Email mountain is down to c.1900. Nothing pre-Cambrian exists in the inbox. Some still to be marked as read, some subscriptions to be deleted. Audible trying to tempt a return, bloody Emma Bridgewater making more gorgeous stuff, dammit, and ironically, the Stoic guy’s newsletter which I skim-read, nod along to and return to my merry non-Stoical ways. Consistent at least. During the mind-numbing, sometimes poignant, process of ridding the past,...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002zljp/monster ‘What is truth?’ Pontius Pilot is alleged to have asked this kind of question before passing judgement. It may have seemed to him a sensible thing to do. For Judeans that was passing the bronze prutah. An institutional washing of the hands that predated Moses. Monster has a tripartite structure. It looks through the lens of the story from different points of view. Saori Mugino (Sakura Andō...

After the early bird raid on the Huntly Hairst, went to that liminal of places, Leith Hall, to meet a cousin for tea and walk the gardens. Was too early, so walked to the pond thinking of chi gunging the pine forest as I used to of a Saturday morning when there was nobody around. Was horrified to find the ancient pine trees had been felled. All of them. The soil scarred by the machinery that had burst through it all. Ravaging the forest. The air...

Most career criminals live in grey areas and not the eternal sunshine of the superwealthy. Some of us may know them. Paul Tait for example came out as The Bad Guru and offers redemption. I knew he indirectly bought and ran with his brother many legitimate businesses in Clydebank, such as The Horse and Barge. A Celtic pub. What interested me more from an authorial perspective were his links with the IRA and his ability to flit from country to...

Wasn’t intending to go to the Huntly Hairst (Harvest) this year, as it started to appear on the list of ‘things-I-can’t-be-arsed-with-anymore’. The same stalls of oils, honeys, teas, soaps, terrible crafts by people who really should take up crosswords instead of spreading ugliness in the world, and home-made kombucha at a fiver a bottle, usually made by someone who looks like they haven’t washed. Angry wasps, angrier pensioners, parking sagas,...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0030qjb/tuesday Tuesday is a stupid film. I don’t mind stupid. Sometimes I welcome it. It makes me feel smarter. I didn’t really get it at first. Some kind of scene in which a grime-covered, size-shifting macaw who listens to hip-hop, lifts its wing and people are at peace? It took me a while to realise this was Death. The plot is identical to (I re-read it to make sure) to Duncan Williamson’s short story,...

"Invention... can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself." - Mary Shelley

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0030fhy/monkey-man There was a time in Holywood when men were men. They had to smoke like a steam engine leaving the station. Drink like there was no tomorrow and break enough hearts to keep the tabloids busy inventing new kinds of innuendo. Some of them were singers, crooners or dancers. They had to shoot straight and have the innate ability to gallop away on any old horse when needed. Which brings me to...

BPL was not amused. The whole point of having a Bus Pass was to avoid hiking anywhere. But a goal is a goal and while BPL could procrastinate for Scotland, she was also a stickler for a goal. It was in this stickleback frame of mind that BPL picked up Bus Pass, (who was moved to tears), donned stout walking shoes, and set off to find the shortest hike possible, preferably with a coffee shop somewhere en route. Thomas Hardy hike* seemed to fit...

Fahrenheit 451 (1953) was a political novel in much the same way as George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Ray Bradbury’s most well-known novel was incendiary. Brave even, when all around were losing their heads over the perceived threat of the red menace and McCarthyism stoked the flames in the mass media, and was rewarded by even more attention and status in the media McCarthyites fed stories to. You wonder what either writer would have made of the...