fourth edition

Lady on the left? My great-grandmother. She would have been ninety-four today.
The photo was taken in the early 1950s outside her cottage and she is with two of her sons, K and T.
I have several photos of her; my other favourite is from the 1930s when she was approached by a travelling salesman who wanted [...]

This entry’s by request..
Starting on the fourth Sunday before Christmas, Danes will open so-called “advent presents” and light a candle in their advent krans (I have not made an advent krans since the year one caught fire in my Copenhagen flat and nearly burned down the house). The presents are usually small – I have [...]

We have a pile of wrapped presents in our living room. David is celebrating his birthday this week and I finished wrapping his presents yesterday whilst he was out looking at naked ladies at his art class. I also made a head start on wrapping the Christmas presents. Now I’m all antsy because we have [...]

.. one Halloween costume down, one to go.
Other Half is currently trying to consider whether or not to stab the ear with a palette knife or not.
Oh, decisions…

I had to laugh when I saw this little news story: Company seeks Glaswegian interpreter.
Today Translations spokesman, Mick Thorburn said: “Over the last few months we’ve had clients asking us for Glaswegian translators.
(..)
“Usually, the role would involve translating documents but in this case its more likely to be assisting foreign visitors to the city whose [...]

Knitting is in my blood. My great-great-grandmother knitted socks, my great-grandmother taught me to knit, my grandmother has never been without a project in her knitting basket and my mother loves knitting socks although she prefers to crochet.
According to my grandmother, my great-great-grandmother, Ingeborg,  “threw” her knitting and it was not until I moved to [...]

Alexander Trocchi’s novel, Young Adam, is an interesting little piece of Scottish beat literature, if rather uneven. It tells the story of Joe, a young disaffected man working and living on a barge boat travelling between Edinburgh and Glasgow. The film adaptation, which stars Ewan McGregor, Tilda Swinton and Peter Mullan, is excellent and well-worth [...]

We went on a mini-break to the North-East coast of Scotland. I love visiting this particular part of Scotland – it reminds me of the landscape where I grew up (agricultural, close to the sea, small villages, cows) and yet this place is so startlingly different and dramatic (dangerous cliffs! fishing huts! waterfalls! lobsters!). We [...]

(yes, I came home with a tonne of ideas for future projects)

My parents are currently visiting these shores and today we treated them to a visit to New Lanark,  a former cotton mill village and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, about an hour from Glasgow. I have long wanted to visit New Lanark although prior to my permanent relocation to Great Britain the words “industrial revolution” [...]