Real fires, it seems, are the largest source of harmful small particulate matter air pollution in the UK, and recent publicity by the Clean Air Campaign seeks to highlight the health problems they can cause.
Supermarket shopping: so much quicker and more efficient – not to mention cheaper – than dotting along the high street from butcher to greengrocer to baker. Or so we’re led to believe. Yet there I was, the other week, in the cereal aisle, taking ages to reset my Tesco loyalty card password, which I had forgotten, and squinting at the screen like an owl in sunlight, since I’d also forgotten my spectacles.
Caledonian Road, like the street after which it is named, feels both modern and old. Andrew O’Hagan’s ambitious seventh novel could hardly be more different from his last, Mayflies, a simple, powerful story of boyhood friendship that lasts a lifetime. By contrast, Caledonian Road is complex and convoluted, managing to be completely contemporary yet as full of characters, plotlines and morality tales as a Victorian novel.
Some decisions by government agencies leave you speechless. When I heard that Glasgow’s Aye Write festival had been cancelled because Creative Scotland turned down its grant application, I thought I had misheard.
In the minds of believers, in other words, prayer is a powerful force. No doubt this explains the outrage of those whose vigils outside abortion clinics in Scotland are soon to be banned. A crucial part of these Christian protesters’ armoury is prayer, both silent and vocal.
I doubt there’s anyone in our village who thoughtlessly switches on the central heating, or turns on the hot tap for longer than needed. Baths are rationed, drawers are stuffed with jumpers and socks that Roald Amundsen would have envied, and visitors arrive in layers, rightly prepared for the worst.
Written in three parts, The Furies is an engrossing, disturbing and challenging read. A writer for the New York Times and The New Yorker among others, Flock brings a descriptive eye to what might otherwise feel like plain reportage. The material and interviews used for the first part of the book were the basis of a Netflix documentary.
The late Scottish poet and essayist Alastair Reid deserves a mighty slap on the back for introducing many English-speaking readers to the work of Gabriel García Márquez. Writing in 1986 in the New Yorker, on whose staff he remained for around half a century, Reid hymned a generation of Latin and South American poets and novelists, including Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda and Mario Vargas Llosa. However special attention was reserved for Colombian-born García Márquez, whose novel One Hundred Years of Solitude was published in Spanish nearly two decades before. It, and others like it, ushered in the literary genre that came to be known as magical realism, in which the fantastical and the real seem indistinguishable.
For months some of us have been hoping that Andy Murray would admit his best playing years are behind him, and leave with dignity and reputation intact. The same applies to ageing workers, whatever their trade. Obviously there are rare individuals who continue to perform impressively into later life - certain composers, artists and writers immediately come to mind.
On an imaginary island between Shetland and Norway lives a solitary crofter called Ivar. In his forties, his only company is an old horse, a blind cow, and a handful of sheep and chickens.
