The township of 12 people
which sells four million
cans of beer a year
Scotland
in the
heat
Hamish Henderson and Scotland:
a crucible of experiment
Tessa Ransford
on a prophetic
visionary
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Alistair Hayes,
Scotland’s runner-up Y0ung Thinker
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Lockerbie
An overview by Morag Kerr of the Justice for Megrahi Committee
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The Cafe
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Today’s banner
Near Commonwealth House (HQ of the Games) – just in case anyone goes hungry
Photograph by
Islay McLeod
A Mr Ng may take over Rangers and rename it. What price Ng FC?
We are afflicted
by the culture of
the Scottish Cringe
Andrew McCallum
Let me begin by putting my cards on the table. I’m only a recreational poet. I write poetry for my own pleasure and satisfaction. Occasionally, and almost as a kind of afterthought, I’ll submit the odd poem to a magazine or journal; and I enter the McCash competition every year because every year, for the past five or six years, my entry has been shortlisted and I’m now obsessed with winning it, in much the same way that I can become obsessed with completing the last few clues of a crossword.
I’ve no interest in – or illusions about – ‘professional development’ or ‘investment opportunities’, since I’m realistic enough to know that I’ll never in a million years be able to make a living from being a poet. I’m a purely recreational poet: I write poetry because I enjoy writing poetry and because (and here’s the nub) I believe that writing poetry enriches my life and, hopefully, also the lives of people around me.
Now here’s a vision. Imagine a republic of Scotland in which its citizens engage with the arts, whether as practitioner or audience, for the simple reason that such engagement is a good in itself, something worth doing for its own sake, a personally enriching experience. Wouldn’t that be something?
I’m reminded of a story my old history teacher and mentor, Angus Matheson, told the class one day. A crofter and his son enrolled at Aberdeen University to study divinity. Four year’s later, when they graduated, they returned to the croft to pick up their lives from where they’d left them off. They didn’t study divinity in pursuit of a careers, or fame, or fortune. They took time out to study because they perceived education to be something worth having simply for its own sake. It enriched their lives. It made them better people.
Let us affirm as a nation in our government’s arts and culture policy
that the arts are valuable in and of themselves and worth pursuing for
their own sake.
