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.

Notes on the road from Arusha

Below, some random observations from the trip last week to Tanzania. You can link to the article in the Times, by scrolling down to the following post, entitled At last, intelligent aid for Africa's poor.

Wherever we went, town or country, there were hundreds, thousands of people walking. Walking along the roads, across the countryside, children in smart school uniforms disappearing across the vibrantly green fields, towards unseen schools or homes, women with bales on their heads, Maasai men with their red and black cloaks and sticks, all just ambling along. There's a beautiful rhythm to this movement, almost hypnotic, and it's something which goes on and on, from dawn to dusk.

The Indian community in Tanzania is much older than the Indian community in Britain, though presumably it owes its origins to the same thing - the British Empire. We saw the remnants of the old colonial culture languorously displayed on Sunday at the TGT Club on the edge of Arusha city. It's an old sports club, built alongside a coffee plantation, now in the hands of American owners. On the field opposite the pavilion, a group of Indian men were playing cricket, while the predominantly white diners in the restaurant and bar looked on. The different cultures and origins of the residents have some curious results: Paolo, 13, born in Arusha to a Belgian mother and an Italian father, was a huge cricket fan, and (by all accounts) a very good player. Doubtless, he'll qualify to play for England soon enough.

There are unintended consequences to the Galvmed story. The charity's ambition is to wipe out 13 livestock diseases and this objective will almost certainly be realised, perhaps even within a decade. The benefits for remote, poor farming communities across Africa are incalculable, increasing wealth and food security exponentially. The same process will change communities forever, a trend already under way in the Maasai communities we visited. These are farmers who, for generations, have been used to losing most of their calves to disease - but now almost all are surviving. Calves vaccinated at a cost of £5 sell for £350 at market. 

In other words, a herd of 300 is worth a huge amount, in anyone's money and some of these pastoralists are rapidly becoming rich. As these individuals gain wealth, the communities around them are changing: there are plenty of traditional huts and bomas (farmsteads), and most of the people we met dressed in Maasai shawls - but other dwellings have replaced their straw roofs with corrugated iron, some houses in remote communities are built of concrete, and a few people own cars and lorries. When we were out in the countryside, in the early morning, Noah Lemorongo, the 40-year-old chairman of the Engarenaibor community asked me in English whether I owned a motorbike. I couldn't understand why. At lunchtime, as we walked away from a bustling village market, he drove up to show off the shining bike he'd bought himself, as if to show off his wealth. Still, as these communities change, it is very striking how many of the younger Maasai choose to remain in the countryside, close to the heart of their traditional way of life. (Note: The photo shows the chairman and half of my fat head, an image that proves the equation: "Wade + baseball cap = Michael Moore.")

The school we visited was blessed with Anna Remi Nchira, a headmistress of outstanding quality. She reminded me very much of the headmistress at my daughters' school in Edinburgh, as if there is some essence of headmistress that is shared across the world. A group of guys from a Western charity and a British newspaper represented important guests - she wasted no time in very formally welcoming us, and, then, just as she should have done, making demands of us, asking us to help her pupils and teachers.

Just as the walkers in the countryside give a glimpse of what like must have been like in pre-industrial Britain, Arusha City (population: 1 million) has the whiff of 18th and 19th century London. It's the whiff of cattle, hundreds, probably thousands of cattle, which are kept in small holdings, right at the heart of the the city, enabling the locals to have access to a constant supply of rich, untreated milk.

Local buses are illuustrated with pictures of great Tanzanian heroes. Here's one we spotted near Arusha coach station. Reading right to left: Barack Obama, Martin Luther King, Michelle Obama, Benjamin Mkapa and Julius Nyrere (both obscured) Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa, and ... that's right, pop pickers, Lionel Richie.

At last, intelligent aid for Africa

It is a little after dawn in the Maasai district of Engarenaibor in northwestern Tanzania. Amid a pre-historic landscape of rolling grassland and acacia trees, Paolo Lemorongo, a farmer, is rounding up cows, so that his visitors can see for themselves the tiny yellow tags that have been attached to each animal’s ear. The tag signifies an animal inoculated against the deadly Ndigana kali, better known as East Coast fever.

