Long day's journey into light

In the summer of  1994, Candia McWilliam took a phone call from Stanley Kubrick, the Hollywood  director, who asked her to collaborate on the screenplay of his latest movie.  “And do you know the  title?” she asks with a lop-sided grin. “Eyes Wide Shut.  Prophetic is it not?”

McWilliam’s face tells its own story. It is long and broad and  has marks and folds around the eyes.   There is a  puffiness,  caused by anti-depressants, and she appears to have no eyelids. Every now and then, an involuntary twitch passes across her cheeks.   “I am what you can look like if you are lucky enough to have had an operation to overcome a particular kind of blindness,”  she says blandly over the coffee cups of a west London cafe.  

The author feels it almost  superfluous to add that this “no simple tale of triumph over a tragedy”, but it is true only up to a point.  McWilliam – who wants “to transmit how thrilling it has been to be alive” - can concede that  her return to the Edinburgh International Book Festival this month, with a 500-page autogbiography, signifies something special about the human spirit. 

From the spring of 2006, she lived a virtual recluse, “a parrot in a cage with the hood over it”, because she had no wish to burden her friends and family with her blepharospasm, a rare brain condition  which causes the eyelids to close over otherwise healthy eyes.   She was condemned to stumble around her own home, until, inevitably, she broke her leg in a fall.  Later, when blood poisoning set in, she found herself in what she calls the “dying ward” of a hospital.

Two years after diagnosis, she wrote an article about her blindness, published in The Times. Marion Bailey, a blepharospasm sufferer, read it and wrote  recommending a Nottingham surgeon, Alexander Foss, who had developed a treatment.  Within weeks, McWilliam was under the knife.  Tendons from her knees were transplanted into the brow of her head and used to pin open her eyes.  To  general amazement, she emerged, unblinking, into the light.

That story of recovery is remarkable enough, but What to Look for in Winter,  is shot through with many tales of hope and despair: her mother’s suicide, two “defenestrated” marriages, her alcoholism, separation from her children.  The subtitle, A Memoir in Blindness, is recognition of her inability to see her way, even when she was sighted. 

 McWilliam was born and raised in Edinburgh, where her father, Colin, was an architectural historian.  Margaret, his wife,  stayed at  home, cleaned the house and mangled the clothes.

“She was 6ft 2in of towering glamour,” she says.  “She was full of talent, stuck on Warriston Crescent, pushing a pram. What could she do?”

McWilliam was just 7 or 8  when she awoke to find her mother lying beside her, and a bottle of pills on the bed.  “I think she had on not a nightgown but a green wool dress,” she writes. “She had sewn me a pink pillow with grey kittens and pussy willow branches on it to help combat my nightmares.”

Whether she  is “non-existent or in heaven” McWilliam’s sees “mummy” in her own children, Olly, Clem and Minoo.   “ I remember little of her, but I  think, ‘That is how she used her hands.’ When my older son smiles, his eyes go sideways - that is what she did. She is infinitely happier in her incarnation in my children, than she was as a person, locked into Edinburgh.”

Beyond the obvious trauma, Margaret McWilliam’s death had other far reaching consequence for her daughter.  Candia’s father re-married; she was sent away to school, where she made a new friends, and found a surrogate family who lived on the island of Colonsay.  Her  kin network, family,  step families, adopted families, not to mention her first husband  (Quentin, Earl of Portsmouth), second husband (Fram Dinshaw, an Indian born, Oxford academic)  mothers-in-law and children, form a mesh of humanity that has often saved McWilliam from herself.

At school, she was teased that she had swallowed a dictionary.  After university, her literary talents came though when she won a Vogue short story competition and  her 1989 debut novel, A Case of Knives, won huge reviews.  Articulate  and stunningly beautiful, she was seized upon by the Sunday supplements, – but she never appears to have accepted that the woman posing for photos was actually her: “I looked a bit thick,” she writes, “where thick overlaps with apparently sexy. A bad mixture for a sardonic introvert.”

She had been drinking all her adult life.  At first it heightened perception, and made her clever. Soon she was just sodden.   “I lost my face when I drank,” she says. “ All I could see was my green eyes  peeping through this awful bruised, sheening, bulging,  sweating, flaky thing.  I lost my bones, I lost my elegance, I lost my hands. I lost all of it. And I lost the capacity to be clean.  I hid in black, dirty, grey clothes. Once you are sodden, you drink to oblivion and wake up in shame.  You live in the dark, and hide from the light.”

Even in the pit of her illness, she  continued to write reviews and short stories, but quit writing novels because she dreaded publicity. “I simply could not face it, and the more shameful I felt myself to be, the more I drank,” she says. “I might have had ‘human block’, or ‘existential block’, but never writer’s block.”

She gave up drink in 2001, and three years later – at Edinburgh’s book festival – outed herself as an alcoholic. In 2006, not long after she had been invited to join the judging panel for Booker Prize, the blepharospasm descended.  Twenty years ago the same condition was held to be a mental illness and McWilliam would have been sectioned  - “that’s true, and do you know, I would have accepted that” she says.  Does she think she brought it on herself? 

“I alternate.  Sometimes I think it was a tailor-made punishment, that I summoned it to alleviate those I love of any putative pain.  Then I think maybe it is a consequence of my habits of my mind, which are so self defeating. Maybe I pulled this snood of blackness over my head. Maybe, because I am so self-sabotaging, every time something looks like it is going right, I ensure that it doesn’t. 

 “Some doctors say it is a consequence of certain habits of mind, or a consequence of a protracted  period of unspeakable stress, or of alcoholism.  I just don’t know. “

In the depths of drunkenness, she had considered suicide;  physical blindness conjured up the same despair.

“I tried to summon death in my blindness because I thought it would get everyone off the hook of having to pretend they could bear me,” she says. “That was not a loving way to think.  Then I went through periods of thinking,   ‘Is there a way of dying and it appearing an accident.’

“There isn’t.  I cannot leave my children in the sort of doubt I have had. I love them too much.  I want to know not just what their children will be like, but what kind of shirt they are wearing, what made them laugh today, what they had for breakfast.

“I am infinitely curious. I never ever lost that response to life.  Even when I was at the back of the cave and under the mud, the crackle of thought – like that painting on the Sistine chapel – lay in there somewhere. The battle to get back to it did seem long and weighty.  I  couldn’t depend on the usual things that people depend on – private intimacy, a partner.  I have to depend on work, the beauty of the world, chance.  Here is a talent I may have, I really don’t want not to have used it when I conk. But in the end we are all alone.”

A few weeks ago, McWilliam, 55, left London, to live in Edinburgh, a six-month trial to see if she was ready to return for good to the city.  Instinctively she feels her home town   is ready to receive this woman  “in the autumn of her life”,  with her foldaway white stick  and her stock of anti-depressants.  But though she wants to keep writing and talking, she says her identity  is shot to pieces.

“I  can’t rely on something that I didn’t know I was relying on, but was,” she says. “I wanted  strangers to like the look of me. Particularly children. But children don’t like the look of me now.  When I smile at babies I have to be really careful they don’t burst into tears.”

It seems a desperately bleak appraisal.  Perhaps self-assessment has never been her strong suit.  Would she accept that she remains blind to her real identity?   That her friends, family and readers, want more than just her beautiful words on the page; would she agree that they might love her appearance too?

“You are a complete darling.  Maybe the penny is about to drop.” 

• Portrait by Colin MacPherson
• This article - one of my better ones, I thought - appeared in The Times Edinburgh International Book Festival supplement. The review below appeared in The Times Weekend Review section, the previous Saturday.

