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Orkney is a gentle, green time machine. While the waters around it carry stories of sea-faring and exploration and the drama of two world wars, the land – low-lying pasture pocked with shallow scoops of water – tells a much … Continue reading
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Stromness on Sunday is quiet. Very quiet. In another era one might imagine the whole town to be at prayer. The cobbled main steet is deserted. We glimpse the harbour in splashes of vivid blue at the bottom of wynds … Continue reading
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It all began last night with a large party in a central Delhi hotel. There were several hundred guests, a famous band and dancing. This was Sangeet, the first of a number of events to celebrate the wedding of my … Continue reading
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Thirty years ago this coming week, Sarah and I were on a short break in the Lake District. We had been together for ten years, we were living in a beautiful place, our respective careers were fulfilling, the children, aged … Continue reading
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On Saturday, I am taking one of my most treasured possessions to hospital. It’s a two-thirds size guitar which I bought while travelling in Latin America in 1973. It is now so cracked and battered that I daren’t play it … Continue reading
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February is a month to be endured. As a student in a drafty rented farmhouse outside Aberdeen in 1970, we were visited one freezing February day by a particularly foul-tempered tradesman who had come to do work on the house. … Continue reading
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On the way home from a Christmas visit to family in the south of England, we decided to break the journey in Yorkshire, roughly the halfway point. Neither of us had been to Harrogate before, and it seemed like a … Continue reading
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I have a tenuous connection with Iran, but it’s enough to sharpen the horror of what has unfolded there over the last few days. In the summer of 1969, my first year at university, I drove with three friends to … Continue reading
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I seem to be losing people. In the last few months two childhood friends, both exact contemporaries of mine, have gone. Three years ago, it was my greatest childhood friend. All too early. I don’t wish to be maudlin, simply … Continue reading
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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
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