“Before the vaccination became available, most of my animals died,” says Mr Lemorongo. “If the cows delivered 80 calves, only five would survive. Of course, when vets first brought the treatment here some people were suspicious, but when they saw that so many animals survived, suddenly everyone wanted it.”

Mr Lemorongo, whose home is a four-hour drive by Land Rover from Arusha, the nearest city, is understandably delighted to be the beneficiary of a ground-breaking aid project, developed by Galvmed (Global Alliance for Livestock Veterinary Medicines). This Edinburgh-based charity was founded five years ago with the aim of halting East Coast fever and 12 other deadly livestock diseases that lay waste to millions of animals every year across the African continent and throughout the developing world.

It seems an unfeasibly large ambition...

... and it is hugely ambitious. The whole article is here Galvmed's intelligent aid. Strangely, this article is filed under "Scotland" at Times online; also the paper printed the word Maasai as Masai, I know not why. All of which is rather a shame, because this is a fantastic aid project, which deserves to be widely reported.

The photo is by me, for once. James Glossop took some fantastic pix, four of which you can see on the Times site, and more on his Times blog, when he gets round to putting them up.

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.

Her and her big mouth

The Scotsman, 5 August 2003

She's got big hands, bloody big feet and a great big voice. "Hurry up," she yells, "I'm freezing me tits off."

Janet Street Porter is sitting with her Olive Oyl legs dangling over the triangulation point on the top of Edinburgh's Blackford Hill. She's not being rude, unkind or unpleasant, she just's being, well, Janet Street Porter. Sort of stentorian.

Behind her, a huge panorama stretches away to Edinburgh Castle, Inchcolm and beyond to Fife, half of Scotland united in the sweep of an eye. But around her, opinion has quickly divided into love and hate, high on this hill. The photographer - the object of the tits remark - is in the former camp, he's lapping it up; in the latter, the birds have stopped singing.

They are not alone. Wrapped in their raincoats and cowering under flat hats, the Calvinist residents of Edinburgh's villa quarters linger warily below the summit, their morning constitutionals on hold. Even their mutts know instinctively to avoid this woman. The bravest scamper up, slobbering, but quickly retire with a whimper. "I hate dogs," Street Porter calls after a Labrador as it dives down the slope to its owner, both of them now sharing a gloomy kind of look.

Street Porter is a real walker, out and proud, the former president of the Ramblers' Association who has trodden the pathways with the rich and famous on a television show, As the Crow Flies, and ambled more discreetly with local groups, like the Selkirk Plodders.

She lives in London, but has a house by the sea at Whitstable and another in Niddersdale in Yorkshire's West Riding, two hideaways which help her make the most of the landscapes she loves. Her ideal is to get on the top of the moors and walk for miles in a "huge expanse of emptiness" or to tramp round the marshes in a Kentish sort of way.

So much for likes. But in the manner of dedicated walkers everywhere, Street Porter tends to dislike a sizeable array of things. Those joggers you meet on mountain tops? "Oh fing hell, them. Or people on bikes," she shrieks.

"Just for a bit, I started running again along canal towpaths and not only have you got dogs, you have people cycling with dogs on leads. Stupid. Mind you, I looked a sight - I was like an octopus having an epileptic fit, a lot of wobbly bits and tentacles flying about."

Before the image can burn itself into your brain, she's off again: "And what about when you're out walking and you get the mountain bikers coming up behind you and they've got no bell? But then they just couldn't have a bell, could they? It wouldn't be macho enough. Hate them.

"They come up beside you and you don't hear them coming if it's windy. They make you jump. You say: 'Why don't you have a bell?' And basically they tell you to f off."

Which is unfortunate, because Street Porter is, she confides, very thin-skinned. That's why she's turned her life into her solo show, All the Rage, which is already playing to rave reviews on the Fringe: it's all just one helluva cathartic experience for her. Often patronised in the media, she is content to let her achievements speak up for her, both on stage and in conversation. She has been the editor of the Independent on Sunday, a successful television executive and she has won prizes for her programmes.

"What I haven't won awards for is being a big woman with big tits and funny glasses," she says. "I can't control what people write. There's no point in moaning about it ..." and for once she slows down "... it's - just - the - way - it - is." Isn't it simply sexism? "I couldn't care less."