On the stump: Patron saint meets national champ

This should be unpromising territory for Labour, but at either end of the long country road that separates the villages of Greenloaning from Braco, the party’s Gordon Banks keeps bumping into supporters.

This is not one of his party’s urban strongholds, like Kirkcaldy or Coatbridge, but rural Ochil & Perthshire South, Scotland’s weirdest constituency, where nothing is as it seems. Take the case of Steve Forsyth from Braco, a 55-year-old, self-made businessmen, a proud ex-Marine and, surely, a natural Tory.

“Make no mistake,” he says apologetically. “I can’t stand the Prime Minister. But it worries me that Gordon Banks might not get elected just because people want a change. He has really stepped up to the plate for this community.”

The incongruity emerges again a few hours later when Annabelle Ewing, the SNP candidate is out on the stump. Confronted by Hugh McAllister, a former mining deputy, who lives on a housing scheme in Menstrie, you might expect to find a solid Labour man. Not at all. “I’ve voted SNP for years,” he announces, shaking Ms Ewing warmly by the hand.

This is probably what happens when you create the 59th Scottish seat from the bits that are left over after the other boundaries have been drawn. Ochil & Perthshire South is a great blob, bang in the middle of the country and none of it makes sense.

For decades Conservatism seeped like rainwater into the bedrock. In former constituencies to the north and west, Tory grandees Alec Douglas Home and Nicky Fairbairn had safe seats. But in the 1990s the Tory party lost out to the Nationalists; these days no fewer than three SNP MSPs are elected to Holyrood from within this same territory.

Yet in the 2005 general election, Labour held off Ms Ewing’s challenge with a majority of 688, making this the second most marginal seat in Scotland. Much of his vote dwells in the thin band of industrial towns around Alloa, but “nowhere is no go” to Mr Banks, even Braco and Greenloaning. “Obviously some places are harder to deliver, but there are Labour voters where you least expect them,” he says.

The clash between Mr Banks and Ms Ewing will define how both parties perform across Scotland. If the SNP fail to achieve a swing of 0.7 per cent Alex Salmond’s vision of 20 Westminster seats will be seen as just so much hot air. And should either party weaken, the Conservatives are clinging to the hope that Gerald Michaluk, a millionaire businessman, can speed his Maserati through to claim the prize.

The Labour-SNP clash comes with a scent of animosity, which hangs in the air around the candidates. Mr Banks’ view of Ms Ewing roughly equates to: she’s all mouth and no action’. Ms Ewing’s assessment of Mr Banks is the same ... but different: he’s no mouth and no action. Should either win, the other will offer congratulations through gritted teeth.

The SNP candidate could hardly be better known — the daughter of Winnie Ewing, the party’s grande dame, and sister of Fergus Ewing, a minister in Alex Salmond’s government. Ms Ewing held the old Perth & Kinross seat in Westminster until she lost out to the Boundary Commissioners, making her mark in Parliament for her voluble campaign to retain Scottish regiments. In the process she called Geoff Hoon, then Defence Secretary, “a back-stabbing coward” and was ejected from the Commons.

For Ms Ewing the incident is a battle honour. Scotland needs “national champions” she says: “I pursued the regiments relentlessly, that is the job of a constituency MP.”

Mr Banks is more low-key, a founding director of a builder’s merchants business who only joined the Labour Party in 1996. Little known outside constituency or party circles he dumbfounded even his allies when he won in 2005, then, as now, campaigning on local issues. Labour installed him as manager of their Glenrothes by-election team. When Lindsay Roy won well in a tightly-focussed campaign, Mr Banks was anointed his party’s patron saint of lost causes.

Conservatives hope the Labour vote stays at home, and think the SNP is not hitting the heights of the Scottish election. Liz Smith, a local MSP, insisted the Conservatives could make up the 4,000 votes they need to spring a surprise.

“There is a sense the Nationalists are not firing on all cylinders,” she said. “If they have lost their punch, there is no reason at all why we cannot come through.” And while Mr Banks plays the local card Ms Smith, believes the wider picture counts. “Even in 2005, not enough of the public saw us as the next government — this time they do and it will make a difference on the ground.”

Stranger things have happened in Ochil & South Perthshire, the constituency which even voters can’t comprehend. “I stay up in Comrie,” Ms Ewing tells a man out with his kids in Menstrie. “The wee village in Fife?” he asks, thinking, that’s handy, just a few miles away. “No, no the one up in Perthshire, the place that’s actually in the constituency.” It will only make sense on May 6.

Read more in the Times of London: here. Photos by James Glossop.

Jack, the crumpet's smashing

"Show me a man who doesn’t like his shoulder blade pierced by a stiletto heel, and I’ll show you a liar,” chuckles Jack Vettriano. He looks up from a copy of his painting, Night Calls, a kind of still life with dominatrix. “It may never have happened – but you’ve thought about it.”

The artist is sitting in the Vettriano Suite, part of a brash hotel in Glasgow’s West End, where the name on the door honours this famously self-taught Scottish painter. An exhibition that travels to London and Milan opens this morning in Kirkcaldy museum, his home-town gallery, featuring many of his sexually-charged images, along with the trams and boats that set his brush a-twitching when he’s not gazing at women.

Already the Vettriano publicity machine has been cranked into overdrive, embarrassing the ‘official’ art world into near silence. The public may love him – he is said to make more money from reproductions of his work than any other artist – but the snobs at the national galleries in England and Scotland just won’t hang him. “Painting by numbers” are the three little words that durst not be uttered.

Fortunately for Vettriano, these days he occupies some weird artistic otherworld, where critical opinion has no meaning. At 58, he has homes in Knightsbridge, Nice and Fife, and is noticeably more at ease with the world than he was a decade ago. Who cares what the critics write? “People like my work,” he says. “ They don’t have to scratch their heads and say, ‘Is that the side of a cow?’ They look at it and know what it is. Accessible – that’s the whole bloody point.”

The Vettriano industry is a marketing masterpiece. When he broke through in the early 1990s, the press latched on to his anti-establishment pose, while the public devoured his cards and prints, a combination that pushed the price of his originals towards the stratosphere.

The process reached a zenith when, with uncanny timing, his best known work, The Singing Butler (then owned by his friend, Alex Cruickshank) appeared at auction precisely one month after a stunningly sycophantic edition of the South Bank Show had given Vettriano maximum publicity. It fetched £750,000. “I was staggered,” says Vettriano. Did he manipulate the market? “How could I?”

Afterwards, he broke with his agents, the Portland Gallery, and his publishers, the Art Group, went into liquidation. Vettriano now runs his own publishing company, Heartbreak, which he set up with Nathalie Martin, formerly a director at Portland.

So are Jack and Nathalie ...? Vettriano’s right eye bulges. “No comment on that,” snaps his publicist. Yes, these days, the man christened plain Jack Hoggan, a miner’s son from Fife, travels with a PR minder.

The truth is that life and art have always been about sex for Vettriano. He was never a man’s man, and in his 20s and 30s, he’d hang out in Bentley’s disco, down by Kirkcaldy’s drab Esplanade, nursing a half pint of lager and lime and eyeing up the talent on the dance floor.

“It was all about strutting your stuff and picking up the women. I always thought that sex was more interesting than alcohol, and I still do,” say Vettriano. “What was fortuitous was, I knew I could paint, but I didn’t know what to paint. Then it just dawned on me: Why don’t you paint the thing you love most of all? Women. And glamorous women at that. I make no apologies for using the term glamorous – I don’t particularly like to see women in jeans or trainers, I don’t think it does anything for them. I like to see them dressed to kill.” He laughs: “And guess who’s dying?”

