From the summit of South Barrule on a clear day you can stand in complete solitude and see the seven realms. Around you lies Mann, once inhabited by Celts then…
Friday 9 November My connection to the Great War is tenuous â a great uncle I never met fought somewhere in France and survived. He lost an arm in the…
One of the first scientific facts most of us learned at primary school is that water is made of two gases â two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen â…
A new King, George VI had recently been crowned, and I became familiar with his features on the coins and stamps we used. The Prime Minister was Winston Churchill. I…
At a round of golf sometime back in the 1960s, one of the group of players decided to share some apples he had brought along. They were good apples, recalled…
The implication of the graphs I showed in last week’s article is that action on climate change is urgent and will be painful. Two recent events, apparently unrelated, draw attention…
Nor any drop to drink. The Romantic poets had gone rather out of fashion among students studying English at university in my day, but their poems do have a way…
I was at Edinburgh Sheriff Court for a morning recently and I heard just one case. This wasn’t because of any legal complexities, requiring hours of heated debate, stretching beyond…
On 10 March 1971, the IRA killed three off-duty British soldiers from the 1st Battalion, Royal Highland Fusiliers. Lured from a city centre pub by the promise of a party…
In 1956 Gordonstoun School was in transition between the founding spirit of Kurt Hahn, an educational genius who ran the school by force of his (warm, eccentric) personality and a…