First blast

This blog is intended to act as an archive for my journalism, to generate a little work for me and to entertain you, dear reader. Over there on the right are weblinks to some of the better or more interesting articles I've written over the years. They come mainly from the Scotsman and Scotland on Sunday newspapers, because these are the easiest for me to access. But there is something from the Sydney Morning Herald, another from the Evening Standard. I also have written for the Daily Mail and the Times.

There are many subjects. I enjoyed meeting Michael Ignatieff, Janet Street Porter and Christopher Hitchens and they gave me good quote, but the interview with Diana Mosley - the widow of the English fascist leader, Oswald Mosley - was about as good a story as I've ever had. I knew she was living in Paris, so I rang her when Le Pen did well in the first round of the 2002 French presidential elections. It turned out she was profoundly deaf, so I had to interview her by fax. Lady Mosley took this very seriously indeed and fired back some fantastic stuff - I still have the faxed copies of her scrawling handwriting. The news story and the feature were both massively followed by other news outlets - BBC Radio 4's Today Programme even broadcast from her Paris flat ahead of the second round of voting.

Sometimes you do get a reaction. The story about how Uruguay saved the haggis was the result of a conversation with my local butcher. Twenty four hours after he told me about it, the BBC had a grim-faced correspondent standing under a statue of Robert Burns asking whether this was the end of Scottish culture as we know it. The piece on the disintegration of the Royal Mile in Edinburgh was powerful enough to result in the calling of a conference to consider the future of the city's most ancient street.

There are plenty more out of my articles out there, so if you happen to see one and like it, send me the web address and I'll add it to the list. One or two of are not so good, of course - an easy one to find is a live football match report I wrote of a St Johnstone game which features on The Temple of the Saints fans website under the heading "absolutely crap report by Mike Wade". Cheers guys.

A lot of what I'm writing at the moment is arts news for the Scottish editions of the (London) Times. In common with articles in most Scottish editions of English papers, these do not appear on the web. If they seem particularly worthwhile I'll post them here in this blog.