He took care over his own image. It helped that he inheritied the swarthy good looks of his Italian grandfather. He annexed his surname too, Vettrino, but added an ‘A’ because it sounded cool. Style still matters – Vettriano’s hair may be wisped with grey, but he cuts a dash in his dark frock coat and black jeans.

And the women still love it. Those who get close can get hurt – it’s not long since he up the broke up the marriage of a lady reporter from the local paper, and she had only gone along to interview him. But there are plenty more gagging to meet him. It’s most noticeable at book signings and exhibtions, he says, when the fans turn up dressed to the nines. “They like the work and they find it sensuous, and if they themselves are attractive, they enhance the occasion a bit ,” he says.

“One of the attendants at Kirkcaldy said me, ‘It’s great to have you back Jack.’ I said: ‘I’d have thought you would be upset because it’s too busy, and you can’t just sit around talking.’ He said: ‘No, Jack. Some of the crumpet’s smashing’”

A slightly shorter version of this ran in the UK edition of the Times. Read it here, Jack

Faces from the Ark

Richard Ellingham, 47, ship’s chaplain
“I am the chaplain, the Bish as they call me, along with the God Botherer, the Sin Bosun, the Devil Dodger. I get everywhere, down in the engine rooms, up on the bridge. When we take fuel from a tanker, I get on the bridge roof. The lads will be flashing lights at the vessel that’s supplying us, they’ll say, ‘What do you want to say Bish?’ I’ll tell them to say, ‘Jesus Loves You’. It’s great – that’s the way the guys are. They’re up there, it's bloody cold, and why shouldn’t I be up there getting cold with them, chewing the fat, and building those small bridges, because those bridges become very important. Six months later Able Seaman Bloggs might think, ‘I need someone to talk to ... I might go see the Bish. He’s a decent bloke – he was out there on the bridge when I was flashing lights and it was raining, it was cold.’ It’s these tiny things that are vital.”


Lieutenant Commander Lindsay Falla, 29, ship’s dentist
“This is a big job for me because it is so high profile. This is the fleet flagship and there are only two dentists at sea in the whole Royal Navy at the moment. It’s wonderful. What prestige. There is no other ship like this - you can say Ark Royal and they know exactly what you are talking about. I say I am the dentist on board. People say, ‘There must be quite a lot of dentists.’ I say, ‘No, just me.’ I knew early on in my career that if I could get this job, it would be what I wanted to do. You had to be a certain rank before you could get the job. I knew I had to do post-graduate diplomas; I did them. I knew I had to work in a hospital for a year, jobs which don’t come up very often, but I did that too. Then another diploma. But I was lucky the job came up when it did.”

Dear reader, these photos are only here because of the great work of James Glossop. James was recently anointed Scotttish Young Photographer of the Year, and has just started a blog of his own on The Times website. Go here for Glossop.

Spirit of the Ark

It is a little after dawn in the Moray Firth, 30 miles north of Lossiemouth. In Flyco — air traffic control — high above the deck of HMS Ark Royal, six officers have their eyes fixed on the horizon, and there is an almost tangible sense of expectation.

Suddenly a voice rings out: “Here he comes.” A Harrier GR9 jets across the slate-grey sea from the port side. The aircraft powers low towards a target that is being dragged along behind the aircraft carrier, like some giant, deranged water skier.

Just as it reaches its goal, the Harrier drops its dummy bomb, which smashes into the water, just short.

A groan goes up in Flyco. “Rubbish,” says one.

“I knew they couldn’t hit two in a row,” says another.

The third: “They peaked too soon.”

It proves to be a rare miss and, to cheers, the next aircraft scores the second direct hit of the morning.

Here on the famous Ark, the flagship of the Royal Navy, a crew of 770 are readying for the multinational Auriga deployment off North America this summer.

After more than a year’s preparation, and the recent delivery of six Harriers from the Naval Strike Wing, the excitement is intense. But the brutal fact is that the next 18 months are likely to represent the last great adventures for the ship.

Launched in 1985, Ark Royal was designed to carry six Harrier jets. Once the cutting edge of naval and aviation science, a generation later both ship and planes are part of a familiar modern problem: like video recorders and in-car cassette players, they are technologically obsolete.

Though she will work again as a helicopter carrier for a couple of summers, Ark Royal is likely to be decommissioned by 2015.

In the 21st century, it seems aircraft carriers are all a matter of scale. When HMS Queen Elizabeth, the first of two new vessels, is launched from Rosyth in 2014, she will be twice the size of the Ark and carry six times as many jets, American-built Joint Strike Fighters. The second ship, Prince of Wales, will launch in 2018, with the same capacity.

If these modern carriers are a boon to the Navy, great old names are another thing altogether. Hanging heavy in the air in the Ark Royal’s ward room and its messes is the absolute belief that its badge should live on, whatever happens to the old ship.

Off the record, it seems every officer and crewman or woman is keen to let you know that Prince of Wales should have its name changed to Ark Royal.

True, such a move might be problematic; the sensitive matter of naming is dealt with by a sub-committee of the Ministry of Defence. But it is whispered that if the Prince of Wales himself could be persuaded of the sense in preserving a powerful naval tradition, who knows what could happen.

John Clink, the captain of Ark Royal, protests that he will not endorse a proposal to change the name of the second of the two new carriers. Prince of Wales is after all a famous warship name in its own right, and history shows that in the rarefied air below decks, men and women soon get used to the idea of a ship’s badge.

Creating a sense of pride begins in the shipyard, argues Captain Clink. “When the ship’s company arrive, it’s very special. There is a palpable pride. It starts with the badge: ‘You’re joining HMS Queen Elizabeth? Have the Queen Elizabeth cufflinks?’”

That said, he will admit that when he was informed by the Admiralty that he was to captain a ship, he sent an e-mail saying: “I don’t care what one it is — as long as it has two names.”

This “Spirit of the Ark” is part myth, part history. The first such vessel began life as the Ark Raleigh, before it was commandeered by Queen Elizabeth I from Sir Walter Raleigh and became the English flagship at the defeat of the Spanish Armada.
It took more than 300 years for a second — a converted collier — to sail from port, but that Ark Royal saw action at Gallipoli as an aircraft carrier. Its successor was even more illustrious, and one of its Swordfish bi-planes crippled the Bismarck in 1941. The fourth Ark never fired a shot in anger but spawned a 1970s TV series, still cheerfully remembered by the older crew. This vessel, the fifth, has seen action in the Balkans and in the Gulf.

Tradition, in other words, looms large here. Even the ship’s dentist, Lieutenant Commander Lindsay Falla, 29, takes up the cry. “What prestige to work here,” says the lieutenant, who achieved her qualifications at Glasgow University, where she signed up after seeing a Navy advertisement offering “Dentistry with a difference”.

“I knew almost immediately that dentist on Ark Royal was the one job for me,” she says. “There is no other job for a dentist in the Navy. I knew early on that if I could get posted here it would be what I wanted to do.”

The same mood has swept away the ship’s chaplain, Richard Ellingham, who has a fleece emblazoned with his nickname, “The Bish”, that he wears with pride. “I am sure there are plenty of chaplains out there who would love to be ‘the Bish’ in Ark Royal — it’s the fleet flagship, its a massive community, we are doing great things, and it is exciting,” he says.

