Tag: scotland

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A Good Day for Goals

In honour of our team reaching the World Cup for the first time in 28 years, Monday 15 June was designated as a public holiday across Scotland. In practice, it wasn’t mandatory, although my employer observed it.

The holiday was motivated in part by the timing of their first match against Haiti. Kick-off was at 9pm in Boston on Saturday 13 June, which equated to 2am on Sunday morning in the UK. I don’t care much for football, and I’ve long been opposed to public holidays, but even I must grudgingly admit it was a nice gesture.

I decided early on to use the day for catching up with my writing, dividing my time three ways: editing existing text, writing further narrative, and worldbuilding. By the evening, the project was on firmer ground than in the morning.

As I explored on the blog three years ago, I’ve tried many times to write outdoors and it rarely works out well. So despite the brilliant weather on Monday, most of the day was spent inside at the computer, except for a couple of walks with the official Taskmaster podcast.

Although I’m a fan of the TV show, this companion piece had somehow bypassed me. So every time I go for a long enough walk, I catch up with one more past episode, which has helped me to make a decent dent in the archive.

In my experience, consistent and steady sessions are the key to making progress on a large project.

For around a decade, I’ve owned a copy of War & Peace by Leo Tolstoy. I’ve been going back to it intermittently during this time, and I’d reached page 767 of 1296 pages by October 2024 – although much of the latter section is given over to endnotes and other explanatory details. Despite its length, most of the chapters can be read in ten minutes; there are simply a lot of them.

On 22 May 2026, I set some time aside to read one chapter before bed and another after waking up. While I don’t always manage, I’m now rapidly approaching 900 pages, so I’m on track to finish by the end of summer.

The public holiday was a massive boon for that writing project, but without also tackling it on a regular basis, it could take a long time to finish what is expected to be a series of nine stories. At least the groundwork is firmly in place, and when I find that regular time to work on it, I’ll have a stronger idea of its future direction.

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The Documentary-to-Drama Pipeline

Last week, I had the opportunity to watch Everybody to Kenmure Street at Dundee Contemporary Arts, followed by a question-and-answer session with the director Felipe Bustos Sierra. It covers the story of a Glasgow man who clung to the underside of an Immigration Enforcement van in May 2021 and the neighbours who rallied around him.

Rather than rehashing the message of the film, which has been done many times, let’s focus instead on its composition.

Like many documentaries, the majority of the narrative is pieced together through eyewitness footage and interviews. This provides a sense of immediacy, while making it cheap to produce. However, there are a few sequences read by actors, Emma Thompson among them. The director later explained these were either to maintain anonymity or for legal reasons.

But this technique also brings its own problems. A performer reading from a script will invariably personalise it to one degree or another, whether by tone of voice, word emphasis, or even the speed of delivery. I don’t know for sure how these sequences were filmed, but I suspect the real people were interviewed and their words were ‘parroted’ by the actors.

Scottish cinema as a whole seems to be having a moment in the sun right now, and this recent batch seems to be following a documentary-to-drama pipeline.

Let’s compare the recent I Swear, exploring the life of John Davidson and the effects of his Tourette’s syndrome. Although he’s been the subject of a few documentaries, this was the first time it was approached as a drama, spanning his childhood and adulthood.

Then just last week, James McAvoy attended the premiere of his California Schemin’, about a Scottish duo who pretended to be American so they would be taken more seriously. This story was first told in the documentary The Great Hip Hop Hoax, and features much of their own archive footage. I look forward to seeing how the dramatisation works out.

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Catching Up With My Correspondence

Last week, I ended up writing about some major changes to a distribution list I run, but I promised to make this week’s entry about writing to a penpal from North Wales. Since last week, I’ve heard my most recent reply arrived safely, despite intermittent postal strikes.

