. It had me thinking of Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire . A mesmerising take on life and art, or just life in general. That might have been the lesbian element. When it’s two...

Blue Nights, for Joan Didion, are that special time of year during the summer solstice and longest days between April and May where the wold is lit up by an eerie beauty. But she reminds the reader where she comes from, subtropical California, the Golden State, does not get Blue Light. It’s not Dylan Thomas’s refrain about not going gently into the night, nor rage, rage against the dying of the light, but a meditation on what it means to have...

Scotland are the team of glorious failure, epitomised by Archie Gemmill’s glorious goal against the Dutch in the World Cup in 1978. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=archie+gemmill+goal&iax=videos&ia=videos&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dq8K9MpSJ40U We were on the march with Ally’s army. England hadn’t qualified for either the 1974 or 1978 World Cups. These were the years when we were a match for England. Now it’s one-way...

Joan Didion sounds French but was, of course, from California. End of ‘a memoir’. Where I Was From is an interrogation of self and American society. It’s not so much as nature versus nurture. More a realisation of something universal. Like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, or when Rabbie Burns turns over mouse’s nest with his plough in a field in Ayr in November 1785. He penned a poem To A Mouse . Reality is sometimes too much and too tragic...

Ken Smith was born 28 th October 1947 in a small village in Derbyshire. He tells us he’s an ordinary bloke. No special powers. Offers no great spiritual insights. No great secrets of how to survive in the wilderness beyond being prepared. He describes himself as The Tramp of Treig. He follows a long tradition of wanting to live alone in an isolated spot of great natural beauty in the Scottish Highlands. He quotes Henry Thoreau: ‘Not till we have...

I like books like this. Hidden history doesn’t follow the kings and queens route. I’m biased in that way because those are not my people. Have little to do with what I know. James Crawford suggests we look and see. ‘Just how much of the past still lives with in the present. An invitation to explore the unexplored and make pilgrimage to the lost and overlooked. An invitation to ‘use the country itself, as its own map’ Our mind doesn’t need to put...