At his breakfast table, with his commanders around him, Captain Clink remains phlegmatic about those two words, the name of his ship. He served in Fearless, a vessel that sailed for many years after it was due to be decommissioned. When it finally docked at Portsmouth harbour for the last time, he watched as men in their 50s and 60s lined the quay and cried.

So when this Ark Royal makes its last voyage, will he join the people weeping at the dockside? “Yes,” he says with a smile. “Sign me up for that.”

But the Spirit of the Ark moves in mysterious ways. As his senior officers troop off to work, one of them says: “Listen, you never know what might happen.”

Photograph by James Glossop, whose photoblog should be on line soon. This article is also available at timesonline.

Blockbuster puts accent on empire

It seems a credible scenario. A well-intentioned modern army marches off convinced that it can impose its superior culture on a distant country. But within months, its leaders are tragically disabused and, among mountains far from home, the troops face an implacable foe and, ultimately, bloody defeat.

If film lovers leaving The Eagle of the Ninth find their thoughts turning to events in Iraq or Afghanistan, its director, Kevin Macdonald, will have achieved at least one of his goals. For though it tells the tale of a Roman legion that is said to have perished in Scotland, his new film is just as concerned with today’s events in faraway lands. To ram the point home, the American actors Channing Tatum and Donald Sutherland are cast at the head of the occupying Roman force.

“It was always my concept for this film that the Romans would be Americans,” says Macdonald.

“That was my first idea about the movie and it still holds up whether or not we had any money from America, that would have been my approach.” The Eagle of the Ninth is based on a 1950s novel by Rosemary Sutcliff and stars Tatum as Marcus Aquila, an idealistic Roman soldier, whose uncle, Aquila, played by Sutherland, epitomises the confidence of the occupying army.

“It’s a film is about a guy who believes wholeheartedly in the values of Rome, and believes everyone else must want to become a part of the great family of Rome,” says Macdonald, who has completed the director’s cut of the movie.

“Marcus thinks, ‘It would benefit them so much — can’t they see it is the only way to live their lives?’ He comes to realise there are other value systems, other people have a claim to honour in the same way that he as an American — or a Roman — can claim honour. This is a film which is some way reflects the some of current anxieties and the political questions that we all have.”

The Romans’ attitudes are contrasted with those of Esca, a Celtic slave, played by Jamie Bell, whose distance from his master is emphasised by his voice — Bell speaks in his native Teesside accent for the first time since Billy Elliot, his breakthrough movie.

The same linguistic trick is accentuated as the Ninth Legion heads beyond Hadrian’s Wall. The Romans encounter the Seal People whose Gaelic language is unintelligible to their uninvited guests, and their world and values remain a mystery to the invaders.

By casting Mahar Ramin as the Seal Prince, Macdonald adds the promise of good box office from a rapidly- rising star. Ramin, lauded at the Baftas for his role in The Prophet, voted best foreign language film, “brings a humanity, a roundedness, to even the most evil moments, the difficult, dark decisions that a person makes”. Macdonald, 42, believes his film stands squarely in the Hollywood tradition of Ulzana’s Raid, a Burt Lancaster vehicle or A Man Called Horse, starring Richard Harris, both 1970s Westerns that carried a fierce anti-war message about the conflict in Vietnam.

“That’s what we are doing — not simply reflecting on the Afghanistan or Iraq wars, but a sense of cultural imperialism,” he says. “Those films dealt with torture and maltreatment of prisoners, but in the context of Indians. The parallel is definitely there, and it is part of what you would want the audience to take away from the film. But it is not necessarily literal. Literalism is very often the death of films.”

The US is not the only country to have established a modern empire. Over generations, millions of Scots felt the benefit of the British Empire. So why not British actors attacking the Seal People? “Britain isn’t a force any more, we aren’t cultural imperialists. That just didn’t seem the right way to go.”

Macdonald, who was brought up near Loch Lomond and cut his teeth as a documentary maker, has been widely praised for the attention to detail he brought to State of Play and The Last King of Scotland. Despite the absence of clear historical data, to deliver the discomfort of the Roman soldier he filmed in Argyllshire and Wester Ross in October and November in the belief that “Scotland looks best when it’s brown, yellow and dreich”. For the cast it was “quite a trial” but the effect is “to make you feel what it was like to have no shoes on, and to be in that landscape in that climate”.

The result, he believes, is a film with an epic dimension — without the excess of Gladiator — but in the sense of “men alone in the landscape, and the unfamiliarly of the world they have come across”.

Eagle of the Ninth will be released in September.

Read in at timesonline, Romans, complete with even more interesting copy.

Islanders buy out Attenborough estate

There is an expectant smile on the face of Deirdre Forsyth, returning officer, as she prepares to announce the result on this, the Isle of Bute’s day of destiny. “The votes for, 2,557,” she booms proudly. “The votes against, 177. Five papers were spoilt.”

The cheers ring out across Rothesay’s art deco Pavilion. An old man punches the air. This joy unbounded tell its own story: the biggest community land buyout in Scottish history has just moved inexorably forward, and by a massive majority. The grin on the face of the Rev Ian Currie — here to ensure fair play at the count — is as broad as the icy channel separating Bute from the mainland.

“This is an historic moment”, says John McGhee, the metropolitan QC who has chaired the buyout campaign. “In five years’ time we will all feel better about this place. When I am in London, and people say where are you going, and I reply ‘Bute’, they will say, ‘I know where that is’.”

The islanders now have effective control of Rhubodach Forest, a 1,700-acre estate that sweeps down from the summit of Buttock Hill in the north, to Shalunt Farm, on Bute’s east coast. For more than 20 years this estate has belonged to Lord and Lady Attenborough of Richmond-upon-Thames, and it was their decision to sell that prompted the campaign.

If the next stage of the purchase process seems onerous — the islanders have to raise £1.4million by the end of May to meet the price — the generous support of the Scottish government means there is little doubt they will achieve their goal.

For campaigners such as Christine McArthur, 45, a native Brandane (as they call the Bute islanders), and the gaggle of B&B owners and business people who have mucked in, the buyout represents much more than possession of acre upon acre of Sitka spruce, or even ownership of a site of special scientific interest that lies at the northern fringes of the estate. It is about “people having pride in the island, and putting it on the tourist map again”.

On Bute, this approach makes a kind of sense. There is talk of attracting “carbon-neutral tourists” to the island to enjoy Rhubodach, along with artists and wildlife lovers. The surrounding countryside is low-lying, and conquerable by bike or on foot; it is served by Scotland’s best ferry service and Wemyss Bay, the mainland port, is a short rail journey from Glasgow.

Then there are the faded charms of Rothesay itself. It was the 19th-century playground for Glasgow’s “tobacco lords”, the merchants who prospered from the British Empire. Afterwards its relative proximity to the city made it a bucket-and-spade resort. Both legacies live on, in the peeling Victorian promenade and the mouldering Georgian side streets, set off by brash seafront cafés. The Rhubadoch purchase can catalyse further regeneration here, or so the logic goes.

And all the while the Attenboroughs look on from their London home, even sending a message of support to the campaigners. They bought into Bute in 1988 when investment in forestry was promoted by government, to help to restore national timber reserves. Terry Wogan, the rock band Genesis and Steve Davis, the snooker player, were among hundreds who acquired Scottish estates, taking advantage of healthy tax incentives. Many of these buyers proved to be absentee landlords, but not the film director. Lord Attenborough bought a local farmhouse and has been a frequent visitor to Bute for 20 years.