She can at least vent her spleen on her mother - she, by Street Porter's account, was a nightmare. On stage she calls her bitch and worse. She says: "I remember wishing after she had her thyroid operation on her neck that they'd cut her head right off."

Here on the hill, she sounds less strident but just as bitter. "My mother was Welsh, and we spent all our summer holidays in Wales. We did a lot of walking then. But you weren't allowed to do the kind of walking where you actually enjoyed it - it always had to be allied to something, collecting firewood or bilberries or blackberries. You had to learn to have fun yourself."

The rest of the year her childhood was spent in a working-class district of Fulham, where she says she spent a kind of schizophrenic existence. She was a fashion-conscious mod who made her own clothes but at the same time she was isolated and withdrawn. "It sounds bad, but I lived in my head, and walking was just something I did. I felt very different from everyone else and I don't know why."

By now Street Porter has clambered down from this morning's peak of achievement and we're dropping away from the Blackford summit. Tramp, tramp, tramp. She could go on for hours.

"A lot of people are surprised that I like walking by myself. They say things like: 'Is it dangerous?' And that's never even crossed my mind.

"I like walking alone, or with one other person, that's the best. I did Hadrian's Wall the other week with a friend, and it was funny. A cab driver said: 'There's a really famous tree you're going to pass,' and he said something about a movie with Mel Gibson and Kevin Costner; he was going on about the most famous tree in the north of England.

"We were doing that bit of the wall coming out of Housesteads, it's fantastic, like being on a switchback. We were walking along the top and it was really windy, and we were wittering on about face cream and sun block and stuff, and suddenly she shouted: 'Where's that tree?' We'd walked right past the north's most famous tree, and we hadn't even noticed it. It's like that isn't it?"

She reckons the most hopeless person to walk with is another woman who is having a relationship crisis. You can have a five-hour discussion about why she should leave her husband, but she'll just go meekly back to him.

They never learn, do they? "No. And then you think, that should have been a fantastic walk - but why have we expended all this energy on a second-rate person, the bloke, the source of all the trouble? He's probably lying in front of the telly asleep, completely unaware of the fact he's been analysed."

You might imagine with her rich experience - itemised with an accountant's care and attention in All the Rage - that Street Porter might have enjoyed the odd romantic stroll with one of her four husbands or other lovers. "I'm not a very romantic person," she says. What, not a single amble down lovers' lane? "Well, they've all walked," she says. "But walking's my thing anyway. I don't think of it like that."

Anyway, men bring their own problems to the hillside. "They think if they don't get to the top before you they have failed some kind of virility test. Myself, I'm a bit of a plodder."

And then there's worse: those Munro-baggers. It's simple. They're sad. "Why've you got to tick them all off?" she demands. "Why can't you just have mountains you enjoy? What is it about bagging Munros? Just tell me what happens." It has to be conceded: it's a male thing, just a bit anal.

"It is," Street Porter agrees. "Obviously I've spent most of my working life with men and they have this way of operating which seems a bit alien to me. At a big meeting at the BBC this bloke said to me: 'I'm going to put my dick on the table at this point...' I thought: 'No, not really.' What he meant was, 'I'm going to be perfectly honest.'"

A duck quacks. We've reached Blackford Pond, the end of our hike. Then she delivers the bombshell for ramblers everywhere. "Bagging Munros is a dick-on-table exercise."

Janet Street Porter - All The Rage is at Assembly, 5:10pm today, and until 24 August.

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.

"I want people to feel things"

Louise Welsh dips a spoon into her soup bowl, pausing between sips while she rolls the notion of “sensationalism” around. “It sounds such a bad word, doesn’t it?” she says. “But there has to be something going on, some kind of excitement.”

The spoon now halfway to her mouth, she stops again. Yes, she says, “I do think I write sensationalist fiction, I do want people to feel things when they are reading it — thrilled, appalled, sick, happy.”

Miss Marple would have loved this: murder over the soup tureen. No one could be more charming than Welsh, the most acclaimed of literary thriller-writers, and her surroundings are delightful. Here in the top-floor Victorian tenement flat that she shares in the West End of Glasgow with her partner, Zoe Strachan, there are all the marks of domestic happiness: the bulging bookcases, the sunlit dining table, the Sunday china and the pretty milk jug. “Would you mind?” she asks, too small to reach up and pluck it from the shelf.

