Category: Diary of a would be blogger
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Summer of love revisited in the shadow of Brexit
Ah, the summer of love. From this long distance it seems an age of rosy innocence. Then the 1967 timeline recollects the startling reality. What a year it was! To a soundtrack of the Beatles, a newsfeed of race riots across the US, death dropped daily on Vietnam. Somehow I just lost fifty years. Where did…
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Island on the Edge
It’s such a gloriously improbable tale. A young woman on the last day of her holiday on Skye spots an old croft house for sale in an estate agents window. What happens next is the stuff of dreams at the end of a hard working week.
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Old skool blogging
Bliss. Blogging in the sun, sitting outside with birds singing, bees humming, light breeze ruffling sea-shore sounds from the aspen leaves and only the distant hiss of hot tyres on the M90 across the fields reminding me that tiresome hustle and bustle goes on beyond Pond Cottage.
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RIP the quick brown fox
Ah, the typewriter. I’m sitting, hands on laptop keyboard, staring at the screen but my mind’s eye looks back to an old Royal machine in a long-ago newsroom where I sit, fingers poised above firm round buttons, piles of screwed up copy paper on the floor, staring into the middle distance, waiting for words.
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Mad hatter’s tea party at Balmoral
This is the hat that I did not wear to meet the Queen. I did not wear any other hat and I did not meet the Queen. But I got near. As a would-be republican I have not been flaunting the invitation but yesterday Ray and I went to our first Royal Garden Party at…
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Talk to the feet
Dear Diary (if I may call you that), I have been neglecting you badly over the last month or two. But I have not been idle. During May I walked 104 miles during the Great British Walking Challenge. On the hypothetical journey from John O Groats to Lands End that would have taken me roughly…
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Flaming autumn
Beth Mad weather. I take my morning coffee out to join Beth basking in an upside down season. The other day I heard geese flying over, there are red leaves piled up on the ground and a robin sits on the wheelbarrow watching me watching him. All the signs of late September are staring me…
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FOUND in chocolate (where else?)
Kev, Ziggy and Tommy enjoy the band Proud parents have followed FOUND the band to all kinds of places. We missed the Small Isles Festival on Eigg but made it to T in the Park, and a container gig (no kidding) in a car park plus sundry clubs in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. We were…
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Pelican patrol
Just to show I don’t spend all my time photographing litter. Here’s my attempt at origami pelicans to hang on the Poetry Tree in the Poetry Garden in St Andrew Square. So, you don’t know about the Poetry Garden? More about that later – right now I better go and pack for the trip to…
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Joining or dividing?
Does social media connect or separate communities? (With apologies to Ian Hamilton Finlay and Little Sparta) Distraction. I should be working but Googling alerts me to a poll on the Guardian’s Edinburgh blog. Should the Old Odeon become a Wetherspoons pub? By the time I vote (no, of course) and leave a comment the story…
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Going hyperlocal – or into the hall of mirrors?
What’s the news today? To find out, I have several choices. I can scan the latest electronic updates in my inbox; I can flit through Twitter or other social media gatherings in cyberspace; or I can take my newspaper and cup of coffee into the garden and sit in the sun while real birds twitter…
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Is beatblogging the future? If so what does it mean?
Stop press: The Guardian has just announced their Edinburgh beatblogger On a mild and misty morning your friendly neighbourhood beatblogger slips a mobile phone in her pocket and sets off hoping to catch sight of the local community policeman breaking into an old railway tunnel.