Mrs McArthur’s family have come to know the director, who has been ill recently. “He loves it here because no one ever bothers him,” she says. “He was walking along with my Mum once when a cycle race went by, hundreds of them, from the mainland. One braked — they all almost fell off — and said, ‘Are you Richard Attenborough?’ Straight-faced, my Mum said: ‘Everyone always says that to him.’ They all got on their bikes and sped off round the corner. Lord Attenborough laughed, ‘You are wicked, Eliza.’”

From the beachside cottage that Mrs McArthur shares with her husband, Colin, a fisherman, the view is spectacular, across the perfect calm of St Ninian’s bay towards the sinuous spur of the Mull of Kintyre. “It’s almost Herbridean, we feel so cut off,” she says. “Lots of people make films here. Bute seems so far away, even though we’re so close to the mainland.”

On the window ledge, a greetings card from Lord and Lady Attenborough looks forward to their next visit, and a taste of the local catch. Little wonder they keep coming back.

Photo by kind permission of James Glossop. Read the story, and comments, at timesonline, Bute

Our friend, the man who abused our child

“It was Sunday night and we were sitting watching Sports Personality of the Year on the telly and the door bell rang,” remembers John. “One of these men was showing me a badge. He said, ‘Mr Reilly? Leith CID. We need to talk to you about something.’” John nervously assumed he had forgotten to pay a parking ticket, until one of the men asked if his wife was home. “I wasn’t sure what the right answer was,” he says. “I thought, ‘What’s going to come out?’”

As soon as they were ensconced in the Reillys’ comfortable living room, one of the policemen asked if the couple knew Rennie. “At first,” says Maggie, “there was slight relief, because you think, ‘At least we haven’t done something.’” The police explained that they were calling as part of an ongoing investigation, Operation Algebra, and that they were investigating Rennie for possession of indecent images of children. And then the heart-stopping words were uttered: “We believe it involves your son.”

This is from an interview with "John" and "Maggie", the couple so shockingly betrayed by their friend, James Rennie. This piece makes around 3,000 words and appeared here in The Times Saturday Magazine

Curse of MacLeod the builder

Over the centuries, plenty of blood has flowed around these walls, occupied by MacLeods for 800 years since Leod, son of Olaf the Black, founded the dynasty. But for modern clansmen the problems really set in after a fire in 1938 destroyed part of the castle.

Dame Flora MacLeod decided to commission an architect to construct a new south wing, handing the brief to a certain MacLeod — it was no coincidence — of Inverness. This proved unwise. The resulting “diseased limb” of stone, pebbledash and tar has all the charm of the worst public housing of the postwar era accentuated by the application of grubby harling to the castle walls. To make matters worse a copper roof was installed which failed within four years and has continued failing ever since, rendering many of the private rooms uninhabitable. The buckets indoors speak for themselves.

More here on the travails of Hugh, 30th MacLeod of MacLeod: wee Shug.

Burns night whisky sensation

A palpable sense of astonishment has overtaken a small but convivial crowd of whisky enthusiasts, assembled in Leith’s historic Vintners Rooms.

In fact, not since 2007, when the Taipei First Girls’ Senior High School marching band made its jaw-dropping entrance to the Edinburgh Military Tattoo, has such a sense of profound shock overwhelmed a select Scottish gathering.

“Oh. My. God,” breathes Charles MacLean, author and whisky connoisseur, from behind his impressive moustache. “Is this an April fool?” Fellow panellists register the same amazement. Whispers of “unbelievable”, “incredible” and “oh no” reverberate around a bar which for more than 250 years housed a Scotch whisky warehouse.

This was the weekend finale of an exclusive blind tasting, and against all odds a selection of three-year-old Scotch whiskies have been beaten by a rank outsider, distilled not in Scotland, Ireland, nor even England. But in Taiwan.

More here: whisky. As a point of information, I witnessed the Taipei First Girls’ Senior High School marching band's performance at the Edinburgh Military Tattoo. The gals, all 150 of 'em, gave an "eyes right" as they left the arena, and it's a fact that they were all looking at me as they high-tailed it out of there.

New Year on the edge

This morning, in his cliff-top café 300ft above the waters of Cape Wrath, Scotland’s loneliest restaurateur is rubbing his hands and readying his kitchen for the first guests of the new year.

John Ure, 54, is wise enough to season his anticipation with a large dose of realism. Even without the snow and ice lying thick around the place, he knows his café — set in the former lighthouse keeper’s cottage at the northwestern tip of Britain — is as seriously inaccessible as it gets: a ferry ride across an inlet and an 11-mile hike over rugged moorland.

The journey can defeat even the most experienced travellers in these parts. Eight days ago Kay, his wife, set off to Inverness to fetch the Christmas turkey. She still hasn’t made it back.

“The snow only began after she’d left,” says Mr Ure regretfully. “It’s the first Christmas we’ve spent apart for 30 years. She’s been stuck in Durness all this time.”

More of Mr Ure, a surprisingly happy man, at: Cape Wrath Cafe.

Happy new year, comrades.

For these women, the future's Orange

High on Well Road, past the bookmakers, the bowling alley and Chinese takeaway, you can enjoy the best view of Auchinleck's Orange parade as it slowly takes shape outside the community centre.

The flutes of the Patna band have returned from wetting their whistles at the Railway hotel, and are forming in orderly ranks. Braided union flags and lodge banners are held aloft; the marchers have fallen into line.

I am in the middle of a housing scheme in Ayrshire. This is not the beautiful coastal strip with its luxury golf courses and prosperous commuter towns, but the eastern side of the county, where the mining jobs have long gone from tough and insular communities. For some who live here it is only a dim sense of their Protestant roots that keeps them going.

It is in communities like this in East Ayrshire, Lanarkshire and West Lothian that the Grand Orange Lodge of Scotland draws its strength. That's why the residents of Well Road are out in their front gardens in their tracksuits and vests, grinning at each other and waiting for the fun to begin. But there is a curious difference to this march.

True, there are the bands, with their gaudy uniforms and their absurdly militant names, such as the Drongan Young Conquerors. But those trussed-up men with their bowler hats and sashes, who for generations have held up towncentre traffic all across Scotland, are nowhere to be seen. Instead, it's women who catch the eye.

Draped in a blue sash and at the head of the parade march is Helyne MacLean, the mouse-like grand mistress of the women's wing of the Orange Order of Scotland.

Behind her, dressed in their Sunday hats, are ladies from all over the country, who are spending their bank holiday Saturday celebrating the inauguration of a new women's lodge in the village.

At the centre of the parade come the Auchinleck ladies, dressed in regulation orange and brown, proudly strutting along. These are the Sisters of Peden, Orange Lodge No205. To outsiders they look militant and uncompromising; to their supporters on the streets, they are proud defenders of the faith. Staunch or scary, I've come to meet them and to find what makes them tick.

There is a clue to the Orange mindset in the very name of the new lodge, which, like so many others, invokes the memory of a bloody and unblinking Protestant fanatic, long forgotten by the rest of the human race.

Alexander Peden was a Calvinist firebrand who defied the King's soldiers during the Killing Times of the 17th century. Peden was variously imprisoned on the Bass Rock, sentenced to transportation and forced to hide in the shadow of persecution, spending the last months of his life in a cold, dank cave. Surely a bitter and bloody chapter in Scottish history, a story you'd never wish to linger over? Not a bit of it.

After the march has ended, MacLean, nibbling on a piece of Dundee cake in the community centre, confides pleasantly: "The ladies themselves chose the name."