Inevitably, when the conversation turns to the author’s fictional world, things become darker. From the city beyond her window, the seemingly demure Welsh conjured a tale of pornography, abuse and murder for her 2002 debut The Cutting Room, which won a Crime Writers’ Association award. She returns to Glasgow again for Naming the Bones, her fourth novel, pulling Murray Watson, a prudish academic, out of his comfortable university office in pursuit of Archie Lunan, a dead poet of the 1970s. As he seeks to disinter the life of his hero, the hapless Murray encounters an increasingly chaotic world — drugs, infanticide, swinging and death — before he is finally thrust into a storm, on a remote island, for the book’s Gothic conclusion.

“Did you follow it? Oh, good,” Welsh says brightly from over the dinner table. “I spent ages on that. It’s quite quiet at the beginning. Hopefully you pull people along until, at the end, they are so much in the world that it all seems credible. Of course, if you started with all that” — “all that” being excess in almost every form — “it wouldn’t make much sense. It has to become sensational.”

The novel’s darkest moments are played out on the real island of Lismore, a short sail from Oban. Events become so extreme that Welsh felt obliged to write an apology to its residents on the final page. “Lismore is a beautiful island rich in wild life and archaeology situated in Loch Linnhe on the West Coast of Scotland,” it reads. “The islanders are friendly. The B&B is well kept and welcoming.” She chuckles at these words, but somehow her creative impulse always leads to a dark place. Welsh loves horror movies and reckons that a well-written thriller can bring on an endorphin rush in the reader. She adores Stephen King. Typically, when she embarked recently on the libretto for Remembrance Day, one of five 15-minute works commissioned by Scottish Opera, she “couldn’t help twisting the story” that Stuart MacRae, the composer, had suggested. So Welsh put in “something awful and disgusting”, to whit: a student whose heart is full of hope is murdered by an apparently senile old couple, after accidently rekindling their past as serial killers. The reviews were ecstatic.

All these dark imaginings bring to mind the furore surrounding remarks by Ian Rankin, who noted during an Edinburgh book festival the “interesting” tendency among some women writers to accentuate violence, reported in this paper under the headline “Revenge of the bloodthirsty lesbians”. She ran into Rankin (“a nice guy”) the next day and made a pretence of stabbing him while he pleaded for mercy.

Welsh laughs at the memory but appends a serious point. “We know women get relatively higher sentences than men for violent crime because women are not expected to do anything like that at all,” she says. “Women’s books seem more violent than the men’s because we are not expected to put anything like that in. In actuality, I’m not sure that they are more violent at all.”

Her own informal audit tells her that women in literature are patronised in other ways. They write as many books as men, form more than half the readership, yet only a third of the articles in The Times Literary Supplement are written by or about women. “That does cheese me off,” she says. “That is reflective of the rest of society — women still don’t hold the same positions as men, and anyone who doubts that simply has to look at their own institution, academic or business. How many men bosses are there, and how many women? Not many. When people say it’s because women take time out to have children, well don’t any of these men have children or families?”

None of these sentiments is delivered with anything like campaigning zeal. Indeed, in her soft voice, Welsh quickly shifts conversation on, puzzled, apparently, by aspects of her own work. It’s odd that women characters have often remained in the background in her books. Each of the first three novels is narrated in the first person by a male, but if Naming the Bones is in the third person its central character is still a bloke, Murray, who busies himself unearthing the remains of another man.

At its core, like so much of her work, is the notion of obsession. Welsh, 45, once ran a second-hand bookshop in Glasgow. She still loves the trade, and the passions of the readers and buyers as they chase down long-dead poets, or whatever secret urges drive them on. And from up here, over the teacups, she seems able to untangle all their lives. “It’s like the foxes in the back garden. Sometimes you look out and there is a whole world going on, a whole ecosystem — birds and foxes and cats. Everyone has their own world and sometimes we know nothing about it. Even the kinky stuff. It’s just a different way of being from us, a different type of hobby, I suppose.”

There is a pause. “All these parallel lives going on,” she sighs. “Would you like another slice of bread?”

