Journalist, author, broadcaster
ABERDEEN, Scotland — The Aberdeen Food Bank Partnership is housed in a former fish-filleting warehouse a stone’s throw from the docks, its shelves lined with boxes of tea and porridge oats, packets of pasta and fresh fruit. In a city once known as “Europe’s oil capital,” former oil workers are now queuing for food parcels. […]
GLASGOW — As hundreds of people gathered outside the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh last week, there were flags of every European Union state, in a sea of Scottish Saltires. “Scotland loves Europe,” declared one placard. “Don’t EU want me baby,” read another. “We want to find a way to respect the democratic mandate for the people of Scotland to stay in […]
Rothesay used to be called ‘the Madeira of the North,’ back in the days when paddle steamers sailed up from the Glasgow coast bringing holidaymakers to the island of Bute. While the palm trees remain, Rothesay now looks like most faded British seaside towns. Paint crumbles on the façade of the Esplande hotel; many of […]
GLASGOW, Scotland — “My mother was born in the Hebrides, in Stornoway, so that’s serious Scotland,” Donald Trump told an interviewer in 2010. The U.S. presidential candidate has long made much of his Scottish roots. He likes Scotland so much that he chose Aberdeenshire as the location for a controversial £1 billion golfing complex. But […]
GLASGOW — At 6:30 a.m. on September 19 last year, Natalie McGarry sat alone on the pavement outside the glass-fronted Emirates Arena in this city’s East End. Inside, the counting of votes in Scotland’s independence referendum had ended a couple of hours earlier — Yes had won Glasgow but lost overall, by just over 10 […]
Chris Van Der Kuyl set up his first video game company in Dundee in the mid-1990s. “It was an industrial landscape,” he says of the city, which had been bled of heavy industry from the 1970s onwards. “Everything was closing, everyone was leaving.” Van Der Kuyl’s 4J Studios would go on to help develop the […]
Shetlanders are fond of saying that their nearest train station is the Norwegian city of Bergen, such is the islands’ distance from the British mainland. Perched on a rocky outcrop surrounded by the wild, oil-rich North Sea, the U.K.’s most northerly archipelago has a very distinctive history and identity. But windswept Shetland — population circa […]
It’s a bank holiday Monday afternoon in a Glasgow boozer. Busy tables are littered with discarded yellow raffle tickets and half-empty pints. On the small stage, a heavily pregnant woman belts out Purple Rain. Bob Gillespie stands by the entrance, shoulders filling out a tweed jacket, silently mouthing Prince’s words. The 77-year-old passed his love […]
Coatbridge has voted Labour en masse for decades TOM Clarke is angry with the media. Last week, The Guardian followed the Labour MP as he canvassed Coatbridge and its environs, the North Lanarkshire patch he has represented since 1982. The resulting video – entitled “the strange death of Labour Scotland” – painted a less than […]
Ian Murray, ‘a good local MP’ THIS is supposed to be the social media election. But nobody seems to have told the good people of leafy Morningside. On a blustery weekday afternoon in the land of Miss Jean Brodie few voters seem particularly au fait with the latest Twitter stramash. “I’ve not heard anything about […]