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Shore Poets
Looking forward to tonight’s gig at Henderson’s under St John’s – expect the unexpected in my set!
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Mar Adentro
To celebrate our heading off to Spain soon, here’s another bit of translation – my version of the classic poem Mar Adentro, by Ramón Sampedro. The movie’s good stuff, if not necessarily Saturday night...
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The Autumn Forecast: Slamming, Caving, Tattie Howking, and Fast Bowling
Keats may have said autumn was a season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, but then he never lived in Scotland when it can be a constant diet of monsoons, high winds, crops rotting in fields, and the...
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Why Duality Tango?
I remember once acting for a client who was buying a flat in another part of town without his wife’s knowledge: a bolt hole, he said, for a marriage going wrong. I didn’t stay at the firm long enough...
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In Translation
More Spanish poetry in translation: the two by Benedetti are pretty light-hearted, especially the second one. In a way that’s slightly more difficult to translate, since it’s less about using the right...
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That Post-Referendum Poetry In Full
I had to be very careful about what I said in public during the Scottish Independence Referendum, given my job (which I rather like and would like to keep!) What I said, or rather shouted at the telly,...
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Andrew C Ferguson’s Virtual Free Fringe: 10 reasons to see performance poetry...
Comedians have taken over Edinburgh’s Fringe. They’ve commandeered all the big venues, and use up all the advertising space with posters of their big old faces, gurning away like the glum game show...
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You’ll Be Hearing From Me (quite a bit, actually)
Sunday, 29th November 2015 Regular readers of this blog (if such creatures do exist) will know that it’s a bit, well, irregular. I could just use everyone else’s excuse that I’m incredibly busy, but...
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Attack of the Killer Drones
Drones have been getting a bad press recently, and rightly so: but don’t worry, this isn’t about the type of drone it’ll soon be economically realistic to buy to send on CIA-style missions against the...
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Never Forget Who We Are
I first wrote this after watching a news item about a bunch of moronic English football fans using the Brexit vote as an excuse to go on the rampage in France, shouting xenophobic slogans as they went....
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Death of a Blind Poet
To, somewhat counter-intuitively, the Monkey Barrel in Blair Street for the last ever session of Blind Poetics on Monday, the hallowed Edinburgh pub of the same name having closed for a refurb. Said...
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Springtime for Red Squirrels: Or, The Art of Poetic Garden Avoidance
To the Scottish Poetry Library on Saturday, for the launch of three new books by Red Squirrel Press: Diana Hendry’s new short story collection ‘My Father as an Ant;’ Stephen Barnaby’s new story...
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Three Weekends in May (2): The Fall of the House of Blackie
A long weekend in a Charles Rennie Mackintosh house. It sounds like an improbable tale, unless of course you’re impossibly rich and connected to what, I suspect, would be some highly secretive and aged...
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Harky, the Husky, and the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night time
It’s not often a story about me gets into a book that’s not one of my own. Okay, so once now. There I was on Facebook the other day, minding my own business, when Robin Cairns hove to on my recipe...
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A Tale of Two Telecasters
In in the middle of his tumultuous 1966 tour of Britain, when ‘going electric’ became synonymous with him taking thirty pieces of silver, Bob Dylan stopped off before his gig in Liverpool with rock...
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Inspiration for Accountants – and other supposedly non-creative types
My Dad was many fine things, and he was also a fine lawyer. Like me, he worked in a multi-disciplinary environment and had every respect for other professions. However, he did used to tell me that...
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