Auchinleck has many surprises. Out on the streets, it's easy to imagine a flash point is approaching as the parade begins to climb towards the village's Catholic church. The crowd, though, remains in good humour, laughing and joking with the scrawny ribbon of spectators spread out along the route.

High on the verge, Eddie McGilvray, the keeper of chapel hall, waves as one of the marchers shouts a greeting. "It's just something they do," he says with a smile and a shrug. "We stand shoulder to shoulder with them when we're watching the Talbot."

McGilvray is talking about Auchinleck Talbot, the village's football team. Just a week before, in a striking display of community solidarity, more than half the population of 7,500 - Catholic and Protestant, men and women - turned out to watch them win the Scottish Junior cup.

For all its modest scale, this parade effectively sounds one of the opening shots of the marching season. This summer there will be 186 marches in Glasgow alone, to celebrate a victory of Protestant forces over the deposed Catholic King James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.

Depending on where you stand, these marches are either the nearest Scotland has to Mardi Gras or the physical manifestation of a scar on the national psyche. So why would women want to get involved? For the ladies of the order the answer is simple: their passionate belief in a Protestant Britain is unshakeable and they have every right to express themselves. "The way the country's going, it makes you value it even more," says MacLean. "I'd fight for it even more. But people just haven't got the values I was brought up on - the commitment to their church and country."

Back at the community centre, the lodge banners and union flags are arranged around a photograph of the Queen. The ladies have arranged their hats and coats tidily on chairs, and ensconced themselves in an annex where a buffet has been laid out.

These women have much to unite them. Few are in the first flush of youth and most have been members of the Orange Order for years. Nearly everyone has a parent or grandparent who was a member of a lodge. Margaret Stirkie is the worthy mistress of the Auchinleck lodge; her husband is its worthy master. Janice Frew joined the Sisters of Peden today, "but she was brought up with the lodge" and her husband is another leading Orangeman in the village.

Above all, what defines the women is their backs-to-the-wall attitude, in the face of what they see as attacks on their way of life - by politicians, by politically correct bureaucrats, by the media and by their own churches. It is difficult to meet them without thinking they are out of step with the modern world.

When MacLean joined the Church of Scotland at the age of 13, the spirit of tolerant ecumenicism, she says with regret, was already reaching the church. "That was the 1960s," she recalls, "when people were very much taking charge of their own lives. Even then I felt there was a need, that the churches weren't entirely for the people. I felt then that the Orange Order was a kind of extension of church membership." She joined the order three years later, in 1969.

Within the church of Scotland things have got far worse since the Swinging Sixties for those of an Orange disposition. Last month it was mooted at the Kirk's general assembly that same-sex partnerships might be blessed by ministers. That is anathema here.

"I don't agree with a lot of the trends the church has gone towards," says MacLean. "People in churches are the keepers of the..." she seems to stop herself saying "faith", aware perhaps that it makes her sound almost too committed.

Instead she goes on: "There are some always asking, 'What are you going to do about this?' The answer is, 'What are you going to do about it.'" MacLean is not for turning. She is staunch, in the language of the lodge.

The Grand Lodge of Scotland is firmly on its back foot. It's peak membership of 80,000 was reached in the 1960s; now it numbers 50,000, around a third of whom are women.

First came devolution, a body blow to the unionist cause. Next up was Jack McConnell's crusade against sectarianism. Last month, the Order joined with the Irish republican group, Cairde na hEireann, to sign a declaration that aims to eradicate the boorish chants that often accompany such parades.

But that gesture does not hide the resentment felt among the women tucking into tea and cake about McConnell's determination to put sectarianism "in the dustbin of history". For it is clear to these ladies that the first minister has them - and the organisation they love - in his sights.

"The Orange Order is a celebration," says Margaret Blakely, who has come from Irvine for this little tea. "In Ireland, sectarianism went alongside terrorism - and that's totally wrong."

"If somebody can actually give us the meaning of sectarianism, what Jack McConnell means by the word, it might help," says MacLean. "People don't know what the Orange Order is about, so they say we're sectarian. But what is that? This is our culture, and we feel it's being eroded. If we were any other religion ..." she lets the sentence trail off in exasperation. The women sitting opposite me feel they live in an all-inclusive, liberal society, which embraces the freedom of expression for all religions. Except their own.

"It's like the rest of society is ashamed of the Orange Order," somebody says. "I think they are," agrees MacLean. "You might see a religious parade abroad and think it was interesting, and you would have tremendous respect for these people.

It seems that people don't have any respect for our faith. Tolerance is accepting people for what they are and not for changing them to what you want them to be."

The women's lodge was established 97 years ago, when democratic and socialist principles were taking hold. Yet despite their numbers - women account for 164 of its 432 lodges - they remain discriminated against, with no voting rights at any important level in the organisation.

"It's something we want to change," says MacLean. "We're striving, and I think it will come. There's still a lot of what we call dinosaurs in there, but we really do have a good working relationship with the men. We are an organisation that believes in democracy. We are getting there." But in an organisation that has steadfast as its watchword, don't expect change any day soon.

At least on a local level the women believe they can make a difference. There's talk of increased involvement in Auchinleck's community council, and a determination to continue fundraising for good causes.

It will seem ironic to some that this fiery brand of Protestantism should now be putting its energies into helping others, but the irony

is lost on Walker. "It's about tolerance, isn't it?" she says. "It's about freedom of civil and religious liberty. And if we believe that for ourselves, we have to believe it for other folk."

That's how it is for the ladies of the Orange Order. They have feelings; they can be cheerful and generous with their time. But they are blinkered, and fanatical about their cause. And it's impossible to ignore another irony: the very tolerance they now crave could well sound the death knell for an organisation that, for centuries, has thrived only because of its rigid resistance to progress.

With the marching, talking and the fruitcake taken care of, the ladies of the Orange Order collect their hats and coats, and head home. The Sisters of Peden need to get ready for their celebration dance. But how long can the party continue for the Orange Order?

This piece was written in 2006. The picture is of a parade in Northern Ireland, not Ayrshire.

Schism looms for Kirk over gay rights

The Times, 21 April 2009

A potential rift within the Church of Scotland over gay relationships emerged yesterday after the Church's house magazine backed civil partnerships and openly gay ministers.

Accusing religious traditionalists of selectively quoting the Bible to support their attacks on homosexual relations, the editorial in Life And Work urged the Kirk to show strong leadership on an issue that has threatened to split the Church of England and could prove just as divisive in Scotland.

The article, which was written by the magazine's editor, Muriel Armstrong, comes ahead of next month's General Assembly in Edinburgh and has been timed to influence a key debate on whether openly homosexual ministers can be appointed to the Church.

Ms Armstrong rounds on the "selective literalists" who use parts of the Bible to bolster their own views but ignore other parts that undermine them. She says that these commentators "presumably no longer accept biblical teaching on sexual matters such as polygamy and sex with slaves" but are happy to quote Leviticus 18:22 on homosexuality: "Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination." The Church said yesterday that the magazine was editorially independent.

"It is not the voice of the Church of Scotland, which is not trying to steer debate on this important issue," the Rev Angus Morrison, convenor of the council of mission and discipleship said. He added that he had already received "a couple" of e-mails expressing concern that the magazine was interfering in the "due process" of the Church.

Senior figures within the Church fear that the issue of gay partnerships could prove as damaging for the Presbyterian ministry as the row that has split the Anglican Church.

A minority in the Presbytery of Aberdeen has already challenged the appointment of an openly gay minister, the Rev Scott Rennie, to Queen's Cross Church in the city.

They have appealed to the Commission of the General Assembly, with a final decision on the matter to be made next month.

In her editorial Ms Armstrong also champions the right of gay ministers to serve in the Church. She said said that two years ago the Church had effectively shelved its decision on the issue and that the moment had come to challenge those who use the "familiar arguments" of tradition, orthodoxy and the "plain meaning of scripture".

"The question of the integrity of a relationship didn't enter the [traditionalists'] argument. It has been suggested that if the Kirk stuck its neck out on this one it would upset other churches that are still in a reflective no man's land on this issue. Isn't it time for leadership? "What is clear to the lay-person is that not everything Biblical is Christlike.

Every student of the Bible is a selective literalist. Those who swear by the anti-homosexual laws in the Book of Leviticus wouldn't publicly advocate slavery or stoning women taken in adultery. They presumably no longer accept Biblical teaching on sexual matters such as polygamy and sex with slaves.

"And yet there are many who continue to be bound by a few Biblical verses — none of them in the Gospels — about homosexuality, nowadays understood as a matter of genetics rather than lifestyle." The debate on gays in the Church will involve members from every Presbytery, drawn from Scotland and overseas. It is likely to polarise opinion, just as it has in other Churches.

The Rev Lindsay Biddle, chaplain of Affirmation Scotland, a pro-gay group, said: "This is about lifting the veil and saying, 'We include you' to people inside and outside the Church, regardless of sexual orientation. We are catching up the rest of society. I know people whose sexuality is accepted everywhere they go — the only place where their orientation is a problem is within the Church."

"There is a sense of quiet over the city"

They were roustabouts and drillers, managers and technicians. The oldest, David Rae, was from Dumfries, a 63-year-old grandfather, who had already had told friends he wanted to retire. James Costello, of Aberdeen was one of the youngest, just 24, a computer planner with his life in front of him, “one of the industry’s brightest prospects,” according to his boss. As early as dawn yesterday it was clear that all 16 men had died in an instant, when Bond Super Puma AS 332L Mk II came down in the North Sea, 14 miles north east of Peterhead.

These lost lives brought a jarring stop to the communities of north east Scotland, where self-image and success are intermingled with North Sea oil and gas. Eight of the dead came Aberdeen and towns close to it, places such as Oldmeldrum and Kintore; all had worked out of the city.

Assistant chief constable, Colin Menzies, had noticed an eerie stillness as he walked through streets from police headquarters to be at the harbourside as the first bodies were brought ashore at a little after eight o’clock.

“There was a sense of quiet around the city,” he admitted. “We are used to seeing and hearing helicopters in the sky every few minutes over Aberdeen and it has been like that for the 30 years. Most either know somebody who works in the offshore industry or have themselves been involved. This really is close to people’s hearts.”

The first cortege had made its way through the dock gates before the sun had even risen over the harbour. A lone police motorcyclist led out the briefest of processions from Albert Quay. First a hearse. Next, a black van, wearing the livery of a local undertaker. And at the rear, a second hearse.

By the bleakest of ironies these bodies had been brought ashore by the Caledonian Victory. Just six weeks earlier, the support vessel’s rescue craft had plucked 15 men, alive and well from the icy waters off Peterhead, after another Super Puma helicopter, flying in thick fog, had ditched into the North Sea. Another three men had also been saved.

What then had seemed to many “our miracle of the Hudson” – a reminder of the Airbus A320 that ditched in New York in January with no loss of life – had brought a moment of unbelievable joy, shared by police, coastguards and rescue workers.

This time, when the Caledonian Victory’s bow doors opened dockside at 4:30am it was these selfsame officials who faced bleak and unenviable tasks. Identifying and preparing the dead for the short ride to the city mortuary; interviewing rescuers who had found the corpses bobbing up and down on a calm sea; screening off the harbourside with tarpaulins to keep prying eyes out of the most sombre business.

As the identities of the dead leaked out, so did the details of their lives. Stuart Wood, who worked for Expro, was a keen footballer and a “great personality”. At 62, Alex Dallas, had only just moved to Aberdeen for his job – his neighbours already admired him as “friendly and sociable.” Bill Munro of Bond Helicopters, paid tribute to the “dedicated” and popular young pilots who had died, Captain Paul Burnham, 31, and co-pilot Richard Menzies, just 24.

At the 12th century Kirk of St Nicholas Uniting, a book of condolence was opened in a chapel dedicated in 1990 to the oil and gas industries. A steady steam of signatories came to pay their respects.

Donald Wood, a teacher at Aberdeen University has been friend with a Bond Helicopters pilot who was killed to years ago. He said he wanted to show solidarity with the workers who risked their lives everyday. For others, the grief was just as immediate. Mary Rose, a receptionist at Canadian Natural Resources, whose North Sea headquarters overlook Aberdeen harbour, had felt almost too close to events. There was a realisation among all her friends that the men she worked with every day could be cut down at any time. “The mood is sad,” said Mrs Rose. “Everyone at my work realises that they have probably worked with these guys. But the men I’ve seen today are realistic, they have to be. They go to work in these helicopters, they go to do their jobs.”

Reverend Andrew Jolly, the chaplain to the oil and gas industry, had watched this dignified procession of visitors. Like A former army chaplain, even that experience could not prepare him for Tuesday’s events. Easter, he hoped might bring faith in resurrection and eternal life, but he acknowledged the crash was a test of faith.

“When you are part of a community you feel the pain and sorrow when something like this happens,” said Reverend Jolly. “Whether you are on-shore or off-shore, you feel it. Aberdeen has taken the oil and gas industry to its heart. We all feel this pain.”

Pooh's a wee bitty glaikit ...

Peering over his coffee cup, James Robertson is talking in a strange, slow voice. He sounds something like Eeyore might sound, if only Eeyore was from the West of Scotland and not the Hundred Acre Wood. And not called Eeyore at all but Heehaw.

“Heehaw has a dour, preachy voice, like Private Fraser from Dad's Army,” Robertson chuckles. “He says: ‘Guid mornin', Pooh Bear ... If it is a guid mornin' ... And I hae ma doots.'”

This strange and wonderful Eeyore is being conjured up in an Edinburgh café because Robertson has made it his business to translate the works of A.A. Milne into Scots. If it seems an unlikely task for an author whose most recent work - the darkly comic The Testament of Gideon Mack - was longlisted for the Booker Prize, he believes that his output in Scots is just as important as his writing in English.

Robertson wants to make reading more appealing to children whose everyday language - or dialect if you will - is Scots rather than English and seven years ago, with Matthew Fitt, he founded Itchy Coo press to do just that. At first they commissioned original titles, but more recently they have turned to translations of popular authors as their means of reaching the widest audience.

Combining the original illustrations with warm, comical texts, books such as The Eejits - Fitt's version of Roald Dahl's The Twits - have been an instant hit in Scotland. “Doing it in Scots gave it a new dimension. People said, ‘This is funny; we feel this is closer to us than the original',” Robertson says.

When, two years ago, someone suggested translating Winnie-the-Pooh he sensed a challenge. Was it possible to take a book that he knew and admired as “quintessentially southern English”, transform it and give it more meaning to a child on a council estate in Aberdeen?

He found the answer to the question when he started on the first chapter: “Yon's Edward Bear, comin doon the stair noo, dunch, dunch, dunch on the back o his heid ...”

The work developed as a kind of homage to Milne, but inevitably Robertson produced a different book. “Scots slants the story in a different direction. As soon as you make a movement in the language, you also shift the tone and register of the narrative,” he says.

Sometimes the translator has to take liberties. Pooh's song Cottleston Pie becomes “Bannocks and Bridies and Buttery Bree”. Completely different, Robertson admits, but “it is a translation of the mood, of the sense of the book, not to be literally correct but to my mind it is an accurate, creative translation.”

Inspiration comes from the characters' voices, which Robertson delights in saying out loud. Pooh sounds slow and “a wee bitty glaikit”, a bear of very little brain in any language. Robertson calls Piglet Wee Grumphie (“grumphie” is pig in Scots) and he remains squeaky and excitable; Owl - Hoolet - sounds like “a professor of some esoteric subject” who would lecture his students in English but subside into a kind of posh Scots in his Morningside flat.

Kanga and Roo were difficult. Robertson thought of writing in a weird Australian-Scots, but decided “that was pushing the boundaries a bit too far” and stuck to plain Scots for Kanga. For the most part Roo just squeaks, which “works just fine”.

Even the unseen characters have an identity in Scots. Woozles remain woozles because “they seemed Scottish enough” but Heffalumps transform into huffalamps, because “lamp” in Scots means “to stride”, and the new word made a kind of sense.

Subtle changes such as this work brilliantly on the page. In the English edition Piglet wonders why a Heffalump would fall into Pooh's trap. In Scots, Pooh tells him: “... the Huffalamp micht be lampin alang, bummin awa at a wee sang tae himsel, and keekin up at the sky, wunnerin if it wis gonnae rain, and sae he widna see the Awfie Deep Pit, tae he wis haufwey doon it ...”

The sequel is published next year, The Hoose at Pooh's Neuk. It will introduce Tigger, who, in Milne's words, does bounce, however much you like him. “Teeger?” Robertson says. “He's a breengin bampot.” Which sounds about right.

Winnie-the-Pooh in Scots by A. A. Milne, translated by James Robertson, Itchy Coo, £6.99

Read the story online in Saturday's paper: Pooh in Scots. And buy the book - it's fantastic - at Itchy Coo.

Proof of ghosts or dust on the lens?

A courtly figure dressed in a ruff and staring from a castle window would not be particularly unusual if he appeared in a period painting. But this image was captured on a digital camera some 500 years after the Elizabethan era and has for thousands of people around the world become the ultimate proof that ghosts exist.

The photograph, taken at Tantallon Castle near Edinburgh last May, was released yesterday by Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist, who “just for fun” embarked three weeks ago on an online research project, inviting websurfers to send him their photos of ghosts.

The response, he said, was “beyond all expectation”. Hundreds of images were sent his way, from as far afield as Mexico and Japan. Then, after 50 of the best images were placed online, some 250,000 people voted for the most convincing.

The array of smudged photographs and crazy fakes that caught the interest of this huge audience may do little to prove the existence of ghosts, but it indisputably proves a human need to believe in them, said Professor Wiseman, of the University of Hertfordshire. “That belief is everywhere, across countries and cultures. It plays on much bigger ideas about life and death, and there's no doubt that, for many of the people who contacted me, there is comfort in the notion that people who have been harmed in life might be able to come back and wreak their revenge.”

In Britain around a third of people say that they believe in ghosts and one in ten claims to have seen one. Proof, however, remains elusive.

One explanation put forward by ghost hunters and some physicists is that in some environments low frequency sound waves - infrasound — vibrate the body, and lead to strange sensations. While Professor Wiseman does not rule that out, he believes that psychology may have a better answer, particularly in oppressive and frightening surroundings such as a ruined castle.

“In the hypervigilance model, as you become scared, you become more on edge. You begin to monitor you own environment and your own physiology,” he said. “In those circumstances, if you hear a sound like a creaking door, it only heightens your own sense of vigilance. The spiral goes on and you might easily have a panic attack.

“From an evolutionary perspective, all this is sensible, because it is comparable to a situation in the "normal world" where you might come under attack. But in these oppressive surroundings, the seemingly inexplicable becomes very worrying and you begin to look for other explanations.”

Read the full story here at the ghost link

The Tantallon ghost ran in the national edition of the Times and for 24 hours it was the most popular stoy in the online edition, followed-up all over the world.

Brave bomb disposal expert deserves VC

The Times, 5 March 2008

Friends of an army bomb disposal expert whose extraordinary courage saved dozens of lives in Afghanistan and Iraq are campaigning for him to be awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross.

Warrant Officer Class 2 Gary O'Donnell, 40, was killed in Helmand province last September while attempting to disarm an improvised explosive device (IED). Yesterday he was awarded a second George Medal, or Bar, the first presentation of its type for 26 years, in recognition of two incidents in May and July, when “he placed himself in immense personal danger in order to protect his comrades”.

James Boyle, a former controller of BBC Radio 4 and a family friend of Warrant Officer O'Donnell, said that everyone who had known the soldier felt a deep pride in his life and achievements. But, Mr Boyle added, many of these same friends “knew Gary deserved the highest military honour - the VC”.

The Ministry of Defence said that the VC was presented “for valour and self sacrifice ... in the presence of the enemy”. Mr Boyle said that no soldier who had worked in bomb disposal had won the medal, because they were not seen as combat troops. “Bomb disposal personnel simply cannot get the highest award because for all their humbling bravery, their work isn't seen to fit the description. Gary was constantly putting his life on the line and on one occasion, when he was defusing a bomb, he detected a guy trying to detonate the thing by using his mobile phone. That is how close he was to the presence of the enemy,” Mr Boyle said.

In that incident Warrant Officer O'Donnell had gone in to inspect and defuse a bomb, after a robotic reconnaissance device had failed in the searing heat, Mr Boyle said. He became aware that an attempt was being made to trigger the device by a terrorist, who was in a nearby crowd, being held back by troops. Lead screens around the device are thought to have deflected the signal.

On another occasion, Warrant Officer O'Donnell prevented an explosion that would have killed him, by jamming his fingers into a closing clothes peg, designed to detonate a landmine.

Warrant Officer O'Donnell's Bar follows the medal he won for disposing of a highly complex, innovative IED in Iraq while working with the Joint Force Explosive Ordnance Disposal Group in 2006.

A senior army officer said: “What he used to do was ridiculously brave. He went far beyond the call of duty.”

Although field commanders make recommendations for awards, they do not have the final say. An MoD spokesman said: “These are then screened at various levels in the military chain of command and passed to a committee comprised of the most senior military chiefs with operational experience, who decide the appropriate awards.”

Campaigners may face a long fight. The VC is the highest military award in the armed services for gallantry under fire, and an equivalent medal, the George Cross, is made to both military personnel and civilians who have shown great courage in highly dangerous situations.

The George Cross was inaugurated by George VI, who was moved by the courage of civilians during the Blitz of 1940. Subsequently, 105 of 156 George Crosses have been awarded to military personnel.

Mr Boyle said that it was time for this military tradition to be overturned. Shortly after Warrant Officer O'Donnell's death last September, he wrote to Des Browne, then Secretary of State for Defence, and to the military authorities to make the case.

Mr Boyle wrote: “May I ask directly if you will consider awarding a posthumous VC to Warrant Officer O'Donnell? This highest of medals is for valour. I cannot think of any case I have ever read about where such sustained valour has been surpassed.”

Warrant Officer O'Donnell was from Edinburgh and lived in Leamington Spa with his wife, Toni, and four children. The MoD said that he had been recommended for the Bar in “recognition of his remarkable actions in two separate incidents. On both occasions Warrant Officer O'Donnell, who during his last tour in Afghanistan disposed of more than 50 IEDs, placed himself in immense personal danger in order to protect his comrades.”