This has also caused me to forget much of what I’ve written. While I meant to make a special point of keeping a copy – as my pal does – I forgot and just posted it without thinking. It’s a small risk, but one of our letters went missing in transit. The more immediate problem with not keeping a copy is that I sometimes have to infer from the response what we were talking about before.

However, we have developed a tradition of asking each other a few questions out of curiosity, in the vein of ‘What friend do you know best?’ or ‘What have you done now that you never would have done ten years ago?’

On to the actual writing, I’m particular about my paper. I keep an A5 notebook with the pages perforated at the spine, so they tear out neatly and fit into a C5 envelope. I admire my pal for being able to write on unlined paper. If I did that, I guarantee the lines would start sloping downwards towards the edge of the page.

Having written so many letters and using that paper so often, I tend to have a rough idea of its length before I write it. Occasionally, it’s shorter than expected, but it sometimes encroach onto eight pages.

And I do write to others as well. The next scheduled letter will be with a Christmas card to my pal in the Republic of Ireland. I don’t exactly go bonkers for Christmas, but this is something we’ve done since the early 2000s, along with birthday cards. If anything, our messages have become longer over this time rather than shorter.

But it’s not a hobby for impatient people. It can take weeks for a reply, and I always have to post early to the Republic of Ireland to help those cards arrive in time.

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The Stories of Secession

In 2014, there was a referendum on whether Scotland should be an independent country, in which 55% of the voters wanted to remain part of the UK. Over the last week, the issue has again raised its head.

Image of Scotland in the UK
Image of Scotland in the UK (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

At almost every literary event I attended ahead of the poll, I found the issue raised again and again in prose and poetry. Some of what I heard was heavy-handed polemic, while others crafted nuanced satires of the situation.

Regardless of quality, though, it encouraged all sorts of people to express their views through the spoken word and to believe that others might be influenced by their writings.

In my experience, much of the creative work was pro-independence. Such was the mood in the country that the National Collective sprung up, bringing together different types of artist to campaign for a Yes vote under one umbrella.

So the prose and poetry that stems from a potential second referendum will likely be even more passionate: from Yes voters who’ve been granted a second chance and from No supporters who believe the question was settled in 2014.

And further to my last entry, the 18-to-22 age group was considered to be the most apathetic generation when I first attended university in 2002. Maybe it was because we had a Labour government back then; maybe it was because George W Bush hadn’t yet invaded Iraq.

Whatever the reason, the situation today couldn’t be more different. Some of the most active campaigners are those of college age, and I barely go a week without seeing a university literary event responding to current affairs.

Let’s see what happens next.

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No Thanks, No Translation.

Last week, Scotland’s voters chose to keep the country as part of the United Kingdom. Rather than make a political post, I’ve decided to take advantage of this country’s moment in the world spotlight to present a few uniquely Scottish words to you. So unique, in fact, that there is no direct English equivalent.

I have a strange relationship with the Scots tongue. I don’t naturally speak the dialect, just standard English. Yet if I’m reading a poem written in Scots, I can understand it slowly, and if someone drops a word here or there in a conversation, I’ll be able to recognise it first time.

Of the three words below, the top two are in common usage, but I’ve yet to hear the third in the wild.

  • Dreich, adjective. A one-syllable word to describe damp and drizzly weather. The first four letters are pronounced dree, while the last two take the slightly guttural sound found in the name Bach. The closest single-word English equivalents would be dull or miserable, but these could easily be applied to a person or an event, whereas dreich is exclusively for weather. The word sometimes makes it into local BBC weather reports.
  • Skite, verb. Related to skating but nothing to do with that online phone service. To skite is to skim or slide along a surface, usually by accident. It can be applied to a person or an object. In English, you could say slip, but that implies the person or object has fallen over, whereas someone who skites might remain standing.
  • Tartle, noun. This is where a person hesitates while introducing someone because they’ve forgotten the other party’s name. Most sources have this down as a verb, yet the example sentence usually given is, “Pardon my tartle.” In that context, it appears it be used as a noun, although I welcome any corrections.