Scotland – The edge is everywhere
Post-pandemic, or ongoing pandemic? In any case, I finally got back to Scotland, where the mountains and sea meet, and the edge is everywhere.
Scotland
We often forget that we are nature. Nature is not something separate from us.
When we say that we have lost our connection to nature, we’ve lost our connection to ourselves.
Andy Goldsworthy
Shuggie Bain will break your heart – and put the pieces back together again
Last night I went to Malmö City Library, to my first indoor cultural event since December 2019. And fittingly, wonderfully, it was Douglas Stuart, talking about Shuggie Bain. As I have written elsewhere, this book is astonishing, a tour de force of love and despair. Acclaimed by critics, loved by readers, translated into a slew […]
Closed Sunday
The Sabbath is still taken very seriously on the isle of Lewis in the Western Isles. There may be Sunday ferry sailings, but not much else. Now I don’t care about not being able to shop one day a week, and I appreciate that if the swimming pool is open, then someone will have to […]
When I see one of these Free Church ministers on the street in Lewis, I feel like walking across the road and hitting him in the face.
Iain Crichton Smith
Aunt Julia
Aunt Julia spoke Gaelic very loud and very fast. I could not answer her — I could not understand her. She wore men’s boots when she wore any. — I can see her strong foot, stained with peat, paddling with the treadle of the spinningwheel while her right hand drew yarn marvellously out of the […]
Scotland will be free when the last Church of Scotland minister is strangled by the last copy of the Sunday Post.
Tom Nairn
Fish Face – Are you ready?
Very excited to present the latest comic in the – perhaps never-ending since jellyfish are the cockroaches of the oceans – killer jellyfish series. On sale at Zine Fest in Copenhagen on Saturday, 17, October 2015. Are you ready?