by tim_bell | Nov 21, 2020 | Latest News
Well done indeed to Douglas Stuart and winning the Booker Prize with Shuggie Bain. I haven’t read it yet, but I will. From what I gather, the setting is very similar to the setting in Trainspotting: crap housing scheme, poverty, and the arrival of heroin. In...
by tim_bell | Oct 31, 2020 | Latest News
It’s very noticeable that nobody – that’s nobody – seriously makes the case for settling the “independence” discussion by means of a referendum. Our voting system is designed to elect named, accountable people for office for a fixed...
by tim_bell | Sep 23, 2020 | Latest News
A couple of days after the third tipping point of the year – the autumn equinox – there’s an unprecedented number of runner beans still on the stem and there for the picking. I’ve never seen the likes. Does it foretell a cold winter? Is it...
by tim_bell | Aug 25, 2020 | Latest News
I’ve just come across a recording I did with The Living Memory Association (TheLMA – good name, eh?) a year or so ago. As a newcomer of only forty years in Leith, it seems some folk might be interested in me, so here Barry Davidson splices my biography...
by tim_bell | Aug 17, 2020 | Latest News
In the BBC1 programme to mark VJ day on Saturday evening, Japanese expansionist ambition was presented as a “bad thing”, to be resisted. Those who resisted it, in support of the status quo ante, faced great hardship and cruelty. It struck me very forcibly, however,...
by tim_bell | Aug 6, 2020 | Latest News
In conversation recently with a couple of folk, there was some dispute about the difference between “national” and “nationalist”. I maintain there’s no real difference, the “differences” are fictions worked up nationalists trying to make out they’re not territorial,...