Naming the Bones by Louise Welsh is published by Canongate, £12.99

Critic finds his voice again

A distinguished American critic who had his vocal chords removed during surgery for thyroid cancer has been given his natural voice back following the intervention of a Scottish company that specialises in synthesising speech.

Roger Ebert - the first film critic to win the Pulitzer Prize - appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show on Tuesday where he was able to deliver his Oscar tips and give an emotional account of how he regained his voice.

“It still needs improvement, but at least it still sounds like me,” said Mr Ebert, who uses a keyboard and laptop to voice his words. “In first grade, they said I talk too much. And now I still can.”

After a series of operations in 2006, Mr Ebert’s face-to-face communication was at first restricted to hastily scribbled notes and rudimentary sign language. Then he began using off -the-shelf text-to-speech computer packages that enable users to speak in a computerised version of standard English.

These made him sound like “Robby the Robert” said Mr Ebert, and in a blog entry last August, he complained: “Eloquence and intonation are impossible. I dream of hearing a voice something like my own.”

During an internet search, he came across CereProc a spin-out company from Edinburgh University that specialises in synthesising “natural” voices. He trialed samples of former President George W Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California, and was amazed. “Their Dubya and Arnold wouldn’t fool their wives, but you can certainly tell it’s them," he said.

When he contacted the company - which occupies a single small office within the university's school of informatics - CereProc told him they could clone his voice if he could provide good quality tapes. Mr Ebert had recorded commentaries for classic films such as Citizen Kane and Casablanca and was able to provide these pure audio tracks. The result is the company's first historical recreation of a human voice.

“Roger doesn't want to sound like everyone - he wants to sound like Roger,” said Matthew Aylett, the company’s chief technical officer. “We took the audio commentaries but it was much more challenging than the normal process when we would control the recording environment."

For its business clients, CereProc records five hours of material to compile a library of hundreds of thousands of sounds. Common phrases are reproduced verbatim, but more complex sentences are blended from natural sounds on the database.
The same techniques have been used to recreate Mr Ebert’s voice and he already has three hours of sounds on his computer. CereProc say they will double that amount and could even include the sound of Mr Ebert’s laughing, sighing or screaming.

In commercial applications, such as an avatar devised for the Scottish Qualifications Authority website, the software has to overcome difficulties with words such as “permit”, in which intonation changes the meaning between a noun and verb.

Mr Ebert finds it easier to overcome these problems himself, said Dr Aylett. “He can type, listen and modify. He can control emphasis and pitch. He can modify the way he speaks, when he speaks. We want to give people more control so they can use the synthesis like a musical instrument.”

You can find this article, in abbreviated form, at the timesonline website. Readers may be interested to know that after a redsign of the Times pages, most news stories in the paper and online will be considerably shorter than before, around 500 words, rather than 650-900. A shame in my view, but I am merely the monkey, not the organ-grinder.

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.

Martin's credo: if you can say it, it's art

Strange interior this. A set of tables, the largest at the bottom, is stacked so that the smallest almost touches the ceiling. Along the mantelpiece a line of terracotta plant pots is arranged from smallest to largest. In the drawing room a pair of curtains is repeatedly opening and shutting.

This is the world of the Scottish artist Martin Creed, in his first solo show in the country that raised him. For those who come out in a rash at the mention of the Turner Prize, Creed is there in the pantheon of irritants. After Damien Hirst’s cow and calf pickled in formaldehyde (which won the prize) and Tracey Emin’s My Bed (which didn’t) came Creed’s installation, The Lights Going On and Off, which carried off contemporary art’s most famous award in 2001.

It was a witty work of minimalism — his admirers said — that comprised an empty room in the Tate Gallery in which the lights were switched on and off. For that, Creed was presented with a cheque for £20,000.

Here in the upmarket Park Circus district of Glasgow, in the Victorian townhouse of his friend Douglas Gordon, Creed, 41, has been set loose in a domestic setting for the first time, filling two storeys with his ever-so-familiar works.

A stack of A4 papers piled up near the staircase. A wall that has been criss-crossed in red paint, applied with a paint roller. And, on the first floor landing, a standard lamp is going on and off again in an exhibit entitled — you have probably guessed — The Lamp Going On and Off.

