Category Archives: Language

Language bridge

This gallery contains 1 photo.

Growing up in Scotland in the 1950s and 1960s, Scots was, unsurprisingly, the language I was most likely to hear when I set foot outside the family home. This was the Scots of rural Perthshire where we lived, one of … Continue reading

More Galleries | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

Witness Blanket

This gallery contains 1 photo.

I recently watched a clip of a Native American elder in a wheelchair being jostled by New York police during a protest against ICE. Speaking to a reporter he said that it pained him to be there in a moment … Continue reading

More Galleries | Tagged , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Dark Angels on Writing

Over the years I’ve come to believe that people are sometimes drawn to Dark Angels courses in answer to an unspoken, perhaps even unacknowledged, need. They may not know it but at the moment they hear about our programme there … Continue reading

More Galleries | Leave a comment

Hawks and angels

Nestled into steep woods on the slopes of a Cotswold valley stands a manor house built of stone the colour of pale honey. It has tall chimneys and gothic windows and a walled garden full of vegetables and fruit trees … Continue reading

More Galleries | Tagged | 3 Comments

Ends of the earth

In summer 2003 I was invited to chair an event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. The book in question was by a writer I knew and admired but had never met. The event was sponsored by a small Edinburgh … Continue reading

More Galleries | Tagged , , , , | 8 Comments

The shortest distance

Last week I took part in the process of interviewing for a new manager for my mother’s care home. I was one of a panel of two relatives and two residents who met the candidates for an informal chat, before … Continue reading

More Galleries | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Tread softly

This story is just one of a trillion reasons why Tim Berners-Lee deserves to stand alongside William Caxton and James Watt in the history of human connectivity. A little over five years ago, on 9 March 2011, an email arrived … Continue reading

More Galleries | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Dark matter

I’ve been doing some pre-Christmas stock-taking. It’s not an inventory of goods, though the stock in question is certainly good, but of assets of a less tangible kind: the writing generated on Dark Angels courses throughout the year, which I … Continue reading

More Galleries | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Leaderology

Leadership. It’s a topic that exercises people in airless seminar rooms without number, up and down the country, every day of the week. Yet in its elevation to the status of a ‘-ship’ it becomes so far removed from the … Continue reading

More Galleries | 3 Comments

Shuffling in backwards

Several years ago, 26, the writers’ collective I’ve often mentioned here, ran its first big public creative project. 26 Letters, as it was called – appropriately, since the title of the collective is a reference to the DNA of the … Continue reading

More Galleries | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments