The Laughing Garreteer

In 1985, aged 16, I fell in love with a girl who lived 80 miles away. I didn’t know what to do, so on a free day between O-level exams…

It has always bewildered me that Great Western Trains – the private franchise running services from London to the West of England and Wales – has never availed itself of…

On November 22nd 1963, conductor Erich Leinsdorf of the Boston Symphony Orchestra was in mid-performance when he received the news of Kennedy’s assassination. On the other side of the Atlantic,…

The earliest book I was given as a child and still own is a first edition of Reginald Turnill’s Observer’s Book of Manned Spaceflight. Space, and all that went with…

Discovering Morgan Since early in the summer, I’ve been spending one day a week at the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh, digitizing their extensive audio collection. It was a taped…

  Heft is a shepherd’s term: a herd of sheep learns their heft, their territory, the boundaries within which they are to spend their lives, and pass that knowledge down from…

They’ve started using Victorian photographic processes again. Here’s a tin type by Joshua Black Wilkins: It’s not just tin types: skilled photographers are also revisiting the calotype, the daguerrotype and…

They cleaned Edinburgh’s buildings many years ago. The odd notable exception, such as that between India Buildings and Edinburgh Central Library, on the difficult turn between Victoria Street and George…

  Yesterday afternoon, I found myself at the Scottish Poetry Library listening to the poems of George Bruce. An interesting man, Bruce: he lived long enough to be offered a…

The faces of the friends you were meant to have, but were born too late to meet, gaze warmly at you from old photographs. Outside, there’s nothing but grey skies…

When we describe someone as “forgotten”, we generally mean that they’ve fallen off the publishing schedules for a decade or two. No more than that: it’s publishing’s survival as a…