by tim_bell | Nov 12, 2021 | Uncategorized
It was Harry Gibson (the play) and Danny Boyle (the film) who took the Trainspotting story away from Leith. Irvine Welsh’s focus was on the collapse of the community of Leith – the demolitions, the dispersals, the diaspora – into which heroin and HIV...
by tim_bell | Nov 3, 2021 | Uncategorized
It’s out, on the streets of Leith, a collection of writings marking the centenary of the amalgamation of Leith and Edinburgh in 1920. OK, we’re a year late, so it’s edition #101 and we’ll hit #200 in November 2120. Fifteen different voices, all...
by tim_bell | Oct 29, 2021 | Uncategorized
It’s not just the Hibs. It’s not just Stella Maris church and the first presbytery house in post-Reformation Scotland. The Irish built a good part of Victorian Leith streets, and they have one of the very few 19th century positive acknowledgements of their...
by tim_bell | Aug 20, 2021 | Uncategorized
See my letter in The Herald or read it here. The “War on Drugs” isn’t a war, it’s big business. Few politicians have the courage to acknowledge this, and none of them is in Scotland. I know little of Afghanistan other than general knowledge and...
by tim_bell | Aug 10, 2021 | Uncategorized
Just too late to join the row about the record-breaking illegal drug deaths in Scotland, here’s a letter I didn’t send to the press. Recent correspondence is quite right to point out that the cause of the scale of the Scottish drug-related deaths is...
by tim_bell | Jun 22, 2021 | Uncategorized
Last week I sent this image of weeds the whole length of the gutter of our street, dense and up to almost 2 feet high, to my MSP and councillors. I asked them for a well-informed opinion on how it has got to this stage. Ben MacPherson MSP (SNP) said it was a Council...
by tim_bell | May 15, 2021 | Uncategorized
I’m very proud to be asked by the Council to make a presentation of 100 years of Leith history. ME! I’ve only been here forty years. Researching it, I was struck again by how much was being lost to the community of Leith in the run-up to the end of the...
by tim_bell | Apr 28, 2021 | Latest News
Dear Ben, I was pleased to see you and the other candidates at the Leith Churches Together hustings last evening. Talking it over with church friends – not party friends – this morning, there is some consensus about the most disgraceful thing said: when you said that...
by tim_bell | Mar 30, 2021 | Latest News
Not content with reaping the ill-gotten gains of the iniquitous first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting arrangements for Westminster (if they were iniquitous when Labour was the beneficiary, they are still iniquitous), Alex Salmond is now gaming the voting arrangements for...
by tim_bell | Mar 9, 2021 | Latest News
I don’t think I’m complacent, but I do think there’s almost no danger of IndyRef2 and Scottish separation from rUK for the forseeable. The SNP may have a majority at Holyrood after May, but there are big doubts about that and at any rate it is...