“One of the things with works like this is that you can describe them in words and you can carry them about in your head,” he chuckles. “I like that. It’s like the way you can carry around a poem, if you can hold it in your head as an idea.”

Critics protest that anyone could come up with this stuff, and Creed’s answer is disarming: yes, they could. What sets him apart is “dogged repetition”, the same thing produced again and again until someone takes a good long look at his work — a scrunched-up paper ball or a lump of Blu-Tack — and decides to make a purchase for, it is said, a five-figure sum.

For some people this trade in the art of the stationery cupboard is no laughing matter. But then Creed, for all his self-deprecating humour, can strike a serious note about his work.

The word “art”, he says, as much as it means anything, is about “putting things in front of people for their enjoyment”. There is no difference between his stack of tables “and a painting by David Hockney. It is an arrangement of colours and shapes. The fact that it is made of tables or paint is a detail. To me, the more I think about it, all artists are the same. But I don’t even like to say I am an artist, because the word art is so difficult.”

Creed, who was born in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, was brought up in Milton of Campsie and Lenzie, a buttoned-up little town on the northeast fringe of Glasgow. When he was growing up a single pub served Lenzie’s population of about 8,000, and the notion of opening and closing a door repeatedly probably represented a good night out. The local psychiatric hospital forms one of his strongest memories — he recalls as a teenager guiding lost and confused patients back to the hospital gates.

He left Scotland to study at the Slade School of Fine Art in Central London and, in the following 20 years, only twice exhibited north of the Border, each time in group shows. This year Creed returns with a vengeance. He has a second solo show at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh and will convert the dark, dank Scotsman Steps — close to Waverley Station — into a £100,000 artwork lined with marble.

In August a dance work premiered at Sadler’s Wells in London will be reprised at the Traverse theatre in Edinburgh. To cap it all, a collection of essays, with a introduction by the artist, will be published by Thames and Hudson and introduced at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

It all adds up to the image of an artist who appears to have been accepted into a kind of critical and commercial mainstream. But when he is back in London, as he makes his way down to his office on Brick Lane, he still won’t tell taxi drivers what he does for a living. “I just say I work in the city,” he says. “Which I do.”

In an office? “Yes, in an office. I did have a studio for two years but it was a waste of space. Most of my work is planned in private and done in the world, it is not made in a studio and then moved out.”

And in an office, of course, he has his palette to hand: the angle-poise lamp, the Blu-Tack, the paperclips. “Yes everything is there,” he says. “Masking tape too.”

* Things, Martin Creed, is at the Common Guild in Glasgow.

Read it online here, on/off, where you'll find a few more interesting facts about the man. I really enjoyed meeting Creed, who was great company. Picture by Jim "Knuckles" Glossop.

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

I won't pay through the nose

A businessman has been fined £60 and had his driving licence endorsed for blowing his nose while stuck in a traffic jam.

Michael Mancini, a furniture restorer from Prestwick, Ayrshire, was given the fixed penalty and docked three penalty points after leaning over and pulling out a paper handkerchief to wipe his nose when stuck in Ayr High Street. Mancini said that his van was in neutral with its handbrake on, and that he was flabbergasted when he was signalled into a parking bay by an approaching policeman.

Matters became “a little bit surreal”, he said, when he wound down his window and was promptly charged by the stern-faced PC Stuart Gray, a man known locally as “Shiny Buttons” in recognition of his zealous attention to detail. “I honestly thought it was a joke,” said Mancini, 39, who was booked for failing to be in control of his vehicle.

“I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding’. But he was absolutely deadpan. He’s a policeman, so you’re not going to start shouting abuse at him. I thought, ‘What is the world coming to?’ You pick the papers up every day and they are full of horror stories — but this bloke has nothing more to do with his time.”

Another amusing tale that, like the whisky thing below, got a huge number of hits on-line, and a very prominent place in the national edition of the Times. Read the rest here: Snot funny.

A huge row is brewing up around the Law Society of Scotland,the body that represents the country's 10,500 solicitors. Read about that here: Tesco law and no confidence vote.

Finally click here for more on this startling revelation: "Scotland even led the field in space sciences, Professor Glover said, though more dogs than Scots have experienced space travel so far."

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.