Category Archives: Community

School’s Gone Back: Time for Summer

Posted on August 19, 2012 by davidsberry

It has become a cruel tradition in recent years that the weather down our way waits until the schools go back before it rolls out its most summery offerings. This year seems no exception —but at least it had the … Continue reading →

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How Come Big Countries Have Such Small Minds?

Posted on August 12, 2012 by davidsberry

I belong to a huge minority—the minority that shunned the Olympic opening ceremony because none of us were really sports fans in the first place and had not yet recovered from the previous two months unrelenting blanket coverage of football … Continue reading →

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The Last Resort

Posted on August 10, 2012 by davidsberry

“Patriotism: the last resort of a scoundrel.” Dr Samuel Johnston The Edinburgh Festival is now launched full-scale and among the myriad of performances  is a play from  Tricycle Theatre at the always avant-garde Traverse called “Letter of Last Resort“. As … Continue reading →

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England’s Not Foreign to Me

Posted on August 8, 2012 by davidsberry

Peter Jones is not a man with whom I would normally choose to cross verbal swords. Freelance journalist more recently for the Hootsmon but previously regular contributor to weighty pieces in the Times and Economist, he knows his stuff but—more … Continue reading →

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Some Candle!—Still Burning

Posted on August 5, 2012 by davidsberry

“She only acted according to the script we gave her
” —Ernesto Cardenal Exactly fifty years ago, when Marilyn Monroe died aged 36 of a sleeping pill overdose in 1962, I was—like Elton John at the time—just a kid. From age seven, I would … Continue reading →

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Butcher’s Choice

Posted on July 8, 2012 by davidsberry

Many column inches have been expended in pursuit of ‘nasty nats’—those Scots impatient to live in a normal, independent Scotland but whose impatience provokes them into rash statements and personal attacks on those who stand in their way. I have … Continue reading →

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Danny Dare: Bigot of the Future

Posted on July 5, 2012 by davidsberry

The launch of the “Better Together” campaign last week (no, not this one, nor even this one, but this one) generated reasonable and measured statements from heavyweights like ex-Chancellor Alistair Darling and positive signs that unionists are finally getting their … Continue reading →

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The Giftie Gie Us

Posted on June 30, 2012 by davidsberry

Listening to the last act of ORF’s live broadcast of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor on top of today’s EFF premiere of Brave and Cummings in Macbeth earlier in the week, I am struck by the contrasting views that various “furriners” … Continue reading →

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Not Our Finest Hour

Posted on June 28, 2012 by davidsberry

Before there were such clinically business-like names as “nuclear strike capability” and “mutually assured destruction”, there was the Strategic Bomber Offensive which, unlike our present military madness, was actually prosecuted to as full an extent as we could. Based on … Continue reading →

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SOS Puffin—2012 Report

Posted on June 26, 2012 by davidsberry

Technically this can’t be a reblog since the original wasn’t a blog at all. But as a great example of a dedicated wildlife fan who has put major amounts of effort over five years into a project to secure the … Continue reading →

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