Category: Diary
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Who can heal our crippling inequality?
After successful surgery I returned home to a genteel part of Edinburgh where people like me can expect to live 21 years longer (twenty one years longer, let that sink in) than people in the neighbourhoods my husband and passed on our short journey to and from the hospital.
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Don’t let big tech Captain Hook grab lockdown loot
In our new Neverland big tech Captain Hook grows ever richer while lost boys and girls of performing arts struggle to survive.
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We’re all islanders in a pandemic
In retrospect it all seems eerily prophetic. Those faces framed in small screens, their distant voices interconnecting in the ether. Yet for Giles Perring it’s something much simpler and more profound than Zoom
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Freedom to speak – and listen with undivided attention
Despite disagreeing, it felt like we had made a genuine human connection. A rare experience, social media makes it too easy for us to stay in our comfort zones, divided, agitated and enraged.
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West Highland trainlines of poetry
No need for narrative as the small Scotrail train pulls out of Glasgow Queen Street – the coming and going of industrialisation is written on the landscape.
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Balanced in between Ireland and Britain
When Marcia died in 1991, seven years before the Good Friday Agreement, her coffin was carried downhill to the church, Ulster-style, the weight born on the shoulders of men from friends and family. Balanced between Catholics, Protestants and non-believers.
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What are we stumbling into? Messages of hope and fear from Amsterdam
How can we be so careless? We cannot afford to forget lessons of another time when populist opportunists arose from recession to destroy human decency.
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Ice breakers
And after the snow melts…snowdrops. Good to walk without plunging up to the knees in white stuff. Even better to feel the warmth of the sun. For the first time in two weeks the road to Pond Cottage is open and, apart from the odd Henry Moore shapes emerging from what’s left of roadside snowdrifts,…
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SAY Award: so Paisley 2021
The Gender Neutral Toilets are warmly welcomed by ‘trans queer’ punk band Spook School though I tiptoe back out to the old school Ladies after encountering a row of urinals. ‘Hello World, welcome to Paisley,’ the smiling face of Paisley2021’s Jean Cameron beams a global greeting from the SAY award screen streamed live from Paisley…
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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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My Irish Baby Box is forty years old
When I was expecting my first baby a parcel arrived from my Aunty Rene in Ireland. Inside there was a handmade book with advice on how to stay well during pregnancy and many practical instructions for making everything we would need in the first few months of parenthood. Forty years later it occurs to me…