by tim_bell | Dec 13, 2020 | Latest News
That’s me only in Leith forty years (exactly, this weekend), and the Edinburgh Council invites me to do an online presentation of what made Leith so damn special in 1920 that they voted 6:1 against amalgamation. Believe me the hard bit was leaving out good...
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,...
by tim_bell | Jul 22, 2020 | Latest News
Good to see some active collaboration between two satirists and commentators who cut their creative teeth in the 1990s, Irvine Welsh and Bret Easton Ellis. As I say in my book, there’s little doubt that BEE’s American Psycho was an influence on IW when he...
by tim_bell | Jul 11, 2020 | Latest News
Following Michael Holding’s powerful speech about taught racism before the first England v. West Indies test Match, I’m reminded of a little-known song in South Pacific (Rodgers and Hammerstein, 1949). With incipient racism running through the whole show,...
by tim_bell | Jul 8, 2020 | Latest News
On the opening day of the Test match series England v. West Indies, let me make this contribution to Black Lives Matter and to Israel/Palestine. Two personal memories, thirty years apart. In 1978 I was in Senegal, the most westerly country in Africa. I came across...
