One thing always leads to another
I’m a journalist. I’ve always been curious about people and places.
I started writing about other people’s gardens a long time ago and somehow I’ve ended up having a wild garden that’s open to the public.
This site is a collection of my writing on gardens, culture, wildlife, the environment and even a little politics.
The garden is open through Scotland’s Garden Scheme supporting Children’s Hospices Across Scotland.
We are open now for spring walks. Please don’t hesitate to let us know when you’d like to come. Just fill in the Contact form. Give us a call. Find out more about Pond Cottage Garden
-
Failing boys at school, failing society
The education system is failing white working class boys. It’s not news and it’s not peculiar to the UK – different studies across the wider world have been saying it in academic language for a long time. But Angela Rayner, the shadow education secretary, made new headlines with her clearly expressed views this week.
-
Weaving a magic spell against Brexit borders
Weaving with dogwood feels like satin flowing through your fingers: soft, supple, satisfying. What’s more, concentrating on rhythm and shape leaves very little time for thinking about Brexit. Or mind-numbing border politics.
-
In a state of ambiguity
Neither one thing nor another. Travelling through Europe for the first on my new Irish passport, I fear the callous carelessness of hard Brexiteers and their crude threat to an essential state of ambiguity: ‘neither simply Irish nor simply British’
-
Turning leaves of the Poetry Tree
‘And so, let’s pause a moment here, draw strength – and reclaim what is ours.’ Reclaiming St Andrew Square Ron Butlin Green, gold, gone. Any day soon the leaves will turn and fall. And in a shady corner of Edinburgh’s St Andrew Square a young tree will reflect the colour of its relatives on distant mountains…
-
Shame the devil, tell the truth
How history twists and turns. The at times black comedy tour, first improvised by comedians Jamie MacDonald and Harry Gooch six years ago, acquires newly topical significance at the finale in St Andrew Square. (Disclaimer: I’m a director of Walking Heads but there are many true words among the jests so I’m reblogging the story…
-
Silent greetings from Mars
Women may be from Venus but that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy the occasional trip to Mars. On a dreary, rain-smeared midsummer night, I land on a sociable planet light years away from Brexit Britain, and find the perfect holiday poem for my husband.
-
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…
-
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…
-
Seeding success: a new Paisley pattern
Tread softly on the way to Paisley Town Hall; it’s a journey threaded with names of the stuff that made a great civic centre. Here’s Gauze Street crossing the canal. Turn right at Abbey Place just before the road divides between Lawn Street and Cotton Street. And pause.
-
The cost of dignity
It should be incredible but it’s only too believable in the dysfunctional state we are in. Headlines in the news stir a moment of dislocation. Where exactly are we? What year is this?
-
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.
-
Pioneering women gardeners: visible at last
Girls will be boys? The terms of employment were simple, if a little strange. The first two women admitted to the staff at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh in 1897 were to be known as ‘boys’ and had to dress like boys too.