In Britain, it is now a year since the Coronavirus pandemic reached our shores. And to mark the first anniversary of lockdown, we are having another lockdown. I would be tempted to say it’s like Groundhog Day, but I said that yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. So, in case you […]
VLADIMIR McTAVISH – A KICK UP THE TABLOIDS Despite starting the year under lockdown, and despite the disaster that is Brexit and the uncertainty of quite how catastrophic it will prove to be, many are entering 2021 in the hope that it will be a better year for Scotland, the UK and the planet. Most […]
We have now reached the beginning of the last two months of 2020. The world, at least my admittedly fairly unimportant part of it, looks remarkably similar to how it did at the end of the first two months of the year. Namely, there’s nothing going on right now, and on the horizon, I can […]
Normally, writing the September edition of this column would be a flying-by-the-seat-of-my-pants affair as I would be having to file my copy in the middle of the Edinburgh Fringe. Obviously not this year. Due to Covid19, this year’s Fringe was cancelled months ago as the whole thing was considered to be a health hazard. Of […]
Twelve weeks into lockdown, and our through-the-looking-glass ‘new normal’ becomes ever more bizarre. While everyone’s lives seem identical from one week to the next, like some never-ending Groundhog Day, other things appear to change dramatically on a day-to-day basis. UK government policy, for example, carries on being made up ‘on the hoof’. One minute, free […]
This is, indeed, a strange time that we are living through. At the end of last year, when we all were making our predictions for 2020, no one would have forecast that a 99-year-old World War II veteran would become a national hero for walking around his own garden. Indeed, it’s strange to think that […]
Early March 2020, Australia. We are now in the third month of the year of 2020, and it is fairly safe to say that the world is probably in a worse state than it was twelve months ago. Despite this, I keep hearing the same pedantic argument about whether 2020 marks the start of a […]
As the bells rang in the New Year and 2019 drew to a close, many on the left were still in a state of shock that a philandering sociopath who had lied to the country, lied to MPs, lied to the Queen, attempted to shut down Parliament and dodged multiple medias interviews had still managed […]
The content of this article may be utterly irrelevant by the time it appears in print. Writing this column in 2019 has proved has been a bit of a matter of guesswork. Nobody knows what will happen to the Brexit process in the period between my copy deadline and this magazine’s publication. We may get […]
We live in such volatile times that it is distinctly possible that every word of this column will be either irrelevant or out-of-date or both by the time you are reading it. It is Wednesday 28 August 2019, as I am finishing off this piece, and Boris Johnson has just asked the Queen to suspend […]